IN DEFENSE OF CONSUMERISM
By Erik Kain
November 30, 2009
Published in Ordinary Times (Blog)
Values are tricky, especially when they come into conflict with one another. Take
consumerism. It’s widely unpopular as a concept, and yet we all participate in some form
of it or another, especially this time of year as Christmas approaches and stores unveil
their holiday deals in spread after spread of glossy ads and energetic commercial
segments. Shopping is a national pastime this season. The other national pastime is
griping about it and wishing that Americans could be a little less materialistic and a little
more in the spirit of the season (once it’s stripped of its religiosity, of course). No Jesus
and no presents – a holiday of bells and whistles and little colorful lights.
Well let me be a defender of consumerism for a moment.
Obviously, placing too much value on simply having things is unhealthy. Someone else
will always have more of whatever it is you have or want, and so you will always be
envious and greedy and unhappy. But placing some value on things isn’t necessarily
harmful.
A new car might actually make you happier. It might be safer, more reliable, handle
better, waste less gas. All these things might make you happier. The new computer
might let you surf the web faster or play a game or chat online with family. The new
couch might not smell funny. The new clothes might fit better and not have stains in
them. All this stuff might actually make you a bit happier – maybe not as much as your
friends and family, though some of it might actually bring you closer to them.
There’s more to it, though. Buying stuff or paying for services creates wealth, and not just
for the wealthy. It creates wealth for the poor also, and for the working class. It creates
jobs for retail workers and delivery people and many others besides. All that horrible stuff
we buy translates somewhere down the line into paychecks for very real people who can
use that money to buy other things like food and shelter and maybe even stuff of their
own to keep them entertained or comfortable.
A lot of jobs in this economy rest on people buying things. That’s not a bad thing since
overall we have more money to buy things with, and these jobs are uniformly better than
the sort of jobs Americans used to have. And yet, we dislike the abstract concept of
consumerism so much that we’ve erected “Buy Nothing Day” events in protest. We even
advertise these events online, probably via our shiny new Apple Macbook.
Having something to be against, to blame, is very important to many of us. It helps piece
our complicated world together into something simple.
Of course, the chaos of Black Friday is absurd. I certainly don’t understand how anyone
could prefer getting up at the crack of dawn to go stand in a freezing cold line at Best
Buy to sleeping off the Thanksgiving hangover, but that’s just me. It’s perhaps just a tiny
bit arrogant to begrudge others their own shopping habits. To some, the event itself is
good fun. Something to do with loved ones maybe. A way to make that paycheck go a
tiny bit further.
You see, the problem isn’t that we buy things, or that we take pleasure in giving and
receiving gifts. The problem comes when too many people distance themselves from
deeper meaning in their lives and replace that value with simply possessing things. This
has always been a problem. Only now, with capitalism more and more people can afford
the luxury, and so more and more of us now suffer from this materialistic impulse –
though in fairness, it is a better affliction than those we used to suffer from like starvation
and plague.
Possessions will possess us if we let them, but having too little is much, much worse.
I just wonder if this problem is as bad or as widespread as so many believe it to be. It is a
sacred cow of popular culture now that we’ve entered into some hedonistic age of
rampant consumerism and a cultural nihilism devoted to the almighty gods of shopping.
This is one point of agreement that many social conservatives and liberals can agree.
But I suspect that in many ways this is just what we choose to see. I suspect that beneath
the news stories and beyond the popular opinion on the subject, most people still find the
greatest joy in spending time with their families and friends. Holidays are still more about
getting together than giving gifts. Having things is still secondary to having them for a
reason. And meaning is still mostly found in deeper places than the swipe of a credit card
or the top shelf of a department store.
Original link: https://erikkain.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/in-defense-of-consumerism/
