About farting

I heard an amusing item on the BBC World Service that in Malawi there is a new bill before parliament which is attempting to make it an offence to foul the air by breaking wind in public. There seems to be some legal dispute as to whether the text is seeking to outlaw flatulence in particular or is making a more general reference to air pollution. However, the Minister for Justice, Mr Chaponda, is adamant that he is leading a campaign for public decency, telling the local radio, “Just go to the toilet when you feel like farting”.

My good friend and fellow potential criminal in Malawi, Pete, and I pondered together over dinner the consequences of this news. Would there be a mass public outcry and camping out on the square like in Cairo with the enraged citizens of... (sorry, I don’t know what the capital of Malawi is) protesting in defence of freedom of expression, perhaps with rhythmic chanting and farting ? (What do we want ?! prrfffff!!! One, two, three, four! What are we farting for ?! etc). As a libertarian myself I would probably be carrying a banner proclaiming: “Wherever you be, let your wind go free!”

And if the bill were ever passed into law, how would you enforce it ? Would there be a new branch of the secret police following you around and slapping you in handcuffs if you accidentally let one off ? And what about false accusations ? The mind boggles.

Actually, the Minister says it would be enforced by local chiefs in a way similar to the existing law on urinating in public. However, I do see a difference here: I may have perfect control over my bladder, but not over my sphincter. To paraphrase a popular aphorism of today: farts happen. To attempt to stem the eruptive force of nature by legislation smacks of King Canute sitting on his throne on the beach commanding the tide to turn.

As Pete and I mused on, Geraldine seemed less amused, she considered that perhaps Malawi would be her kind of place. Generally, it seems that women find farting less amusing than men. I wonder why that is ?

As a man I do find farting intrinsically funny.

Perhaps it is the joy at seeing a sudden loss of dignity in someone who had previously been giving themselves airs and graces; in other words it is the very essence of slapstick. There is the delight also of observing how people choose to react to this breakdown in polite social intercourse. Farting is the bathetic reminder that we are all human. I am reminded of Montaigne: “les rois fientent; et les dames aussi.” (Kings crap; and so do ladies). Rather than take this as a disappointment, we should embrace it as a cause for celebration of the entirety and universality of the human condition.

If my amusement at farting is branded as puerile, the attitude of a little boy, let me retort that embarrassment at it is equally the reaction of a little girl. Perhaps we need a more adult view, neatly expressed in a cartoon on display in our downstairs loo. Two impeccably dressed English gentlemen with tightly rolled umbrellas and bowler hats sit alone in a first class railway compartment reading the Times. The first asks: “Excuse me, Sir, have you just farted ?” The second replies: “Of course I have, do you think I always smell like this ?”

Farting is seen as taboo in most societies that deem themselves to be civilized and to have moved on from their origins closer to nature. People don’t want to be reminded of that side of their humanity, and the perpetrator is indeed “in bad odour”. Admittedly the smell can be decidely anti-social, especially in such a confined space as a lift. It has to be recognized though that in a simple more rural society, where people tend to live outdoors and closer to many other intense smells of nature, the chances are it passes unnoticed anyway, or at least can be more easily relativized as part of life’s great olefactory tapestry, which we have generally forgotten in our modern anti-septic world.

The true joy of the fart is of course not its smell but its noise (“The fart has no nose”, folk proverb quoted by Bertolt Brecht). There is a boisterous sincere vitality in a loud fart. Actually farts are like dogs, their bark is usually worse than their bite. The ones you have to beware of are the silent but deadly (SBD), sneakily and hypocritically emitted in their full and evil fetidness by those who then pretend it wasn’t them and accuse others. This gives rise to the folk wisdom of “he who smelled it dealt it” or in its more erudite form “he who perceived it conceived it”. No, far better is the honest audible farter.

A sonorous, full-bodied fart is worth cultivating. In the late 19thC, the Frenchman Joseph Pujol famously made a music-hall stage career as “le pétomane”. He was capable of farting at will and even able to play the Marseillaise through his anus. Actually, his muscular control was such that he was able to suck in the air and then expel it, so it wasn’t coming from his intestine at all and didn’t smell. There was me thinking he must have been on a special diet of brassica and pulses washed down with beer, but apparently not.

