Emilie Zola's "Paradise for Ladies"

Among the many, many novels Emile Zola wrote is one I never heard of, Au Bonheur Des Dames ("Paradise for Ladies"). As Agnes Callard explains in this interesting essay, the novel has a romantic plot but is really about the rise of the department store. Zola covers all the sides of this phenomenon: the demise of small shops that have been in the same family for generations, the miserable conditions of the workers, the frenzy of greed induced in the shoppers, which induces even wealthy woman to shoplift. Apparently Callard wrote this because "Paradise for Ladies" has become a television miniseries, but she says nothing about that except to complain that it doesn't capture the complexity of the original.

Anyway, I was struck by this:

For all the suffering it causes, the Ladies’ Paradise is a place of passion, filled with energy. The people inside of it may be a bit crazed with the desperation to buy, or the desperation to sell, but they are noticeably alive, when juxtaposed with the surrounding neighbourhood, which reeks of darkness and decay. And this, in the end, is the sharpest contrast in the novel: between the lively, colourful world of the department store, and the stagnant and despondent world outside of it. As much as you empathise with the umbrella store owner, there is no question as to which way the future lies. What Zola showcases about capitalism is that it is a powerful source of optimism, of momentum; and that people, once they become wealthy enough to attend to something other than survival, need some such engine. The difficulty that he implicitly raises for any alternative to capitalism is not the usual one, about efficiency: how will the system be organised in such a way as to avoid poverty for all? It is instead a motivational difficulty: assuming it does avoid poverty for all, what will move and inspire and incite those people?

And this is absolutely the problem with contemporary socialism: it's boring. 

Where is the real energy in America? The passion? The hope for the future? Certainly not on the left, where everything is doom and gloom: climate collapse, young people will never own homes, maybe we should throw it all over and go back to gathering nuts in the woods. Not in the arts, where the serious artists are as depressed as the left-wing activists and Hollywood can't do anything but recycle old superheroes.

The energy is in the business world. And not all of that; retailers are pretty glum. The energy is in the big tech firms like Nvidia and Google, in gaming companies, with the aerospace guys psyched up about new stealth weapons. In the top sports leagues and their stars. With SpaceX, with geothermal firms drilling for the hot depths, with people making electric buses and giant wind turbines. With extreme sports guys who can get ten million views of a death-defying mountainbike ride. 

This, to me, is the secret of right-wing icons like Donald Trump and Elon Musk: they radiate energy and a sense of action. Maybe Trump doesn't have any actual ideas, and maybe Musk's Mars colony is stardust, but they convey a sense that they are going somewhere. If half the country hates and opposes them, that just makes their journeys more heroic. If there ambitions have a brutal edge, that just makes them more appealing to many.

If you want to capture the human imagination, you need energy, vision, and an exciting plan for the future. Bemoaning the state of things is no good; it only depresses people in an age when, so far as we can tell, humans are more depressed than ever. 

This is what I think whenever I read some anarchist or communist writing in sorrow or anger about the woes of our time: show me your vision for a better future. Otherwise, stop dragging everyone down. Because if people can only get energy and excitement from brutal Randian tycoons or violent nationalists, that is where they will go.