Consumerism - Big Ideas
Jonathon Porritt
Materialism
Jonathon Porritt
Many big ideas have struggled, over the centuries, to dominate
the planet, but only one has achieved total supremacy. It's
compulsive attractions rob it's followers of reason and good sense.
It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatens to tear
apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause
or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe; it
is consumerism.
My name is Jonathon Porritt and, for the last three decades, I've
been banging on about the environment and social justice. I first
got involved in the 70s, with Friends of The Earth and the Green
Party and since then I've been a campaigner, a political candidate,
I've taken direct action, I've been an advisor to government, I've
written books, I've lectures, I've hectored, you name it I've done
it.
For the last ten years, I've been working with Forum for the
Future to promote the solutions to today's social and environmental
problems and I've come to realise it's consumerism that is,
absolutely, at the heart of this. But, what is consumerism? Isn't it
just a posh word to describe shopping? We're all consumers, after
all, we all go shopping and society obviously couldn't function
without some level of consumption.
I'm not talking about consumption here, I'm talking about the idea
that we should all, actively, be consuming more and more every year
and that this is the best measure of economic progress. Consumerism
puts consumption at the very heart of the modern economy and
everything is done to persuade us to go and consume more;
advertising hoardings, billboards, newspapers, magazines and TV. We
are bombar5ded day in and day out by these advertising messages. You
may think they're all selling you something different, different
products, different brands, but at the same time they're selling you
one big idea; that the more we consume, the better our lives will
be.
Almost unnoticed, consumerism has become our principal pastime, our
zeitgeist, our ideology, all rolled into one. It's a very seductive
idea, but it's also a lethal idea. We've become a generation of
compulsive shopaholics. Scale up all of these individual acts of
consumption multiplied by several billion people and stand back and
watch the disaster unfold.
The trouble is, as consumers, we don't always know the real cost of
what we're buying. My daughters have a passion for Braeburn apples,
They're juicy, they're crunchy, but they're air-freighted in from
New Zealand. So who knows how much fuel has been spent to get them
into my home town. What we really ought to be doing, is buying far
more of the food we need from local farmer's markets. That way the
producer's linked to the consumer, environmental impact is reduced
and we really do begin to understand the true cost of eating the way
we eat today.
Our love of shopping, quite literally, threatens the end of the
world as we know it today. As our population grows and we go on
consuming more and more, the eco-systems on which we depend are now
close to collapse. It's all down to the power of modern consumerism.
So how did we fall into this trap?
For much of human history, the biggest problem was scarcity,
experienced as poverty, hunger and deprivation. So this urge to
acquire, to go beyond meeting one's basic needs, started as a
survival instinct. It's part of our essential human nature.
As civilisation advanced, life got easier, material goods became
more available, but they were never what we consider plentiful,
except for a tiny majority. For thousands of years, there were only
a comparatively few conspicuous consumers; the rich and the
powerful. For them, the trappings of luxury always had a secondary
purpose. They were designed to distinguish the rulers from the
ruled. To remind the powerless where the power really lay. Society
was so rigidly divided that the poor accepted their lot without
question and that was largely due to one very good reason; the fear
of God. After all, what really mattered was life after death, not a
better life here on Earth.
During the 17th century, new trade routes opened up and a new
middle-class of traders and entrepreneurs emerged to exploit them.
They revelled in their new found wealth. It now became respectable
to consume and flaunt one's consumption. In 1776, one man would
capture the spirit of self-interested individualism. In his book,
The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argued that the pursuit of luxury
worked as an economic driver that would make everybody richer. The
best way to encourage economic growth is to unleash individuals to
pursue their own selfish economic interests. Adam Smith provided the
model for an economic system that would take over the world; capitalism
was born and consumerism would be at the heart of it.
Shopping
During the 19th century, scarcity was gradually overcome.
Personal wealth and the trade it promoted drove an unparalleled
economic boom that transformed the West. Giant factories were built
to supply the goods that society now demanded. Thanks to the
Industrial Revolution there was a gradual shift towards mass
consumerism.
It wasn't just the production of goods that was revolutionised,
the process of buying was, itself, transformed. After the first
department store opened, in 1852, shopping became a respectable
leisure activity. Department stores offered a dream world of
material luxury, promoting shopping as and experience to savour and
stores became the cathedrals for a new faith on the march.
There was one country where shopping and consumerism would become
a way of life. By the early 20th century, Americans had the highest
personal wealth of any country in the world, creating huge new
markets. By the 1920s, the ordinary man and woman in America had
come to believe that affluence was their birthright and to have
access to consumer wealth became an integral part of The American
Dream.
It was around this time that consumerism took a very different
turn. Stimulating and manipulating people's desires, spinning dreams
and subtly creating envy. As the advertising industry really took
off, temptation and seduction became at least as important as
providing information. Big business and it's advertising agencies
turned to the science of psychology. Advertisers started to work out
how to play on our subconscious. It wasn't what the product did that
mattered, it was the kind of person it promised to make you feel.
Consumerism didn't always go unopposed. Most famously, in the
1960s, the hippy movement rebelled against rampant capitalism. It
transformed it's disgust with materialism, not just into a
philosophy, but into a new way of living. It was a movement that had
enormous appeal.
Thatcher and Reagan
Then, America and the West took a fateful step. A new breed of
politician dismissed environmental warnings and ushered in an age of
even more rampant materialism. Hippies were now replaced by Yuppies
and a new philosophy ruled; Greed Is Good. Throughout the 80s we
were all encouraged to measure our success by how much we earned and
how much we bought. Today's successors to Thatcher and Reagan have
done little to set aside the toxic legacy of such triumphalist
individualism.
Such is the momentum of consumerism that nothing has been able to
slow it's relentless march!
CREDITS: All of the above information was taken from the UK's Channel
Five series "Big Ideas"
Further Reading:
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The Conquest of
Cool: The Rise of Hip Consumerism - Thomas Frank |
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The Romantic:
Spirit of Modern Consumerism - Zygmunt Bauman |
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Serious Shopping:
Psycotherapy and Consumerism - Adrienne Baker |