Although I lack the skills of Pujol and cannot fart at will, I do enjoy making the most of one, when it comes naturally. Fortunately, when concentrating at work or during an entertainment at a concert, theatre or cinema, they don’t seem to come, but afterwards, once relaxed... It seems sad that people such as the Minister of Malawi would deprive people, or perhaps I should say men, of this innocent pleasure.

One of my favourite Japanese poems in its elegiac simplicity goes:

“Letting rip a fart;

It doesn’t make you laugh

When you live alone.”

Subject of course to the right company, farts are for sharing.

About the economy and values

Economists habitually divide the economy into three sectors. The primary sector includes agriculture, forestry, mining, fisheries: basically the gaining of natural resources. The secondary sector includes manufacturing industry: the processing of these resources into finished products. The tertiary sector includes everything else: what we loosely term services.

As any civilized, that is economically organized, society develops, it progresses through three ages in which its economy is dominated successively by the primary, secondary and then tertiary sector.

To begin with our hunter gatherer ancestors settled and started to grow their own food in an agricultural society based on subsistence. You can still find societies like this in remote parts of the globe and indeed through millenia of human history the majority of workers were engaged in agriculture. However, in Western Europe with the coming of the industrial revolution, things started to change. First of all increasing mechanization on the land meant that the farming could be done by fewer workers and thus the increasing spare capacity of labour could then be harnessed to produce other goods in an increasingly industrial society characterized by an ever greater division of labour and a constant discovery of new material needs. In turn increasing automation meant that fewer workers were needed in the factories and they could be employed on other tasks in the services sector. This is where we are now, in our post-industrial societies, where typically well over two thirds of jobs are in the tertiary sector.

I would like to argue, in a rather general way, that many of the unspoken values of a society are driven by its economy, or which sector dominates it, and you can see this borne out in different historic and geographic situations.

In a subsistence agriculture, especially in an area like Europe which is characterized by marked seasonal differences, it is essential for survival to maximize production at the right time of year and then to manage the storage and consumption of that production through the year until the next harvest. In modern management-speak this is called “forward-planning”, but it is in fact “backward-looking”, that is learning from many years of past experience what the seasonal patterns are and which methods work best in practice. A society of this kind attaches a high value to traditions, which are the ritualized embodiment, for the purpose of remembering them, of practices which work well. This society also respects its elders who have gained wisdom from much experience. It values an ability to work hard, often together, and attaches importance to the thrifty, or as we might say these days “sustainable”, management of resources. This agricultural society’s aim is survival.

The values required for a highly industrialized society to work are quite different. This kind of economy depends on producing and consuming an ever larger amount of goods. This society needs to encourage people to be forever buying something new. What is new is valued more than what is old, and sadly that is also true of people. Old people are seen as just a nuisance, not as a repository of wisdom. Consequently many strive to appear to be younger than they actually are. “Success” becomes equated less with the respect that goes with one’s usefulness to society, and more with the accumulation of material possessions. This society attaches little value to tradition and more to novelty and innovation. Replacement goods are cherished, people want what is newer, better, bigger, faster. This industrial society’s aim is growth.

As the economy becomes post-industrial and more and more services are on offer, the emphasis may start to shift away from the mere acquisition of goods to the enjoyment of more services. However, people will always need to buy goods and so the manufacturing sector still remains fundamental to the economy and it is ignored at a society’s peril, as a comparison between the United Kingdom and Germany will reveal.

Even so, in the economy dominated by the service sector, I do see this further development that the consumer who is saturated with goods now spends an increasing share of his income on services. For example, people want to go out more, eat out more, travel more, try new experiences.

Getting rich as reflected in owning more possessions, becomes less important than enjoying life. People come to be respected more for what they do and have done than for what they own. It is better to be than to have. This fortunately more humanizing trend in today’s post-industrial society is driven by its economy’s increasing need to sell services but it still co-exists with the tendencies I have described in the industrial society that needs to sell goods.

There is a glimmer of hope though that this post-industrial society’s aim may become more one of sustainability and self-fulfilment.

