Lunching at the Savoy

I was in London a few weeks ago and I very pretentiously opted to lunch at the Savoy. It felt like a very posh thing to do, and like something Winston Churchill would have done in his day, and as a devotee of WC, it felt like the a propos thing to do. Besides all of that it is a Gordon Ramsay restaurant so the food was apt to be delicious, and it was.

As I was sitting there and lunching (not having lunch, I can’t imagine having lunch at the Savoy, when one is at the Savoy “lunch” is definitely a verb) and marveling at my grand surroundings I was contemplating of all things inequality. While the cost of my lunch was not outrageous, it is not something I or about 99% of the human race could afford to do on a daily basis, I was in it for the experience and I was on holiday so splurging felt appropriate, I may even make a habit when I am in London of Lunching at the Savoy, just so that I can say, “ oh pshaw, I always lunch at the Savoy”.

But getting back to inequality, what I struggle with is the two-sided coin that is inequality. On one hand I am a defender of equality to the point that I would take up arms to defend it and believe that it is the foundation for a just society.  On the other I can’t help but recognize that all of the beautiful things that are man-made that I love to visit and see were the result of gross inequality including in part the Savoy. It is all enabled by a great disparity in wealth. All of the palaces, castles, churches were built during a time of extraordinary inequality, most of the great art was the result of royal and wealthy patrons, most writers prior to the 20^th century were attached in some way to the aristocracy. It was only when freed from the quotidian tasks of survival does human culture reach its pinnacle.

Equality, at least of the economic kind that I am referring to here, is inherently utilitarian; functional and barren, it lacks flourish.  A king can build a castle, an emperor a palace, a bishop a cathedral, but a politician must build a concrete block with windows. It is hard to imagine building the palace of Versailles today; the outrage would bring down the best of intentions. We do tolerate the über-rich building mansions of epic proportions but they are monuments to our worship of the self more than they are contributions to collective culture. 

The flip side to this inequality; however, is that is not sustainable, eventually the people rebelled against the ostentation of the aristocracy. In spite of the belief by the noble classes that they were chosen by God to be better than others the people could only tolerate so much inequality. Now I know I am painting with a broad brush the period of revolution and there were many caused beyond inequality that caused the peasantry to rise up (there are probably a 1000 books on all the various causes) but there is still something to be said for that fact that the revolutions occurred at a time when income and wealth disparity was at its greatest. That is until the modern time.

At risk of quoting Aristotle it seems to me that there must be somewhere in the middle where there is enough inequality that there is incentive for great works but not so much that people are compelled to rise up. I still wonder if  the cultural greatness of the renaissance is compatible with a commitment to equality. I have not resolved this conundrum only to say that it is there, and while lunching at the Savoy I am quite enamored by the delights that inequality has brought me, but on the way out, while I stop at the toilet, I am reminded that we all shit the same.

Oh, and if you do lunch at the Savoy have the pumpkin soup with toasted hazelnuts and the braised lamb shank, it was superb.