INTRODUCTION
El Nino and raging forest
fires, migrant laborers exploited in sweatshops, domestic violence
and community disintegration, contentious democracies with low
voter turnout, youths killed for sports jackets in the US, dowry
deaths in India, baby formula misuse in Africa....the list goes
on. As in any age, human kind has its share of social problems.
In a certain sense, they are the conditions of being human, the
trial of fighting through our bad points and working to bring
out our best, and consequently a better society. In the last 200
years, though, mankind has made incredible technological and material
strides. Large parts of the world are no longer preoccupied with
basic survival. We live in an age of wealth and material prosperity
as all sectors of the world are opening up to the "free market"
and the material benefits of capitalist society. With such material
bounty, however, why do our problems persist? Why is it common
that Japanese children, who grow up in one of the safest, cleanest
and most materially prosperous societies, bully their peers into
suicide? Why do some prosperous Malaysians in fancy cars feel
the need to literally drive others off the road? Why are Europeans
and Americans streaming into book stores in search for titles
on inner peace? There is something clearly amiss in our modern
consumer societies.
I use the word "consumer" here to point directly at
the issue of our present consumption patterns. These patterns
have emerged as one of the most pressing issues in the world today,
one which effects both economized and vernacular societies.1 From
environment to community development to education to sex and gender
issues, if we look deeply into the social problems of mankind
today, we see that virtually all of them are somehow linked to
the workings of our economic system and the drive by so many to
attain material satisfaction. Although so much of this drive seems
to be for the material, for a comfortable life or for a luxurious
life, closer inspection reveals something in our spirits that
is driving us to consume our earth into ruin. Based on the ability
of so many to satisfy basic material needs, it must be something
more than just a desire for things. There must be something deeper
behind them.
This is what might be called "consumerism":
the dominant culture of a modernizing invasive industrialism which stimulates - yet can never satisfy - the urge for a strong sense of self to overlay the angst and sense of lack in the human condition. As a result, goods, services, and experiences are consumed beyond any reasonable need. This undermines the eco-system, the quality of life and particularly traditional cultures and communities and the possibility of spiritual liberation.2
More simply, consumerism is a
way of living in which the meaning of one's life is the acquisition
and consumption of forms and experiences. In this first chapter,
I will attempt to construct a spiritual history of this consumer
energy. In doing so, I hope to lay bare the psychological subtext
of our "drive to buy" and the mythology of our economic
order. From there, I think we will have the foundations for offering
a spiritual response to the materialistic world we live in.
To gain a better understanding of this crisis of consumption patterns
in our world today, it is important to take an historical walk
through some of the key developments of the present, dominant
economic order. The beginning point, though certainly not the
ending point, must begin in the West in the great mercantile and
economic explosion of the 16th century. This period saw the blooming
of an international capitalist system which began 400 years of
western political colonialism and which continues today under
more purely economic guises. This explosion was significantly
fueled by the rupture of the Catholic Church with the Reformation,
the development of scientific perspectives, and the rise of its
philosophical child, the Enlightenment. By the dawning of the
Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, a radically new
order had shaped itself in Europe, an order which spanned out
across the globe to the Americas and to Asia and Africa during
the era of high colonialism.
I. A Spiritual History Of The Rise Of Modernism
II. The
"Theology" Of Consumerism
NOTES:
1. In the search for a proper designation, we often use First
World and Third World or Developed World and Developing World.
I find both of the designations incomplete and value loaded (i.e.
first is better than third, developed is more complete than developing).
I would rather choose "economized" and "vernacular".
"Economized" denotes societies whose relations are governed
by the values of the market. Vernacular, defined as that which
pertains to a "particular locality", denotes societies
whose relations are governed by various other values besides the
market, such as those of religion and culture. I have learned
both of these terms through Majid Rahnema's writings, "Participation"
and "Poverty" in The Development Dictionary: A Guide
to Power as Knowledge, ed Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed Books
Ltd., 1992).
2. As defined by the Think Sangha at its 2nd international meeting
in Hakone, Japan, May 27-31, 1997.