Discuss: The Gospel of Consumption

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Excellent article whose message needs to be continually heard.  It’s funny, but the comments I added last month to Mike Tidwell’s article on global warming are probably more apt here, so I’ll add them to the discussion after first saying: Henry David Thoreau spotted this insidious pattern to consumerism over a century and a half ago… why isn’t he considered the epitome of a Real American and why don’t we have a national holiday in his honor?… Obviously another holiday would cut that much more into production.  (Note also that holidays under this consumerist model are primarily diverted away from their original purposes to become functioning units of economic stimulus, the most obvious example being Christmas.  Likewise with education, which has little or nothing to do with the enlightenment and liberation of the individual; rather, education is now mostly functioning as nothing but a subservient arm of the economy.)

The writer [Mike Tidwell] makes the usually rare point in environmental arguments that to confront this problem [of global warming] would mean that humans would have had to pass through a spiritual catharsis.  This suggests that the problem is not just physical/technological, that somehow our spiritual “wrong-headedness” is at the root of the problem.  “Spiritual” suggests concerns not just for physical survival, our “means,” but also the “ends,” i.e. identifying a purpose for life once our physical needs have been met.  But we have been functioning under an extreme consumerist model that holds as its rewards such concepts as “luxury” or “the American Dream"… in other words, in lieu of identifying any purpose beyond physical comfort and pleasure, we have asked double-duty of our means, that they also function as life-goals (e.g. bigger house, faster or more comfortable car, etc… a pattern with no end in sight).
How does this comment help with the problem?  Maybe it doesn’t, since we seem to be at such a desparate point.  But at least let’s not kid ourselves that spraying the atmosphere with sulfer, or painting everything white, is anything more than treating symptoms.  If we could somehow solve global warming with giant mirrors only to support more gluttonous consumption, that’s precisely the type of unenlightened society not worth saving.  So let’s hope that what the writer implies will come to pass: as we save the planet, we find (and save) ourselves.

This is a terrific article and says in wonderful form what the organization I represent, TAKE BACK YOUR TIME (Ben Hunnicutt of the Kellogg’s Six Hour Day is on our board) has been working for for the past six years.  Check out our Web site at:  http://www.timeday.org Thanks for writing this Jeffrey--would love to discuss these issues with you sometime!  TAKE BACK YOUR TIME is currently championing a national paid vacation law and the theme of trading productivity for time instead of stuff--to improve our health, quality of life and environment.  best, John de Graaf
Executive Director, TAKE BACK YOUR TIME.

I wonder sometimes how consumers who butt against logic (buying gas guzzlers like large SUVs at a time when global warming is devastating our earth and United States) can be so narrow minded (downright uncaring) about the obvious disaster. Then I feel no pity.
Business men are in th business to make money and they rewards those who bring in more sales. Well we provided them the opportunity to mine our kids. Long live consumerism.

This article was my first insight into the idea that consumerism wasn’t always the basis for the American economy.  I’m not ignorant enough to have thought that things have always been the same as today, but I never realized that our economy was devised by politics and businessmen and then lobbied/campaigned for.  In standard history courses, we don’t learn about political sway when it comes to our “consumerism” and in economics classes we are only taught how to live in the economy as it is, as though it is a stagnant entity.  The history of consumerism should be taught everywhere, with an emphasis oh how it was created, giving fuel to those who are faced with the conquest of how to change it and start something new.  The age of the consumer needs to end.

After 9/11 George W. Bush urged American to go shopping.  John McCain and Hillary Clinton want a vacation on the gasoline tax credit so we will mindlessly consume the fuel we should be conserving.  It is not about facing reality and making the necessary adjustments to deal with serious socio-economic and environmental issues, it is about propping up an archaic and burdensome economic system that needs to collapse and will.  The longer we wait the harder will be the impacts and adjustments.

Congratulations to Jeffrey Kaplan for skillfully illuminating the sad fact that our modern mass-consumption economy was deliberately engineered as a way to keep the profit-making machinery of mass production from choking to death on its own output.  For those just becoming aware of this sordid truth, I offer another revealing quote, from post-war retail analyst Victor LeBow: “Our enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and selling of goods into rituals. …We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever increasing rate.” Growing up in a small town in the 60s, I had no idea how this short-sighted agenda was transforming the quieter, saner life of my parents’ day into the frantic, insecure life of today.

As a student nearing completion of a master’s degree in environmental studies, I read this article as a means of procrastinating work on an already-late paper for an environmental policy class.  The paper concerns the dry policy-theory concepts of problem definition and agenda-setting, as applied to the growing political awareness of climate change as a serious issue.  It seems, however, that all roads lead me to where I’m supposed to be, because this article is closely related to the subject of my work:  Do we define climate change as an emissions problem—essentially just another kind of pollution—to be solved by typical technical and regulatory means?  Do we see it as an efficiency problem, to be solved by hybrid cars, compact fluorescent bulbs, and living closer to our jobs?  Or do we define it as a fundamental flaw in an economic paradigm based on the ideas of limitless production, limitless consumption and endless, unlimited growth?  More importantly, what are the consequences of the way we frame the discussion?

We may, of course, need all of the above perspectives to avert the calamity we’ve called down upon our children’s heads.  But if we think our salvation lies in technology and incremental changes that leave our present practices substantially intact, we may find that our best efforts have been swamped by relentless growth, that we have merely slowed the stampede without turning its course.  Kaplan shows that time and community are the real luxuries in human culture; if we pursue them with half the zeal of our current religious devotion to money and possessions, we can have not only a healthier society, but a healthier planet as well.

Missing from this article and the Kelloggs 6 hour day is the concept of multi-stakeholder participation investment in each business and industry.  First Nation Production Societies pre-invasion were structures of progressive ownership for workere growing from apprenticeship to elder (master) status and always having a responsible say.  A Gospel of Consumption occurs because of is missing counterpart of intelligent responsible participation in both production and consumption.  Indigenous peoples of the world were able to work shorter days because they cultivated the massive productivity of the multilevel orchard, typically oak (acorn), butternut, chestnut, hazelnut etc mixed with fruit trees, berries, grapevines, mushrooms, and much more.  This three dimension food production for all species held water in its roots, pumped water, minerals and nutrients deep from the roots into the substrate, harvested some 95% of solar energy and condensed moist ocean winds onto the leaf surfaces.  Weather is drawn by the cold energy vacuum of photosynthesis’ conversion of solar energy.

We have manufactured scarcity in our ‘agri’ (L = ‘field’) cultural removal of the indigenous orchards.  Agriculture supplants 2 dimensional production at 1% of the 3 dimensional production of multi-level orchard production. We have lost the abundance of nature’s engine.  We are the earth speaking, so one can understand that the wisdom of nature is to be found in the interactive choir of our collective effort and voices.  Our role as passive workers, suppliers or consumers is not particularly relevent.