HUMAN VALUES AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
In this next section,
I will give an outline of the development of the consumer mentality
in economized societies and the issues that now face both the
economized and vernacular worlds. Although the previous part of
this section dealt deeply with capitalism's development in the
West, I do not wish to imply that the rest of the world has been
a passive recipient of these "western" values. I do
wish to emphasize, however, the influence of western scientific
rationalism and capitalism as it spread throughout the world during
the 400 years of European global colonialism. Science as mechanistic
causality, state as bureaucratic rationality and market as the
law of supply and demand are great universalizations. As such
they belong nowhere and can consequently penetrate everywhere.1
In the colonial experiment, we have seen the power of these grand
abstractions to strip individual cultures of their unique qualities.
Yet we have also seen non-Europeans adapt these ideas on their
own terms in the struggle to redefine themselves (e.g. Mao's adaptation
of Marxist-Leninism, Japan's unique style of capitalism, Indonesia's
"guided democracy"). However, in the large majority
of these cases, although the non-European cultures were able to
weed out distinctive western characteristics while inserting their
own national ones, they were unable to see beyond the violent
and destructive effects of these grand unchallengeable truths.
For example, Thailand's modernization process of the past 100
years has ensconced elite Central Thai values into a homogenizing
state bureaucratic structure. Proud of being the only Southeast
Asian state uncolonized by the west, it uses these structures
from "nowhere" to colonize the ethnic and cultural diversity
of its territory, symbolically witnessed by its adoption of the
Anglified and ethnocentric name "Thailand", over its
traditional name of "Siam".2 Jawaharlal Nehru, one of
the great anti-colonialists and leader of the non-aligned movement,
further brings this point to bear in his vision of modern industrialization
as the key to India consolidating its independence.3
The indictment here then is not so much of European or American
culture itself for these universalist forces have been successful
in colonizing and disembbeding European culture as well. Alexis
de Tocqueville's view of the United States in the 19th century
looks prophetic in this context. "He invented the term 'individualism'
to describe the peculiar (and, he believed, mistaken) belief of
Americans that they could each live without depending on others,
and he noted how this very illusion, paradoxically, contributed
to the unprecedented homogeneity of American custom and opinion."4
The indictment is more the hegemony of these notions and the way
they serve the interests of those who control the mechanisms of
market and state.
CONSUMER CULTURE
By the end of the 18th
century, much of Western Europe had begun to experience the first
wave of the industrial revolution and increasing urbanization.
The people living in cities increasingly began to construct a
sense of identity through their work within the blooming industrial
capitalist system. These "first sixty years of the 18th century
saw the development of 'a consumer revolution' in the sense of
an increased number of people aware of, and able to purchase,
an increasing variety of goods for the household, and for body
decoration"5 Clothing and appearance, to a certain extent,
have always been used as a way to show social distinction and
identity. Yet with the development of new types of working classes
and the "pervasive indifference of much metropolitan social
interaction"6, the acquiring and displaying of commercial
objects expanded and took on new social significance. During this
period, consumption patterns fell along class lines as determined
by occupation. These patterns became a way of forming identity
and a sense of community through distinguishing oneself from others
of different vocation and class.
Much of this new conspicuous consumption was made possible with the freer movement of goods and the expansion of the print media through the development of infrastructure and faster transport, principally in trains. The significance of this development was not lost on Marx: "This locational movement - the bringing of the product to the market, which is the necessary condition for its circulation, except when the point of production is itself the market - could more precisely be regarded as the transformation of the product into commodity."7 As we noted earlier, the price making system created an initial alienation by inserting the mechanism of money between producer and buyer. Yet the movement of a good out of its local environment to be sold in a new one alienates it again, this time from its place:
With the spatial distance that the product covers on its way from its place of production to the market, it also loses its local identity, its spatial presence. Its concretely sensual properties, which are experienced at the place of production as a result of the labor process (or, as in the case of the fruits of the land, as a result of natural growth) appear quite different in the distant marketplace. The product, now a commodity, realizes its economic value, and simultaneously gains new qualities as an object of consumption.8
The concurrent development of
advertising in the middle of the century was a natural result
of this alienation. For as products were taken out of their locales,
they could be stripped of their original meanings and filled with
new ones for the consumer in the new local. Advertising was and
is the engine for the sensual remaking of a good after its physical
dislocation.
Further, as the division of labor and machine driven mass production
expanded, a new type of faceless good emerged, one which had little
local identity and which, in all aspects, was exactly the same
as the others made along with it. The splintering of the worker's
identity through an alienating form of labor was thus augmented
through the consumption of various reconceptualized goods as a
way to mark differences with those from other economic classes.
A common aspect of this economic
stage is that patterns of higher class groups are aspired to and
aped by those of lower classes in an attempt to demonstrate a
material well-being and social status.9 This is the common behavior
of one who is "unchosen" attempting to manifest a "chosen"
personality. This is an important stage in marking a new shift
in the mentality to manifest sanctification, or "chosen"-ness.
In the original Puritan model, sanctification was manifested through
the diligent and successful carrying out of business and duties.
