The Passion Economy: Why it'll hurt to change the way the world works
A new book encourages us to break free of the burdens of corporate life. But, as George Pitcher argues, we'll have to suffer to make our lives different after this pandemic
You don’t have to be over-cynical to recoil from those who say that nothing will ever be the same again after this pandemic has passed. The same was said when the Berlin Wall fell just before Christmas in 1989, but if anything East-West tensions with Russia (and China) are more strained as ever.
Then we heard that nothing would be the same again after Christmas 2008, in the midst of the global financial meltdown. But lately capitalism’s wild beasts have been every bit as rapacious as they were in the Noughties.
So forgive us if, in the New Year of 2021, we greet the notion that nothing will be the same ever again after this plague with scepticism. Yeah right - and Donald Trump will be secretary-general of the United Nations.
And yet this time there is something more than wistful hopes for a better world when dark days are over. This time, the prophecy seems to be rooted in industrial practicalities and enlightened self-interest.
Conservatives have embraced the social market, because they’ve had no choice. A Green agenda has been delivered not by ideology, but by localism and lack of consumption. Technology is dismantling corporatism, as we ask what is the point of offices, indeed of corporates themselves?
In a book called The Death of Spin, published in 2003 shortly after the “dot-com bubble” burst (in the financial markets, that is - it seems to have inflated rather nicely since), I asked the question: What are companies for? I argued that emerging technologies at the time meant that the traditional joint-stock company office had been reduced to little more than a social purpose:
…to provide identity and purpose for the individual and, most specifically, a place for men to go during daylight hours, in uniform, to play displacement war-games and latterly for women to find a post-liberation fulfilment beyond the rearing of children (ditto the uniform).
That was then. Just now, we are meandering through strange and unfamiliar woodlands. The promised broad, sunlit uplands are not just mask-free with beer gardens and house-guests at the weekend. They are to be equipped with technology come-of-age, liberating the corporate animal, with staffers as mistresses and masters of their own destinies.
In a recent book, The Passion Economy, Adam Davidson, the New Yorker journalist and co-founder of NPR’s podcast Planet Money, makes the case that we’re embarking on an era when our accrued skills and experience - our passions - offer us not just a purpose, but a mission to fulfil in matching what we love to our own place in the economy. No more corporate gradgrind.
The LSE’s Professor Charlie Beckett has explored what this might mean for the increasingly atomised trade of freelance journalism. As someone who has unconsciously developed his own personal passion economy over the past two decades, in journalism and Anglican priesthood, I’m intrigued.
In economic terms, British newspapers and the Church of England have much in common. Both are suffering precipitous declines in numbers of subscribers. Both are, in short, going broke. Yet no one is seriously suggesting that either journalism or religion is becoming obsolete. The means of distribution of their products - and in broad terms making them pay - are what are at issue.
In conversation with Harvard Business School’s Jon Jachimowicz, Davidson says that while he was writing The Passion Economy:
I kept noticing that there are a lot of religious people who follow what I’m describing… every Sunday or whatever, when they’re forced to think about questions like “How do I fit in the world?” “What is my broader sense of myself?” That seems to be a good practice. I liked that passion also has a religious valence.
What strikes Davidson is that traditional career paths are measured with objective metrics that imply some impossible perfection. It’s a wholly inappropriate model for imperfect humans, who are nevertheless blessed (my word, not Davidson’s) with unique and priceless characteristics.
…if you look at most religious traditions, it’s some version of “You’re a lump of sinful clay who’s going to screw everything up all the time.” Perfection is not going to happen. But there is something out there that is perfect, which you can take little pieces and sculpt yourself with… I remember an Orthodox rabbi who was telling me, “I don’t go to synagogue every morning because it means something to me. Most mornings I hate it. It’s too early. It’s boring. It’s the same—but it’s the only place I ever have certain moments. And if I didn’t go every morning, especially the mornings I hate, I wouldn’t know when those mornings would come.”
That’s a version of losing one’s faith in God and wondering what to do next - the paradoxical answer, of course, is to pray. And that idea of perseverance in the face of doubt, disillusionment and despair isn’t only at the heart of religious practice, it seems to me, but also one of the central drivers of this idea of a passion-driven economy.
Nowhere in Davidson’s book will you find an etymology for the word passion. Its root is in the Latin verb patior, to suffer. It’s why the Christian Church (and Mel Gibson) speak of the Passion of Christ, that period in the liturgical calendar of most of a week, memorialising the suffering, torture and, on Good Friday, death of the Christ, ahead of the great Feast of the Resurrection at Easter.
The purpose of passion is not therefore celebratory, as declaimed on the side of a million domestic-service vans (“a passion for window-cleaning”). It is the idea that one must suffer for the object of desire, in a sure and certain hope of its fulfilment. As Stephen Fry’s narrator at the start of his novel The Hippopotamus says: “I’ve suffered for my art, now it’s your turn.”
A great line. But there’s a truth in it. If our art is the sum total of our passions, then we’re going to have to suffer for it, if we hope for some kind of transformative economic experience beyond the humdrum experience of holding down a job. And that’s as true, terrifyingly, of freelance journalists, academics, writers of books or vicars.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE.