Before moving ahead to expand on the significance of a newly emergent post-material turn, let's be sure we have a solid understanding of the nature and continuing importance of a pure economic materialism. This we will do with a quick run-through of an essential 20th Century manifestation of economic materialism, the rise of suburban living and the meaning of life behind it.
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The quest by philosophers for a singular and final explanation of the meaning of life has been largely given up as a fruitless exercise. Instead, we are left to deal with this task on our own. Most of us say that we believe in God, and that religion takes care of all questions of ultimate meaning. The trouble with this kind of response for us Americans is that we pay lip service to religion, but then what we really do is go to the mall. We are materialists, body and soul, through and through, and we live accordingly. We find our meaning not in the heavens, but in goods. As materialists we believe that the essential purpose in life is to gain access to financial resources and to use them to acquire material possessions. Accomplishing this purpose is our passion. Our temples are the Mall of America and Amazon.com. Meaning comes from adopting purposes and values about which we care passionately and pursuing them through actions in the world, and the predominant form of meaning today is deeply materialist.
Our dream of where to live for over a century in this country has been fundamentally suburban; the city doesn’t suit our consumerist ways as well and conveniently as the suburbs. Fifth Avenue in New York and the Magnificent Mile in Chicago have consumer palaces we love to visit, but most of us can’t afford to buy much in these places. Our real consumer paradise is in the suburban malls and big box stores where we can find an abundance of treasures we can actually afford, and where we can drive right up and walk right in to buy what our heart desires. We can’t afford the big city cathedrals of luxury retailing for the elite, but we are blessed with the affordable and accessible big box suburban churches of consumption for the middle class, and, of course, Amazon where today with a touch of our finger on a keyboard we can buy us our dreams.
You might think I am out to ridicule the vast majority of Americans who enjoy the delights of accumulating consumer possessions, but this would not be too smart given the current predominance of materialist sentiments. Instead, I will begin by reinforcing the significance and importance of the suburban consumption machine and those who drive it. By-and-large, despite what many academics say, suburban dwellers are happy people, and they want to stay that way. They choose the suburbs for good reason; this is where they can most fully realize their material dreams. Most importantly, these are the people that keep the economy humming, and when they face unemployment, declining housing values, and foreclosures, the economy suffers. Lets take a quick look at what survey researchers have found out about materialism and life satisfaction.
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Many happiness researchers postulate that materialists will be less satisfied than others because they are caught up on an economic treadmill that requires increasing amounts of time earning and buying in order to sustain the delights of consumption. Life on this treadmill sacrifices a deeper happiness that comes from having time to engage fully in a variety of satisfying pursuits: interacting with family and friends; involvement in community activities, such as amateur sports, charitable causes, politics, or church; putting energy into some activity so engaging as to cause one to lose all sense of self-consciousness; or accomplishing some purpose that expresses one’s deepest commitment to highly regarded personal values. The losing of self-consciousness through intense engagement psychologists refer to as flow, and a wide variety of activities can produce it—pitching in an a highly competitive baseball game, writing important software code, working on a painting of a desert landscape at sunset, pursuing a deer with a bow and arrow, or climbing a fourteener, such as San Luis Peak in Colorado. The same is true of accomplishing a valued purpose such as writing a book about how to bring climate change to a halt, successfully helping elect a candidate for political office who will support cap and trade, or completing a lay sermon about belief in God before a Unitarian church congregation.
Survey research has indeed confirmed that materialists do experience less life satisfaction than others, primarily because they spend less time with their families and more on economic pursuits. But recent findings paint a more nuanced picture of the relationship between materialism and happiness. In college, more materialistic students tend to be more outgoing and popular, less accomplished academically, and more likely to take up majors with the best income earning prospects, such as business and engineering, than their less materialistic counterparts. After college, many, but not all, materialistically oriented graduates achieve financial success. Those that do turn out to be just as satisfied with their lives as their peers who care less about making money, but those who aspire to financial accomplishment and fail to achieve it experience a small but statistically significantly lower level of life satisfaction than others, again because of less time spent with family. Actual economic success in effect compensates for lost satisfaction from extra time on an economic treadmill, but if you jump on the treadmill and fail to advance, your happiness suffers. In sum, materialistic suburbanites who achieve economic success appear to be as happy as anyone else, and those who fail suffer for it, but not by much.
