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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780310597490 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Zondervan |
| Publication date: | 01/04/2011 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Consumer Detox
By Mark Powley
ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2010 Mark PowleyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-32475-1
Chapter One
I Am a Consumer
When I was a teenager, I experienced what I can only describe as raging shoelust.
Like all the other boys in my class, I obsessed over running shoes. As my old trainers started to lose their lustre, I set my heart on a new pair. After school I would go to Discount Daisy's shoe shop just to look at the new trainers with their sleek design features: bright reflective strips, super-cushioned soles, the Nike swish, the Adidas stripes. Deep down, I knew these shoes were special. I had to have them.
On the way home I would scrape my old shoes against the wall to wear them out quicker. Then the bartering with my parents would begin.
When I eventually persuaded them to replace the shoes I had been busy destroying, we would go along to Discount Daisy's and I'd try desperately to steer them towards the most expensive pair ("these ones don't fit right; can I try those ones?").
And the purchase—how can I express in print the thrill of the purchase? Words are too poor. At last, the shoes were mine. All that the trainers were, I now possessed. And if I was lucky, I could wear them home!
Do you remember this kind of thing?
Many's the time I would find myself, later that day, lovingly cradling my new shoes and flying them through the air like fighter planes.
OK, maybe that last bit was just me.
The point is: something was going on with those shoes. This was about more than footwear. This was about envy, seduction, the thrill of the chase, the power of the purchase, the warm afterglow of conquest and that profound, inexpressible bond between man and sneaker.
It isn't just me (apart from the fighter plane bit, but I think we've established that). We're all involved in this worldwide love affair with stuff. Consumerism has been growing for a while. Since the nineteenth century, industrialization has allowed us to make more and better products. At the same time, individualism has been on the rise. The members of each generation have increasingly seen their lives as a personal quest for self-fulfilment. In the last fifty years, consumerism has gone global. It has become the driving force of our economy, powered by advertising and easy credit. Now, for most of us, it's the air we breathe—as vital to our culture as TV memories are to our childhood.
There are whole books explaining the story of how we got here. But for now, here we are. Consumers in a consumer world. The question is: Where do we go from here?
The first step
How do we get a grip on consumerism?
Ask a recovering alcoholic. It begins when we admit the problem. The first step on the road to freedom is to acknowledge what's going on. In The Shape of Living, Cambridge professor David Ford writes, "Naming is a powerful act.... To name the situation brings it into language. Language is shared, and to find just the right word links our experience to others."
So let's name this. I love my stuff. I think I have too much. My consumer choices influence me more than I like to imagine. I don't like looking cheap or feeling bored. The idea of a less comfortable life scares me. My name is Mark, and I am a consumer.
But if we're going to name this thing, we need to say right at the start that this is much bigger than just shopping. Consumerism is everywhere.
The chances are you didn't make the clothes you're wearing now (unless you're reading this in the bath). It's unlikely that you grow much of your own food. We get what we want by buying it. We are always consuming.
But it's more than what we do; it's how we think. For the consumer, choice is everything. We live in worlds of our own choosing. We choose our location, our occupation, our recreation and our religion. We adopt a "lifestyle." We mix and match as we see fit. The customer is king.
No wonder, then, that we find ourselves "buying into" ideas, "shopping around" for churches or "investing in" relationships. We even put ourselves on "the job market." We think like consumers; we speak like consumers.
Consumerism spills over any boundary we'd care to put around it. everything seems to have a saleable value, from the ridiculous ("man sells advertising space on forehead") to the ambitious ("name a star for $54") to the downright disturbing ("kidney for sale"). Through the wonders of the Internet, we can buy from most places around the world at our own convenience. Unless we live underground, there is no escape from the world of commercial messages, bleeps, texts, 24/7 shopping and the shift work needed to make it happen.
Consumerism is everywhere.
Good monster/bad monster
So then, consumerism is a bad thing, right?
No.
So it's a good thing?
No.
I think we know in our bones it's more complicated than that.
If you're like me, consumerism is part monster, part friend. If we're going to name it well, we need to see both sides. So let's brace ourselves and look at the ugly, slimy side first.
For starters, consumerism is unsustainable. If everyone in the world adopted a Western lifestyle, we would need at least two planets to resource it, and possibly five. This is bad ecology but even worse math. We don't have two planets. Which means I'm living a lifestyle that can't be made available to all (there's not enough chocolate, for starters).
Consumerism has a monster-sized environmental footprint (actually it's more like a trail of destruction than a footprint). The shopping economy depends on us mining and making and shipping and packaging and throwing away more and more stuff. That's a lot of freight miles. It's a lot of shrink-wrap. It's a lot of carbon emissions. This is unfair. When eco-disasters strike, the rich nations of the world will always find a way through. It's the poor nations, despite their small carbon footprint, that increasingly bear the consequences of the consumer revolution they never got to enjoy.
