Consumerism and the Soul
Sermon delivered to the Northwest Unitarian Universalist Church
Houston Texas, April 2005
We’re going to talk today about consumerism and the soul. Or I’m going to talk and you’re going to listen. Or sleep. I’m very pleased to be here. It’s an adventure, it’s a culture shock, coming from the Woodlands Unitarian Church. I was doing a show there – I’m not in show biz, I call it anti-showbiz because I prioritize the message over the money. That means I don’t advertise. Spreading information about yourself is fine – a little self-centered, but the self needs to be centered sometimes. But advertising – anyone here in advertising? Oh, we don’t do confession here. Do we testify? Never mind. Don’t incriminate yourself. I realize it’s controversial, and I hate controversy. I do. Let’s talk about the Middle East instead.
This is a wonderful program you have, guest sermons. It testifies to the fact that y’all come to church so regular you wore out your preacher.
I’m not a regular minister, I’m a highly irregular minister. To tell the truth, which I try to do, on Sundays, I’m a lay person but I wanted to talk to you about this, so here we all are.
Imagine no possessions. Let the church say don’t go there. I won’t. But do let’s talk about consumerism and covetousness and advertising, which is the instruction manual that comes with consumerism and covetousness.
There are some things that advertising does that ought to be unconstitutional; they are not, but they are meanwhile very bad ideas. I have seen the best minds of my generation dedicated to persuading people to buy, and occasionally lying. That’s part of their job: deceit. Deceit in the service of covetousness.
Advertising, in its early days, was understood by its practitioners to be founded on making people unhappy, in order to trap them into resolving unhappiness through purchase of product. Work of the devil?
A cursory examination of a random sample of ads shows the company, the manufacturer or the retailer portraying themselves as a friend or even family member of the targeted consumer. That is, they solve daily problems, give advice, console, and generally function in loco parentis.
Why would a company want to be your friend? Would you buy something your friend or family member recommended? I would. I tend to buy what my local hardware store recommends, quicker than what Amazon.com recommends. I like my friends small, and local.
Why do we make consumption such a big part of our lives, other than that we’ve been instructed to? Not that we all do, and not that we should never buy anything, except on Buy Nothing Day, November 26 is it?
Why do we hitch our self-esteem to self-aggrandizement, to the appearance of wealth or of cutting edge style? Why must our cars be bigger than other people’s? According to Dr. Peter Whybrow, it’s not only self-esteem we’re boosting, it’s self-preservation. (Dr. Peter Whybrow: American Mania: When More is Not Enough.) Ancient instincts hitched to purchasing power. Identity hitched to products. I’m a Starbucks guy. I’m a Versace gal. We’re joining a club, a gang, a big village. Community is provided by buying. Now, that’s me being polite. We might also say community is replaced with stuff. Just because you wear Sean Jean, do you think that someone else wearing Sean Jean will rescue you from your burning house? Will come over and baby-sit while you go for a job interview? Maybe.
Hyper-consumerism is soul-damaging in what I think are heart-rending ways.
It narrows our personal values (and social values – the personal is social) to transient, superficial, self-centered, short-term gratification. We lose our sense of deeper, stronger values, we trivialize our own existence, and along with it our relations with others and with the idea of a well-spent life. This is described in Peter Whybrow’s recent book as being all about speed, the moment – there’s no history, and no consequences.
It fosters ignorance of cause and effect, the relatedness of production and consumption, the meaning of our actions. When we consume, if we do not know or care to know the origin of the product, the conditions of life for those producing, the effects of the production process on the environment, we are alienating ourselves from the community that is our species and the community of all species. Moving the focus from village to self while destroying nature, our mother. Losing learning built up over generations. We are being irresponsible citizens, and the irresponsible person is in spiritual trouble. And the same goes for society, which is us.
When we bend down to pick up the newspaper, do we ever stop to think who got it there? Maybe they enjoy their job; maybe they got up in the cold and wet and wished they were somewhere else.