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An entertaining writer skilled at explaining how we extract meaning from materialism is James Twitchell. Consider the quote that begins the final chapter of his book, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism. Here it is:
Sell them their dreams. Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams—dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don’t buy things to have things. They buy things to work for them. They buy hope—hope of what your merchandise will do for them. Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods.
These are the words of Helen Landon Cass, a female radio announcer, spoken before a convention of salesman in 1923. Is American materialism indeed the answer to the quest for meaning in life? Cass seems to think so and so does Twitchell. Anyone concerned with economics and the pursuit of meaning can’t ignore what Cass and Twitchell have to say given the extraordinary role of consumer desire in our global economic reality today. How could acquiring possessions be an act of self-creation that defines what we care about in the world? What exactly is the power of stuff? Let’s see what Mr. Twitchell has to tell us about consumer desire and meaning. But first, my personal story of seeking meaning through consumption.
I love to spend a few weeks each winter hiking and backpacking in the Sonoran and Mohave Deserts and a month or so in the summer doing the same in the high-mountain Colorado Rockies. I spend a lot of time dreaming about this when I am not actually doing it. I see myself as a botanizer and photographer of wildflowers and landscapes in deserts and high mountain meadows of stunning natural beauty. To do this I need equipment and I need to get there. Navigating the desert or getting up rough mountain roads to trailheads is eased with a four wheel drive vehicle, and now that I am officially old, what could be better than a Toyota RAV4. This I have come to describe as my mountain camping car, partly to assuage my guilt over owning a vehicle that gets only pretty good mileage. You might think that I bought this car to project a certain public image, but I have since determined I did it as a matter of self-definition. Driving it around makes me feel like the hiker and backpacker I am any time of year. A piece of my self-creation is what I drive, but in my own eyes, not so much the eyes of others. I now discovered that most drivers of a RAV4 use it more for going to the mall, judging from their body shapes, than driving up mountains to trailheads. Owning such a car for me symbolizes my freedom to explore and have adventures, something that I doubt others perceive. There is lots of other little self-expressive things I buy that has little to do with my public image. I love the small, lightweight stuff that eases the task of backpacking like little stoves, little tents, lightweight sleeping bags, and so on. This is an REI-based (the premier outdoor store and cooperative) consumerism that helps to define who I am. I have just recently, for example, discovered moisture-wicking t-shirts which I just love. For a while, I put my consumer effort into having car camping comfort goods such as a larger tent, chairs, and a screened porch around the picnic table, all of which I have come to enjoy in my old age. I have even looked at some of the smaller travel trailers, but, like Diderot’s robe, buying one would lead to still other needs, like a bigger, more powerful car.
Recently, I have experienced a modest transformation in my attitude toward all this. I still absolutely love the idea of high mountain exploration even though I am slowing down in my dotage, but I now see car ownership as a pain and driving on four wheel drive roads as creating more anxiety than pleasure. My RAV4 has been sold to my son, a big guy that has to squeeze to get into smaller vehicles and at 26 had yet to own a car (he needs it more than I), and my wife and I get along now on just one car, a well-worn Toyota Corolla. To get to the mountains I will rent something, and I am scaling my car camping back to mostly backpacking sized equipment that will fit on a plane. I would like to get a new camera though with a larger image sensor and a good macro lens for wildflower photography. There is always something more to buy. In any case, self-creation and the search for meaning is a dynamic process, and the REIs of the world do a great job selling me objects of my dreams. (Just this year our youngest son got a new job that required a car for commuting, so we sold him our Corolla. We now own a "baby" Prius C, and have figured out how to jam into it all our camping stuff and do our mountain camping and hiking routine. Getting to trail heads is more challenging, but everything worked out in our first attempt in the summer of 2014. Our consumer status is now wrapped up in getting 55 mpg in the mountains.)
