Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Monday, 18 February 2013
pleasures of post consumerism
The other
pleasures
of postconsumerism
Kate Soper
Kate Soper promotes the attractions of a postconsumerist life-style - something that is of
critical importance in winning wider support for a
sustainable future.
The evidence for the impact on global warming of affluent lifestyles is now
incontrovertible and receiving belated mainstream media attention. One has to
be glad of this. But it is difficult not to be disheartened by the blinkered nature
of the two most commonly encountered reactions. On the one hand, there are
the carpe diem fatalists. Resigned to the prospect of ecological devastation, they
see little point in mending their profligate ways, since the impact globally will
be so minimal. Every percentage reduction of carbon emissions in the UK, they
point out, will be more than cancelled out by their increase in China or India.
As the counter to this we have the technical-fix optimists, who believe - or
hope - that new technologies will solve the problem, thus ensuring continued
economic growth with very little alteration in our life-style. Provided we make
the investment now, the ‘pain’, as these optimists put it, can be kept to a
minimum.
I shall not here address the particular arguments of these responses, nor
31Soundings
32
seek to arbitrate between them. What concerns me, rather, is what they share
in common, namely, the presumption that the consumerist model of the ‘good
life’ is the one we want to hold on to as far as we can; and that any curb on
that will necessarily be unwelcome and distressing. Neither the ‘seize the day’
fatalists nor the technical optimists dwell on the negative consequences of
Euro-American-style affluence for consumers themselves (the stress, ill-health,
congestion, pollution, noise, excessive waste); and neither suggest it might be
more fun to escape the confines of the growth-driven, shopping-mall culture than
to continue to keep it on track. We hear all too little of what might be gained
by moving away from our current obsession with consumerist gratifications, and
pursuing a less work-driven and acquisitive way of life.
T
he reason for this is obvious. Counter-consumerism is bad for business. It
is ultimately incompatible with the continued flourishing of de-regulated
global capitalism. (It is a measure of the Stern report’s alienation that
it cites the risk to economic growth as the main reason for attempting to curb
carbon emissions, when it is, of course, that very growth that is the major factor in
their creation.) The market economy, in short, is averse to the promotion of any
non-commodified conceptions of human gratification and personal development.
Its main productive mission is not human or environmental well-being, but the
multiplication and diversification of ‘satisfiers’ that can realise profit; and since
this mission runs entirely counter to any idea of accommodation to natural limits,
it can hardly surprise us that alternative conceptions of the good life have been
so under-represented in consumer society. Indeed, everything conspires to ensure
minimal outlet to any countering imaginary, and the forces arrayed against it
are truly formidable.
The advertising budget for promoting consumerist spending is an estimated
$435 billion per annum, and, according to a recent Human Development Report,
the growth in advertisement spending now outpaces the growth of the world
economy by a third. Such astonishing expenditure is indicative of the need
to repress all inclinations towards freer forms of enjoyment and to reinforce a
demand otherwise at risk of becoming sated. Businesses are ever fearful of what
they term ‘need saturation’, and bent on the development of new purchasing
whims. According to a director of the General Motors Research Laboratory,
the aim of business must be the ‘organised creation of dissatisfaction’; another
senior executive, cited in Naomi Klein’s No Logo, has put it with even greater 33
The other pleasures of post-consumerism
candour: ‘consumers are like roaches - you spray them and spray them and they
get immune after a while’. Hence the need for ever more powerful stimuli to
buy. Advertisers are also targeting children at increasingly young ages, employing
manipulative strategies in order to ‘groom’ them for a life of consuming.
Dependent as it is on the revenue from commercials, the media will do little to
stem the flow of this merchandising activity. For more than a decade, the anticonsumerist campaigning group Adbusters has been trying to buy airtime for its
social marketing TV spots, often called ‘un-commercials’, but they have been
regularly rejected by CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, MTV, and major networks around
the world. Nor are we likely to find much expression given to a countering ethic
within mainstream politics, where, with the exception of the Green Parties, the
same consumerist mantras on the importance of economic growth, expanding
markets and boosting high street sales are sounded, to the exclusion of all
other visions and conceptions of how to live and prosper. Everything conspires
to ensure that the ‘other pleasure’ to consumerist pleasure is so marginalised,
occluded and denied representation that any choice in the matter has been more
or less eradicated. The choice not to be identified and exhorted as a consumer
is precisely what is denied in the current era of choice.
