The Decadent Capitalist Society: Cruises Edition
What the Popularity of Cruises Says About our Society
Note: I’m not sure about the status of this post. It oscillates between a personal rant and a sociological/philosophical analysis full of value judgments. Readers are warned to take it with a grain of salt!
As regular readers of this blog may know, I was getting married last month. As for the tradition, my wife and I went on our honeymoon last week. Given the period of the year and other considerations, we settled for something that none of us had experimented with, a cruise in the Mediterranean Sea. One week of being taken care of, visiting nice destinations in Italy and Spain, and enjoying free time on a boat filled with restaurants and activities, this could not be bad. At least, this is what we thought.
I will quickly pass on the unfortunate implications of sailing at the end of October/beginning of November, even in the Mediterranean Sea. We have realized the hard reality that bad weather may make it difficult if not impossible for a boat to enter a harbor. As a result, several of the excursions we should have done were canceled or significantly shortened. For better or worse, this week has at least been the opportunity for the sociological experience of experimenting with all the aspects that can plausibly participate in what I would call the decadence of the capitalist society. Let me discuss some of the most salient.
Culture, but only at the surface.
This is probably the most striking thing about cruises. On the paper, you have a huge cultural offer. Many different – and expensive – excursions in nice places, but also shows, music, and other artistic performances on the boat. If you’re used to traveling a little, however, you quickly realize that the excursions are mostly a joke. Have you ever dreamt of visiting Rome for one hour and a half? Well, this is the kind of thing that a cruise is proposing to you. There are obviously material constraints that explain why it’s difficult to give people more time. It takes time to go from the boat to many places, you have to make sure that everyone has returned on time before the boat’s departure so you plan a comfortable margin, and, well, the boat cannot stay forever in the harbor. The result is however that people go everywhere but see nothing. This is travel at its worst. As for the shows on the boat, they obviously do not offer the kind of artistic experience you may be used to having if you live in a big city like Paris. Fair enough, it was to be expected.
Consume a lot, but don’t mind for quality.
A salient feature of cruises is that you are encouraged to consume a lot. There are two sets of mechanisms that contribute to that. First, you can enjoy many free stuff, especially food. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are indeed included in the price package, and you can virtually eat as much as you want. Second, the cruise companies do their best to make you spend as much time as possible on the boat (this is partially related to the previous point) and submit you to a large choice of paying offers for food and alcohol. Moreover, they rely on a bit of behavioral economics. You do not pay with your credit card, but with a special card on which you can put money or that you synchronize with your own credit card. The result is the same of course – what you buy, you pay for it. But still, cognitively speaking, it is different. And since you spend a lot of time, you’re quickly bored, and this too pushes for consumption. Unsurprisingly, you should not expect high quality in return. Again, this is partly due to material constraints (most of the food is defrosted) but is also related to the fact that anyway, you don’t have really any choice once you’re on the boat.
Pollute, pollute, and pollute.
This leads to a third feature – a well-known one: cruises are a very polluting economic activity. Big cruise ships consume a lot of energy and generate a lot of waste. Add to that the pollution produced by the transportation (in buses) of passengers to the various destinations. To be fair, cruise companies have been making some real efforts over the last years to reduce their environmental impacts, for instance by explicitly encouraging people to only order what they will eat. But for the rest, this is mostly greenwashing.
Tell me your ethnic origins, I will tell you what your function on the boat is.
A cruise ship is a place with a high degree of national and ethnic diversity. This is true among the passengers but also crew members. Regarding the latter, the most striking aspect is the level of segregation of nationalities/ethnicities in terms of functions. To simplify a bit, crew members who are coming from countries of the so-called “global South” clean, cook, and are doing the service. Crew members from rich countries manage and entertain.
These features echo what is the worst in our contemporary capitalist societies. To be clear – in case it needs to be clarified – I’m fully in support of capitalism and I don’t think that there is a plausible alternative economic system, at least within our 21st-century-human horizon. But when you think of all those problematic aspects in a capitalist economy, you find most of them in cruises.
While on the boat, I was reminded of Ross Douthat’s book The Decadent Society in which Douthat diagnoses the decadence of Western civilization in terms of economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion.[1] I do not pretend that cruises epitomize all these dimensions of civilizational decadence. I nonetheless believe that the popularity of cruises and the construction of still bigger ships to address a growing demand signal something about capitalist societies. The arms race in constructing always bigger ships obviously reflects a quest for profit by the cruise companies but also a morbid fascination for mass (consumption) activities. I say “morbid” because there is something amiss in always looking for bigger ships, bigger mall centers, or higher towers. The fact that there may be an economic rationale behind this (maybe with respect to fixed costs) doesn’t change anything. In some way, it reflects the kind of economic stagnation and intellectual exhaustion that Douthat singles out. We have difficulties finding new ways to entertain people and people themselves are getting bored or lazy. So the simplest is just to continue what we were doing before – putting thousands of persons on a ship and offering all kinds of food and distractions – but just at a bigger scale.
It might be answered that the attraction of cruises for so many people is justified by several considerations. Most of the passengers are elderly and/or families. In both cases, these persons have good reasons to look for fully organized trips where they do not have to plan and worry about anything. This is precisely one of the advantages of living in a capitalist society: if there is a demand for something, there is a good chance that someone will provide it at some point. If people are happy with and want this kind of holiday where they have nothing to do and don’t mind the superficiality of the cultural activities, so be it.
I’ve no difficulty granting the point. Its economic logic is impeccable. But my critique is moral, not economic. It surely reflects a form of perfectionism on my part, on top of a real frustration with this experience. For sure, the cruise ship is not a full model of the capitalist society. It merely represents an extreme version of it where all its excesses are gathered and combined. That cruises are popular does not prove that Western civilization is decadent. But it nonetheless signals something about the path that the capitalist society could take, and this is not the path I would like to go along.
[1] Ross Douthat, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (New York: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020).