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All-Consuming Century
by
Gary Cross
Space aliens might think we are too
bizarre to be worth conquering. We let
dogs lick our faces, yet go all out to avoid slightly dirtying our shoes. We
anthropomorphize inanimate objects. We act as if automobiles were our royalty.
We know how many times Roseanne Barr has been married, yet could not guess how
many million people died of infectious diseases last year. We are loyal to
evildoers within our groups even when those evildoers annihilate many of us. We
waste the great commodity of time as if it were nothing, yet get excited
because one method of wasting time is slightly more profane than other methods
of wasting time. We treat ordinary folks in arbitrary out-groups as if they
were slime. We treat powerful evildoers in out-groups with respect merely
because of their power. We respect people in proportion to their fame, looks,
power and inoffensiveness of their rhetoric.
Fitting into the school of cautious
optimism, or perhaps the school of cautious indifference, Gary Cross delivers
the clearest and easily the best history of consumerism I have seen. The
century, observes Cross, began with Americans trading in frontier values for
the ideals of consumption. Increases in manufacturing productivity made it
possible. Hostility was muted by asserting that we were merely enjoying our
freedoms. We claimed we were not asserting status, maintaining status or trying
to obtain a bit of status—Or doing anything primarily for power, attention and
distraction. We were merely pursuing tastes. People tended to think that if any
manipulation was going on, it was other people who were being manipulated, not
us.
Attempts to keep up with the Joneses
ended up in failure because the Joneses were moving even faster. The century could
be summarized as the pursuit of more. The world beyond goods and services was
seen as too boring or frustrating or both.
In America failure meant having a
crappy job. Even violent criminals and neer-do-well movie extras did not
hesitate to hold someone in a fast food uniform in contempt. The former at
least enjoyed the adulation of the media for being an outlaw.
During the century, ideologies that
completely blamed individuals or the system evolved into new ideologies that
completely blamed individuals or the system. He writes that early consumption
critics fell into one of four camps:
·
Simple life purists.
·
Consumer rights advocates.
·
Let’s-protect-consumers-from-themselves activists.
·
Defenders of private and public spaces and communications.
Later, the counterculture “politics of
style became just style, another market segment easily integrated into the
merchandising system.” Hip consumption replaced unhip consumption. The pursuit
of the new instant gratification led to long-term dissatisfaction. The 1960s
counterculture produced almost no lasting solutions.
As Russell Jacoby has written
elsewhere, “Pluralism, rejected as shallow, has been resurrected as
multiculturalism. Pop culture, disdained as conformist, is now seen as
rebellious.”
The most intriguing section of this
work covers the past two decades, perhaps because their influences are still
great. In the
1980 to 2000 period free lunch markets
and impulse first ideologies added most to the consumerist predicament. The author
claims the government played only a small role. Mass markets, he alleges, depend
more on markets than politicians.
The best sellers of self-absorption
are executives, not drug dealers. The war on drugs had little influence on drug
use because it mostly engaged in symbolic cowboy actions. An unstated goal of
power marketers is getting people to spend their free time on activities that
cost money, or at least on activities that that advertise other activities that
cost money.
The narrow New Right thinks freedom
can be misused only when some illegal, non-market indulgence is pursued. They assume
power markets are almost always right and consumer preference equals truth
revealed.
Deregulation, he writes, led to even
greater immersion in advertising. General Mills went so far as to package Fruit
Gushers candy as a volcanology
curriculum for science teachers. Hardly a complaint was heard. Maybe if they packaged
Fruit Gushers as part of the sex ed curriculum, there would have been
complaints.
The author claims Ronald Reagan
slashed government programs, but a cursory look at the record would reveal that
Reagan slashed little. His policies
were more spend and tax shift than slash and tax cut.
Ever more cleverly designed,
habit-forming toys led to greater isolation for both adults and children.
Multitudes of consumer choices availed themselves from eco-tourism to slot
machines in South Dakota. Public life and private life became domains of market
life. Children were not sheltered from much, except sex and profanity, and
those two only until the near teen years. They were, of course, sheltered from
the rigors of an exceptional education.
Some recent Americans developed a work
hard ethic, but it came with a spend harder ethic. Hard-earned money was almost
certainly not for pursuing some distant, noble end. Americans no longer
compared themselves with the Joneses.