Y
et despite this virtual repression of alternatives, there are signs - and The
Good Society, recently published as part of the Compass programme for
renewal is a timely response to these - that the contradictions between
capitalist and ecological pressures, and between what the economy demands
and what is humanly most valued, will not be contained indefinitely. Shopping
may still be one of the nation’s favourite ways of spending time, and there has
been precious little reform in the use of the car and air flight, yet there is also
disenchantment with the negative by-products of the affluent lifestyle, and a
growing sense that it may stand in the way of other equally - if not more - valued
goals. Such disaffection may find expression in nostalgia for certain kinds of
material, or for objects and practices that no longer figure in everyday life; it
may lament the loss of certain kinds of landscape, or spaces (to play or talk or
loiter or meditate or commune with nature); it may deplore the fact that were it
not for the dominance of the car, there would be an altogether different system
of provision for other modes of transport, and both rural and city areas would
look and feel and smell and sound entirely different. Or it may just take the
form of a vague and rather general malaise that descends in the shopping mall Soundings
34
or supermarket: a sense of a world too cluttered and encumbered by material
objects and sunk in waste, of priorities skewed through the focus on ever more
extensive provision and accumulation of things.
Although these kinds of reactions are doubtless driven partly by an altruistic
concern for the global ecological and social consequences of the consumerist
life-style, they are also distinguished by self-interested motivations; however the
form these take is rather more complex than anything recognised by neo-classical
economic or rational choice theories of the appetitive individual. In these more
complex forms of self interest, the individual acts with an eye to the collective
impact of aggregated private acts of affluent consumption for consumers
themselves, and takes measures to avoid contributing to it. For example, people
may make a decision to cycle or walk whenever possible in order not to add to the
pollution, noise and congestion of car use. However the hedonist aspect of this
shift in consumption practice does not reside exclusively in the desire to avoid
or limit the un-pleasurable by-products of collective affluence; it also resides in
the sensual pleasures of consuming differently. There are intrinsic pleasures to
be had in walking or cycling, which the car driver will not be experiencing. But
these pleasures can only be secured through greatly limiting car use, and in this
sense they are themselves conditional on commitment to self-policing in the use
of the car and support for policies that restrain its consumption.
C
learly individuals who think this way are currently in a minority. But,
arguably, they form the avant garde of a counter-consumerist movement
and green renaissance that could well gather increasing momentum over
the next decades, eventually posing a more serious threat to the market-driven
economy and cultural hegemony of our times. The dependency of globalised
capitalism on the continued preparedness of its consumers to remain forever
unsated - forever fobbed off with compensatory forms of gratification, forever
nonchalant about the consequences of consumerism both socially and ecologically
- is now beginning to be recognised, across the political spectrum, as one of the
more significant sources of dialectical tension of our times. This finds its most
explicit expression in the expansion of green and ethical consumption, and in
the centrality of the No Logo forms of opposition within the anti-globalisation
movement. But it is also acknowledged in some sense by corporate capitalism
itself, for instance in its appeals, post 9/11, to ‘patriotic shopping’ as a way of
showing support for the ‘Western way of Life’. And it is reflected in growing 35
The other pleasures of post-consumerism
official concerns about the consequences of the high-stress, fast-food life-style
on the upcoming generation, and in recent evidence suggesting that the increase
in wealth and material possessions is no guarantee of an increase in happiness.
