Business: always the villain, never the hero

Feb 26, 2013, 03:16

Merryn Somerset Webb

Posted byMerryn Somerset Webb

Share with
friends:

Comments (14)

When I was at  university, I did a course called Business Literature and Society, taught by the rather marvellous Neil McKendrick, later the Master of Gonville and Caius College.

The idea was to look at how business and industry were portrayed in British literature. It was rather depressing. We looked George Orwell’s horror of business and money in general. He hated poverty (it “kills thought”), but he didn’t fancy money or capitalism much either (“the advance of machine technology must lead ultimately to form of collectivisation”).

We looked at EM Forster and the horror of technology-led progress he displays in The Machine Stops, as well as the ambiguity towards progress shown in Howards End.  Think of quotes such as “the real thing is money and all the rest’s a dream”, or “humans heard each other speak with increasing difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky”.

Then there was DH Lawrence who raged against even Forster’s portrayal of business (“you did make a nearly deadly mistake in glorifying those business people in Howards End”). and made his own views as a certain an unwavering critic of industry pretty clear in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 

We looked, too, at Dickens, with his endless antagonism to the Victorian age and vision of money, commerce and industry threatening personal relationships.

Then we moved on a bit and read David Lodge (Changing Places, Nice Work) and Margaret Drabble, who worried endlessly about moral exhaustion in industrial society (a “huge icy fist... that is squeezing and chilling the people of England”).

Sign up for a 3-week FREE trial of MoneyWeek
and get the following free as well

"The only financial publication I could not be without."
John Lang, Director, Tower Hill Associates Ltd

Flick through all this literature – and much more modern – and you will see that as a rule we haven’t much good to say about businessmen, capitalism or even entrepreneurs, for that matter.

This all popped back into my mind this week when I was reading Janet Daley in the Telegraph. The column in question is here. In it, Daley rages against the idea that public institutions  should be allowed to operate with an “aura of sanctity” around them – “almost as if being employed by an outfit that is funded by state subsidy means that you aren’t doing it for payment, that idealism and devotion to your vocation are somehow a substitution for renumeration.” The public sector is, therefore, “inherently virtuous”.

This is, of course, nonsense. Yet as an idea it increasingly runs parallel to the idea that “private enterprise, and specifically profit, are necessarily evil”. Where does this extraordinary notion come from? asks Daley.

It is hard to put your finger on the very beginning (the defensive snobbery of the landed gentry during the industrial revolution is probably a good place to start) but what might help, just for once, would be a few popular books with a successful businessman as the hero. not the villain.

PS I am not so familiar with American literature, but this looks interesting. More on the businessman in UK literature here.

Comments (14)

Published in Blog More articles by Merryn Somerset Webb

Share with
friends:

Related articles

Comments

Leave a comment

  • 1. JT

    (26 February 2013, 05:55PM)  Complain about this comment

    I heartily recommend Daley's article. She makes the point the NHS seems to be immune from criticism (and spending on health has been ring-fenced by the coalition) - despite the fact it has been responsible through institutionalized incompetence for large numbers of avoidable deaths. And yet nothing changes and no-one seems to be accountable. It's a national disgrace.

  • 2. SK

    (26 February 2013, 05:57PM)  Complain about this comment

    You should read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - one of America's most read books of the 20th century and taught in schools and colleges out there.

  • 3. NeutronWarp9

    (26 February 2013, 06:57PM)  Complain about this comment

    Not all businesses are the same but why is it so difficult to understand that a public sector worker is paid (far too much mind, what what) to do a job and has no meaningful financial incentive - other than to retain a salary via employment. Hence if a patient lives or dies, not financially fussed. Somebody pays cash without the VAT, so what?
    However, in the private sector, it is not uncommon for management and fee earners to be meaningfully incentivised. Consequently, whatever result you can get is all too often the order of the day; whether it be lies, half-truths, omissions, exaggerations, or horse meat rather than beef. It's all about the money, innit?
    However there are many fine private companies, of course. I hear Apple's Chinese operations are most wonderful and much better than our dark satanic mills of old.

  • 4. Shinsei1967

    (26 February 2013, 07:03PM)  Complain about this comment

    It's exactly the same in TV and films. Businessmen are almost always portrayed negatively.

    From Gordon Gekko in Wall Street to Mike Baldwin in Coronation Street . Despite the fact that Mike Baldwin was keeping open probably the last factory in Salford throughout the 70s and 80s, employing hundreds, he was always portrayed negatively compared to his rival for Coronation St alpha male status Guardian reading teacher, Ken Barlow.

  • 5. Boris MacDonut

    (26 February 2013, 07:06PM)  Complain about this comment

    Given the broad gammut of literature ove the past 150 years I'm sure if such a thing as a lovable and benign businessman existed he or she would have been written about. Citing Dickens as anti business is a bit rich, he was more pre-occupied with the evil that business caused to the poor masses. A problem that has seemingly still to be properly addressed even today. Business is always the vilain as it simply never seems to have a heart, a moral compass or any sense of its real role in society. It is a massive failing and there is no will to deal with it.

  • 6. Shinsei1967

    (26 February 2013, 07:44PM)  Complain about this comment

    A banker friend of mine has just been watching the complete series of The Onedin Line from the BBC (1971-80). For those too young to remember it tells the story of a late C19th Liverpool ship owner.

