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The Ethics of Extravagant Wealth

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IMG_5657Last week received, along with our usual delivery of the New York Times, a gigantic 336 page glossy magazine on real estate which featured postings around New York City, The Hamptons, Long Island “Gold Coast”, LA, and Florida.  Firstly, I cannot imagine what that cost to print and the hassle for the delivery team, heaving the paper plus heavy tome onto driveways everywhere.  Secondly, this kind of publication is hardly a flier about a sale at Target.  While I might casually flip through the Target ads and be inspired to busy Tide on sale, what is the likelihood of my deciding on a whim to buy a 12 million dollar mansion in Watermill or a west-side condo in NYC for a mere 6.5 mil?  Oh look dear, lets get it!  Not likely.  Which leads me to point #3: what a royal waste of paper, ink, natural resources to distribute a huge document on high end real estate to random people living in modest three bedroom homes?  What is the ecology of all of this?

But then I opened it up at random and was struck by the sheer immensity of these IMG_5658mansions, one after the other.  The Court-at-Versailles decadence of offering a 8 bedroom house with 10 bathrooms, three guest cottages, on nine landscaped acres next to the wetlands…  We are talking about the 1% of the 1% territory here.  In a world where the vast number of humans struggle to survive, to feed themselves, or even in our wealthy country, pay their basic bills– here we are invited to “just move in” to a 12 million dollar mansion with 12,000 square feet.

IMG_5660I have nothing against the rich but at some point, how rich is too rich?  Why would even Bill Gates need the mansions featured in this four color, heavy paper circular?  Does this magazine represent unethical living at its most egregious?  If we add up the huge impact on the fragile environment where many of these mansions were built (especially the newer ones on the east end of Long Island or on the Florida coast), consider the extravagance that rivals anything Marie Antoinette could have dreamed up, and the message of entitlement–well, many questions present themselves.

IMG_5659The irony is that the audience for this publication would never be picking up their Times from the driveway and using this book to find their dream mansion.  They have a staff that does that sort of thing.   So, is it to make the rest of us all feel bad?  Vicariously rich?

Why do we lack universal health care, quality public education, support for the poorest among us–and yet advertise “homes” that are really palaces?  Can a real estate magazine like this promote discussion about the ethics of entitlement, unbridled consumerism, and our lack of concern for nature?

Clouds and time

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I am thoroughly entranced by clouds these days… well, maybe all days.  They hover over us and define our days as sunny, stormy, crop-growing, stay-inside, or simply terrifying.  I like to think of clouds as landscapes upside down, floating continents, the history of the globe but sped up.

Or better yet, let us watch them moving…

 

Interiors/Exteriors

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Apollo- in Delfi

Apollo- in Delfi

I recently returned from a educational trip to Rome and Greece with my students and those of colleagues.  As I walked around the Plaka and every small town that we visited on our Classical tour, I saw endless shops with souvenirs: from cheap trinkets to pricey replicas and interpretative artistic renderings.  All the students–and I–took hundreds of photos. In fact most of the time we viewed the ruins through the lens of a camera, be it a phone or fancy SLR.

On returning home our suitcases bulged with objects acquired along every stop of the way.  And this got me thinking: have we replaced interior experiences and memories with exterior objects, things?  As a culture we own more stuff than any previous generation  in the entire history of the world.  Museum visits always end–sometimes start–with a visit to the museum store.  We start them young. Disney and Pixar movies are accompanied by merchandise, often before the movie is even released.  What does this all mean, apart from enterprising Capitalism?  DSCF0462

Have we replaced our memories with physical objects to record our lives?  Photos rather than recall?  Souvenirs rather than imagining walking through the ruins at Delfi, Olympia, Corinth?  We seem not to trust the transformative and enveloping experience itself and want some physical trace to represent our travels, both near and far.  We are our possessions, rather than our gathered thoughts, feelings, recollections.  As Plato noted in the Symposium, we are entranced by beauty, lulled by the glow of shiny things.  But we must also move beyond this level of simple understanding to a higher/deeper entrancement.

sunset in NauplioI spent one evening sitting on the pier in Nauplio watching the sun set behind the mountains, across the gulf.  Every other minute I was compelled to take a picure and I watched every passerby do much the same.  We could not but look at the beauty that radiated from the sunset through the clouds, illuminating the water and the small Venetian fort in the harbor.  We humans long for beauty in a deep and irrevocable way that translates into desire– a pure, simply, passionate desire to own and to have that beauty.

But what are we really seeking here? Johann Gottfried Herder captured this best in his poem , Ein Traum:

Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Leben
Auf Erden hier;
Wie Schatten auf den Wogen schweben
Und schwinden wir
Und messen unsere trägen Schritte
Nach Raum und Zeit
Und sind, wir wissen´s nicht, in Mitte
Der Ewigkeit.

We are indeed in the middle of eternity and the things we cling to will vanish.  Only memory  lives on.