(One might cite here the findings from the ‘Happy Planet’ index of well-being
recently published by the New Economics Foundation, and the influential work of
economists such as Richard Layard.) After years of being largely confined to the
campaigns, debates and life-choices of ‘alternative’ groups and social movements,
themes of consumption, counter-consumerism, ecological crisis and sustainability,
and the problems of ‘over-development’, are moving centre-stage. Consumption
is now emerging as a possible point of vulnerability for the deregulated market,
a key area of political contention, and a site where shifting cultural perspectives
and new modes of representation might begin to have significant impact.
Going slow, going local, going easy
We need therefore to be more assertively utopian in promoting sustainable
consumption, not only in the sense of being willing to offer blueprints or projections
of other possible futures, but in the sense of seeking to form desire, and to encourage
a different structure of feeling and affective response to the world of material
culture. This involves, in turn, a challenge to contemporary conceptions of
‘progress’, and a more historically informed understanding of the regressive aspects
of consumerism. Advocates of an ‘alternative hedonist’ response on need can
reject the ‘back to the Stone Age’ conception of its agenda as failing to recognise
its innovative quality; and they can also highlight the more backward, puritan and
ugly aspects of a work-driven and materially encumbered existence. They may also
want to question some of the gains of the age of ‘comfort’ and ‘convenience’. The
machines and lifts and escalators and moving walk-ways that reduce our energy
expenditure do so at the cost of the exertion of muscular power and the sense of
vitality that goes along with that. Constant grazing and ‘comfort’ eating deprives
those who ‘indulge’ in it of the enjoyment of satisfying a sharpened hunger and
thirst. And food satiety and over-provisioning create a vast amount of waste. (It
was recently reported that the average family in the UK throws out 400 pounds
of food per annum - enough to fund everyone’s Council tax.) The central heating
and air-conditioning that ensures that we are continuously in the ‘comfort’ zone in
homes, offices, airports and shopping malls has certainly cut out the pain of extreme
temperatures, but it has also made interior space more boringly homogeneous, and Soundings
36
reduced sensitivity to seasonal changes.
What needs challenging above all is the presumption that ‘progress’ and
‘development’ are synonymous with speeding up and saving time. Today it is
well-nigh impossible to travel long-distance other than by air, and it would be
thought grotesque for industrial designers to promote product innovations on
the grounds that they allowed their users to proceed at a more relaxed pace.
Speed is, of course, convenient - and can be thrilling. Yet there is also a relative
dimension to both these attributes, of which we
should be aware. Travelling by chaise at fifteen
miles an hour was regarded as exhilaratingly
rapid by Charles Dickens, who in Pickwick Papers
describes fields, trees and hedges rushing past at
that pace ‘with the velocity of a whirlwind’. Today
a twenty miles per hour speed limit is regarded
by car-users as restrictively slow. (There are, in any case, more absolute limits
on road capacity and the speeds at which drivers themselves can operate with
relative safety.) A comparable dialectic is at work in our capacity to respond to
the increasing computing power of silicon chips (which currently doubles every
eighteen months). We have certainly very quickly adapted to - and indeed
become extraordinarily dependent upon - the fast processing of information and
the billions of electronic exchanges this allows on a daily basis. But there is a lot
of evidence, too, to suggest that information overload is a major contributor to
stress at work, and that the innovations are not always unmitigated blessings.
B
ut the demand for speed of both transport and communication is relative
in a further and rather different respect, since how fast we want - or
‘need’ - to travel (or communicate) is itself a function of other aspects
of an overall life-style and pattern of consumption. Urbanisation goes together
with developments such as commuting and loss of rural shops and services,
developments that in turn are dependent upon provision of faster means of
transport. The affluent modern life-style is a structure of interconnected modes
of consumption, each one of which is integral to the whole and reliant upon it.