Subsequently this religious sensibility was sublimated, and the
successful carrying out of business became communion itself. Here,
as the industrial, modern stage moves towards what is called the
post-modern stage, the image of the successful carrying
out of business begins to become important.
This concern with the image of
a product is a logical extension of the commodification and alienation
of a good. Just as a worker's labor is alienated and commodified
by the separation of him from his product through a salaried payment,
a good is commodified and alienated through its disembbeding from
place of origin, re-presentating and selling not for its inherent
qualities but for its invested qualities and ability to convey
a designated meaning. It then becomes important for the image
it portrays. For example, a Mercedes is more significant as a
marker of affluence and sanctification than as a means of transport.
This is where the notion of "style" and the disturbing
importance of image over substance in our modern capitalist culture
enters. It is also how the market is able to homogenize local
crafts with distinct qualities or produce quantities of faceless
goods which are invested with meanings designed to create desire
in the consumer and wealth for the producer. Advertising thus
becomes the industry of remaking goods with attractive images
to increase financial profit while the consumer comes to lose
the sense of difference between needs and desires.
The post-modern stage of consumption
indicates the types of consumption now prevalent in economized
societies, first seen in the United States in the 1950s and particularly
in the 70s and 80s and increasingly seen in the big cities of
the "developing world" as well. This stage marks a further
splintering of identity. In the modern stage of capitalism, identity
was still place based, mostly in the workplace or urban neighborhood,
and consumption patterns tended to fall within these confines.
In the post-modern stage, identity shifts from consumption patterns
rooted in class which is still very place centered to the actual
patterns of consumption themselves. In this way, patterns of consumption
have become more fluid crossing ethnic and class lines (e.g. white
American suburban boys embracing gangsta rap). Post modern consumption
patterns correspond more to age and life stage groupings.10 Ultimately,
consumption itself has become more central to the process of identity
production.
Consequently, it has become a
more scattered and image laden process. The great national corporations
like Ford and Mitsubishi which homogenized local production with
a national production have themselves begun to lose their national
character. With Ford relocating factories to Mexico and Mitsubishi
likewise to Malaysia, they can no longer make the claim "Made
in USA" or "Made in Japan" which used to have the
ring of high quality and national pride. When Ford owns a 25%
stake in Mazda and General Motors owns a 37.5% stake in Isuzu11,
patriotic Americans are faced with a dilemma when encouraged to
buy American goods to support American jobs. When an Argentine
comments,"But isn't Coca-cola Argentine"12, we can know
that the post-modern world of placeless and faceless consumer
items has not only penetrated America but also wherever Coca-cola
rears its head. This is the world of post-modern consumerism:
trans-national corporations making products completely disembedded
from any place or context. They are the universal products to
be consumed by universal citizens realizing their individual appetites
in a global free market.
Consumption has become a free play of images with people mixing
and matching as style and advertisers beckon. Yet still, the sublimated
valuations of "chosen" and "unchosen" exist.
The target group or identity (the sanctified) may now no longer
be the rich but some permutation of what has become stylish or
"cool". (e.g. rich white Americans wearing "traditional
clothes" of poor villagers from Guatemala). Yet, as we will
see below, what is cool or stylish is almost always merged with
the image of financial success or a lifestyle that can only be
attained with financial success and the ultimate quantifiable
value, money.
Below we see the permutations of the Puritan ideal of sanctification:
Sanctification through disciplined
work & financial success (Puritan) -->
Disciplined work & financial success AS sanctification (early
capitalist) -->
Possession of image of financial success as sanctification
(modern capitalist) -->
Possession of image as sanctification (post-modern)
CONSUMER ISSUES
1) Commodification - Image
- Style
The idea behind commodification is to split any aspect of a person
(his/her work, products, needs, words, image, etc.) from the person
themselves in order to make it a commercial product which is sold
and bought. This is the way most of capitalism makes money. It
does not so much create a new service or product. Rather it seeks
to enter all the possible connection points in an economic transaction.
On a basic level, this takes place between the worker and his
product or the seller and the buyer through the mechanism of money.
More deeply, capitalism seeks to actually manufacture new possibilities
for mediation as we have seen above through the transportation
of goods from one locale to another. Out of David Ricardo's work,
we can see that "the major problem of economics was no longer
the material production of goods, but their distribution - as
the condition for the realization of their exchange value."13
Economic value is created by the opportunity for individuals to
intercede in economic relationships and make money off them.
Thus we see the competition of trying to gain a favorable trade surplus through increasing exports of more complex goods which involve more market mediations in their production and thus can be sold at a higher price per unit (e.g. it is eminently more profitable to export high unit cost automobiles and hi-tech computer equipment than low unit cost raw materials like wood and grain) This leads to such absurd situations like the Japanese, who use soybean products as a major food staple in soy sauce and miso, importing 95 percent of its soybeans.14 Surely, as a traditional food, the Japanese were able to be self-sufficient in this food product. By importing it, however, they are able to import an agricultural product of less net worth while exporting more costly products like electronics. In the end, they win the game of exchange value, but perhaps endanger their own self-sufficiency. Such mediation in economic relationships may see no end:
The Economist has suggested that the appropriate strategy for those who own the rights to products or processes in a fully globalized economy is not to produce anything. Instead, they should simply license rights to the products and processes for an amount sufficient to yield the same profits they would have made if they had produced the products locally or for export. In other words, those who hold monopoly control of patented technologies should not be expected to produce anything - simply collect the profits. It is a far cry from Adam Smith's ideal of a competitive market economy in which the returns go to small producers.15
With the commodification of not
only goods and services but now personalities, the recreation
of image and the commodification of an image with another image
makes this splintering of man, goods and his own imagination endless.
