LONDON, 6 March 2006 — When BBC TV’s flagship current affairs program, Newsnight, launched its “ethical man” experiment a couple of weeks ago, with the aim of transforming the life of one of its journalists, Justin Rowlatt, we all knew immediately what “ethical” meant in the phrase. Just as with other ethical makeovers we have seen over the last few years, from the hilariously casual Christa d’Souza in Vogue to the impressively thorough Leo Hickman in the London Guardian newspaper, there is a clear set of “ethical” goals to be met. Switch to a sustainable power supply. Get your organic vegetables delivered. Cycle. Recycle.
I am as keen as any Newsnight viewer to go along with those goals, and happily tick the boxes in my own life. I too get a nice warm glow from putting scraps in the compost bin or going to the farmers’ market. I too resolve to do even more and be even better next month and next year. And I can see and admire where the most committed proponents of this kind of ethical living want us to go — all the way to a thoroughly Thoreauvian life lived close to the land that would eventually be embraced by everyone in society. In the ideal progression, as you buy your fair-trade coffee and plant your carrot seeds in your wildlife-friendly garden, you would become part of a widespread revolution in the way people relate to the land and the market, and seamlessly move on toward a society in which we would live lightly on the land and gently with one another.
I can see that ideal shining out of the writing and lives of a few people, and admire those who live by it in their carbon-neutral homes with their compost loos. Those few have turned their backs on the lifestyle sold to us in travel magazines and fashion catwalks — a lifestyle that looks so brilliantly bright with its trans-Atlantic flights to glittering beaches and endlessly renewed clothes, but is in fact so dirty and leaves a snail’s trail of filth across the world. Instead, they are embracing a lifestyle that may look a bit grubbier but is in fact a whole lot cleaner, and that decision is an example for us all to ponder. But it’s important to be honest right now, and say that the way that ethical consumerism seeps into most people’s lives is nothing like that, and does not seem to be taking society as a whole any closer to that ideal. Why is that? For a start, for most of us the ethical label is still a brand among other brands, one you can sport now and again. This pick’n’mix ethical lifestyle is hardly going to start a revolution. You can drink Innocent smoothies while standing in the queue for your trans-Atlantic flight you can eat locally grown broccoli but be unable to resist the imported blueberries beside it you can buy a fair-trade T-shirt alongside a couple of dresses that are so amazingly cheap you just can’t imagine how little the women were paid who stitched them. Is it simply a way of taking our minds off the heaps of disposable rubbish that we are buying if we pay for them with our new Bono- endorsed Red Amex card? While I’m not saying one should junk those shopping decisions, it’s possible to be more honest about their limitations.
Because it’s pretty depressing that so often the personal choices of ethical consumerism, however good in themselves, are seen as all you need in order to get political change going. Of course it is comforting, in this world in which many people have lost faith in collective action and in the response of political parties, to believe that simply by picking something different off the supermarket shelf we have paid our political dues. The other kind of political action, the kind that involves trying to push other people and governments into making the same choices, is a whole lot harder and more risky.
Politicians are clearly responding to this narrowing of the political remit. A politician such as the leader of the UK opposition Conservative Party David Cameron totally understands the modern desire to believe that easy, pleasant choices in our homes and shops are all that’s needed to create all the change we want. On BBC radio earlier this week he said there was no need for government coercion of individuals or businesses. “We’ve all got our roles to play, in terms of the choices we make as individuals, as businesses, as families, but it’s not for the government to tell everyone ... we have to travel less, that would be a mistake.” He is the perfect spokesman for this kind of personally oriented ethical living: a figure who cares enough to plan solar panels and a wind turbine on his own home, but doesn’t care enough to impinge on the freedoms of others to drive gas guzzlers past the house and fly filthy jets above it. It may be good to believe we can detoxify our own homes and gardens, but it doesn’t mean much if we leave the rest of the world choking. There’s also the problem that in much of this debate ethical behavior is defined by such very narrow parameters. It is very telling that Newsnight’s “ethical man” set his goal from the outset as “reducing his impact on the environment.” But is this the sum total of ethical living? When I think of the people who have literally made me stop and think about their moral example in the past few months, I know nothing about their impact on the environment.
I’m thinking of a man I met a few weeks ago at a friend’s house, who had given up a prestigious career in the media for retraining as a primary school teacher. I was struck by what seemed like his absolute integrity in deciding not to keep his own life separate from the people around him. I am thinking of a woman I spoke to who has taken an asylum-seeker and her baby into her house because the refugee is at risk of deportation and has absolutely no means of support from the government. That’s a truly risky ethical action, one that impacts completely on her life. She took it because she felt it was impossible for her to turn her back on a woman in need, while the rest of us would rather hide our heads in the sand when we see such neediness. It’s so hard to confront that kind of ethical living, because dealing with the desperate human needs and the glaring inequalities on our very doorsteps is so much messier than buying something fair-trade for the sake of the needy far away.
And just as there are aspects of personal living that the usual “ethical” remit doesn’t speak to, there are pressing political issues that are never going to be affected by ethical consumerism and that therefore risk losing out in a world in which political activity shrinks to shopping. How can our consumer choices speak to issues of how our government tolerates torture of terrorist suspects by its allies, or civilian deaths in its wars, or the poor treatment of refugees? While this generation may remember Thoreau’s poetic and joyful relationship with the land, we tend to forget his night in prison for refusing to pay taxes to a government that was pursuing an unjust war. There are other kinds of ethical action that it is absolutely vital to celebrate, alongside the altogether laudable long-life light bulbs and reusable nappies.
