Friday 4 November 2011

Wealth and Wisdom


Victor Meldrew picking up the phone...

"Hello. What?.... No I don't want to subscribe to Which?"

I have only recently realised that David Renwick's character Victor Meldrew, consumed by his personal war with the brutality and short sightedness of the modern world might have been missing a trick. I had Which? magazine all wrong. I had wrongly assumed Which? was a product of the 1980s obsession with misguided consumer "empowerment" that stemmed from the privatisation of public utilities. Instead it was founded in good old Bethnal Green by a man called Michael Young who had the far sighted idea of producing objective advice to consumers as an antidote to "consumer culture".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Which%3F
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Young_(politician)

In my youth I took a dim view of middle-class "penny pinchers" who took a pious view of how thrifty they were without having really experiencing poverty and maintaining a sense of entitlement to the wealth they did have. To an extent a misguided application of liberal (as opposed to radical) feminism might explain why skills of household management might have been lost. Expectations concerning control of household expenditure and finance in heterosexual relationships can be highly "gendered"- although this need not be the case.

Fairly recently I "rubber-necked" at a Diwali celebration in Trafalgar square and was interested to hear how in Hinduism there is an emphasis on the combination of wealth with wisdom. I know George Orwell characterised Eastern religions as "death worship" but I think he might have had the same concerns/layman's prejudices I had about the caste system. As "religious types" are often characterised as unworldly people it is interesting to think that even my trip to the shops might be an opportunity for spiritual practice. Informed consumption by those of us with resources to spare might be the answer to many of the world's problems as well as our own.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakshmi#Respect_for_money

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