Philobiblon

I’ve been reading Herve Kempf (Le Monde’s environment editor) How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet. His environmental wrap-up isn’t particularly new – in fact it surprises and rather worries me that for the French audience for which this was originally written he felt the need to run through the basics of ecological catastrophe – but I’m finding his political side interesting and different.

This is his take on the super-rich class, what we he calls today’s oligarchy, after he’s run through a detailed account of how it spends its money on who-can-build-the-biggest-yacht competitions and such like (p. 58)…

“It bears no plan, is animated by no ideal, delivers no promise. The aristocracy of the Middle Ages was not an exploitative caste only; it dreamed of building a transcendent order, dreams to which Gothic cathedrals splendidly bear witness. The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie that Karl Marx described as a revolutionary class exploited the proletariat but also felt it was propagating progress and humanist ideals. The ruling classes of the Cold War were borne along by the will to defend democracy and freedoms in the face of a totalitarian counterexample. But today, after triumphing over Sovietism, capitalism doesn’t know how to do anything but celebrate itself.”