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Charles Mudede

Jenny Durkan, the mayor of Seattle, a city whose air has been severely polluted by smoke from wildfires caused by anthropogenic climate change, exemplifies the total state of things in the USA today. She, like most in the city, cannot change urban habits, plans, and systems, even though the region, the country, the world is obviously getting dangerously warmer. One would think that any person who has lived in Seattle for the past 20 or 30 years would be alarmed into action by these summers that keep getting hotter and drier. You can actually see the increase in smoke with your eyes; you can really feel the increase in heat on your skin.

These senses are not lying to you. Nor is the scientific consensus on global warming. But the mayor, like almost everyone else, continues as if all of these worrying developments constitute only an anomaly that will be self-corrected soon enough. There are no real plans to deeply transform our living and transportation habits. Apartments that are under construction are still adding parking spaces. Apodments projects have ground to a halt. Considerable parts of the only major downtown public transportation plan that’s in existence today are being attacked by the mayor, whose office windows must have great views of this haze. Bike lanes and improvements are delayed and delayed. When more smoke returns next year, we can expect to be exactly where we are this year. The same goes for the year after that.

But why this social and cultural paralysis? The answer is actually found in Thorstein Veblen’s book, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institution.


The book, published in 1899, has many excellent and revealing images/passages that concern the historical roots and evolution of capitalist forms of consumption, which, because they are motivated by the unearthly, endless growth of money (or accumulation of capital—hence, capitalism), have little to do with the necessities of life (those have an end) but lots to do with mass-produced luxuries (there’s no end to things you do not need).

Here is one image that concerns the death of a French king:

In persons of a delicate sensibility who have long been habituated to gentle manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may become so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set aside the instinct of self-preservation. [An illustration of this] is afforded by a certain king of France, who is said to have lost his life through an excess of moral stamina in the observance of good form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift his master’s seat, the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so doing he saved his most Christian Majesty from menial contamination.

Veblen, who might be the greatest American economist, is here attempting to show how habits of leisure can become so hardened in humans that not even the fear of death can change them.

But what has this to do with driving automobiles, building apartments with parking lots, or the management of SDOT, an organization that seems to have a religious obsession with car mobility? It’s not simply a matter of connecting the fire and the smoke that killed the king with wildfire smoke that’s choking our city. It is this: Consumers have adopted the ways and logic of the old upper classes, the old elite, the courtiers. There is little about the car that can be described as necessary. Indeed, it’s in every way a great waste of time, space, and money—in short, a luxury. A more practical mode of urban living would be to reduce the size of the city, increase shared modes of movement and living, and make walking or biking safe for adults and children. Doing this (or making these practical changes) would be exactly the same as that unfortunate French king moving his chair away from the fire with his own hands.

But that is not what we are doing. We have adopted the king’s mode, which is, in essence, the main mode of capitalist consumption—the consumption of luxuries. Kings have carriages. We have cars. Kings have chateaus. We have single-family detached homes. We might find god in the back of a bus, but never a king and queen. And so, we cannot move from the fire that’s right in front of us. We sit in our cars in exactly the same way as that King France, who waited for his chair to be moved by his servant.

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...