To be honest, even on a good day I find it hard to justify my lifestyle. Apparently, right now around a billion people are going hungry. What am I supposed to do with that fact? I can buy bottled water I don't really need, while one in six people on the planet can't regularly access any clean water at all.
Consumerism thrives on ignorance. I have no idea who made the vast majority of my stuff. I don't know if they were paid fairly. I don't know if their working conditions were humane. All this is often hidden from view. But I am no longer unaware of the kind of things that go on. I know that Bolivian coffee farmers have been mercilessly let down by the unpredictable coffee market that gives us the low prices we want. I know that children on the Ivory Coast have been held as slaves to produce cocoa for nearly half of the world's cheap chocolate. I know that some underpaid workers, like nineteen-year-old Li Chunmei in China, have literally died on the job. She worked in a stuffed toy factory for twelve cents an hour and collapsed after working sixty fourteen-hour days in a row. As Vincent Miller says, "She was worked to death making things that we try not to call sh*t."
The inner accountant in all of us might find this next statistic interesting: The US and UK currently spend a combined total of nearly $600,000,000,000 on their military each year; they give away only about a tenth of that amount. But the size of defence budgets is just part of this. The real issue is why we have them. Why do we need the navies and the surveillance and the border measures? Isn't it, at least in part, to protect a way of life that we can't afford to share with others? Put it this way: if the defences weren't there, our privileged lifestyle wouldn't last long. That's why it has been suggested that consumerism is only the surname of the present world order. It also answers to Military Consumerism. Our lifestyle is propped up by military might, whether it is as blatant as nuclear missiles or as subtle as applying political muscle to energy negotiations.
And all the time I wonder what effect consumerism has on our personal lives. Is a good consumer a happy consumer? Maybe not. According to the psychologist Oliver James, the worst side effects of consumerism act like a virus. He has a name for it: Affluenza.
The Affluenza virus is a set of values which increase our vulnerability to psychological distress: placing a high value on acquiring money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others and wanting to be famous. Many studies have shown that infection with the virus increases your susceptibility to the commonest mental illnesses: depression, anxiety, substance abuse and personality disorder.
We could talk more about this. We could talk about obesity. We could talk about disposable relationships. We could talk about aggressive individualism and the breakdown of community. We could talk about all this stuff, and we could ask how kids are affected by growing up in this kind of society.
Novelist Ben Okri put it like this, "Material success has brought us to a strange spiritual and moral bankruptcy.... The more the society has succeeded, the more its heart has failed."
This is the ugly side of the monster, the dark shadow of the consumer dream.
But at the same time, consumerism isn't without its benefits. There's a cuddly, hairy side to the monster too.
Consumerism has contributed to our prosperity. The power of consumer demand has encouraged more efficient manufacturing, better technology, developments in health care, and more besides. As I write these words I'm sitting, well fed and well dressed (OK, reasonably dressed) in my comfortable study, typing away on a laptop because my job allows some freedom to pursue my passion to write. It can't be all bad.
Consumerism has created jobs. Despite the huge differences in pay and conditions around the world, our consumer lifestyles have created a vast market for the growing economies of countries like India and China. Have so many millions of people ever been lifted out of absolute poverty in such a short space of time? Is it better to starve on a peasant farm or to work towards a living wage in a factory?
Consumerism is allied to great political freedoms too. Who would want to surrender the right to spend freely earned wages on what we choose? Who dares to return to the grinding poverty and rigid inequalities of earlier periods in history? You first!
I am a torn soul. The monster is also my friend. In fact, like every other consumer in the system, I am implicated. I am part of the monster.
Guilt-flavoured ice cream
Not only is consumerism complicated; our reaction to consumerism is complicated too.
On the one hand, some of us feel provoked to outrage. One lifestyle website I saw recently tried to make its point with the following statistics:
Annual spending on ice cream in Europe: $11,000,000,000
Annual global investment needed to provide clean water for all: $10,000,000,000
On the face of it, it seems so stark. European indulgence; global need. Then I got thinking: What's the logic here? Is ice cream somehow to blame for poor water supply around the world? Perhaps we should round up all the ice cream sellers, close down the factories, and ban it altogether. It would go underground, like crack cocaine. Ben and Jerry's would be sold undercover on street corners. Would this help?
