How beauty could save the world
[Originally published at I-System TrendCompass] Something unexpected and altogether different is presently percolating through our culture. It is coming from China and it’s subtle, but I believe it’s making an impact. Over the last few months I have noticed a flood of videos appearing on YouTube and social media, which show Chinese craftsmen and women making a variety of objects of everyday use: tea pots, garments, musical instruments, umbrellas, game sets, water wheels, silk cloth, paper, etc.
The objects are made from scratch by transforming materials commonly found in nature: rocks, dirt, bones, bamboo, animal or fish skins, antlers, sea shells, wood… The process of transformation is captivating and satisfying to watch and it is all done manually with traditional tools and methods. The final products are beautiful, one of a kind objects. The links below show just a handful of examples of this craftsmanship:
Oilpaper Umbrella, It Took Two Months to Make, Completely Handmade (14 min)
Using bamboo to make some sophisticated old furniture——Bamboo Sofa (7 min)
Craft Windows with Shells, Use Cedar for Muntins, to Make Mingwa Projecting-sash and Sliding Windows (8 min)
Waterwheel Irrigation: Takes One Month to Restore, Used in Ancient Times for Irrigating Farmland (12 min).
Purple clay teapot making紫砂壶制作 (9 min)
All these videos, and there must be hundreds, if not thousands of them, are produced professionally, made in beautiful, serene settings which underscore the connection with nature. Many of these videos are getting a great deal of traction and positive commentary in social media. Having watched a number of them, it is clear that they are not just random expressions of people’s hobbies. Rather, they seem to convey a subtle message which could be profound and transformative, because it cuts to the core of human social and economic organization.
Hyperproduction of everything
To a Westerner, the exercise of these crafts may appear quaint but perhaps also overly labor intensive and inefficient. It may even seem wasteful. Since the industrial revolution, we have adopted the paradigm of increasingly efficient, industrial hyper-production of nearly everything.
Rather than wasting energy and time making things ourselves, we can hop to a supermarket and buy them off a shelf for next to nothing. Then when they break, or we use them up, we can discard such things and replace them with new ones. Where they come from, how they were made, or who made them, is almost entirely irrelevant. What is important is that we can acquire them easily and cheaply so we can focus our energy on our own important, productive and efficient work.
The need for gunboat diplomacy
But a number of problems arise with hyper-production of stuff because super-efficient industrial processes can easily turn out more products than the market can absorb, creating a growing surplus which, in turn, creates price pressures and the problem of deflation. In our economic system, deflation leads to economic depression, so surplus production must find and open new markets for surplus products of our industries.
Since the industrial revolution, this frequently involved gunboat diplomacy: promoting the system of “free trade” with compelling, military means of persuasion. Gunboats were needed because the newly “opened” markets invariably experienced economic collapse as local crafts and industries found themselves unable to compete with Western industries.
True, the relationship has inverted today and since the 1980s, China assumed the role of world’s leading producer of large quantities of cheap everything and anything. But today, China seems to be sending a different message, which is a beautiful alternative to gunboat diplomacy.
The beautiful alternative
What if, instead of industrial hyperproduction we made craftsmanship great again? We’d produce less stuff, but the stuff would be more valuable, more beautiful and more durable. Instead of discarding and replacing things, we’d repair and maintain them. This approach would reduce the demand for resource extraction, waste and environmental devastation. It would also absorb a great deal of productivity and surplus labor, which has been a serious problem of the Western societies since the industrial revolution.
It would also solve the problem of nanny state and failing pension funds. Artisanal production requires hard work, patience and skill. Acquiring specialized skills invariably takes many years, some are refined and perfected over lifetimes. Products or services delivered by artisans with a lifetime of experience are invariably better than those of novices in ways that can’t be copied. In the markets, they command a premium. Thus, an older artisan could charge higher prices for his products. Furthermore, an artisan’s skills themselves have a market value as many novices will seek instruction from their more experienced colleagues.
In this sense, people nearing retirement don’t become “useless eaters,” or “net consumers of capital,” as European Central Bank’s chief, Christine Lagarde called them. Through their labor and experience, craftsmen become owners of “golden hands”: the most valuable, most honored capital in any society. Rather than becoming a burden and a liability, they become our most highly valued asset, capable of training up future golden hands.
I have to confess, it took me some time to ponder these questions as they cut to the very foundations of our societies: not only their economic organization but also their intellectual and cultural framework.
