The Core Modern Value
Go ahead, make it make sense.
It’s not hard to say that America has transitioned from a society in which the values were primarily determined by religion to a society in which the values are primarily determined by consumerism. One only need to compare the motives of early English settlers and small American towns to contemporary ones, and examples abound.
There are many different ways that one might conceive of the shift, and even many ways to consider it to be good news:
One might see it as a shift away from a society dominated by prim, churchy dogma into a society liberated to freedom of choice.
One might see it as a shift away from a society dominated by superstitious personification of inanimate mechanisms to a world where, at last, reason prevails.
One might see it as a shift away from masochistic self-abnegation into a healthy embrace of material prosperity.
However one judges the experience of religion and the experience of consumerism, though, it’s especially useful to evaluate the differences between religion and consumerism in terms of what they are trying to do, particularly as far as social policy goes.
And, in terms of social policy, the true stewards of religion are, above all, in search of the best possible ways for humans to live and be.
And in terms of social policy, the true stewards are consumerism are, above all, in search of ways to make money for themselves.
Defenders of the modern way of living might leap to say that the above characterization of consumerism is unfair. So it might be amended to say that, the true stewards of consumerism are, above all, in search of making money from themselves — with the understanding that, in a spirit of fair play, everyone else is entitled to try to do the same.
But beyond that, I don’t know how you get much more fair to consumerism.
It is what it is.
Religious inquiry is fundamentally ethical. And anti-consumerist. No major religion recommend us to the completely unregulated pursuit of our material desires, and most religions are suspicious of it. Any major religion that acknowledges a hedonistic path invariably has a broader avenue of principles for guiding human behavior past the id. The higher messages are the norm in religion. Hedonism is, overwhelmingly, at the fringe.
It feels important to really stress that religion is centrally concerned with ethics, because these days people often point to the fact that people have done terrible things to others in the name of religion as a categorical indictment of religion itself. But I think one can mediate that critique:
First, whenever someone does something in the name of religion, that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that we have to call that religious activity. We can point to religious institutions that have been commandeered by irreligious people — put to essentially irreligious purposes of amassing wealth and power, for example — and I think we can fairly choose to say that true religion is something else.
Two, religions often improve. The Catholic Church may have instituted the Inquisition, for example, but it gradually developed into an institution which did not do things like that. And long ago, Buddhist monks frightened people with vivid descriptions of multifarious hells — far more Baroque scenes than the most imaginative visions of the West, mind you — yet modern Buddhism is, by contrast, legendarily tranquil.
Yes, the Church still has much to answer for as its terrible history of sexual abuse comes to light. And, yes, it should answer for this. But I think the central point pertains: many institutions that have had a core mission to identify and transmit ethical ways to live, may not have become ethically perfect but they do evince a capacity to become more ethical.
Fundamentally, I think religions have done enough to demonstrate that if we try to be more ethical — willfully and thoughtfully — we will be. And it is worth trying, and religions have succeeded in this regard.
Consumerism, on the other hand, has a different relationship to ethics. It’s not so say that consumerism discourages ethical behavior, per se, but rather to say that consumerism generally proceeds from the idea that the ethics of the society have been worked out already, and therefore we don’t need to worry about them.
Sometimes the ethics of consumerism are sometimes justified by saying that Adam Smith proved the pursuit of self-interest benefits everyone and, therefore, everyone can act as selfishly as possible and be assured of actually contributing to social progress (even though this is not true).
Sometimes they are justified out of a nearly subconscious notion that, somewhere in the 70s after the civil rights movement, with the burgeoning American middle class, that Americans had developed a way of life that was ethically unassailable, and, therefore, all the ethical battles could be declared won.
Regardless of the explanation, generally speaking, consumerism supposes that the work of identifying ethical behavior has been done, the mechanisms to preserve fairness are generally in place, and, therefore we don’t need to worry about ethics in the pursuit of the good life.
Instead, we can orient our lives around the acquisition of wealth, for the purpose of purchasing goods and services.
Note that this different from the relationship between economics and ethics. In economics, the market is generally acknowledged to be amoral, and so the behavior of the market is considered to be a somewhat separate domain from ethical thinking. Consumerism, which is not so much a branch of study as an approach to life, justifies itself by saying that ethics are necessary, but that they are fait accompli.
