The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [22]
The manufacture and promotion of all of these was no game, but rather an attempt to subsist which was no less grave, and therefore no less worthy of respect and dignity, than a boar hunt on whose successful conclusion the fate of an entire primitive community might once have hung. For if a new wrapping machine did not operate as efficiently as anticipated, or if a slogan failed to capture the imagination of shoppers, there would be no escape from shuttered houses and despair in the suburbs of nearby Verviers. The biscuits carried lives on their backs.
Modern commercial endeavours may not be of the kind that we have been taught to associate with heroism. They involve battles fought with the most bathetic of instruments, with two-for-the-price-of-one specials and sticker-based bribes, but they are battles nonetheless, comparable in their intensity and demands to the tracking of furtive animals through the deadly forests of prehistoric Belgium.
10.
I travelled back to England along the route used weekly by a fleet of articulated lorries transporting shipments of Moments from their plant to the United Biscuits distribution centre at Ashby de la Zouch. Near Ostend, I stopped off at a service station whose forecourt was lined with trucks heading for the cross-Channel ferries.
I lapsed into thoughts of factories across the continent involved in making breadsticks and candles, rubber bands and butter, lasagne and batteries, pillow cases and toy boats – and in turn, I imagined trucks that would at that moment be crossing Europe, travelling north with fondue sets, west with hi-fi parts, underneath the Alps with cellophane and around the Bay of Biscay with puff cereal.
At the end of a field opposite the service station ran the high-speed Thalys rail line, on which bullet trains sped at 250 kilo metres an hour between the Netherlands and France, each machine costing some 28 million euros. Inside, passengers might have been reading papers and having a drink (maybe a Pepsi Light, a Tropicana Mixed Fruit Vitalité, a Fanta Lemon or a Schweppes Dry Orange), while outside, the shadows of trees flickered in the dusk like the projected images of early films. What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation.
It was in the eighteenth century that economists and political theorists first became aware of the paradoxes and triumphs of commercial societies, which place trade, luxury and private fortunes at their centre whilst paying only lip service to the pursuit of higher goals. From the beginning, observers of these societies have been transfixed by two of their most prominent features: their wealth and their spiritual decadence. Venice in her heyday was one such society, Holland another, eighteenth-century Britain a third. Most of the world now follows their example.
Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. But the premises of a biscuit company are a fruitful place to recall that there has always been an insurmountable problem facing those countries that ignore the efficient production of chocolate biscuits and sternly dissuade their ablest citizens from spending their lives on the development of innovative marketing promotions: they have been poor, so poor as to be unable to guarantee political stability or take care of their most vulnerable citizens, whom they have lost to famines and epidemics. It is the high-minded countries that have let their members