Heroes Not Zombies

It’s good to have something useful when you need a job done. But what happens if we turn utility into a god? What happens to our quality of life when we try to base all our decisions on usefulness?

You’re familiar with the saying “They know the price of everything and the value of nothing”?

It’s hard to argue against “value for money” but this drive towards ever more utility, ever more “efficiency” is the trap described so comprehensively by Prof Jacques Ellul of Bordeaux in his work on “The Technological Society”.

We need utility, but not at the expense of quality, value and those “invisibles” which Saint Exupery says we see “only with the heart”.

I heard a Conservative Party member say yesterday “The country is a business so it should be run as a business”, and immediately I thought “No! The country is a community and should be run as a community!”

Isn’t this our problem today? That we facilitate the rise to power of pathological narcissists and those who think “greed is good”? The “financialisation” of the economy under neoliberal thought let’s those who grab the most grab even more whilst those who we described as “essential workers” during the pandemic are left behind.

I really believe we need to address this imbalance and give more time, attention and resources to care, love, beauty and kindness, and put “utility” and “efficiency” back in its place. Like fire, utility and “cost effectiveness” are good servants but terrible, dangerous masters.

Those of you who are familiar with Iain McGilchrist’s “Master and His Emissary”, or his “Divided Brain”, will know that what I’m arguing for here is a rebalancing of the cerebral hemispheres to put the right hemisphere back in charge…..or as he has put it, to use the whole brain instead of only half (the left hemisphere which reduces everything to utility and what can be grasped and grabbed)