    He tells me that it is the only TV series he has ever seen that portrays business life as it actually is. Amongst the personal stories of the Onedin Line it is full of plots about securing working capital & bank loans, insurance, expansion & investing in new equipment, tax issues etc.

    Despite, or because of all this, it was actually very popular viewing

  • 7. Jay

    (26 February 2013, 09:29PM)  Complain about this comment

    Where does this extraordinary notion come from?

    It may have originated in the writings of Ignatius Loyola, 1491-1556, an aristocrat from the Basque region who founded the Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Having spent much of his early life gambling, wenching and duelling, wounded by a cannon ball during a battle, he limped for the rest of his life and never really had to work. Therefore it was relatively easy for him to idealize the concept of service without personal profit.

    His writings include this influential famous prayer...

    Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest;
    To give, and not to count the cost,
    to fight, and not to heed the wounds,
    to toil, and not to seek for rest,
    to labour, and not to ask for any reward,
    save that of knowing that we do thy will.

  • 8. Inflation Monkey

    (26 February 2013, 10:15PM)  Complain about this comment

    I agree with SK, you should read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. A Swiss friend gave me a copy of read over 15 years ago. It showed business and capitalism in a positive light.

    However it seem unlike in the US, this book and author, just like business and capitalism in general, are considered "beyond the pale" in most of Europe and the UK.

  • 9. Baxter Basics

    (27 February 2013, 09:22AM)  Complain about this comment

    For every Joseph Rowntree there seems to be a hundred Robert Maxwells.

    I think that, over the centuries, society has been conditioned to believe the (fallacious, IMHO) reasoning that profit is inherently evil since, by definition, it must come at someone else's expense. It feeds the notion that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. To be fair, this argument is given rather a lot of credibility by tales of asset-stripping private equity raiders, pension fund misappropriation, conflict of interest via commission-based incentives, banker's bonuses, interminable annual inflation-busting CEO pay-rises, expenses fiddling and selling tools of oppression to oppressive regimes (to name but a few).

  • 10. Baxter Basics

    (27 February 2013, 09:23AM)  Complain about this comment


    We are hard-wired to be more averse to losing a few quid rather than potentially gaining a fortune. By the same token, tales of philanthropists like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet providing literally billions of dollars to worthy causes seem to impress us less than the myriad businesspeople that support their local communities through providing jobs to them.

    It's a shame. Good business should be lionised to set the expected standard of good business behaviour as much as anything else. Unfortunately the reality is that there are far too many "fast buck" merchants out there, which is probably why I'll be eating part of a badly-treated horse for my tea.

  • 11. Shinsei1967

    (27 February 2013, 01:17PM)  Complain about this comment

    "For every Joseph Rowntree there seems to be a hundred Robert Maxwells."

    To be fair the whole of the UK is covered with buildings, institutions, schools, colleges, scholarships etc funded by Victorian philanthropic busimnessmen.

    On the other hand there was practically no corporate or income tax for the government to be able to fund these things.

  • 12. JT

    (27 February 2013, 04:56PM)  Complain about this comment

    Shinsei,

    You're right.

    Daley's article is making the point that, in fact, for-profit businesses usually provide better products and services than the state - something which will be self-evident to most of those who have used private dentistry, medicine or education.

    Why then is state spending on health and education still ring-fenced? Because we don't yet have a government strong enough to make fundamental change. The big question for 2015 is whether that will change.

  • 13. Bayard

    (27 February 2013, 05:32PM)  Complain about this comment

    Two answers to your question, Merryn.
    Firstly, the British are obsessed with land. Even before the Industrial Revolution, anyone who made money bought land, lived off rents and became one of the landed gentry. After a couple of generations, everyone had forgotten that the family made their money in "dirty trade". It's all part of the Great British Disease of snobbery. No-one in Dickens's stories actually works for a living apart from a few walk-on parts, other than Doyce, the engineer. Everyone lives on inherited money or rents. This is what people aspired to.
    Secondly, we expect our businessmen to be honest and moral, so the only stories that make the papers are when they are caught being dishonest or immoral. "Local businessman gives staff £100 for their Christmas bonus" is not news, whereas "Local businessman gives staff a Kit-kat for their Christmas bonus" is.

  • 14. Andrew H

    (27 February 2013, 07:36PM)  Complain about this comment

    @Merryn and @Boris

    That's not strictly correct, Dickens wrote about contemporary issues that he felt were unjust.

    Specifically "A Tale of Two Cities", and "Bleak House" deal with abuse by the state (The tryanny of the revolutionary government, and the misery of those caught up as wards of the Court of the Chancery, respectively).

Leave a comment

This will be the name displayed with your comment.

This helps us verify comments are genuine. It will not be displayed anywhere on the site and is stored confidentially.

Please keep your comment within 1,000 characters and relevant to the main topic. We encourage healthy debate, but we don't allow insults or bad language. Anything off topic or unpleasant, we'll remove. Enjoy the conversation! Thank you.

captcha To prevent spam-related comments please enter the characters shown in the 'Captcha' box to the left.

By leaving a comment you accept our terms and conditions.


FREE - MoneyWeek's daily investment emailJohn Stepek

Our free daily email, Money Morning, is an informative and enjoyable analysis of what's going on in the markets. Written by our Editor, John Stepek, and guest contributors.
Sign up FREE to Money Morning here.

>