Sphinx

In this morning’s Grauniad, George Monbiot argues that the fundamental political decision of our age – not solely in Britain or Europe or the West, but across the globe – lies between “public luxury available to all, or private luxury available to some.” My immediate thought was of the famous lines in Cicero’s Pro Murena (76):

The Roman people hates private luxury, it esteems public munificence; it does not love lavish banquets, still less sordid behaviour and brutality; it recognises differences in services and circumstances, the interchange of work and pleasure.

I’ve no idea if this is a deliberate reference (Monbiot hasn’t responded to a query on the Twitter); rather like the “many not the few” line, it’s such a boilerplate contrast that the resemblances don’t necessarily mean anything.

In its original context, of course, the remit is quite limited: this is about the political elite policing its own boundaries, in a society where wealth was essential to gain access to public office but there were strong motives to ensure that wealth alone was never sufficient (or any old scoundrel might buy his way into power, rather than socially acceptable scoundrels): what mattered was what you did with your wealth. It’s also not at all clear that “the Roman people” held such a view, but Cicero was never hesitant in claiming a popular mandate for his own agenda without much fear of contradiction.

Monbiot’s article reframes this as a question how ‘society’ should spend its wealth rather than how the political elite should; the feelings of ‘the people’ should be expressed not in choosing between different politicians on the basis of whether they build aqueducts or eat magnificent banquets from citrus-wood tables, but in deciding between political programmes on public programmes, taxation policies and the like. In Roman terms, this is the sort of populism – agrarian reform, corn doles etc. – that gave the Gracchi a bad name, but harnessed to the rhetoric of traditional aristocratic values.

It’s interesting that Monbiot retains the positive characterisation of ‘luxury’ as something to which everyone should be entitled – echoing the way that writers like Adam Smith rejected the traditional moralising discourse of luxuria in the late 18^th century. For Smith, a labourer’s linen shirt could be considered a ‘luxury’, in the sense that it is not strictly a necessity in purely material terms – and such luxuries are good rather than bad, contrary to earlier claims, both for the individual (to maintain some social pride and gain some pleasure from life) and for the workings of the economy as a whole.

Likewise for Monbiot, nice parks and well-funded education could be considered luxuries, especially in a society where in practice they’re increasingly accessible only to those with private wealth, but they’re the sorts of luxuries that ought to be available to all. In other words, where Cicero wanted to contrast both public and private and luxury and munificence, Monbiot is happy to focus just on the first pair.

Of course, on a planet with finite resources and no magic pudding, there’s a decent case to be made that something like a long-distance transport system is a luxury in the bad old sense: not only not a necessity, but a corrupting, socially destructive indulgence. The argument should be less about ensuring that everyone can enjoy a particular thing and more about whether we can afford for anyone to have it. But given how far current political debate is even from Monbiot’s starting-point, it’s understandable that he doesn’t try to argue this position…