Let's say we somehow managed to cut out all ice cream spending (without resorting to martial law) and diverted the money to water and sanitation projects instead. Would this really work out? Should wealthy governments administer the funds directly, or would this be patronizing to poorer nations? But if the money is diverted via regional governments, how do we know it will get to the point of need? How many billions in aid have been siphoned off through corruption? Or just misspent? How many sanitation improvements on the ground have later been ruined by natural disaster or war? How many children whose lives have been saved from waterborne disease die only a few years later of malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, or famine?
These are tough questions.
I know I'm skating close to the edge here. I need to say right now that the rich countries of the world probably do consume too much ice cream and definitely should invest more in clean water for all. But the stats are never as straightforward as they seem. And a comparison approach can easily lead to an impossible burden of guilt ("This is a great day out we're having—and what a lovely park! Would anybody like an ice cream, WHILE THE POOR CHILDREN OF THE WORLD SUFFER AND DIE?!").
On the other hand, some of us react in the opposite way and end up merely justifying the status quo.
It is often suggested that the world needs consumerism like a car needs fuel. If we don't consume, everything will fall apart, and then we won't be able to help anyone. Or to put it another way, as George W. Bush said in 2006, to save the economy, "I encourage you all to go shopping more."
Actually, this isn't as helpful as it may seem.
Consumerism doesn't always encourage a strong economy. Out of control, it encourages unmanageable debt. We think we're creating wealth, but actually we're just playing with figures on a piece of paper. If only I could illustrate this. If only the economic system could experience a kind of global crash induced by overexposed borrowing.
Hold on ... I've just remembered something: 2008.
What counts as profit on a balance sheet isn't always lasting benefit for society. What happens when the irresponsible debts our society is built on come back to haunt us?
What happens when we total up all the costs of obesity and consumption-related cancer?
How stressed and fragmented is society allowed to become before we ask if it's all worth it?
How much money would compensate for leading unhealthy lives on a degraded planet?
Is this the only way to create jobs?
Where does this leave us? According to David Ford, when we're overwhelmed by something like consumerism, we often suffer from "the wrong sort of guilt and paralyzing isolation." He's right. We feel guilty about the mind-boggling statistics of poverty; yet at the same time, we wonder if there's really an alternative to the current system. And besides, who else really cares enough to change it? So, more often than not, we do nothing.
There has to be more than this. On the one hand, guilt can't change the world. But on the other, I'm fed up with being paralyzed by the idea that the only thing I can do to combat global poverty is buy another pizza.
I'm looking for a way forward. I want to know how to live within the system but without it dominating my life. I want my consuming to become creative, shaping the economy instead of being shaped by it.
I'm looking for breakout.
Breakout
I'm not the only one.
In a recent UK survey, nine out of ten people said that society has become too materialistic. There are signs in culture too. Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club is one novel that voices a rage against the system:
You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.
We don't have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives.
Somewhere tangled up with all the anger is a cry for something different. I want to give my life to something worthwhile.
But how do we know if this is any more than a fantasy?
How do we know if liberation is possible?
That's when I turn to the Scriptures.
There's a whisper of liberation in the leaves of the Scriptures. There's a conspiracy of freedom. The Bible carries the story of slaves on their way to a new land. It is alive with the songs of those who once were trapped but now find themselves in a spacious place. It's the Scriptures that tell us a fairer world is worth hoping for. They tell us that liberation is possible.
But possible doesn't mean easy.
The book of exodus finds the Israelites escaping from slavery in Egypt. Previously, they had been caught in the machinery of Pharaoh's empire, oppressed by a system of forced labour and impossible production targets. Now they were travelling across a desert to freedom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Consumer Detox by Mark Powley Copyright © 2010 by Mark Powley. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction....................91. I Am a Consumer....................15
2. I Am Not What I Buy....................29
3. I Am Richer Than I Know....................49
4. We Can Decode the System....................65
5. I Will Not Maximize My Life....................87
6. The Power of Stop....................107
7. Life in High-Definition....................121
8. The Art of Waiting....................139
9. The Deep Yes....................155
10. Idol....................173
11. Openhanded....................191
12. Tele-vision....................211
Detox Diary....................229
Acknowledgements....................243
Notes....................245
What People are Saying About This
'It is a gift to be able to stand up with him and say, ‘I am a recovering consumer.’ And we are reminded in these pages that we are not alone.” — Shane Claiborne, Author And Activist
“This book is not about guilt. It’s about life. Many of us think we are alive, but we are really just breathing. The things we own begin to control us like heroine, or demons. Our possessions possess us and we find that the more we buy, the less we become. We end up the wealthiest and loneliest people in the world. In this book, Mark Powley exorcises the demons of consumerism and invites us to detox from our addiction to Mammon. Mark refuses to accept the lie that happiness must be purchased.” — Shane Claiborne, Author And Activist