When we peel a banana, do we know or care that many generations of people work exclusively in the banana picking business, only to see their economy wrecked by falling prices? Do we know or care that entire governments have been overthrown over bananas?
Consumerism can be thought of as a form of eating – we’re all eating, but we’re not feeding each other. The focus of survival and the pursuit of happiness are transferred from the village to the self. Not even to the global village, since we’re alienated from that village as I’ve described. The isolated self is in no position to aspire to spiritual health.
WHAT SHALL WE DO? (This means I’m all through complaining, for now, and turning to solutions.)
How shall we overcome overconsumption?
There is hope in community, and in the connectedness with other endeavors. Economic, of course. If the stock market goes up, we have hope, if we have stocks. Social justice, of course. Peace and equality give us hope when they happen, mostly in our dreams. Also spiritual. Only our spirit can save our spirit. We have nothing to fear but the failure of the spirit.
Having sampled superficial joys, we turn to things of more significance – less flashy, more substantive. As the individual matures, perhaps so with the culture and the nation. Is America going through a collective regression brought on by infantilization? Will the world follow suit? If so, how do we get to the other side of that regression?
In Zap Comics, which I read in the late sixties, a fellow named Flakey Foont went out to find God, and believe me, he took along a lunch. Same goes for big social changes. And the same goes for the search for truth in advertising. I shouldn’t hold my breath were I you. But I’m a big believer in labeling – not so much labeling music for bad words but labeling products – what effect did the manufacture of this product have on some environment somewhere? Or everywhere? What were the working conditions and pay of the people who made it? Were they so bad that the workers revolted and the army had to come in and kill the union organizers? That’s why I feel bad if I ever have to drink a Coke because every product sold in the joint is a Coke product and I don’t trust the water.
I have proposed a smart shopping cart with a disk drive, into which you insert a disk containing all the social information you need to avoid products with bad karma. Really hip people can just wave their phone at the shelves. But that would be buying really hip phones. I’ll go either way on this one. Of course, at the end of the aisle you may feel like you just have to go to another store. That’s also worth considering.
Why can’t stores be labeled? I can’t figure this out. It’s so simple. On the front door it should say who owns it, what other companies they own, which governments they own, who they bought yesterday and how many they fired today.
Can you boycott all companies that hurt others and the earth, that foster indifference to the hurting of others and the earth? Boycott greed? Godspeed.
Can small daily personal choices become a fetish that keeps us from the big picture? Yes. I try to simplify my consumer struggles into a few rules. My anti-advertising principle: I always tell people I don’t buy anything with a price that ends in 9. I don’t do it, but I always tell people about it. We can bypass products that substitute for exercise or community. We can share – don’t buy, borrow. But don’t break it – if you break it you bought it.
Communities can organize. When I drank coffee, I bought it from a friend who had it shipped in from Minneapolis from some people who bought it from cooperatives in Central America. Fair Trade is a growing segment of the economy. Food coops provide an opportunity for people to think together about a responsible food economy.
Organized consumer pressure is a time-honored mode of social change work. Most recently the Immokalee Workers in southern Florida, mostly immigrants picking our tomatoes, campaigned for a penny per pound more in pay, and boycotted Taco Bell, the biggest buyer of their labor. They won. You can all go to Taco Bell now. If you want. Just don’t buy coke there. They’re owned by Pepsi, after all.
Getting and spending. The more you spend, the more you have to have to keep up with yourself and your spending, so you work and work and work in the service of spending. It’s kind of fun, sometimes. But it takes humanity down a road – and it is the goal of the get and spend gurus that all nations will follow us down this road – that leads to more of the same. Is that our vision, our spiritual path, that road lined with fast food and superficial pleasures and selfish gratification? Is that what our species is about? We could be working less and contemplating more, and more than just our navels and the cell phones we’ll soon be installing there. No, I don’t think that’s our destiny, that road. I think there’s a road less taken that we are fast forgetting. Let’s work together to remember, assuming that the socialization of our souls is still legal.