For example, the seductive image of sports personalities for consumers
has come to the point where people actually want to buy the image
of the image of these sports personalities in the apparel they
wear. Nike built its own image on the image of the famous athletes
who wore its apparel and then became an image greater than any
one of its endorsers. Now people want to wear Nike not because
Michael Jordan wears them but because of the larger image of Nike
itself. In fact, now instead of Nike wanting athletes to wear
their products, athletes are the ones wanting to wear the Nike
swoosh to show their high level image. Nike makes billions of
dollars every year by appropriating the image of star athletes
and building its own refabricated image. When the consumer buys
Nike shoes for $150 a pair, they are paying approximately 5% of
this for the actual manufacturing cost.16 The rest goes to profit
and to image creation to pay the star athletes to use their image
and to pay the advertisers who make the image.
Such a manipulation of image presents the opportunity for the powerful (chosen) to exploit the disenfranchised (unchosen). The corporation has become the mediator between the individual and his own individual communion with God, as seen in the religious like quality imbedded in consumer items. By holding the mechanisms of economic power (capital and the means of production) and thus "sanctification" in the control of the products and their images, corporations can weave a fine web of delusion. Through the control of production and imaging in advertising, corporations build larger amounts of their own economic "sanctification" through capital accumulation while selling the empty image of success and sanctification to the consumer which leaves him poorer and thus less "sanctified" for it.
2) "Needs" and Greed
As we have seen above, the commodification and alienation of products
allow corporations through the use of advertising and packaging
to invest new meanings into goods. These meanings have a profound
effect on the way we view ourselves and our relationship to the
world. The consumer act has now become a way to fulfill a series
of abstract and conditioned needs through economic means. As Ivan
Illich explains, these needs belie the true meaning of the word
and rather reflect a conditioning put upon us. This first conditioning
took place during the Enlightenment when, as we have seen, the
idea of poverty was quantified into a lack of a material means.
By defining the poor as those who lack what money could buy for them to make them 'fully human', poverty, in New York City as well as Ethiopia, became an abstract universal measure of underconsumption. Those who survive in spite of indexed underconsumption were thereby placed into a new, sub-human category, and perceived as victims of a double bind. Their de facto existence became almost inexplicable in terms of economic terminology, while their actual subsistence activities came to be labeled as sub-human, if they were not frankly viewed as inhuman and indecent.17
As we have seen, the poor in Enlightenment
society became the new sinners or "unchosen". The post-modern
sinners or "unchosen" are the despicably poor who cannot
consume at proper levels. The power of this theology can be seen
in the "need" of poor ghetto youth in the US to buy
$150 basketball shoes while they go poorly nourished living off
food stamps or the "need" of poor urban dwellers in
Southeast Asian cities to buy televisions and motorcycles before
getting a house beyond the corrugated steel shanties they live
in. These consumer goods hold a spiritual power of "sanctification"
which means more than food or shelter. They fulfill a spiritual
need that all man is striving for but which has been hideously
warped by the theology of capitalism and consumerism.
The new priests of our global
consumer culture are the "experts" who must make the
intricate quantitative calculations of precisely what our human
needs are, or in other words, what most of us are lacking and
need to consume in order to become "developed" in economic
terms or "chosen" in sublimated spiritual terms. In
1973, under the behest of the World Bank, needs as "norms
of human decency" were actually translated into technical
measurements and the measurements took on a new approach in economic
development called the Basic Needs Approach. Yet before this,
man had already become dependent on the mechanistic gospel of
needs preached to him by government and scientific experts. These
experts who hold the knowledge of calculation exhort the creation
of structures like superhighways and airports for transportation,
dams and nuclear power plants for energy, hospitals and health
professionals for medicine, satellites and cable systems for communication.
With these basic needs installed, the corporations then further
exhort in us the need for automobiles and air travel, electronic
goods of all sorts, pharmaceuticals and insurance, and televisions
and computers to make use of all these needs. With the gospel
of needs in tact, one can never get enough needs and the critical
qualitative evaluation between need and greed is totally lost.
Thus far none of our development and economic experts have come
up with a quantifiable index of greed.
Though it is easy enough to rationalize a modicum of the well-being we experience with all of these needs, the fact is that for the most part they are not being created for the true well-being of all but for the well-being of a few. The energy of competition continually atomizes groups into ever more detailed levels of accomplishment. Further, unmanaged or free competition naturally leads to the powerful getting more powerful through their increasing competitive advantage.18 In our increasingly global free economy, total sales of the top 200 trans-national corporations were bigger than the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 182 countries -- of all except the top nine nations. That is about thirty percent of world GDP. Yet those corporations employed less than one-third of one percent of the world's population, and that percentage is shrinking.19 With the ecological crisis coming into public fore, the monitoring of our resource use is a common concern and issue. With experts and economic leverage, such corporations most strongly influence the use of these resources and subsequently determine the way they are developed (i.e. for more needs systems which perpetuate our "spiritual" dependence on products which over consume gasoline, wood, water, etc.). By controlling the resources upon which our material "sanctification" depend, corporations are able to take advantage of the ecological crisis by transforming man into cyborg, "modeled in the image of an immune system that can provisionally be kept functioning if it is kept in balance by appropriate management."20 It seems then we are reaching the penultimate point of this experiment with scientific social engineering. The state and corporation as the grand social machines created in the image of rational modern man are now remaking man in their own image.