I think it’s important to note that consumerism does generally consider the ethical battles to be won. Because while even a fairly cursory study of Christian scripture, for instance, would incline the reader to be automatically suspicious of the morality of pure consumerism, we modern practitioners of consumerism have some good reasons to think that our behavior is ethical: it’s not that we have consciously turned from virtuous ethics to sinful hedonistic materialism; it’s that the ethics have been resolved, and we have proceeded comfortably beyond them into the next evolutionary step — of buying greater and greater luxury.
It‘s been my observation that most people do not get their values from an inner urge toward serious inquiry but that, mostly, most people get their values from the desire to belong, and, consequently, they get their values from what is ambient around them. This means that the prevailing messages in society are embraced not necessarily because they have been subjected to the rigorous critical thinking of each adherent and judged to be right by him or her, but often, much more simply, because they are popular.
And, if the messages of consumerism treat the ethics of society as a foregone conclusion which does not need to be urgently revisited, if the overwhelming ethical statement of modern society is, “Yep. Sure. We know all that,” then it’s important to note how comparatively little effort is expended even to describe what “all that” is.
In fact, the discussion of our ethical framework seems to have been largely eclipsed by a prevailing interest in achieving a certain way of life. People want good, well-paying jobs. They want to fall in love, get married and move into houses. They want the houses to have many big rooms, nice furniture, and large TVs. They want to raise families, and they want to spend money on their children at birthdays and Christmases. They want their children to be active throughout childhood, and they want to spend money on lessons and activities for their children, because this is believed to be one of the most reassuring indicators that children will be able to get good jobs themselves.
The cycle of good living will continue, then.
And the goal of American consumerism is, primarily, the upper-middle class lifestyle. A generation ago, it could have been fairly stated that the goal was a middle class lifestyle, but since then the middle class has begun to split into two distinct categories: the lower middle, in which savings is an issue; luxuries like cruises, pilot lessons, and extra vehicles require a lot of effort; and there is a general experience of “feeling the road” in day-to-day life, and the upper middle, in which obtaining these things are not so much of a hassle, but whose members do not consider themselves to be rich.
It’s the upper middle we want. Its mores are the ones that are re-affirmed throughout the culture. When we watch TV or movies set in the modern day, the characters in those stories tend to live tend to live upper middle class lives (even though hardly any character on television or in film could afford to live in the housing they have while making what they could reasonably expect to make if they worked their job in the real world). People in the TV commercials are upper middle class. Perhaps the educated and/or professional people around us are upper middle class — particularly in the suburbs.
There is a lot of conversation about the rising inequality of wealth in America, and the fact that median wage has more or less stagnated while the rich are getting richer; however, some of this complaint has been mediated by a counter-argument that more and more people are entering the upper middle class — making the upper-middle class living the wholesome goal that justifies current levels of wealth disparity. And again, this vision is what our political conversation orbits: jobs, wages, productivity — all of which equals new opportunities to improve and, ultimately, to enter the upper middle class.
The notion becomes so pervasive that it is easy to suppose that this has been the end goal of human living all along: the peculiarities of the culture are so pervasive that they are taken to be arbitrary when they are, in fact, particular.
The truth is that our way of life is full of choices.
If our way of life is full of choices, are they good choices?
In order to decide, it seems to me of primary importance to note one key feature of consumerism:
The pursuit the upper-middle class American lifestyle generally obliges its aspirants to have some awareness that other people are not getting there, because they are not able to — and not to mind too much.
When I say that we don’t mind that other people aren’t entering the upper middle class, I don’t mean that we don’t mind that we’re thinking about getting that Tesla this year while, for the Joneses, a Tesla is a decade away. I mean that we don’t mind thinking about getting that Tesla while twenty percent of children in the U.S. will go to bed hungry for some period of time this year, and while, on the planet we share, at any given time close to one billion people are not getting enough to eat and a few million are in the process of dying from starvation.
To wit, consumerism makes it acceptable to pursue the gratifications of one’s own appetites for luxury without any particularly high degree of concern for the fact that some portion of the human family is suffering from what, from the perspective of the industrialized middle class, constitutes the most basic material wants.