But, for that very reason, shifts in one area will always have knock-on effects in
others, and thus influence the overall structure of consumption. Were car use
severely restricted, lives would be saved, communities revitalised, and children
released from the nervy surveillance of their elders, as well as the dangers posed
‘alternative hedonists
can highlight the more
backward, puritan and
ugly aspects of a workdriven and materially
encumbered existence’37
The other pleasures of post-consumerism
by adults constantly encroaching on them with their motorised vehicles. Were
more people to shop by bike or bus rather than car, it would encourage the return
of high street retailers, and fewer small stores would be forced into closing because
of parking restrictions in town centres. Were we to reduce the working week or
the work loads expected of employees within the working day, it would bring
with it a relaxation of the speed at which goods and information were required
to be delivered or transmitted. Were airfreight to be curbed, it would have a
major impact on the sourcing of perishable goods and significantly reduce the
mileage travelled by many articles of everyday consumption - with benefits for
consumers, the local economy and the environment.
B
ut these are suggestions for tackling the more negative and hedonistically
pre-emptive aspects of the car-culture. We also need to emphasise the
positive pleasures and experiences of going slower. For wherever proper
provision is made, to walk or to cycle is also to enjoy sights and scents and sounds,
and the pleasures (and benefits) of physical activity and forms of solitude and
silence, that are denied to those who travel in more insulated and speedier ways.
Obviously, no one could rely exclusively on these modes of transport, but most
of the obstacles to regular cradle to the grave biking could readily be overcome
through more committed and imaginative forms of provision: why not multilane tracks, with cover for those who want it, cycle rickshaws and motorised
bikes for the too young and less able, showers and changing-rooms and cafés at
regular intervals on cycle tracks? Schemes like these look utopian in the present
context of the car culture, but the costs would be negligible relative to that of the
continued expansion of the motorways (especially if one factors in the medical
costs likely to be saved through better public health).
Perhaps the single, most prized and seemingly irreplaceable advantage of
fast travel is the ease with which it delivers us to far-flung holiday or conference
destinations, and permits large numbers of people (though always a small minority
in global terms) to enjoy tourist experiences that would once have been confined
to the wealthiest elite. The pleasures of foreign travel are undeniable. Yet in the
era of the so-called ‘global village’, with its pressures towards homogenised forms
of tourist provision, long-distance holidaying no longer guarantees unprecedented
experience in the way it once did. Moreover, holidays today are seldom of a kind
to provide that sense of timeless immersion in a different environment and
rhythm that once made them such objects of nostalgia - particularly for children. Soundings
38
One might even hazard that the extreme contrasts to ordinary life presented
by holidays in very distant and culturally unfamiliar locales militate against the
more surreal and dream-like holiday experience that accompanies a removal to
somewhere closer yet still strangely different from normality. Proust’s Marcel
scarcely travels very far from Combremer to his holidays in Balbec, and its ‘tourist’
experiences are hardly very dramatic or sublime; there is much that is repetitious,
even to the point of tedium, in the ways that the days are expended. But it is
precisely in virtue of those qualities, and their subtle shifts in what constitutes
the routine and the familiar, that the sequence of days combines to constitute a
rare and entrancing experience: they are able to merge with each other in a way
that will yield in retrospect their unforgettable beauty and exceptionality.
D
elivering goods faster, getting more done, enhancing productivity, these
are all objectives that are intimately connected with the contemporary
adulation of speed, almost always presented as entirely laudable aspects
of the work culture of modernity. But speed in the context of work is really about
the saving of labour time. It is, as E.P. Thompson famously pointed out some
while ago now, about the clock replacing the sun, such that time becomes a
form of imprisonment rather than a milieu in which life is lived. Today, we are
still subject to that imprisonment. We may not be back with the work routines
of the nineteenth century, but there is no doubt that we are still subject to a
time-economy imposed by the quest for profit, which is seriously undermining
of human happiness and well-being. Those of a more optimistic cast who
anticipated a future age of leisure have been confounded; very little free time has
been realised from the unprecedented productivity of the last century. Dramatic
illustration of the opportunities missed in this respect is provided in Juliet Schor’s
1991 book, The Overworked American:
Since 1948, productivity has failed to rise in only five years. The level of
productivity of the US worker has more than doubled. In other words,
we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in terms of
marketed goods and services) in less than half the time it took in that year.