3) Delusion - Dispersion - Disenfranchisement
For many, the connections between the needs of the consumer world
and those in power who design them are too difficult to see, especially
since the system is based on breaking down connections. For those
able to see or for the many befuddled by their feeling of alienation
and dissatisfaction amidst such material wealth, numbness is an
option provided by the "chosen". Through the control
of imaging, most prominently through advertising, corporations
and advertisers mix and match fine sets of images for desired
results, sets of images which if penetrated reveal conflicting
values.
The recent popularity in economized communities with clothes and
goods made by indigenous peoples in vernacular ones offers a prime
example of how the machinations of the system are hidden underneath
a mirage of images. In US mail order catalogues a number of conflicting
values are packaged together in one purchase. A look at the more
"politically correct" catalogues trying to actually
help such indigenous peoples brings to light the contradictions
of the consumer system. Such "politically correct" catalogues
usually offer personalized displays of goods, emphasizing the
uniqueness of the people and giving some insight into their culture
and some social problems.21 This develops some critical awareness
of the good as part of the person and part of a place. It is an
attempt at decommodification by linking the good directly to the
person who made it.
However, most of the magazines
do not examine the deeper meanings underneath their presentations
and business. The products they are selling are packaged as leisure
ware, clothing and goods to be displayed by the happy successful
"developed worlder" on vacations and in free time. The
image evoked by the models in the catalogues is one of material
success,22 which is the means to such a beautiful life spent in
consumption and leisure. As we have seen, by disembbeding the
product from its locale, the product loses its original meaning
and takes on a new one. In the case of indigenous crafts, the
ones desired by consumers are usually ceremonial items used only
on special occasions. Yet as we see in the catalogues, they become
this new item representing the ease and leisure of capitalist
culture. Although awareness of the indigenous people who made
the product and some of their difficulties is being raised, a
conflicting value of material success through competitive accumulation
is also being presented. These underlying values are the same
ones which have undermined the livelihood of the very indigenous
person the catalogue is trying to raise awareness of.
Such indigenous people are being
disembedded from their culture by the growing economization of
their country by foreign corporations, global financial bodies,
and a national elite. In the case of the more "politically
correct" catalogues, these people may have had assistance
in setting up a home craft initiative by the organization making
the catalogue. This is done with a true altruistic spirit by the
company to help combat against the more predatory companies subverting
these people's traditional way of life. Although the consumer
on the other end who buys the goods may pause to consider the
difficulty of the people's dilemma and the politically correct
consumption they are engaging in, the consumer may never come
to a deeper understanding that their very act of consumption defines
their individual freedom and generates the whole system which
is causing indigenous people's troubles in the first place.
Such "politically correct"
catalogues may provide a friendlier form of livelihood for indigenous,
but the support is still paternalistic in that the consumer and
the company are helping these people to maintain their culture
like a zookeeper protects an animal from becoming extinct. The
commodification of these people's image as indigenous through
their crafts imprisons them in a distorted, commodified identity.
In the same way an animal in a zoo is relegated to its physical
form and stripped of its intricacies as part of a living biosphere,
these people become the sum part of their manufactured goods with
little attention to the web of interactions and attitudes which
go into making the goods. Instead, a small space for biodata is
provided like the plate on an animal's cage. The fact that many
catalogues lump together indigenous groups of great diversity
into one mix-mash of traditional symbols and goods shows the lack
of true care for their individual cultures.23 Beyond this, it
shows the homogenizing forces of a consumer system which is more
focused on the sale and the presentation of a product for the
affluent (the global individual of appetites) than for the production
by a person from a real place. For this reason, what appears as
a diversification of the marketplace in the form of new goods
from unique places, actually signifies the envelopment of that
place into the global anti-culture of surface image. Indigenous
people have then two choices. One is to remain as cultural artifacts
for economized man to marvel at like a zoo animal. The other is
that through successfully marketing their "traditional"
products which are sold as homogenized consumer goods, they can
attain material well-being and take on the pleasures of a modern
material life while at the same time maintaining a commodified
version of their identity, just the image with which to continue
business. Isn't this the goal for all beings, to attain the "chosen"
status of conspicuous consumer?
Finally, as David Korten notes,
such socially responsible corporations find it increasingly difficult
to survive. Corporate raids by less socially inclined corporations
seek out those which through such compassionate policies are not
competitively streamlined and are thus open to mergers and hostile
takeovers.24 The point here is not to malign companies trying
to do some good but rather to expose those which use the image
of social responsibility to support their economic bottom line,
to conscientize those who do not see through the contradictions
of their work, and to encourage those who attempt to do good but
are compromised by a structuralized greed. There are in fact civil
organizations successfully working to directly unite producers
from the vernacular world with consumers from the economized world.