Sadly, at the same time, this incipient positive trend is countered by an oppressive desire to attach an economic, or monetary value to every object and activity in society. The thing is that while our economy is dominated by the service sector, the service sector is in turn dominated by the financial sector.

The pervasive logic and narrative of the financial sector, and its quest for ever quicker and bigger returns on capital, poisons the whole of our economy and society. “Value” is understood only in its material and economic sense of a price-tag and not as something spiritual or ethical.

The financial sector is all-powerful and beyond the control of elected government. It dictates the economic orthodoxy and political agenda. Given its influence over US government (most of the decision-makers in the US Treasury once worked for Goldman Sachs and the like), we were all forced to accept their own notion that they were “too big to fail” and had to be bailed out. Would not have Ireland been better off running the risk of letting a large bank go bankrupt, rather than bankrupting the whole nation?

Governments have always had to borrow money and financial institutions have always needed someone to lend it to. However, this mutually beneficial relationship has now been disturbed by the greedy desire of lenders to extort a higher rate of interest, because they perceive the borrowers to have their backs against the wall.

So now that our countries have become over-endebted by bailing out the financial sector, rather perversely and ungratefully these same people seek to dictate to us the terms on which we may be allowed to borrow more money. They seek to tell governments what policies they should be running. Surely though it is for the electorate to decide what policies it wants its government to pursue, not for the financial sector and those who kow-tow to its orthodoxy. Why should governments be obliged by them to slash the social state against the wishes of their people ?

What is this nonsense about not being able to afford the benefits of the past, when our countries are in fact far richer than they ever were when such things as universal education, health care and pensions were first introduced after the war ?

And of course, at the same time, all those in positions of political and economic power who are singing the praises of cuts are not actually on the receving end of them themselves. Oh no, they’re on big salaries and giving themselves bonuses. These same leaders, who would have us put up with the cheap alternative, never accept anything less than the best for themselves. People are right to be outraged. If anything, I’m surprised there aren’t more of them out on the streets.

Or then again, maybe I’m not, because too many people have actually been taken in by this narrative that it is the economic and monetary value of everything that counts. “It’s the economy, stupid”, the story goes, it’s all about numbers and that thing called ethics is irrelevant to the modern world. Such people, and they are many, spend a lot of their own time worrying about what things cost, where to get them cheaper and how to save money. They can tell you how much they paid for everything they ever bought in their lives; so much so that in a bizarre way the price of something becomes more important to them than its utility. They should relax: they’re far better off than those in the third world and after all money is only for spending. But because of their own obsession with money, they are the first to accept the specious argument that what is socially beneficial cannot be afforded, whereas in fact the truth is that the same large amounts of money “we can’t afford” are being spent on the more selfish satisfaction and protection of the few. To put it simply, cost is not the point; I believe there are some things that should be paid for in a society no matter what they cost.

Keynes, the author of “The general theory of employment, interest and money”, admitted himself that after his initial theorizing he was surprised at how in practice money was becoming an end in itself rather than a means to a greater end. He had underestimated the propensity of money to become a commodity in its own right and people’s ability to see the accumulation of it as an end in itself.

So just as I was becoming optimistic that we were becoming less materialistic in our post-industrial society, by being drawn as consumers as much towards services as to goods, I see too that now more than ever we are victims of the monetary thinking “ what does it cost ?” and of the economic narrative that “profit and loss is all that matters”, both of which undermine the real values of society.

It is of course a much simpler way of understanding life, as it is only black and white: it is easier to calculate what is profit and loss, than to consider what is right and wrong. The only thing is that real life is actually more complex and colourful than the economists would have us believe. Not for nothing is economics called “the dismal science” - though of course it is not a pure science at all, only a social one.

We don’t live together in society merely to make money out of each other, the purposes are much greater and broader. Solidarity and social cohesion should at the very least be seen to be in everyone’s enlightened self-interest. There are many signs that we have lost our way by attaching too much importance to what can be done cheaply and turn a quick profit, rather than by considering what is in the best interest of the majority.

We are wrong to let the economy shape so many of our values.