Exploring new paradigms
What we study under the rubric of “economics” today, all began with the industrial revolution and “classical” economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus and Jean-Baptiste Say who popularized and promoted the industrial economy as the only way to advancement and progress. But this type of progress has also created a deep longing for the “return to nature” - a more wholesome, more joyous and more beautiful way to live and work.
This longing may be vague, but we all sense that reducing ourselves to interchangeable cogs in what William Blake called, “dark Satanic mills” falls far short of human spirit’s full potential. And it’s not just our productive potential that goes unfulfilled: it is also our creativity and our ability to experience pride in our work and joy in living. In a subtle way, the videos from China convey exactly the more fulfilling, more creative and more joyous way to work and live.
Wasteful and unnecessary: the definition of luxury
Chinese crafts videos suggest that there’s a different way to do things and organize a society, even if it may seem alien and unrealistic to us. As intellectual heirs to Smith, Ricardo and Malthus, we may think that spending two months to make one hand-made umbrella is wasteful and unnecessary, but “wasteful and unnecessary” is practically the definition of what we call “luxury.”
Spending two months on an umbrella could even be thought of as a luxurious way to live. But it’s more than that: that umbrella will certainly have a market value, again as an object of luxury. From the hands of a skilled craftsman, it will probably be superior to the ones created by Cartier, Hermes or Gucci, and more valuable in the market: it really would be one of a kind!
Consider a quick value calculation: suppose the umbrella maker pays himself $20 per hour. If he worked 8 hours per day for two months to make an umbrella, the craftsman’s umbrella would cost about $6,400. You might wonder who’d pay that much money for an object you could buy for just a few bucks? It might be the same class of persons who pay $38,000 for a handbag. The point is that a market for such items almost certainly does exist.
What if…
The same principle could also apply to the production and consumption of foods. What if every morsel of food we consumed and every sip of wine, tea or coffee were produced with the same dedication to quality, the same fastidious attention to detail? Wouldn’t food be a joy to consume, experience and share? With mass produced “fast food,” eating devolves to little more than necessary but underwhelming refuelling of the body and a waste of opportunity to enjoy the produce to the fullest.
What if we also invested as much time and attention to human relationships? What if we expended as much devotion and time to raising our children rather than spending endless hours in traffic jams on our way to those dark satanic mills only to be cogs in giant hyper-production machines which then necessitate that we send our children to war to “open” new markets for the cheap crap we produce?
A tale of two quotes
What if craftsmanship made us more honest and more honorable? The contrast was captured in the following two quotes. The first one is from F. William Engdahl’s book, “A Century of War” (p. 126):
“Increasingly after the 1957 [economic] crisis, large U.S. industry and banks began to follow the ill-conceived ‘British model’ of industrial policy. Systematic cheating on product quality became the fashion of the day. … Pride in workmanship and commitment to industrial progress began to give way to the corporate financial ‘bottom line,’ a goal calculated every three months for corporate stockholders.”
The second quote is a simple observation by Walter Lipmann:
“You don’t have to preach honesty to men with creative purpose. A genuine craftsman will not adulterate his product. The reason isn’t because duty says he shouldn’t, but because passion says he couldn’t.”
Architecture
The logic of corporate financial ‘bottom line’ calculated every quarter for corporate stockholders has changed more than just the way we work. It’s also changed education, health care, music, arts, architecture and much more. With hyperproduction of everything, we went from this:
To this:
Of course, you wouldn’t discuss this with economics professors: their courses don’t even acknowledge such questions, let alone trying to answer them. Concepts like aesthetics, beauty, taste, joy, or quality of life simply don’t compute in the economics curriculum as defined since the industrial revolution. But the videos from China, judging by the commentary in social media, have already prompted the debate, which seems to be gathering momentum.
China’s attack on West’s bling factor
In my next article, I will tackle a related development from China, but more from a strategic than aesthetic angle. Nevertheless, the winds of change could potentially be equally transformative for the future of human societies.
Alex Krainer – @NakedHedgie is the creator of I-System Trend Following and publisher of daily TrendCompass reports which cover over 200 financial and commodities markets. One-month test drive is always free of charge. To learn more about TrendCompass reports please check our main TrendCompass web page. To start your trial subscription, drop us an email at TrendCompass@ISystem-TF.com, or:
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Beautiful piece you've written.
One of the very best article i have read in weeks. Thank you.