They are a growing minority who seek to re-embed economic transactions
within ethical norms and personal bonds.25
Through this mixing of images,
the "sciences" of marketing and advertising continue
to lead on consumers and satisfy them with the taste of "success"
in the consumption of images of success. As these images never
actually bequeath success yet give the sense of success, they
offer an excellent means of political and social disenfranchisement.
The development of leisure industries throughout the industrialized
world in the last twenty to thirty years is an excellent example
of political and social dispersion through consumer preoccupation.
It is not by accident that a number of "free market democracies"
have made the leisure and entertainment industries a central element
of their economies.26
More and more people today are
becoming absorbed in the great wealth of leisure activities from
travel to sports to music and myriad forms of entertainment. In
the vast majority of these forms, the ideology of competition
forms the basis of value. Everything is broken down into competitive
levels derived from quantity. A vacation to Bali is better than
Hawaii since it is farther away (more miles), costs more and is
consequently more exotic. Music is rated weekly by Top Ten hits
which are based on the number of CDs sold. A band is now evaluated
for its gross profits like a corporation.27 Yet implied in the
whole system of competition is the aspect of winners and losers.
In economized societies, if one is born out of or falls out of
the competitive loop of success (most often manifested in failure
to advance into high level competitive education) there is little
hope left of attaining any real power or say in their life. The
"unchosen" are left with grasping at "images"
of power that they hope can realize their dreams, "a pair
of Nike Air Jordan's to improve my game", "a Pierre
Cardin suit to get me that good job", "breast implants
to make me more attractive". Yet these are just images and
not the true levers of power, which are somewhat based on aptitude
but often on acquaintance with others in the group of "chosen".
For those who have had their dreams dematerialize or who see through
the illusion, life does not afford much less but titillation and
dispersion into the mass entertainment of a splintered society.
Technology as the mechanistic partner to science has also afforded the priestly "chosen" ample opportunities for befuddling the "unchosen". Speed as a property of this technology is another method in which conflicting images may be mixed and matched and consumers may be fed into a world of deluded images. "Speed blurs concepts", and "thoughts summoned at speed are likely to be not the best thoughts but simply the first habitual response, thoughts automatic as opposed to thoughts idiomatic, reflective or ruminative".28 Most conspicuously, the use of speed in media and advertising has tremendous power to blur distinctions, disconnect related meanings and connect unrelated ones. Furthermore, as we can see in the vernacular societies of the world, the speed of consumerism disables these cultures from any chance of absorbing and digesting the values and images of consumerism in their own way. The speed forces an ill fitting accommodation of traditional values and structures alongside modern ones, like the development of MacDonald's in India who's majority Hindu population does not eat beef out of religious conviction. The result is often a devaluation of the traditional in favor of the modern. Finally, the speed of modern consumer culture fits well into the competitive energy of capitalist society.
The attraction of speed is only partly the exhilaration of acceleration; much to do with competition, with overtaking......Overtaking is a cultural emblem. In global financial terms, the kick is not for a company to be wealthy, but to be wealthier than it competitors, streamlined, like a car, to overtake.29
Speed is ultimately another effective
means for those on the competitive high end of the system (the
chosen) to maintain their position, as corporations increase profits
through exhilaration and titillation or gambling for high stakes
on computerized global money and stock markets.
If a social movement does develop,
it is likely to be commodified out of meaning. Witness the development
of Rock'n Roll in the 60s. The music blossomed out of a counter
culture, anti-authoritarian movement by folk singers, artists,
poets and intellectuals against the mindless materialism of main
stream America. Yet by the end of the decade, it had been commodified
into a big business. The rise of the entertainers as commercial
successes drove a split between them and the people who they used
to be a part of and spoke for.30 Such is a classic case of commodification
where the parts of a union are alienated and the identity is splintered.
The concurrent Punk movement of the 70s was equally as revolutionary
in its attack on the corporate nature of Rock and the economic
establishment. It screamed of the economic depravity and meaninglessness
in post-modern England. Yet it too was summarily and with greater
speed commodified and mutated into a commercial endeavor called
"New Wave" where wearing leather and dying your hair
was not a protest against social and economic injustice but a
mark of "social sanctification", of popularity and financial
success (as a pop star).31 Now that the 60s and 70s generations
have come of age, such a culture of "dissent" is becoming
the very ethic of the corporate world. Corporations like Microsoft
are staffed with "punk rockers" and "rebel"
types who encourage us to "break the rules" and "be
different" but never challenge the theology of "sanctification"
through economic advancement and its corporate high priests.32
Finally, the arena of politics itself has become commodified with the use of money by corporations to manufacture citizen front groups, to inundate the press with policy campaigns, and to back candidates who support consumer attitudes. Ronald Reagan, the movie star turned politician, offers the penultimate example.