We fuss about whether to get the new sweater when some people have barely any clothes at all. We complain about the movie being unexpectedly sold out while people die of diseases contracted from the water they drink. As a laudable act of conscience, we harken to our pettiness in the face of economic disparity with a hashtag: #firstworldproblems, but do we really understand the situation?
I think it’s possible that the main thing that allows us to be at peace with our behavior is that we have lived the greater part of our lives on the more fortunate side of the transaction, having little or no awareness of how it feels to be on the other side.
We can only imagine what it feels like to be in need and to see people with so much turn their backs on us. We have not experienced it.
Since we’re talking so much about ethics it might be worthwhile to define what the term. Philosophers have approached the definnition variously, but for the purposes of this essay, let’s suppose the following pragmatic definition:
Ethics are the principles by which the greatest possible well-being can be assured for every sentient being (considering the interests of all other beings) — and the inquiry by which one arrives at better and better understandings of these principles.
The point of ethical inquiry is to seek a system in which every thing that has a capacity to experience the quality of its being is assured the best possible chance of experiencing a high quality of being — with consideration of all other beings in mind. This requires a lot of careful thought, and, sometimes difficult choices.
Through ethical inquiry, for example, we might decide not to eat animals because we are aware that modern farming methods often require animals to live horrible lives, and we know we can be adequately nourished by plants.
If we were to discover that plants were extremely sentient — and research continues to surprise us with new evidence of how sentient plants actually are — we would probably not cease to eat altogether, though. Considering the whole system of beings, we would presumably judge that human lives were worth, at least, the sacrifice of the plants at the end of their lives. (We might, however, labor to provide plants the best lives possible, according to our understanding of how they experienced life.)
When American society was primarily steered by religion, this sort of inquiry was ambient. It is not hard to look back into our records of history — the letters, the speeches, the volume of storytelling, and to see a pervasive interest in moral behavior. Political figures, philosophers, novelists, playwrights, communities large and small all show signs of careful turning over notions of what is good and right. Even as recently as a generation ago, it is easy to point to television sit-coms that were primarily occupied with moral behavior. The popular and long-running show Family Ties, for example, is, in retrospect, more or less a seven-season treatise on how to live life as an ethical middle class moderate political liberal.
Today, when we consider ourselves to have graduated from this inquiry, it is less apparent, and, again, one need look no further, I think than the growing canon of recent American storytelling in which, basically, villains are the protagonist, to see the evidence of it.
Or, beyond the fiction, one can also look at the presidential race for more immediate and tangy evidence of our “evolving” moral attitudes.
But perhaps it is not fair to pin the blame for our ethical lapses on consumerism. Perhaps we can make an argument that consumerism is entirely ethical?
We can certainly try. Let’s lay out some premises:
In the world, there are people with more and people with less. There are people with considerably higher levels of education and people with considerably lower levels of education. There are people with considerably higher quality of food, clothing, shelter, sanitation and public services, and there are people with considerably lower quality of food, clothing, shelter, sanitation and public services.
Ethical inquiry requires us to consider the ways of life that will maximize the well-being of all entities capable of sensing well being.
For consumerism to be ethical, then, here is what we must consider to be ethical:
In a society in which some people have considerably more and some people have considerably less, and in a world where some people have considerably more and some people considerably have less, the best way to assure the most well-being for all is for us, when we have more, to associate primarily with people of similar social and economic attainment, to continue to pursue more and more for ourselves, and to more or less ignore the needs of people who have less.
Go ahead, then.
Say it is ethical.
Perhaps, we might say that, in truth, there is little ethical justification for purely self-centered consumerism (except to say that, somehow, it is ethical to prosper and to do little to help other people who are suffering). And yet, this degree of selfishness is commonplace, and it enjoys full cultural sanction.
People spend Saturdays going to wine-tasting classes while other people go hungry.
Groceries throw out edible food, and lock the dumpsters, while people go hungry.
People buy third and fourth cars while other people live in shacks made of corrugated steel.
People go on cruises, collect football team memorabilia, go out for tapas. Take swing dancing classes, sky dive, parasail, make a lifestyle of dining out extravagantly.
