As a way to help pay the bills during his time in the New York experimental theater scene of the 1970s, my father worked for the National Endowment for the Arts. His job was to help start art and theater projects for inner city children, at a time when the city was broke and the public schools had precious little money to spend on such programs themselves. I remember him telling me about how often he encountered people who rejected any such spending as wasteful and a matter of misplaced priorities. “Why are you spending money on puppet shows for these children,” they would ask him, “when so many of them go to bed hungry?”
This notion, of the low priority of artistic and intellectual fulfillment relative to material needs, has enduring popularity. Key to that popularity is its ideological promiscuity. Certainly, many who voice this attitude are typical conservatives, grumbling about how their tax dollars have to pay for these programs. (They are typically silent about, say, the roads that get them to work and back.) But there is also a strain of the left-wing that embraces this line of thought, a kind that thinks of itself as a tough, non-nonsense approach to doling out what’s necessary in a world of limited resources. I don’t doubt the noble sentiments behind these ideas, but taken to any kind of logical end, they lead to arguments of the type “why should we build public libraries, when there are the homeless?” And inevitably, the unspoken logic of this belief is that poor people have no inner life, have no intellectual or aesthetic needs. The response is simple: serve spiritual and material needs both.
I thought of this attitude when I read Bhaskar Sunkara’s encomium of Soylent, the buzz-ready, tasteless food “replacement,” though Sunkara is surely not guilty of it himself. I think of Soylent as something like the word of neoliberalism made flesh, a perfect symbol of the madcap embrace of efficiency at the expense of human pleasure. Still, the future Sunkara imagines is a cheery one, and I get where he’s coming from. It’s important, for one thing, to understand the way technological change is always political, and the morality of its consequences always contingent on political struggle.
In this telling, access to adequate nutrition stops being a matter of being able to afford it, where everyone has an adequate supply of Soylent and can thus go about their day, unfazed by the possibility that they or their children will not get enough to eat. Eating real food will continue, but it will become something like a bonus… or, as I would call it instead, a luxury. If it went down the way Sunkara would like for it to go down, I couldn’t complain, however queasy I might feel about it. Getting everybody fed in a way that is actually emancipatory would be too powerful of a social good. No more hungry bellies is about as simple and pure a socialist ideal as I can think of.
But though that future is worth hoping for, I doubt history would proceed that way.
First, I have to say: Soylent’s safety and long-term nutritional value are unproven, with nothing resembling the type of necessary clinical trials or long-term safety tests to demonstrate that people actually can safely live on this stuff. The developer of Soylent, Rob Rhinehart, has performed most of his research with himself as a test subject. Throughout his discussions of Soylent, Rhinehart has evinced the kind of iron self-belief that is common to the transhumanist set, for good and for bad. Dude gave himself potassium poisoning and came out of it more confident than before, which is both charming and a little disturbing. He calls himself a fallen libertarian, and I’m glad to see he has rejected capitalism, but the notion of self-reliance and the transcendent individual that is baked into his discussion of Soylent worries me. In any event: the assumption that we can defy the most basic of our primal, animal needs seems tailor-made, to me, for an age built on hype and the celebration of our own hubris.
Sunkara also addresses a darker future. He writes,
Our biological need for food to perform effectively as workers is one of the few things employers have to respect. A labor force sipping Soylent all day at their desks would satisfy that need without disruptive pauses for food preparation, consumption and cleanup. Lunch breaks could come to be seen as an antiquated luxury, relics from a bygone era of 40-hour workweeks, paid vacation and sick days, and “Cadillac” health and dental plans.
Let’s take this further. In this future, Soylent or similar products– products, commodities, sold by for-profit companies– do become widespread. Convinced by the brutal logic of austerity politics that is the basis of elite political culture, the government ends programs like food stamps and the federal free school lunch program, replacing both with rations of Soylent. Large agribusinesses jockey to have their particular ingredients, heavily subsidized by the government, included within the recipe. Huge corporations enter into no-bid contracts with states to supply the Soylent that will keep the poor adequately fed so that they can work. And an immensely important, immensely destructive social and cultural shift takes place: food, long our definition of a minimal requirement for life, becomes instead a luxury good. The affluent continue to eat food– real, tasty, nutritious (or not) food. But for the poor, real food becomes a symbol in the way that flat screen TVs and cell phones are now symbols, as luxuries that the affluent insist poor people should not own. “Why is that mother buying her children chicken,” sneers the lady at the supermarket, “when she could just give them Soylent?” The taste of real food, the communal enjoyment of a long meal, the pleasure of a night out at a restaurant, the millennia of cultural traditions passed down with food as the primary subject– all become more goods for the affluent to enjoy.