We actually could have chosen the four hour day. Or a working year of six
months. Or, every worker in the United States could now be taking every other
year off from work - with pay. Incredible as it may sound, this is just the simple
arithmetic of productivity growth in operation (p2).39
The other pleasures of post-consumerism
In fact, what happened in the US - where, as elsewhere, any political ‘choice’
in the matter was ruled out by the dictates of the economy - was that free time
fell by nearly 40 per cent between 1973 and 1990; and although the average
American in 1990 owned and consumed more than twice as much as he or she
did in 1948, they also had considerably less leisure. Similar trends are signalled in
the UK, where a steady decline in work hours since the mid-nineteenth century
was halted in the 1990s, and where two-fifths of the workforce are now working
harder than in the 1980s.
I
t has often been pointed out, as a relatively new aspect of contemporary
worker ‘exploitation’, that those who put in most hours on the job are today
also among the most highly paid. It might seem, then, that they are driven less
by the need for more money than by their fear of losing their premium job, their
ambition to achieve, their desire for recognition, or their sheer addiction to the
‘workaholic’ routine. One has to doubt, of course, whether any of these personnel
would put in the same hard graft without the relatively high levels of remuneration,
but it would certainly seem that the status acquired through holding down a high
pressure job is a significant source of additional fulfilment. On the other hand, the
blurring of the work-life distinction that is the almost inevitable accompaniment of
the 60-70 hour week and constant availability comes at enormous personal cost,
and in an important sense erodes the possibility of any other form of fulfilment.
There are now Wife Selecting and speed dating agencies pandering to the pathology
of those whose job addiction has cost them all sense of the art of living.There is a
whole service industry supplying round the clock childcare to those who can no
longer spare the time for it themselves. There are increasingly bizarre work practices
and divisions of labour (for example, couples doing back to back shifts) in those
cases where childcare is simply proving too expensive. A recent study covering
1074 working and co-habiting adults over the age of 18 found that more than a
fifth of couples were so busy they could go for a week without seeing each other,
often with serious impact on their relationship.
Sceptics will always question whether there really is a need for more free
time, and whether people are genuinely capable of benefiting from it. But
this scepticism has never had to be put to the test, since we have never yet
experienced a socio-economic scenario in which work and income are relatively
equally distributed, part-time work is the norm, and everyone has access to a
reasonable level of basic income. Nor have we yet experienced an industrialised Soundings
40
society that, having ample leeway for the provision of more free time, has not
extensively commodified recreation itself, so that it has come to be regarded as
a source of further productivity and economic growth. In a culture where being
in work is closely associated with personal success, and those without work are
almost always deprived of the necessary resources for the carefree enjoyment
of idleness, or for the more concentrated and passionate pursuit of hobbies or
cultural or sporting activities, it is hardly surprising if ‘free time’ is seen as a
problem rather than a source of fulfilment. We cannot predict how people would
react to less work if it was no longer so closely associated with the stigmata of
idleness, unemployment and reduced citizenship. There is also evidence that
long hours and workaholic culture affect the capacity of people to relax and
cope with leisure time. There is, in other words, a ‘work-ethic dialectic’, which
needs to be replaced along alternative hedonist lines, so that by working less we
also come to find it easier to relax. The shift required to transform the ethics of
work along the lines that André Gorz and others have suggested will certainly
strike many as too utopian to be feasible. But it also seems utterly implausible to
suppose that we can continue with current expansion rates in production, work
and consumption over the coming millennium.
http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/library/c72426_3.pdf
Crisis of American Consumerism
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Some people buy inflatable Santa Clauses, and they put them on the rooftop. You ask if they really needthat, they chuckle and say "no, no, of course not." But, when you ask them about flatscreen TVs, nobody chuckles anymore, people feel uncomfortable.
The truth is, we have very limited real needs.
