You may have seen just before Christmas that Saudi Arabia is to claim the world's tallest building in its capital, Riyadh.
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At nearly two kilometres high, the so-called "mega-tower" would be more than double the height of the current record-holder, the Burj Khalifa in nearby Dubai, which stands at an astonishing 828 metres.
To the well-known Saudi contempt for the rights of women, foreign workers, people of other sexual orientations and the free press, they intend to add a towering proclamation of riches and their own galloping excess.
Why, though?
In unrelated news, many will have been delighted to watch Australia's wicketkeeper Alex Carey become only the second gloveman to score a century in a Boxing Day Test. Teammate David Warner also excelled turning his long-awaited 25th hundred into a memorable double ton.
Warner's ebullient celebration and to a lesser extent Carey's, were de rigueur, which is to say, they were completely unremarkable in the modern era.
Inevitably, Carey's milestone elicited historical footage of the other keeper to do it, the late great Rod Marsh, in the centenary Ashes Test of 1977.
What was striking looking back, was Marsh's dignity which extended to a reluctant wave of his bat to say thank you for the applause.
That is, unlike Warner, Marsh didn't cheerlead his own acclamation, he merely acknowledged it.
Not for him any leaping about fist-pumping and badge-kissing. Nor an operatic collapse to the knees while gesturing to the heavens.
Warner, by contrast was in rapture, overcome by the achievements of self, his own personal redemption.
In their different ways, the proposed Saudi tower and the self-promoting excesses of our sports people (which guide so many) speak to an ailment of the moral heart. A gaudy elevation of the self-loving individual at the expense of something collective, quiet and quintessential.
Something admirably contained.
We see its results all around us.
In Canberra's inner-south, perfectly liveable houses are being bought for $2-3 million and then demolished to be replaced with more modern dwellings. More modern, but certainly not more modest.
Indeed these assertive piles are vulgar monuments to personal success, often taking up their entire allotments and extending to two and three storeys, replete with underground parking, temperature-controlled wine cellar, games room, home cinema and gym. Sometimes an indoor pool.
It is not merely that such avarice is questionable in a world hammered by rapacious environmental destruction, species loss and inequality. It's that this suburban greed is endemic and it invites no critique.
This silence through normalisation speaks to a culture of materialist declaration that has broken free any moral/communal/environmental foundation.
What does building a voluminous energy-consumptive house, overbearing the neighbours and bristling with external lights and cameras, say about the individual? This question is simply never asked.
Instead, bland McMansions expand with impunity to their site borders. These charmless white boxes thumb their noses at past values of humility, restraint and harmony with community and environment.
They declare, like the Saudi tower, that this is my block, this is my achievement, these are lengths to which I can go, and therefore, the lengths to which inevitably I will go.
The space between what is socially reasonable and what is technically permissible, has been confused, collapsed to nothing.
This triumph of tasteless excess extends also to the roads.
Take the now ubiquitous 4WD or SUV as the Americans insist we call them. Just as we have belatedly come to understand there are existential implications of our runaway consumption, we have also rushed to these gauche three-tonne leviathans.
Even worse are the utes - or as the Americans call them, trucks. These absurdly oversized vehicles could not be more out of step with the times, yet they fill the underground garages of the aforementioned McMansions. On the roads, they occupy their lane entirely, unable to be seen around or even through, just like the houses do on their blocks. It seems to have escaped the Australian consumer the Simpsons episode featuring the Canyonero - a ludicrously powerful and enormous SUV - was a satire of this lust for largeness. This urge to conquer nature, not live in it.
Watching the cricket on Wednesday, I counted four simultaneous ad-breaks where the product being flogged was a large SUV (Audi, Hyundai, Ford Everest and Skoda). The Hyundai Sorrento, the ad proudly boasted, now has an even longer wheelbase, to allow for even more seating, "one-touch" everything and cinema-quality viewing with surround-sound.
It is time to start noticing this universal gluttony. It is time to stop making exceptions for our own private excesses while generally claiming awareness of habitat destruction, resource exploitation, and reckless consumption.
It is time for a resurgence of the collective over the consumptive. The plural over the personal. The social over the self.
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The Saudis have made their unconscionable riches from fossil fuel exploitation and from cartel management to ensure their profits have remained high.
Riyadh, the urban inferno they intend to adorn with the new tallest building, is listed as one of the cities in the world set to become unliveable due to climate change. Climate models suggest it could have as many as 200 heatwave days per year by the end of the century. Two-hundred!
Let's call all of this for what it is. Tasteless, greedy, deluded and, frankly, immoral.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast.