So: with what you know of the class structure of the 21st century world, which future of food do you find more plausible? The cheery one in the possible classless society of the future, or the dark one, in the classed society we have now? We’ll have to work and see.
“I don’t doubt the noble sentiments behind these ideas, but taken to any kind of logical end, they lead to arguments of the type “why should we build public libraries, when there are the homeless?” And inevitably, the unspoken logic of this belief is that poor people have no inner life, have no intellectual or aesthetic needs. The response is simple: serve spiritual and material needs both.”
So you reject the possibility that a movement seeking both would need to prioritize? That is, we can walk and chew gum, equally push for better funded libraries and public arts programs, as well as government spending to insure every citizen has “basic life necessities,” or perhaps an annual income above the poverty line (or maybe something even further)?
And yet in the later half of the post, you seem to insinuate that, the world being what it is, such reforms are unlikely to be achieved, equally, at or around the same time, and so the strategy, the order in which certain goals are fought for, and the way in which they are argued for, matters (the implication being, to me at least, politics is zero sum).
I guess at the end of the day I’m still unsure what your argument would be against someone standing up at the city hall meeting and saying, actually, let us take the revenue from this new proposed tax on fracking and use it to exclusively pay for addressing homelessness or hunger, rather than to fill the budget shortfall for the city’s schools.
Surely, in the grand scheme of things, we say lets get the money from those who have an abundance of it, and do all these things. But when the former is presently on the table, and the latter requires a lot more coalition building (i.e. time), what’s the proper choice–maximize the utility of the short term option, or reject it in favor of building and maintaining a framework for much more radical change in the mid to late term?
When is not taking what you can get the better strategy, and what’s the calculus for deciding it?
I think if you chew on it, you’ll see that you’re begging the question– your attitude, it seems to me, presumes the superior importance of the material goods to the intellectual and aesthetic goods, which is precisely what I reject. More importantly, I do reject the binary. We have had the money to fund schools and libraries before, and we still do. We only have to insist that the choice not to is that, a choice.
I don’t know that superiority is the right word, but certainly the intellectual/aesthetic (whatever that is) is predicated on the first. You can’t have those without having a modicum of health or physical comfort (I would presume, though perhaps there are enough people who have had supremely satisfying (either religiously, aesthetically, etc.) experiences while being tortured, crucified, or otherwise starving/dying of disease to demonstrate that this isn’t actually the case). Perhaps this is what you still disagree with?
The rest of your response basically ignores the question: there are real opportunity costs to particular political strategies, and goals are achieved over time. The way you seem to be approaching this issue is to say, well X would be the best, or at least a pretty good iteration when it comes to the best of all possible worlds, so I flatly reject any course of action which doesn’t fight nearly equally for nearly all of those things, at the same time.
You’re wandering pretty far from the discussion of Soylent, which was proposed by somebody else, not me. I’m in fact proffering a less optimistic future, nor more optimistic one, so it’s an odd context in which to accuse me of being idealist.
That’s why I said the second half of the post doesn’t seem to match up with the first.
In both cases, I am arguing against a limiting vision of the left-wing project that involves a narrow, mechanistic definition of human flourishing. I choose instead to advocate f or the necessity, and indivisibility, of both. In the second half, I am attempting to demonstrate how we could provide the material need of nutrition more broadly in a way that actually increases class distance.
Saying, hey, a technology that makes it possible to feed everyone very cheaply is good, but it doesn’t change the underlying structure of haves and have nots, so we need to be careful it doesn’t become a tool for the haves to justify the have nots having even less, is right on.
