We hear it, implicitly and explicitly, whenever American pundits and politicians talk about places like Cuba, China, or Russia, or when business people wax eloquent on the wonders of a McDonald's in Tokyo and Levis in Gambia, or when pseudo-intellectuals like Francis Fukayama talk blithely about "the end of history" and the irreversible triumph of free market-based democratic institutions -- the world wants to be like us, and "like us" means, usually, one thing: Consumers. The push for democracy in certain places in the world, George Bush would have had us believe, was not fueled by stirring notions of freedom or the urge for historical retribution but by the desire for VCRs, camcorders, and appliances. "Freedom" means "freedom to buy."
I think about this notion of consumption a great deal because of how I make my living. Since the age of 35 I have been living pretty much hand to mouth as a freelance writer, and overall I've been satisfied with the experience. I've had the freedom to do many things I wouldn't have been able to do if I'd been tied to a nine-to-five, and I've taken good care of myself.
One of the unintended but fascinating results of the way I've lived my life is a new relationship with money and consumption. When I used to have what's called "disposable income," I disposed of it like any good consumer: I paid my bills, put some away, and spent the rest on whatever happened to please me. Even at this low level of consumerism, I found myself wanting things because I could want them, not because I necessarily needed them. Some sort of alchemy had had transmuted wants into needs, and suddenly I needed to buy the entire Windham Hill label in CDs, needed to have that computer game, and so on.
But when money became tight and frugality became necessary, I found my consumerist desires ebbing away for lack of nourishment, like a fog clearing, and a landscape emerged quite different from everything I'd been taught. Our society, stewed in capitalism for the last 150 years, is so geared to consuming as an end and means of living that we can't envision any other reality. The nature and logic of our system teaches us that cash can measure the value of everything, and that acquiring things for that cash can heal the ills of the flesh and spirit. But no healing can ever come out of this scheme: the engine of capitalism doesn't run on satisfaction but uncertainty, where buying is offered as an antidote to (but is really a cause of) dissatisfaction. Thus, people scatter to the stores, dispose of their income, and leave hungry.
But what happens when those consumerist desires wither? What takes their place? No one answer answers these questions, but I know I gained an inner peace of sorts because now vague and open-ended compulsions didn't drive me. I was able to whittle what I needed down to manageable levels and learn to want what I needed. In one of his journals Henry David Thoreau said that one of the hardest things he ever had to learn was not to want too much. He's right -- not wanting a lot requires discipline, a discipline not much valued in our culture because of the dogma that prosperity equals quantity, and quantity has it own quality. But when the money doesn't come rolling in, then the vaporous roots of most consumer desires dissipate, like a dream or mirage, the possibility of peace and clarity hangs on the horizon like a rising moon.
All these thoughts came back to me on a recent week-end jaunt with a friend to Newport, Rhode Island. De rigueur for any tourist to this land's end is a tour of the Cliff Walk, the snaky path that winds for four miles with the ocean on the left and, on the right, the flotsam of the enormous mansions thrown up by the rich and almost-rich. She definitely had her sights set on making the pilgrimage; I acquiesced. A good-natured guide pied-pipered along our merry little band of about a dozen or so; he earned my respect for managing to shout out interesting stories for almost three hours and not lose his voice.
I had a hard time with this tour because my I couldn't leave my scruffy politics with the guide books in the car. As our escort began to initiate us into the eccentricities and bank accounts of the people who lived and live along the Cliff Walk, I found myself getting more and more annoyed, and it peaked when we got to the Breakers, the monumental pile of stone thrown down by the Vanderbilts. I began to make snide comments to my friend. She, exercising very good judgment, moved away from me so that she could enjoy the view and the monologue.
Several things were happening at that point. No matter how much the guide told me about the riches and treasures of the place, it didn't strike me as a home inhabited by real people. Instead, it stood as an enormous display case. And that bothered me as well. It bulged with whim. Nothing felt really necessary in the place, and despite its tonnage, the Breakers struck me as incredibly tenuous, almost chimerical.
But perhaps what most irritated me was the serf-like pulling of the forelock done by most members of our group as the guide rhapsodized about the marble this and grand that. I began to take his fawning, society-page delivery, and the equally fawning soaking-up done by the crowd, as a personal insult, and I wanted at that moment to offer a "counter-tour," something that would inform our merry band that the people who laid up these rusting treasures should not be admired or eulogized but feared and resisted whenever possible.
But I didn't. We moved on.
Other thoughts occurred to me as we walked through "Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt's tunnel" and scanned the house of Doris Duke, the mansion that tobacco money and nicotine addiction built. The stories the guide told us sounded like stories about spoiled and errant little children, and Nick Carraway's line about rich people being careless people came to mind. And because they were spoiled, they were dangerous. On a caprice they could destroy anything they felt stood in their way simply because if it obstructed their desires, it deserved to be destroyed.
And all the stuff! Veblen was certainly onto something when he dissected "conspicuous consumption," but even his capacious phrase doesn't really capture the gluttony these edifices display. Why this compulsion to obtain, to covet, to hoard? They have all passed on now. Everything they wanted, or thought they wanted, didn't retard their going by one breath. Gluttony, sin number 5, fausted them, and as with all gluttons, what they had fed on began to feed on them. They stopped being people and metamorphosed into consumers.
