The Final Frame - Roger Hicks

A while ago, you may have noticed, Leica Null-Serie number 107 sold for $1,900,000 (about £1.2 million) at auction. I have not the faintest idea who bought it, but it did set me thinking about riches and priorities. What is something ‘worth’? A Leica M9 costs nearly £5,000, which is around the price of a Tata Nano car, but then, a ‘complicated’ wristwatch (it’s a technical term, apparently) can cost even more. Are they ‘worth’ the money?

The obvious answer is, ‘Yes, if there are people willing to pay that much.’ This immediately raises at least two other questions. First, how did they get the money? After all, there can be a big difference between being paid a million pounds a year and actually earning a million pounds a year. That’s assuming the money was neither inherited nor stolen. Second, regardless of how they got the money, is it legitimate to say that how they spend it is no one else’s concern?

The answer to the second, clearly, is that society as a whole does not think so, otherwise there would not be compulsory taxes. But even then, we are still taking a very blinkered view of things: we’re still talking about money.

Or are we? As soon as we start talking about ‘society’, we are talking about living together: about how each of us depends on other people. Anyone who thinks that his success is the result purely of his own intelligence and hard work is clearly not very intelligent. At the most basic, his parents didn’t abandon him to starve. After that, he went to school and learned to read and write, travelling, of course, on roads that were paid for by taxes, and protected from murder and robbery by police that were paid for by taxes. If he went to university, he learned from other people who had chosen to work in that environment, and at the university canteen his food was cooked by other people. We are all interdependent.

A common response to this, from the financially overprivileged, is, ‘Why should I care who cooks my food? There is always somebody else who will take the job.’ Well, yes, but this is where lack of intelligence again manifests itself. If someone else can do their job, then someone else can probably do your job, too. They might not do it the same way, and they might not do it as well, but equally, they might do it better. As for the argument that stupid people deserve to be paid less than intelligent ones, this raises some interesting questions about the nature of ‘deserve’, along with questions about luck and accidents of birth.

So let’s assume that we live in a society with (reasonably) progressive taxes and (reasonably) equal access to education. That we live, indeed, in a society of material superabundance, where there is more than enough for everyone, in the sense of food, shelter and clothing, so that once our basic needs are taken care of, we can afford to choose different priorities. We can buy clothes that are more than merely functional; we can buy food that is more than we need merely to sustain life; we can buy books, magazines and electronic gadgets.

As soon as we juxtapose ‘books, magazines and electronic gadgets’, the question of priorities is made abundantly clear. We all know people who never buy books; we all know people who buy electronic gadgets only when they have to. We also know people whose houses are full of teetering piles of books, and people who must have the latest model of whatever gadget is fashionable at the moment, such as iPads, iPods and computers.

This brings us back to the questions raised in the first paragraph. What are things ‘worth’? William Morris famously said: ‘Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.’ There is, however, a third category: investment, which is essentially a shared belief in value. Would the buyer of the Null-Serie Leica have paid $1.9 million if he didn’t believe that other people thought it was valuable, too? I’m not talking about prestige because, after all, plenty of rare and valuable things are bought by anonymous buyers and disappear into private collections, so they aren’t bought to show off. No, this is a question of how society values something, or at least, of how a certain section of society values things. We may do well to ruminate upon how our own position in society is reflected not by our possessions, but by our attitude to how those possessions are valued.

Roger and Frances website