Howard Jacobson: So what is the legacy of the banker's greed? A cynical society – and bad art

Some of my best friend are bankers. All right, a couple of my best friends are bankers. All right, all right, I know a banker. But even knowing only one is sufficient to make me think twice before charging the rest of them with cupidity and greed. We are all cut from the same cloth. Your banker might just as easily have been a charity worker had this or that worked out differently. And you and I, reader, might be sleeping today on mattresses stuffed with increasingly worthless bank notes if only a teacher hadn't interested us early in Sons and Lovers or The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.

We think we're through and through who we are and were always meant to be, but in truth we are no more constant than dice on a crap table. So alongside "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God" we need to remember that other saying about he that is without sin among you.

I don't say it is only circumstance that saves us from greed, but I do say we would be greedier than we are if those twin beauties Temptation and Opportunity winked at us more often. As it is, we haven't been entirely indifferent, most of us, to the money swilling out of the City of London.

Grateful beneficiaries of spiralling house prices and handsome dividends, we took without complaint the crumbs that spilled from rich men's tables. It was fun, while it lasted, the party in the restaurant at the end of the world, dancing as though we knew the apocalypse was waiting for us the minute we stopped. Like just about everyone else, I thought the finale would be of Osama bin Laden's designing, an ancient, mouldering, life-hating puritanism putting paid to our good times for ever. Whereas – irony to end irony – we were all along rotting away nicely from the inside on our own. Which, from the moralist's point of view, is more satisfactory. Explosions are arbitrary. Implosions express a moral logic.

So we are back having to wade into greed after all. It was horrible – wasn't it? – at the same time as it was fun. A boy banker with ruined nostrils (OK, ignore the ruined nostrils) should not have been taking home more in a single Christmas bonus than three dozen schoolteachers earn in a year. Never mind that we would have had trouble turning down that kind of money ourselves. And never mind that regulation ends up in gulag socialism. It should not have been.

There's injustice and there's injustice. And there are words and there are words. Education is a good word. Say it three times. Education, education, education. It grows on you. Hedging is a vile word. Hedging, hedging, hedging. It gets worse with every repetition. Naked short selling is not pleasant on the ear either. The words will always tell you all you need to know about the substance. What good could ever come from a practice as unmelodious as a naked short sell?

It took from the euphony of language, as well as from the pockets of the poor, all that amassing of wealth. And maybe worst of all it made us cynical about other people and about ourselves. When you all agree to be greedy together, you at the same time agree – as a matter of camaraderie – that no interest other than self-interest can exist.

Forget the money for a moment. Simply consider what has happened to the concept of disinterestedness. It has become inconceivable to us that a person might inhabit a moral or intellectual position for its own sake. What's in it for them, we ask. What promotion or publicity or book deal are they looking for. In our pursuit of wealth we have returned to our savage state, rapacious in ourselves and convinced of the essential rapacity of others.

A few weeks ago I wrote a column in this paper which addressed, among other things, the subject of cyclists. I won't rehash the arguments. I simply said the obvious: that cyclists, while believing they are saving the planet, just as often ruin it for other people. You don't have to agree with me. I don't write to be agreed with. The assumption that I write to be agreed with is a symptom of the decline of the concept of disinterestedness. As were the many responses to that column which appeared in the usual places imagining me in my smelly car – why it had to be smelly, I neither know nor want to know – aggressively forcing cyclists off the road.

In fact I don't drive a car, and haven't for nearly a decade. I don't like driving. I don't like cars. It is possible not to like cars and not to like bicycles. But it was assumed that I could only be attacking one form of transport prejudicially, on behalf of another. I must have been an interested party. I must have been in it for profit.

As far as it bears on a particular case, this assumption of interestedness is neither here nor here. If they want to see me in a stinking car, let them see me in a stinking car. But it points to a more general malaise. There is no longer any free, irresponsible, plastic play of thought. We are not permitted to muse or speculate or write for the fun of it, or for the pure sound that truth makes it when you strike it, wherever you strike it from. Everything has a hidden motive, and that hidden motive is the intellectual equivalent of self-advancement.

What this means for art is the death of it, for the whole point of art is that it is self and intention free. Imagined worlds are now scrutinised for authorial parti pris, it being impossible to believe that the author is not seeking to extract advantage. Where once we entered the world of art as innocents, willing to submit to the power of otherness, we now venture as into a jungle of competing market forces, armed to the teeth with suspicion, disagreeing with this valuation or with that, though any work of art worth the name is not in the valuation business.

Not surprising, then, that the marketeers' artist of choice is Damien Hirst, the great parodist of art-making, rejoicing in the principle of profit, telling us that all our suspicions are true, and that art, too, is out only for itself. The famous shark pickled in formaldehyde is a true image of our times – humanity on the forage.

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