They compared themselves with
celebrities. Those who felt brief anxiety because they did not measure up to
their favorite celebrities had the option of undoing the anxiety with new toys,
new pills, new gurus and new TV channels. Computers offered more choices and
less passivity than television, yet they were also isolating.
Advertisers and consumers engaged in a
weird tango that ended up with consumers in ever narrower niches, “personal
cocoons” where lovers of rugby, Toyotas, Bill Murray and Foster’s Beer cared
little about lovers of Andre Agassi, BMWs, Thomas Kinkade and Beck’s Beer,
except when the former saw how the BMW could help his status, or the latter got
bored with Beck’s and experimented with Foster’s. Community equaled just about anything
from isolated bird watchers to gated, walled neighborhoods designed to keep
inmates and almost everyone else out.
Markets and various narrow moralities—left
and right—offered little to reduce the distances among individuals. One “morality”
that combined a ravenous consumption of possessions with an “edified” spiritual
detachment from the very same possessions can be well described as ludicrous.
The ideas of the weekend and the
Sabbath declined. Moonlighting, up 20 percent in the 80s, and working wives
were major trends. In 1996 sixty-one percent of wives worked. Commutes became
trips from one suburb to another suburb.
Cross calls it an ambiguous legacy.
Smoking decreased. Gambling and promiscuous sex increased. “Americans found it difficult
to want or even to conceive of more satisfying options.” Critics derided
consumer culture as superficial and purposeless. Americans scorned or ignored
the critics.
The critics were considered elitist
and offered little in the way of alternatives. Some critics merely criticized
the consumption of the poor while ignoring others’ consumption. Products
replaced other sources of identity and emotional connection.
Advertisers and peer pressures did not
merely passively manipulate consumers. Consumers were active participants. “Americans
who learned from birth to identify with an endless parade of goods would not
easily appreciate quiet walks in the woods, the pleasures of lifelong
friendships, or the deep gestures of acknowledging the grief and joys of
others.”
Goods are a way to display oneself
without having to engage in the difficult development of personality or
character. Cross writes that it is easy to conclude that goods are an easy
heaven compared to the hell of other people.
He hopes the future will deliver
neither the nanny state nor unfettered consumerism. Americans, he holds, should
realize that several shifts occurred, not merely a shift to more goods, but trends
toward personal goods such as entertainment via headphones versus the social
board games of the past.
Cross denounces spacey, elitist
critiques of consumerism that held ordinary Americans in contempt, yet this
work veers close to a different elitism, the elitism that says most Americans
are to stupid and lazy for a life other than the trough or the treadmill. It is
therefore okay to cater to “needs” (meaning self-indulgence) because at least
it prevents despair and tribalism—or so it is alleged.
The author seems to recommend little
more than some minor restrictions on where and when people can sell, advertise
and be vulgar. This is a bad approach. His recommendations are little more than
token measures, yet they will create a brouhaha with first amendment
absolutists. Does it really matter whether someone who plays video games for
five hours a day plays less profane video games for five hours a day? Changing
a tiny segment of the market from R-rated to PG-13 does not accomplish much
other than improve the ratings of Bill Maher’s TV show.
Consumer excesses should be dealt with
by progressive consumption taxes, better bankruptcy laws, greater taxes on externalities,
better academic standards, not first amendment restrictions. No one would
bother with Channel One if schools were so rigorous that they simply could not
afford to waste time on classroom television. Those who massively consume
should pay for the costs they impose on others.
Some of the critics were unpopular,
but they were also right.
Cross grossly understates some of the
human tragedies that occur with the triumph of consumerism. No children should
die because their parents are carting them all over the countryside for trivial
reasons. This argument would have benefited from two goods that cost next to
nothing: piss and vinegar.
While reading this, some comments from
Jonathan Rowe and
Edward Luttwak reappeared in my mind. If we value other things, “why conduct the economy as though the sole purpose is to pile up more stuff in the garage?” Yet we “coddle greed but burn lust at the stake (except when it is enlisted in the service of greed, in advertising for example.)” Luttwak notes that the natural environment is increasingly protected; yet personal and social environments increasingly belong to power markets. The law requires clean air, and the law requires kids to watch the detritus on Channel One. Recommended.
—Book review articles by
J.T. Fournier.
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