“You’ve heard of the golden rule, haven’t you, boy?
Whoever has the gold makes the rules.”
Aladdin (1992)
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| Just look at all those obsolete pound coins. |
As I understand it, there are some lucky souls out
there – you may even be among them, O Cherished Reader – whose allotment of set
texts for GCSE English included J. B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, a
work to which I was recently introduced in the form of the 1954 film adaptation
starring Alastair Sim.1 Aware as I am that jealousy of said lucky
souls on this count is sinful and pointless, it remains the case that I’m
certain I would have found An Inspector Calls a subject of study infinitely
preferable to almost every single one of the miserable selection of GCSE set
texts to which I was subjected myself (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a
selection of short stories by Thomas Hardy, and, worst of all, Susan Hill’s I’m
the King of the Castle – though I would probably have kept Shakespeare’s
very entertaining Much Ado About Nothing2). My
fifteen-year-old self could probably have written a rather elegant essay or two
on what Priestley says about taking responsibility for one’s actions, as well.
This post is not such an essay, but that’s not to say it won’t make use of some
of the same themes, so if you did study An Inspector Calls for
GCSE and are consequently still sick to the back teeth of all thematic analysis
of it, you might want to give this one a miss. Equally, if you didn’t, and are
still unfamiliar with the story, you might want to prevent my spoiling it for
you by not reading any further until such time as you should be familiar
with it.
An Inspector Calls introduces us to the Birlings, a well-to-do
Edwardian family whose members have all had some sort of dealings with a young
lady known as Eva Smith, whose recent death is suspected to have been suicide. At
the questioning of the mysterious Inspector Poole (Goole in the original
playscript, but here and henceforth I’m working from the film version I saw),
each Birling admits to actions that contributed in some way to the desperate
nature of the situation Eva ended up in. First up is Arthur, the father of the
family, who fired Eva from her job at his firm after she helped lead the
workers in petitioning the management for higher wages. And it’s awfully easy
to shake our heads in judgement and dismiss his arguments about the need to
remain competitive in order to remain open for business, and so to pay any
wages at all, as mere profit-driven heartlessness – but I’m not really here to
comment on that. I’m interested in the next Birling to have her involvement
with Eva Smith exposed: Sheila, Arthur’s daughter. Because all Sheila did wrong
was go shopping.
Well, all right, there was a bit more to it than
that: Sheila went shopping with her mother, Sybil, and ended up in a bad mood
because Sybil kept disagreeing with her about what she ought to buy. In a
department store called Milward’s, she encountered Eva Smith, who had found a
new job there as a shop assistant. Eva committed no greater crime than
demonstrating how to wear a particular hat more elegantly than Sheila could,
and then failing to entirely stifle a snigger when Sheila unsuccessfully tried
to cram the same hat over her elaborate coiffure at an acceptable angle – but Sheila’s
response was to denounce Eva to her manager and declare that if she saw Eva
working at Milward’s again, she would promptly take her custom elsewhere. It
was clearly a disproportionate response to a virtually nonexistent slight, but
the point I want to make is this: Sheila had power over Eva – power over her
continued security and quality of life – and the source of that power was nothing
more than her ability to spend money.
Money, to use the common phrase, is power. This is,
in fact, so obvious a state of affairs that I’m actually struggling to articulate
it in greater detail. Money means you can acquire items; it means you can
benefit from services; it means you can bring about changes in your life and the
lives of others. To have money is to have some of the ultimately desirable
commodity, the thing that people all over the world are striving and scheming
to get their hands on in ever larger amounts. Eva Smith wanted money to live
on; Milward’s wanted money to run their shop; Sheila wanted – and indeed had – money
to buy hats of which her mother disapproved,3 and then to withhold
from Milward’s in order to get her own way. The ever-pragmatic book of Proverbs
puts it like this: “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave
of the lender.”4 Money can’t buy you everything, but it can buy you
everything that can be bought, and that means you’ll never struggle to find
someone who’s keen to relieve you of yours, whether through a legal transaction
or otherwise. The cash in your pocket and the string of electronic numbers in your
bank account represent power. They represent a weapon to be used – spent
or withheld – for good or for ill.