This commitment to a politics of image permeates administrative responses to criticism. While the deregulation of business allows for greater profits and reduced attention to industrial health and safety, the argument that Reaganism favors the rich is characterized as a problem of 'perception'.....By reducing all social issues to matters of perception, it is on this perceptual level that social issues get attended to. Instead of social change, there is image change. Flexibility at the surface masks intransigence at the core.33
The commodification of even social,
political and religious movements indicates the power of this
religion of capitalism and the ultimate disenfranchisement and
disillusionment of most people in the industrialized world. This
is clearly manifested in the poor voter turnout in the "democratic
elections" in "developed" countries. In many cases
less than 50% of the eligible voters participate.
Such disillusionment and disenfranchisement simply paves the way
for more delusion and dispersion in consumer activities. Consciously
or unconsciously, people consume to forget. To forget their problems,
to forget their failures, to forget trying to figure out who they
really are, to forget to challenge a system which must paint them
as failures since in the natural hierarchy of competition there
is only limited room at the top.
THE LAST OUTPOSTS
For those on the margins,
in vernacular societies mostly but not exclusively located in
the "developing" world, the prospects are not much better
as the last vestiges of cooperative, local communities are being
paved away by the constant permutation of commodification. The
1990s has brought the assault on the final frontier of the un-economized,
the informal sector. This sense of historical mission and of manifest
destiny is, as seen in the opening of the American west (and the
erasing of the American Indian), an essential characteristic of
Enlightenment man.
In pre-capitalist societies, the sense of time is reflected in
the natural order with periods of growth and decline, of indulgence
and atonement. Yet Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment,
rejected this cyclical sense of time and viewed his present society
as the heir to all accumulated knowledge before it. With the correct
method of scientific inquiry, he felt man could continue to progress
to an ever more perfect form through the conquest of nature. This
sensibility continued to develop beyond Darwin's theory of evolution.
As seen in Marx as well, the forward march of history is not to
be denied. The fallacy here is not the sense of the evolution
of life towards higher and more perfect forms, but rather the
interpretation of evolution as mathematical, linear and solely
measurable in quantifiable terms. Such an interpretation denies
the validity of the evolutionary process in individuals and societies
which are materially less developed. With the Christian
evangelical view of the non-Christian world as one of heathens
sublimated beneath the surface of this interpretation, those who
occupy societies not within the market system become relegated
to lesser ones of a previous historical epoch. They are civilizations
which need to catch up with the historical march of progress,
and the people, perhaps no longer seen as religious heathens,
are seen as economic ones, the "unchosen".
In this way, we can expect the
free market to penetrate every nook and corner of the planet not
only from the dynamic of profit (greed) but also from a sublimated
spiritual sense of the civilizing mission. The Crusades of religious
evangelism have given way to the economic crusades of "development".
Consequently, we are seeing the injustices of the agrarian and
industrial revolutions in England over 400 years ago replayed
in various regions in the southern part of the hemisphere today.
On the coercive side, the expansion
of the commandment of private property continues to lead to the
fencing off and demarcation of previously public lands and the
subsequent depopulating of rural areas under the tide of agribusiness
and ranching industries. This pushes more and more people into
the cities most often leaving the old and some women behind as
the sole holders of tradition and a fading community. Those left
behind represent the most despicable of persons in the modern
age. Poor, uneducated, with no sense of "style", and
with few consumer goods, they are the truly "unchosen"
of this age.
On the enticement side, with such
a painting of "chosen" and "unchosen" identities
in capitalist society, the young of vernacular societies are enticed
to the "promised land" of the cities through the advertising
and images of television, often the first consumer item of households.34
If the individual is not enticed into the city by its images,
he or she may be enticed by the city's freedom of identity and
lack of obligations and duties. The spread of consumer values
has been successful in monetizing and commodifying relations and
public ceremonies in vernacular societies. With increasing competition
in many vernacular societies to hold more and more lavish public
ceremonies, those who cannot afford to keep up, drop out of the
community by moving to the anonymity of the city where community
obligations are often a bare minimum.35
Finally, for those who stay and fight this encroachment of their communities and societies by the values from "nowhere", there are almost insurmountable odds. As seen above, with the pressures from the outside forcing their way in, the only viable economic means for staying on their land may be to enter into businesses which glorify (yet commodify and distort) their distinct culture.36 Through tourism and craft production, some societies may be able to preserve some aspects of their culture yet often they become emptied and commodified forms, merely a slower form of death.
CONCLUSION: RELIGION AS ACCOMPLICE
TO AGENT OF TRANSFORMATION
In the above analysis,
we have seen how beginning in the West and then spreading worldwide,
religious values have been subsumed under the epistemological
and material revolution of scientific man. This revolution has
given birth to a mechanization of society under the nation state,
the free market and the "free" individual. Our religious
values have been incorporated into this mechanistic project as
a subliminal validation for the rational values of this process.
Once the material quest supported the greater spiritual one, but
now these roles have become strangely confused. The spiritual
has become pre-occupied with the material, and material "salvation"
has become our highest truth. Institutionalized religion is either
a dead artifact from a previous age with no meaning for modern
man or is happily in the service of the quest for material satisfaction.
