Are you loving it?" asked Neil Young in his song Are You Passionate?. Some people are, but they're probably not the ones Young had in mind, "we're lovin' it" being the slogan of McDonald's. Young's question was that of a rebel rock'n'roll poet, but the answer came straight out of corporate America.
As to the big question of the album Are You Passionate?, businesses are answering in the affirmative as never before. No matter how mundane an industry is, someone is passionate about it. For example, you probably couldn't be less interested in anything in the news than Interpack 2008, a trade fair for the packaging industry. It has been going on in Dusseldorf. But Elopak is "passionate about packaging", as are Active Packaging, Polyphane, Venture Packaging, L Gordon Packaging, WEBPackaging and countless other companies that use this same phrase in their marketing.
When an expression takes hold in mass culture, it doesn't always reflect anything significant. People started saying "wazzup?" just because of a beer advert. But, in this case, I don't think it's just chance that the language of love and passion has been taken over by commerce.
Capitalism is incredibly flexible and responsive, and one challenge it has had to meet is that people may live by it, but they don't really like it. In the eighties, greed was good but, in the noughties, we're after something deeper than just material wealth. Or at least that's what we like to think. All this talk of passion allows businesses and customers to pretend that their relationships are not shallow and materialistic after all, but are based on shared enthusiasms.
It also reflects a romantic elevation of feeling above such mundane concerns as efficiency, value and good workmanship. Corporate-sham passion is a neat way of getting us to take our eyes of the ball. After all, you can argue about whether a product is over-priced or shabby, but not about whether its manufacturer put its heart and soul into it.
I'm also bothered by the enthusiasm inflation such talk implies. If people are passionate about packaging, then what words have we got left to describe how they feel about their lovers or major life projects? I suspect the transatlantic influence is at work here. I have an American friend who always thinks I don't like things, because I describe them as "good" rather than "terrific" or "awesome". Being passionate about storage technology is just not British.
For all these reasons, I bristle every time I spot yet another example of companies claiming to be passionate about whatever they do. Passion should be about Neil Young, love and rock'n'roll, not fruit smoothies or car hire.
But perhaps I'm in danger of missing something important. Even if most people who claim to be passionate about print are no such thing, some surely are. Almost anything is interesting and absorbing enough if you get deeply enough into it. So why is it we often find it funny or unbelievable that people have a genuine enthusiasm for some things but not others? Getting immersed in the deep waters of technical philosophy is probably less useful to society than grappling with the problems of effective and economical packaging. Yet the passion for philosophy is much more socially acceptable. Isn't the idea that some passions are silly whereas others are acceptable often little more than a prejudice?
I've been known to get pretty obsessive about trivial matters myself. I've lost count of the number of different types of tahini I've tried using to make the perfect houmous, and I don't see anything wrong with that.
Passion for the objectively trivial is only wrong if you take it too seriously. With sufficient distance, almost any human activity looks absurd, and those who are unable to see this are the most ridiculous of all. However, if you always take a detached view of what you do, you can never truly engage with life. The dilemma is that to make anything matter, you have to get close to it, but you become a fool if you can't also step back from it and put it in perspective.
It's not wrong to be passionate about packaging, but it is wrong to pretend that businesses have the same complex, meaningful feelings that human beings do. That's why corporate passion is really objectionable. Employees and customers have desires and feelings; corporations do not. When they claim they do, they diminish the emotions which form the real stuff of life.
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