I don’t know how many reputable philosophers are on record as having said that the universe and even life itself are essentially absurd. The Bavarians, a sturdy tribe of Germans settled around the city of Munich, the city of beer where I once used to live, sum it up in one of their pithy sayings: “Saufst, schtirbscht; saufst net, schtirbscht ah!” It is hard to be so succinct in English but a reasonable translation would be “Drink too much you die, for shame; don’t drink at all, die all the same.”Beer drinking is not one of the things that are foremost in my thoughts. But I also run into such absurdities in other contexts. The economy came to mind, the marketplace. There is no such thing as a perpetuum mobile. To keep things moving requires that you put something in. If everything stopped at the status quo antes there would be nothing to sell or buy. We would all be dead. Just losers, no winners.
If you are in commerce and you have something to sell you must find a way to attract buyers. And if you want more than a hand to mouth break-even existence you need many more buyers in order to buy more things to sell to even more buyers. It is a veritable chain reaction until we run into limits. Now we have a dilemma: everything we buy creates waste, pollutes, or harms us in other ways and we would want to cut back, not consume so much. But suppliers can’t survive unless we consume stuff. Most of us grew up believing that there are no limits. The power companies, for example, helped us to think of more ways to use more of the energy they sold. I remember a Southern California Gas Company presentation of the then new icemaker refrigerator where the young lady presenter showed us novel ways to use ice cubes. Put them in drinks; use them for compresses if you burn yourself; give them to houseplants for easy watering, and so on. More consumption was thought to be good for the economy.
Today, though, the limits are obvious. The power company now offers us advice on how to save on energy, i.e. to save money by saving energy. It’s a noble thing to do, of course, but it strikes me as absurd when a supplier urges consumers to consume less. Ultimately, of course, this hurts the supplier. Business shrinks. Employees become surplus humanity on food stamps. We are sorry for those workers and start looking for scapegoats. At election time voters prefer politician who promise to save their jobs. As if any politician had the slightest idea how to do that. The more efficient we become the worse it gets. Should a factory now scrap their robot machinery and hire people instead? They cannot afford people unless they outsource to a poorer country where labor is cheap. But that is not what angry voters want. They want their own old jobs back. And those jobs do not exist any more. The economy, I say, is absurd.
I take a pill every evening. It controls my symptoms. I buy refills every month. It is an ideal situation for the supplier. But I, the patient, would like a pill that cures me, that leaves me with no more symptoms to control. It would be ideal for me but counterproductive for the producer of my trusty daily pill, obviously.
When I am sick I see my doctor. Sick people are the stock in trade of physicians and hospitals. Healthy people less so. We all deserve praise for professing to embrace the idea of preventive medicine. But what if we all turned out to be perfectly healthy tomorrow morning? All of us, except the few that get involved in accidents. They will not generate enough income for more than a few doctors and one hospital per town. I see a paradox in that. Physicians do not know yet how to make us all well. But should they find a way, their own existence would be endangered. Some dilemma.
On the other hand, it has all happened before. When the automobile made the horse obsolete all drovers, farriers, and horse traders lost their jobs. Even the horse butchers of Paris slowly disappeared. I remember two of them on rue Chappe in the 18th arrondissement. In the late Forties one still had a shop sign in the form of a horse’s head, a tête de cheval, signifying the nature of his business. Most of these shops are gone now. Their supply of merchandise has dwindled, and so have the customers. But as far as I have been able to determine life goes on. A few doors down the street from where the horse head used to hang you find today the busy Cafe de Chappe. Prominently displayed on the menu the owner lists his Steak à Cheval, a very common item in Parisian brasseries consisting of an egg straddling a ground beef patty “like a rider on a horse.” I am not sure but I think he meant this as a joke. I have convinced myself that, while sad, it is a hopeful sign that most young people cannot possibly ‘get’ this splendid pun. As it did on rue Chappe, life goes on everywhere, at least in the short run. Was not Charles Darwin in the 1830’s worried about Thomas Malthus’ prediction, namely that there was no room for more people? And is it not now two hundred years later? And isn’t Malthus just about the last thing we worry about in our day to day lives? Bless Alfred E. Neuman and his dictum: “What — Me Worry?”. Yes, that’s us. I suspect that there is method in Mad.
(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credit: clipart