Academics jump on commercial consumerism as a mindless popular caving into Madison Avenue psychological manipulation motivated by a corporate conspiracy to maximize business profits. A mass production economy, capable of creating through the magic of advanced technology a cornucopia of material goods, requires for survival a mass consumption economy able to absorb all that is produced. Inadequate demand would doom such an economy to stagnation and depression. To prevent this, goods must do more than just stimulate people to consume beyond basic need. To transform the ordinary into objects of desire, the practice of marketing adds meaning to products that inherently lack it through advertising, packaging, branding, and fashion. When we buy goods, we gain not just something that is materially functional, but something that gives spark and significance to our lives. “And what could ever be wrong with that?”, Twitchell rhetorically asks of us. What exactly is the problem with creating self-identity and expressing what’s especially important to us through the brands of goods we voluntarily choose to possess? Isn’t true democracy the right to choose whatever we want to consume absent substantial harm to others?
In order for goods to express something beyond their physical being, they must possess an identifiable brand to which a meaning can be attached. An ad at the bottom of the New York Times business page caught my eye a few years ago (April 13, 2011) as expressing visually and in text ideas to emotionally attract readers to a particular brand. Pictured in the ad is Breitling’s Superocean watch at $3,335 along with a picture of a diver poking his shaved head in swimming goggles above water with the nearby text, “Herbert Nitsch, Airline Pilot, Deepsea Diver, Extreme Record Breaker.” The diver and the watch standout in stark contrast against a dramatic black background. The ad tells us that people who are athletic, accomplished, powerful, heroic, affluent, and discerning in their tastes own such luxuries as Superocean underwater watches. Advertisements cannot be overly complicated or they fail in their task to attract viewers and potential customers. Very quickly we learn from the Breitling ad that someone with heroic qualities endorses the watch. If we aspire to the values and virtues the ad communicates, then we may well give serious consideration to purchasing the watch, if we can afford it, and even if we never go diving. By acquiring the watch, we, in effect, endorse what it symbolizes in the ad, not only for our own sense of identity, but for the sake of admiring others we wish to impress who know about Breitling, which, as the ad tells us, supplies “instruments for professionals.” A life of meaning for most of us amounts to choosing our heroes, and advertising endorsements facilitate this task.
As Twitchell would no doubt argue, advertising adds a meaning to goods that they intrinsically lack. Look at any advertisement, and I am sure you can discern the intended message conveyed about virtues of the brand and the people who consume it. Advertising and branding together take over from religion much of the means for satisfying our hopes. Prayer to gods as the path to getting what we want out of life gets displaced in the world of commerce by the magical power of goods. Nothing is more amazing to me than my Iphone which connects me to the world and allows me to socially interact with anyone I know with a touch of the screen. It also permits me to record my thoughts and ideas when I am relaxing in a Rocky Mountain meadow campsite far from civilization, and even read a book, as long as my battery lasts. It’s not just advertising in a world of high technology that gives a product meaning, but the design details as well. We want an Iphone not just because of its attractive ads, but to experience all the wonderful things it can do for us. Just like prayer, commerce will get you to heaven, only it will be a heaven on earth.
One might think that a mass production economy and its capacity to produce cheaply huge numbers of identical goods would lead to us all consuming the same things and in the process creating highly similar personal identities. Through the wonders of competition in advertising, branding, product design, packaging, and fashion, diversity prevails in the consumer world. Go to any mall, or cruise the internet, and you will discover a never-ending panoply of goods. We all have plenty to choose from in creating our own special form of life. Branding seems to refute the notion of consumer individuality since many of us select the same identical product. If enough of us didn’t for a given brand, it wouldn’t survive. Consuming a particular brand isn’t a creative act so much as selecting a combination of brands to consume. Through choosing an ever-changing combination of brands we continuously seek identity and self-creative meaning. We brand ourselves and construct a coherent self-image by consuming a constellation of products. Life must cohere as Diderot found out in the purchase of his new robe. For those of you who don’t know the story, Diderot lived a messy life including the wearing of a robe that was little more than a rag, which he decided was just too much. He thus acquired a rather plush new one that made the rest of his surroundings look even more tawdry. Soon he bought entirely new furnishings to match his new robe. In the consumer world, buying one thing inevitably leads to another. Diderot in modern terminology branded himself by creating a coherent fashion. How do we today learn about this process? Twitchell tells us it’s TV that does the job, but I suspect that currently its more than that, given the rising use of the Internet, especially by the young.