It is ironic that among the world's
major religious traditions, Buddhism has perhaps the strongest
tradition of material asceticism, yet today from Sri Lanka to
Japan to the West, it reeks of material and consumer excess. In
Theravada Buddhism, lay followers traditionally have materially
supported renunciate monks with food, clothing, shelter and medicine
in the spirit of dana (generosity) in return for spiritual
blessing. Today, this tradition has exploded into a big money
machine in which rising economic elites pour money into monastery
construction attempting to buy their way into a favorable rebirth.
Monks, as well, freely indulge in the comforts of Mercedes and
the handling of money (strictly against traditional rules). In
the Mahayana tradition, specifically in Japan, urban temples overflow
with funds made from memorial services and funerals, Japan's third
largest industry. Priests are know for their fine clothes (not
robes), fine cars, and conspicuous tastes in leisure (golf). The
West's interest in picking up the less material aspects of Buddhism's
philosophy and meditation practices as opposed to its elaborate
rituals is not without its pitfalls either. Expensive retreats
in fancy country getaways and the commodification of any physical
object for religious practice (meditation cushions, bells, pictures
of deities, etc.) make the new Buddhism of the West a largely
upper-middle class phenomenon.
Perhaps the most disturbing of
these trends is the emergence of new Buddhist schools which have
adapted their doctrines to the material theology of economic elites.
New schools such as Dhammakaya in Thailand, Fokuangshan in Taiwan,
and Sokka Gakkai International from Japan preach doctrines in
which following the Buddha's way will ensure a very real material
prosperity in this life. As an impulse away from the monks and
priests who have often told Buddhist lay followers that ultimate
salvation must await a more favorable rebirth, these schools have
a reformist credibility. Yet in this age of growing economic disparity,
such theologies offer a way for economic elites to disregard how
intimately their quest for material sanctification is at the expense
of others. Charity is offered as an appropriate means for making
up for certain inevitable disparities due to levels of spiritual
birth and attainment expressed in material success. Further, proselytization
offers a way for those of lower income levels to psychologically
buy into this often exclusive group of materially chosen. In Sokka
Gakkai's case, it is notable that the priesthood has been eradicated,
perhaps in favor of the more direct mediation of money. Using
large sums of money raised from their membership, these schools
buy instant credibility through major donations to universities
and political patronage to governmental elites.
Thus many in the modern world who see the hypocrisy of religion
have left it behind and struck out on their own. Yet the recovery
of our true religious values, perhaps still existing underneath
layers of hypocrisy or better still out in the world of human
experience, is the very recovery of the humanness which our infatuation
with the material and the mechanical have stripped away. Relying
solely on structural approaches and social engineering to address
social ills which at their root arise from mental, emotional and
spiritual dislocations is like trying to catch our shadow. Indeed,
adjustments to existing structures like the call for corporate
responsibility and generosity miss the more fundamental fallacies
of such structures. The very nature of the corporation is as "a
dissipative system" which must produce profit (and waste)
in order to survive. As a process rather than a thing, the corporation
has become a disembodied entity owned, organized and run in such
a diluted and diffused way that human concerns like responsibility
are not within its system mechanics.37 The firing of corporate
heads who do not maximize the profit making of this system begs
the question of who is in control.38 Have we so deeply invested
in this engineering of reality that the machine now controls the
spirit?
Religion on a basic level speaks of morality and qualitative attitudes and on a higher level speaks of the unique realization of each person's being. In this way, it forms a contrast to such quantitative mechanics. Yet religious institutions today face total crisis in their replacement with the theology of the market and with their total co-optation into this theology. Buddhism, in particular, must respond to the decay of its traditional forms due to the advance of the market and also the warping of its teachings with the rise of this new "market" Buddhism. If Buddhism, and religion in general, has anything to offer economics, law and politics, it is in uncovering and evaluating the moral and spiritual claims which underpin them, and then offering the necessary adjustments so that the foundations of our society are healthy and infused with deeper spiritual truths. In this way, I have attempted to look to the moral and spiritual underpinnings of capitalism and consumerism since all too often they are seen as secular, value-free systems.
NOTES:
1 Sachs, Wolfgang, "One World" in The Development
Dictionary: A Guide to Power as Knowledge, ed Wolfgang Sachs
(London: Zed Books Ltd., 1992) 109.
2 Sivaraksa, Sulak, Siam in Crisis (Bangkok: Song Sayam,
1986) XX.
3 Gopal, Sarvepalli, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography, Vol.
III (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984) 288.
4 Lummis, C. Douglas "Equality" in The Development
Dictionary: A Guide to Power as Knowledge, ed Wolfgang Sachs
(London: Zed Books Ltd., 1992) 43. AND Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy
in America ed. Phillips Bradley, New York: Vintage Books,
1960, 53-54.
5 Bocock, Robert, Consumption (London: Routledge, 1993),
14.
6 Frisby, D., Georg Simmel (London: Routledge, 1984), 131-32.
7 Marx, Karl, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy (London: 1973 [1844]), 534.
8 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Railroad Journey: Train and Travel
in the 19th Century (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980 [1978])
46.
9 Bocock, 18.
10 Bocock, 27-33.
11 Korten, David C., When Corporations Rule the World (West
Hartford, Connecticut & San Francisco: Kumarin Press, Inc.
& Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1995) 225.