And meanwhile, throughout the world, people suffer from the inability to meet comparatively simple needs.
In fact, our casual pursuit of luxury, while human suffering goes on, has become so completely normalized that I would suspect that most readers have an automatic reaction is to the idea — something either like, “Yeah, so?” or like, “Yeah, I know, and I feel terrible. But what can possibly be done about it?”
From our perspective, we may have gone over this territory enough in our minds that it may feel okay to hold the needs of others at a distance, or even to forget them.
Certainly, there is broad cultural sanction for it.
Is it possible, then, that some of that distorting cultural conditioning has actually happened to us?
Suppose we extricate ourselves completely from the system, and talk about an alien culture on another planet. On this alien planet, there are people who have plenty, and there are people who want. The people who have plenty preoccupy themselves with the concerns of wealth, and most of them do very little to help the less fortunate. They say, “It is okay for me to spend time trying to obtain these things for me and my family, instead of helping others to have a little more themselves, because…” And each has his or her reason, but the overarching conclusion is that it is okay to be this way, because everything in the system says it is okay to be this way.
How does it look? Do you want to meet those aliens?
What if they had superior technology than we did? Would you want to invite them here?
To some degree, cruelty can be legitimately excused when it is the result of ignorance, and sometimes ignorance is innocent. We do not fault spiders, boa constrictors, or tigers for what they do to other living things, because we see that they do not know any other way. In fact, they simply cannot be any other way.
Similarly, when factory farms began to remove the beaks of hens with hot knives and to place them in cages only slightly larger than their bodies, so that they would spend their lives immobile and doing nothing by laying eggs, there was a long period of time when the consumers of these eggs could easily have been forgiven, I think, because the food industry did such a careful job of keeping these truths from public view. People could sincerely make the case, I think, that they did not know any better.
Now, however, to fail to see the truth about factory farming’s treatment of animals becomes, increasingly, a matter of choice.
And so it is, unquestionably, a choice to overlook the material needs of other people in the world, and the amount of benefit that could result if we who have a lot in the world turned our attention toward those in need. Virtually no one in our society is ignorant of the disparity of material living in the world anymore. Indeed, I think it’s safe to speculate that only the thinnest margins of people on Earth are unaware of it.
The truth is, when we do not think about it, we are choosing to ignore it.
It’s famously told that in 1789, when the people of France did not have enough bread, Marie Antionette, wife to King Louis XVI, callously replied, “Let them eat cake.”
This story made Marie Antionette a hated symbol of decadence. How could the queen, surrounded by such luxury, be so utterly cold in the face of human suffering?
As it turns out, though, in reality Marie Antionette has since been vindicated. She probably did not say this quote, and there is evidence that she was defensibly engaged with the plight of the poor. The quote may have been a bastardization of something said by Marie-Thérese in 1660, but was not likely anything Marie Antionette would have said.
But in real life?
Perhaps there is such a cold Marie Antionette.
And perhaps it is us.
At some point, the criticism may start to feel unduly scathing. An obvious counter-argument emerges: “Well, how much should I give, then? Should I give so much that I become homeless myself? Is it only ethical if I am the poorest person on Earth, until everybody is wealthier than me? Surely it’s ethical for me to keep something, right?”
And, certainly, we must all define our limits. But I think there is a converse question that must also prod us:
How little thinking about the situation can we do before it can fairly be said that we are turning our backs to the situation?
Is it enough to think about it every few months, passingly, and make no change in our behavior?
Is it enough to think about it every week, passingly, and make no change in our behavior?
Is it enough to think about it several times a week?
Is it enough to think about it every day and to make no change in our behavior?
Can we say, fundamentally, that we are acting ethically, if we have all of our material needs met, we provide for our children, and still we do nothing for the people in the world in greater need?
Perhaps we can draw one boundary at the dissolution of our own peace of mind into the part of the world that needs, and we draw another boundary at the callous turning of our backs. There is a good bit of range in between, then. A lot of nuance.
As a society, do we tend to be closer to one of those lines than the other?
We do?
Which one?
On many occasions Arnold Abbott, a ninety-year old pastor in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has prepared plates of food to give to homeless people in the city.