Much of the debate over how to address the economic crisis has focused on a single word: regulation. And it's easy to understand why. Bad behavior by a variety of businesses landed us in this mess -- so it seems rather obvious that the way to avoid future economic meltdowns is to create, and vigorously enforce, new rules proscribing such behavior. But the truth is quite a bit more complicated. The world economy consists of billions of transactions every day. There can never be enough inspectors, accountants, customs officers and police to ensure that all or even most of these transactions are properly carried out. Moreover, those charged with enforcing regulations are themselves not immune to corruption, and hence, they too must be supervised and held accountable to others -- and so on. You can see how regulation cannot by itself resolve the problem. What is needed instead is something far more sweeping: for people to internalize a different sense of how one ought to behave, and act on it because they believe it is right.
The normative values of a culture matter. Regulation is needed when culture fails, but it cannot alone serve as the mainstay of good conduct. But what kind of transformation in our normative culture is called for?
What needs to be eradicated, or at least greatly tempered, is consumerism: the obsession with acquisition that has become the organizing principle of American life. This is not the same thing as capitalism, nor is it the same thing as consumption. To explain the difference, it is useful to draw on Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of human needs. At the bottom of this hierarchy are basic creature comforts; once these are sated, more satisfaction is drawn from affection, self-esteem and, finally, self-actualization. As long as consumption is focused on satisfying basic human needs -- safety, shelter, food, clothing, health care, education -- it is not consumerism. But when, on attempts to satisfy these higher needs through the simple acquisition of goods and services, consumption turns into consumerism -- and consumerism becomes a social disease.
The link to the economic crisis should be obvious. A culture in which the urge to consume dominates the psychology of citizens is a culture in which people will do most anything to acquire the means to consume -- working slavish hours, behaving rapaciously in their business pursuits, and even bending the rules in order to maximize their earnings. They will also buy homes beyond their means and think nothing of running up credit-card debt. It therefore seems safe to say that consumerism is, as much as anything else, responsible for the current economic mess.
But consumerism will not just magically disappear from its central place in our culture. It needs to be supplanted by something.
A shift away from consumerism, and toward this something else, would obviously be a dramatic change for American society. But such grand cultural changes are far from unprecedented. Profound transformations in the definition of "the good life" have occurred throughout human history. Before the spirit of capitalism swept across much of the world, neither work nor commerce were highly valued pursuits -- indeed, they were often delegated to scorned minorities such as Jews. For centuries in aristocratic Europe and Japan, making war was a highly admired profession. In China, philosophy, poetry, and brush painting were respected during the heyday of the literati. Religion was once the dominant source of normative culture; then, following the Enlightenment, secular humanism was viewed in some parts of the world as the foundation of society. Such normative change is possible, especially in times of crisis.
To accomplish this sort of change, we do not have to give up on capitalism itself. This position does not call for a life of sackcloth and ashes, nor of altruism. And it does not call on poor people or poor nations to be content with their fate and learn to love their misery; clearly, the capitalist economy must be strong enough to provide for the basic creature comforts of all people. But it does call for a new balance between consumption and other human pursuits.
There is strong evidence that when consumption is used to try to address higher needs -- that is, needs beyond basic creature comforts -- it is ultimately Sisyphean. Several studies have shown that, across many nations with annual incomes above $20,000, there is no correlation between increased income and increased happiness. In the United States since World War II, per capita income has tripled, but levels of life satisfaction remain about the same, while the people of Japan, despite experiencing a sixfold increase in income since 1958, have seen their levels of contentment stay largely stagnant. Studies also indicate that many members of capitalist societies feel unsatisfied, if not outright deprived, however much they earn and consume, because others make and spend even more: Relative rather than absolute deprivation is what counts. This is a problem since, by definition, most people cannot consume more than most others.
Consumerism, it must be noted, afflicts not merely the upper class in affluent societies but also the middle class and many in the working class. Large numbers of people across society believe that they work merely to make ends meet, but an examination of their shopping lists and closets reveals that they spend good parts of their income on status goods such as brand-name clothing, the "right" kind of car, and other assorted items that they don't really need. This mentality may seem so integral to American culture that resisting it is doomed to futility. But the current economic downturn may provide an opening of sorts.