But Anne, I haven’t got very much cash in my pocket
or a very long string of electronic numbers in my bank account. I can see that
money has power if you’ve got enough of it – if you’re a government or a giant
corporation or an eccentric billionnaire or whatever – but I don’t see that my
drop in the financial ocean is going to make all that much difference to
anything, whatever I do with it.
It’s an understandable objection – but this is
precisely why I bothered to mention Arthur Birling before moving on to his
daughter. We can cast Arthur Birling, owner and manager of his firm, as the
giant corporation, with enough spending power to have some real clout in the
world at large, but An Inspector Calls isn’t about the effects of Arthur’s
decisions on the world at large. It’s about the effects of his and his family’s
decisions on the life of one young woman. And Sheila managed to mess up Eva
Smith’s life just as catastrophically for the price of a hat, as Arthur
did for the price of increased wages for all his employees. However much or
little one has of it, money is still power. Money can still mean life or death
to an individual, even if the world at large would barely notice.
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| What a profound-looking hat. I wonder what it cost. |
And it’s for that reason that I suggest we ought to
be very discerning about how we spend it.
Ethical shopping is something I’ve been interested
in for a while now, and have built up some knowledge of (which is actually kind
of hilarious given that, academically, I avoid any study of ethics like the
plague). For this reason, I’ve been thinking for a good while now of writing a
blog post outlining some of the relevant issues and principles and pointing my
lovely readers towards some brands and retailers that can be commended for
their commitment to fair trade5 and sustainability. And if you’d be
interested in a post to that effect, rejoice: you’ll get one next week. But I
wanted to get the why straight before tackling the how.
Ethical shopping is not about you. It’s not about
soothing your guilty consumer’s conscience (take that jazz to the atoning blood
of Christ, not the filthy rags of your own deeds) or creating a particular, wholesome,
magazine-esque lifestyle for yourself (covetousness is a sin, people). I say
this because I’ve previously fallen into the trap of thinking like that and I’d
spare you the same. Rather, ethical shopping is about trying to use the power
your money affords you for good rather than ill. The statement that best
expresses the approach I try to take to the matter is the following quotation,
attributable to Anna Lappé: “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote
for the kind of world you want.”
I like that quotation, because I think it
communicates well the way in which spending money represents an exercising of
power. Just as one thinks carefully about the weighty decision of which way to
vote in a election, so one ought to think carefully about the weighty decision
of how to spend one’s money. At the same time, there’s no illusion here that
any of us is single-handedly bringing about a fairer world economy, any more than
any of us single-handedly brings about a particular election result. I vote not
because my vote holds any special weight by itself, but in the hope that it might
be joined by enough others to tip the scale in my favoured direction – in which
sense it does hold power – and, equally, in the integrity of my own
conscience, that I at least did what I could.
Money is power. If we ignore that fact in the way
we spend ours, we can no more stand innocent next to governments and giant
corporations and eccentric billionnaires than Sheila could stand innocent next
to her father. We might not be talking about bringing about major changes in
the world at large, but at the end of the day, the price of a hat can be enough
to save or to ruin an individual life. What’s more, we shall all have to give God
an account for our actions, and it won’t matter what we had – that’s for him to
decide – but what we did with it: Jesus commended the widow at the Temple
treasury for contributing her mere copper quadrans, after all.6
Money is power. Let’s do our best to spend it well.
Footnotes
3 I
too like having money to buy hats (though not specifically ones my mum doesn’t
like); the best hat shop I know is a little gem of a place in Lyme Regis called
Pop Goes the Weasel, or The Old Stuff Made New Hat Factory, or Alison Tutcher
Milliner: http://www.alisontutchermilliner.co.uk/.
There you go, one ethical retailer in advance of next week (points for UK-based
manufacturing and re-/upcycling, as well as quality and excessive
gorgeousness).
5
Not one word. Not capitalised. That’s a whole other kettle of fish.