I didn't talk a lot about this on the way home, partly out of deference to my friend's desire for a relaxing weekend, partly to avoid being a talky bore. But seeing all that embalmed opulence, seeing, in essence, a shrine to compulsive acquisition, led me to think about how the word "citizen" has been made cognate with "consumer," how we've been proselytized into believing that piling up debt to enrich corporations is a citizenly duty that undergirds the entire system of American democracy and American culture. Of course, "capitalist democracy" is a contradiction in terms, but we never get a chance to know this and so blithely go on believing that Presidents Day really is about stores clearing out immobile merchandise, that Christmas really is a referendum on the strength of the economy. (Doubt this? Compare voting tallies at all levels with the number of people playing the lottery. Which activity draws more people?)
But we can no longer afford to be citizen-consumers.
Thoreau had a dead eye aimed at Newport, though he never visited there. He didn't much care for what the Vanderbilt ilk (and their modern reincarnations, the Donalds) did with their lives, not only because their ostentation offended his somewhat cold-fish Yankee stinginess but also because he quite clearly understood the price continual consumption of the capitalist sort extorts. First, he recognized that beyond a few basics, such as food, serviceable clothing, fuel, and shelter, all of what humans own serve wants, not needs. As he said in his journal, one of the hardest things he ever had to learn in his life was not to want too much because to want too much, and then to own things to satisfy those wants, would kill him, in spirit if not in body.
But people, he felt, were not very good at recognizing the difference between their wants and their needs, and so ended up like the young man in Walden who, married and owning a farm, hobbled down the road of life lugging all his possessions behind him like a drag anchor instead of walking free and upright. He was a "sleeper," Thoreau thought, and would miss the finer things that life and nature could bring. Thoreau calculated that the proper value of something was not what it would bring at the cash-nexus of the market but how much life it took to obtain it. Life for things: that's how the equation worked in Thoreau's mind. A corollary: The more things a person owned, the more life that person spent to get them. With only a finite amount of life to spend, it was important to know which things were necessities and which would, if pursued, literally kill a body off. (Think of the rise in hypertension and various heart diseases over the past century and how their increase correlates nicely with the onset of our capitalist era. In fact, many researchers, especially in the newly forming field of evolutionary medicine, have seen these afflictions as particularly modern, "modern" being a less-charged synonym for "capitalist.")
Unfortunately, most people don't hear Thoreau's message. Instead, we threaten to drown ourselves in garbage, gaud, chicanery, and ennui because we've twisted all our wants into necessities. We have no vision of the good life and no process for producing one, and certainly no vision of a public life not geared to satisfying private greed. But what would happen if they did hear what Thoreau had to say, what if, by some strange magic, people woke up one day and decided not to make shopping America's #1 favorite pastime and could get past the "disease" exposed on an NBC Dateline [October 11, 1995] show called "shopaholism"? They would still buy necessities, like food and clothes, but not chemically-confected, overpriced desserts or $879 leather bomber jackets. What would happen?
Well, the obvious challenges would come when the Chicken Littles started mouthing off about widespread dislocation of the capitalist economy, loss of jobs, services, quality (not to mention golden parachutes and bloated pension plans). But given the present state of the state, with its inequalities of wealth and power, I don't see how things could be more dislocated, and the fact of a falling sky might incite some minds to re-jigger the whole set-up so that it produced items that were useful rather than simply profitable and gave workers power over the workplace rather than set them up to be exploited for the greater good of stockholder dividends.
No, I think the real challenge would come on Saturday morning about 10 a.m. when suddenly people are not jumping into their cars to go to the malls. What would they do with all of this suddenly freed-up time? That is the Final Jeopardy question. Americans are so used to having everything done for them, and paying out large amounts of money for the privilege, that it's doubtful they remember how to feed their own heads. Most Americans don't read much, write many letters, play games, preserve pears for January, or do any of the multitude of things they used to. Instead, we've contracted out the entertainment and preservation of our selves until we no longer have much control over our lives. Giving up shopping would suddenly reveal just how empty life can be in the kind of society we've created.
What would be the purpose of life in America if suddenly it wasn't centered completely on the buying and selling of things? What would our time on this earth be for if it wasn't for the laying up treasures? How would we conceive of ourselves if "citizen" was no longer synonymous with "consumer"? What would be the reason for working if we suddenly believed we didn't need so many "things" after all? In fact, what would work be? What would it be like not to be burdened with the equation that material gain is a measure of the self's worth? How would the self be measured? Utopian? Given the present state of indoctrination in our society, yes. Impossible? No, if only because Americans seem to have an historical capacity to re-invent themselves, and the American "experiment" of blending prosperity and individual liberty is by no means finished. I have no answer for any of this, no grand scheme that would unite the macro-changes needed to socialize industrial capitalism and the micro-changes needed to leaven the individual spirit. All I know is that our prosperity has required us to give up a lot along the way that would make life useful, knowable, articulate, coherent. It's time we earn our way to that.
(October 1995)