So far, much of this scaling-back has been involuntary, the result of economic necessity. What is needed next is to help people realize that limiting consumption is not a reflection of failure. Rather, it represents liberation from an obsession -- a chance to abandon consumerism and focus on... well, what exactly? What should replace the worship of consumer goods?
It must be a culture that extols sources of human flourishing besides acquisition. The two most obvious candidates to fill this role are communitarian pursuits and transcendental ones.
Communitarianism refers to investing time and energy in relations with the other, including family, friends and members of one's community. The term also encompasses service to the common good, such as volunteering, national service and politics. Communitarian life is not centered around altruism but around mutuality, in the sense that deeper and thicker involvement with the other is rewarding to both the recipient and the giver. Indeed, numerous studies show that communitarian pursuits breed deep contentment. A study of 50-year-old men shows that those with friendships are far less likely to experience heart disease. Another shows that life satisfaction in older adults is higher for those who participate in community service.
Transcendental pursuits refer to spiritual activities broadly understood, including religious, contemplative and artistic ones. The lifestyle of the Chinese literati, centered around poetry, philosophy and brush painting, was a case in point (but a limited one because this lifestyle was practiced by an elite social stratum). In modern society, transcendental pursuits have often been emphasized by bohemians, beginning artists and others involved in lifelong learning who consume modestly. Here again, however, these people make up only a small fraction of society. Clearly, for a culture to buy out of consumerism and move to satisfying higher human needs with transcendental projects, the option to participate in these pursuits must be available on a wider scale.
All this may seem abstract, not to mention utopian. But one can see a precedent of sorts for a society that emphasizes communitarian and transcendental pursuits among retired people, who spend the final decades of their lives painting not for a market or galleries but as a form of self-expression, socializing with each other, volunteering, and, in some cases, taking classes. One does not need shoes with fancy labels to benefit from a hike. Chess played with plastic pieces is the same game as the one played with carved mahogany or marble pieces. And I'm quite sure that the Lord does not listen better to prayers read from a leatherbound Bible than those read from a plain one, printed on recycled paper. In short, those who embrace this lifestyle will find that they can achieve a high level of contentment even if they give up a considerable segment of the surplus wealth they command.
The main way societies will determine whether the current crisis will serve as an event that leads to cultural transformation or merely constitute an interlude in the consumerism project is through a process I call "moral megalogues." Societies are constantly engaged in mass dialogues over what is right and wrong. Typically, only one or two topics dominate these megalogues at any given time. In earlier decades, women's rights and minority rights were topics of such discussions. Megalogues involve millions of members of a society exchanging views with one another at workplaces, during family gatherings, in the media, and at public events. They are often contentious and passionate, and, while they have no clear beginning or endpoint, they tend to lead to changes in a society's culture and its members' behavior.
Having a national conversation about this admittedly abstract question is merely a start, though. If a new shared understanding surrounding consumption is to evolve, education will have a crucial role to play. Schools, which often claim to focus solely on academics, are actually major avenues through which changes in societal values are fostered. For instance, many schools deeply impress on young children that they ought to respect the environment, not discriminate on racial or ethnic grounds, and resolve differences in a peaceful manner. There is no reason these schools cannot push back against consumerism while promoting communitarian and transcendental values as well. School uniforms (to counter conspicuous consumption) and an emphasis on community service are just two ways to work these ideas into the culture of public education.
I certainly do not expect that most people will move away from a consumerist mindset overnight. Some may keep one foot in the old value system even as they test the waters of the new one, just like those who wear a blazer with jeans. Still others may merely cut back on conspicuous consumption without guilt or fear of social censure. Societies shift direction gradually. All that is needed is for more and more people to turn the current economic crisis into a liberation from the obsession with consumer goods and the uberwork it requires-- and, bit by bit, begin to rethink their definition of what it means to live a good life.
Amitai Etzioni is professor of international relations and director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University, as well as the author of The Active Society and a frequent contributor to CNN.com.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amitai-etzioni/the-crisis-of-american-co_b_1855390.html
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