But that’s very different from saying that anyone who tells you to prioritize physical needs over aesthetic/intellectual ones (to the degree that they can even be separated) is being too to cynical about the political calculus.
Which is, as far as I can tell, a real and difficult issue of any part of the “socialist” (or whatever it’s more properly called) agenda that has strong utilitarian underpinnings.
“We have had the money to fund schools and libraries before, and we still do.”
I had no idea you and Ethan had that kind of cash. Impressive.
I thought Michael Kinsley was neoliberalism made flesh.
Regarding the more pesimistic prediction you discuss, I’m not so sure we aren’t already there, at least in a minimal sense. The food most accessible to the poor is nutrient fortified, highly processed carbohydrates. Eating well has become a kind of luxury–consider that the first signs of gentrification tend to be foodie-approved restaurants. Eating well on a budget is possible if you are smart about what you buy, where you buy it, and you know how to cook, but that takes time, and time is a resource short in supply for many poor people.
You’d run into a ton of opposition from grocery retailers, not to mention anyone who ends up as the loser among agro-business companies. Besides, we’re talking about American conservatives here – giving the poor Soylent would still be the government subsidizing their food, so they’d oppose it in favor of killing the program entirely.
It seems more like it would become a niche camping food and survival ration in case MREs aren’t available for soldiers. Mix it with something else – like yogurt and sugar – and it might be enjoyable.
Who would be “giving the poor Soylent”?
That was in Freddie’s scenario – regular SNAP funding gets replaced with funding to buy stocks of soylent.
The ideology you’re worried about really is a problem. It works its ill effects in education policy all the time.
The salient distinction doesn’t seem to be between “material” and “non-material” goods, however: traditional foodways are as material as Soylent. Your reference to “pleasure” comes closer to the mark: the left should be committed to making leisure, enjoyment, uplift, and pleasure available to all- not merely income. This is actually a pretty popular sentiment, as you can tell by bringing up National Parks (which everyone- excepting only the most grotesque ideologue- loves. Not only loves, but cherishes as a source of pride).
Soylent is not a scam to take unhealthy food away from poor fat people, in order to save public funds. Let go of dystopia.
Let’s HOPE it is a flat screen TV. A luxury that even poor people want and choose as the price falls to nothing.
Right now, it is a diet pill, a cigarette, that curbs hunger, something for those (read paleo) that need to stay skinny to compete in the top 20%.
But calories get cheaper. Accept it.
But towards your dad, I would support happily a SNAP system, that only provided staples, but also gave people complete cooking utensils and taught them aggressively how to cook.
no skill takes the same amount of money and more completely increases the quality of life of a person’s life.
Freddie,
dammit, you need to ADMIT right now, that smartphones (and likely flat screen tvs) wil be civil rights.
And if you don’t know why this is, challenge me on it, call BULLSHIT, but don’t sit and act like gadgets are luxury goods.
I think you misunderstand me – it’s not that I think poor people shouldn’t have flat screen TVs, it’s that those are constantly mentioned when the affluent complain about the “life choices” of the poor.
I mention flat screen TVs and smartphones all the time because they are what happen for the poor, if you stop regulating everything.
I think they both ought to be a civil right, so that we can shut down al the government buildings and move the whole ball of wealth transferring wax to the cloud.
BTW, this is why “sponsored bandwidth” (read FREE monthly data services) should be a positive thing, and you ought to be terrified of effort to “protect” Net Neutrality.
My prediction is that in America Soylent will itself be a luxury good: an expensive technomagic “health food” for rich “rationalist” nerds in tech industries who want to believe they’re finally living in the future of In the Year 2525. Where it will do harm is when it becomes a way to torture and poison people suffering from famine in Africa or Asia under the name of humanitarian aid, because from all I’ve heard these kind of food replacements are always actually torture and poison. America in general does not believe in the humanity of poor starving people far away so no big deal, it’s cheap nutrition, it’s saving the world!
Only an extremely privileged person could write this garbage.
Only an extremely privileged person uses the word privilege in that sense.
Hmm it looks like your website ate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I
guess I’ll just sum it up what I had written and say,
I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I as well am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing.
Do you have any helpful hints for beginner blog writers?
I’d certainly appreciate it.