12 Classen, Constance, "Sugar Cane, Coca-Cola and Hypermarkets:
Consumption and Surrealism in the Argentine Northwest" in
Cross-Cultural Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities,
ed. David Howes (London: Routledge, 1996) 43.
13 Robert, Jean, "Production" in The Development
Dictionary: A Guide to Power as Knowledge, ed Wolfgang Sachs
(London: Zed Books Ltd., 1992) 182 AND from David Ricardo, On
the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London:
1817), ch.1.
14 Durning, Alan, How Much Is Enough? the Consumer Society
and the Future of the Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992)
56.
15 Korten, When Corporations Rule the World , 125 AND "A
Survey of Multinationals: Everybody's Favorite Monsters,"
The Economist, March 27, 1993, 8.
16 The $20 million that basketball star Michael Jordan reportedly
received in 1992 for promoting Nike shoes exceeds the entire annual
payroll for the Indonesian factories that made them from female
workers making as little as 15 cents/hour. Korten, When Corporations
Rule the World , 111 AND Richard J. Barnett and John Cavanaugh,
Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994) 325-29.
17 Illich, Ivan, "Needs" in The Development Dictionary:
A Guide to Power as Knowledge, ed Wolfgang Sachs (London:
Zed Books Ltd., 1992) 94.
18 Witness the ultimate competitive institutions, professional
sports leagues which institute all sorts of management like common
salary caps, preferential selection of young players for weak
teams and such to level the playing field and make sure no team
dominates for too long.
19 "Corporate Empires", Multinational Monitor 17 no.
12 (December 1996). The information is from Forbes Magazine and
the World Bank's World Development Report for 1996.
20 Illich, "Needs", 99.
21 Hendrickson, Carol, "Selling Guatemala: Maya Export Products
in US Mail Order Catalogues", in Cross-Cultural Consumption:
Global Markets, Local Realities, ed. David Howes (London:
Routledge, 1996) 108-111.
22 Hendrickson, 114.
23 Hendrickson, 108.
24 see the fates of two do-gooder corporations, Stride Rite &
Levi Strauss in Korten, When Corporations Rule the World ,
208-14 & 232-33.
25 Consumption, Civil Action and Sustainable Development, "Development"
Vol. 41 No. 1, March 1998, Society for International Development,
Rome.
26 see various aspects of such policy by the Thatcher government
of the 1980s in Britain in Tomlinson, Alan, ed., Consumption,
Identity & Style: Marketing, Meanings and the Packaging of
Pleasure (London: Routledge, 1990).
27 "Mom, Dad, I outgross both of you put together",
Rock star Henry Rollins in Frank, Thomas, "Why Johnny Can't
Dissent" in Commodify Your Dissent, Ed. Thomas Frank
and Matt Weiland (NY: Norton, 1997) 43.
28 Griffiths, Jay, "Life of Strife", in Resurgence
No. 174, (January/February, 1996), 11.
29 Griffiths, 9.
30 "My Generation", Tape #6 in The History of Rock'
n' Roll Obie Benz, writer, editor, producer (Burbank, CA:
Time-Life Video & Television and Warner Home Video, 1995).
31 Savage, John, "Tainted Love: The Influence of Male Homosexuality
and Sexual Divergence on Pop Music and Culture Since the War"
in Tomlinson, Alan, ed., Consumption, Identity & Style:
Marketing, Meanings and the Packaging of Pleasure (London:
Routledge, 1990), 166-67.
32 for a discussion of this point in detail see Frank, Thomas,
"Why Johnny Can't Dissent" in Commodify Your Dissent,
Ed. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (NY: Norton, 1997) 31-45.
33 Ewen, Stuart, "Marketing Dreams: The Political Elements
of Style" in Tomlinson, Alan, ed., Consumption, Identity
& Style: Marketing, Meanings and the Packaging of Pleasure
(London: Routledge, 1990), 54.
34 see the dislocations of Philippine and Indonesian society from
such economic and brain drain in Market Cultures : Society
and Values in The New Asian Capitalisms, ed. Robert W. Hefner
(Singapore: ISEAS; US/UK:Westeview Press- Harper Collins, 1998)
251-67 and Continuity, Change and Aspirations: Social and Culturral
Life in Minahasa, Indonesia, ed. Helmut Bucholt & Ulrich
Mai (Singapore: ISEAS, 1994), 91-105.
35 Philibert, Jean-Marc & Jourdan, Christine, "Perishable
Goods: Modes of Consumption in the Pacific Islands", in Cross-Cultural
Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities, ed. David Howes
(London: Routledge, 1996); Malarney, Shaun Kingsley, "State
Stigma, Family Prestige, and the Development of Commerce in the
Red River Delta of Vietnam" in Market Cultures, ed.
Robert W. Hefner & authors own observations and discussions
of Japanese rural life.
36 One example of this is in Howes, David, "Cultural Appropriation
and Resistance in the American Southwest" in Cross-Cultural
Consumption: Global Markets, Local Realities, ed. David Howes
(London: Routledge, 1996) pp. 138-60.
37 Loy, David, "A Buddhist Critique of Transnational Corporations",
talk given at XX Conference, Malaysia, August 1997.
38 Korten, When Corporations Rule the World , 242-44.