Aggregating Interest

Was listening to NPR, a habit I have to kick, and there was a featurette on a building trend in Germany towards recreating Prussian palaces. Apparently, many Germans are sick of modernism, and looking to reflect pre-20th-century cultural roots. Meriting brief mention were the masons who build these things, in much the same way they were built centuries ago, one stone on top of another (though the stone cutting is largely automated now). This is an extremely expensive way to build, and always has been, now mostly because of labour costs. When you see these palaces, whether in Germany or France or elsewhere, you are struck both by their "beauty", which is due entirely to their craftsmanship as their designs are fairly unimaginative, and their excess. They just stink of feudal tyranny. The landed class sucks up all the resources of the serfs and spits it back out as a stone edifice. The masons themselves often live in wattle and daub shanties, which would look inspiringly cool and rustic to us (all these "green building" rags now on the market, burning up paper pulp, would die for one of them), but likely served only as reminders of poverty to them. But the only lasting testament of these masons' existence is the palace which, once completed, they likely never set foot in.

I often think of these structures as a model for how we organize most everything in our society, historically and presently, in one of the few modes that has carried over through the advent of capital. A single focal point aggregates all the resources, through means fair or foul, and all the other actors participate relative to the dictates of that focal point. In this model, all the actors are made to pay a cost, but only the focal point is the ostensive beneficiary. Put like this, the model sounds completely insane, but we all participate in it every day. We all invest our energies in the "projects" of our various bosses, in the holidays of our culture, in the objects of our desire. A case in point is this wedding I'm planning in the distant future. A whole lot of people, starting with the lady and I, are going to be putting a whole lot of resources into a roughly 12 hour event, centered entirely upon two people. It sounds completely absurd on the face of it (actually, I think it more than "sounds absurd", but recognizing absurdity rarely delivers one from absurdity's grasp). It's also the only time that all the actors in the "wedding" will ever be brought together in one physical space and time. Likewise, in our current model, the only way an entire mountain will be stripped of its useful rock and transformed into a 500-year or millennium-strength building is by hundreds of craftsman signing on years of their lives to a draconian contract for the benefit of the rich. (As a footnote, which blogger doesn't seem to have, I will add that my favorite edifices I've ever been involved in building were the public ones in places like Yosemite Nat'l park and San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. They avoid half the problematic by being open for anyone to visit and being beneficial to no one individual. Invaribaly, however, they have the names of big money donors carved into them, because no municipality can seem to figure out how to aggregate enough public funds to do one of these- we have to let some enterprising capitalist bilk it out of our pockets first, then "gift" it back to us in the form of a subsidy for our own labor.)

My whole reason for writing this is that I really like stone edifices and big parties, but I can't seem to find a way out of the problems of inequity and exploitation implied in their undertaking.