For doing so, he was arrested three times, because it was illegal to share food in Fort Lauderdale.
Abbot said that one time when he was arrested, a police officer commanded him, “Put down that plate!”
It sounded, to him, like he was being asked to put down a gun.
After his arrests were publicized in the media, a judge suspended the ordinance that prohibited the sharing of food. So now it is possible to feed homeless people without being stopped by the police.
But the National Coalition of the Homeless reports that laws to restrict the sharing of food are being pursued in thirty-one U.S. cities.
The most common rationale, they say, is that one should not feed people who are hungry, because, then, they will not learn to feed themselves.
Suppose someone has great wealth, but in their lives they feel troubled.
Suppose they discover that they are troubled because they realize they are not living a life of conscience. So they begin to look for new opportunities to give of their wealth, and they begin to spend more and more time helping people.
As they spend more and more time helping people, they make less and less money — since the transition into providing more direct services for people in greater need almost invariably involves making less money — and, in consequence, they begin to live more and more simply.
Instead of seeking to summit one material vista after another, they seek simply to be comfortable and satisfied. They take good care of their clothes. They choose accommodations that are clean, sturdy and well-kept, but which are not extravagant. They keep their transportation expenses to a minimum. They buy food that satisfies them.
In the meantime, they do three things: they try to grow, they try to help others, and they try spend some time each week at their leisure. They try to grow, because it is satisfying and it makes them better at making the world a better place. They try to help others, because, when they grow, they realize that they have more than others and it feels beneficial to share. They rest and enjoy themselves at their leisure because, no matter how nobly and completely one tries to give oneself to the world, nature clearly requires of us to spend some time for ourselves.
How much would a life have to tend this way, before we began to consider the person living it to have some degree of a saintliness?
But is this saintliness?
Or is it just an example of somebody who’s doing what, to greater or lesser degree, anyone concerned with living ethically is supposed to do?
Is it, perhaps, simply the example of someone who has taken a few honest steps out of a system that is so aflame with material desires as to be, essentially, corrupt?
There are those who might be inclined to reply, “Well, aren’t the poor in America better off than the poor elsewhere? Wouldn’t it be ethical for them to stop trying to be wealthier and turn their attention to the really poor people? If so, why should I worry about the poor?”
Perhaps it’s true. There is, perhaps, some argument that anybody who is better off than other people could do some good — and experience some direct benefit — from turning to help those less fortunate than they. And, apparently, there is some evidence to suggest that poorer people actually do donate a larger percentage of their income to charitable causes than richer people.
But if you’re the one in the equation who is doing better than everyone else, and who is also making the case that you don’t have to do anything, because most of the people below you can just help themselves by being charitable then, for God’s sake, who are you in the system?
That’s how good people talk? That’s how good people think?
The truth is, I am not off my own hook. At all.
I am not that saintly the way the fictional person mentioned earlier is.
But maybe I can try to be.
I’ll finish writing this essay. After I finish writing the essay, I will read to prepare for the classes I have to teach this week. I will research what I need to research, and I will plan what I need to plan.
I know that, in my classroom, I intend to steer my students toward being good people. I know that I would like them to be thoughtful and empowered, and I know that I would like them to live lives as good people, as people of conscience.
After I read, I have to dust, vacuum, and clean the kitchen. I have to do laundry. I need to get my hair cut, and I need to buy some groceries.
I do know that I need some fallow time today, to recharge my batteries, I feel like I have been giving more than I have been receiving, and I feel tired, impatient, irritable as a result. I need some quiet time.
If I had kids, I would need to give them attention. Would I allow them to take my attention and point it wherever they wanted it to go? How would I best serve them, and, also, serve the world?
I do not have kids. I do not have that light in my life, or that responsibility. I know that I have more free time. When that time arrives, when I recognize that I have free time, what will I do?
Will I read something? What will I read? Where will it take me?
Will put on a movie? Which, and why?
Will I, perhaps, make a little more space to hear the need of the world?
Will I look at the world’s need honestly, look at my resources honestly, and, when I am healthy and refreshed and ready, attempt to bring these two together a little bit more?
If I did that, what then?
If I made it a practice, what then?
If we all did, what then?