In the end, what different types of branded products do for us is what matters. Some of what products achieve is magical, yet mundanely functional. Advil gets rid of our aches and pains, Tide gets our cloths clean, Cheerios keep our heart in shape, and Coke tastes good. We feel more sensual with exotic perfume or aftershave on, and as a result we probably behave more sensually and increase our attractiveness to others. An expensive watch communicates our wealth and power in society. Fancy cars do the same while also giving us an environment of comfort and luxury and a powerful machine that can go from 0 to 60 in nothing flat. Both watches and cars rise to the status of works of art, as can a tastefully appointed living room, or a diamond bracelet. A Green Bay Packer sweatshirt in Wisconsin expresses an affiliation that connects one socially to numerous others. A Northface jacket symbolizes the outdoor activity the wearer presumably undertakes. Goods are, and always have been, signals and signs to others as well as ourselves about who we are, what we believe, and what brings meaning in our lives. Above all, goods communicate. So how does this all related to the way we choose to arrange ourselves in space?
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At the mid-Twentieth Century, middle-class Americans everywhere turned their backs on the old, established central cities as places to live, and they did this for good reasons. Streets were traffic-clogged, city governments were often corrupt, crime was fearsome, the quality of schools was in decline, the air was often polluted, the streets were noisy, housing was densely packed and overcrowded, and low-income immigrants of a different race were arriving daily. By contrast the suburbs looked like a dream—open green spaces, new, detached single family houses that one could own, local control of government, social and racial homogeneity, and the ability to commute to work in the privacy of one’s car. What could be better?
Before World War II, cities retained the hub-and-spoke shape and relatively high density given them by the electric trolley. People either walked to work or they rode the trolley, and many lived compactly in apartments or other kinds of multifamily housing. Outward spreading of the relatively well off to new “streetcar suburbs” for single-family housing occurred in all large cities, but population densities stayed relatively high. The economic and cultural heart and soul of the city remained at its center, but all this was about to change.
Americans could have followed the prewar approach of basing the shape of urban space on public mass transit and compact housing, but they chose a distinctly different path—the creation of an urban transportation system and access to suburban housing rooted in a love affair with the automobile. A majority of urban Americans now live in suburbs instead of central cities and reside in locally governed, low-density municipalities and commute from detached single family homes to low rise business and commercial buildings surrounded by convenient parking. In the process, most Americans now avoid ever setting foot in a high-density central city. Not only did people move to the suburbs, but along with them so have businesses. The multistory central city factory located on a rail line or near a dock found itself replaced by a low-rise suburban plant with its truck bays and close access to freeways. Densely packed older department stores and high-rise offices in the central city business district have been out-competed by low-rise suburban shopping malls and office parks with their ample parking and close proximity to housing developments. Only in the suburbs could our new postwar consumer dream of possessing spacious, well appointed single-family dwellings and sleek, powerful motor vehicles be easily satisfied. Nothing is more important in symbolizing our material accomplishments than our homes and our cars. We fill our living spaces with those consumer items that define who we are, and choose motor vehicles that reflect our deepest values in life. In the U.S., what matters most is where one lives and what one drives. Governments at all levels supported and fostered this dream with home loans guaranteed against default, tax deductions for mortgage interest payments, and massive systems of freeways and highways that eased the task of moving around the suburban landscape.
For several decades following World War II, suburban expansion and the industries it fueled pumped up consumer and investment spending and assured national economic prosperity. Especially for the U.S., the passion for financial accomplishment and material goods has taken a distinctly and even radically suburban form. In our most recent economic crisis from which we are now only beginning to recover, the suburban dream faced serious challenges from an unprecedented "middle-class" experience of extraordinary housing foreclosure rates and exceptionally high unemployment levels. Our economy seriously needs a new engine of growth. The question we now want to address is whether a shift in attitudes and values is in the cards that will in itself push us toward an economy rooted in a less materialistic, more compact and environmentally friendly form of living, and whether that shift will offer us sufficient options for getting a living.
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