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Dove is one quarter cleansing cream so it can't dry your skin the way soap can. Tide gets out the dirt kids get into. Choosy mothers choose JIF. There's always room for JELL-O. The best part of waking up is FOLGERS in your cup. You deserve a break today. Have it YOUR way. Who wants gum? I do! I do! Please don't squeeze the CHARMIN.
I grew up watching television, as did most people my age. I even watched ALL MY CHILDREN and AS THE WORLD TURNS every weekday that I wasn't in school. I can still tell you who Erica's first husband was and why Bob and Lisa were divorced. But I also still remember that four out of five dentists surveyed recommended sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum. I can still recall that CERTS is made with a drop of retsin (but I don't know what retsin IS). And I know that in hardest water CALGON helps detergents get laundry up to 30% cleaner. I did no research for these facts. I remember it all twenty-five or thirty years after I first heard it - just like the advertisers wanted me to.
I often tell people that I was raised Catholic when they ask me what religious tradition I was raised in. But I really should tell them that I was raised CONSUMERIST. I can rattle off advertising copy quicker than I can the passages from the Baltimore Catechism that I memorized. And I'm sure that the advertising slogans I just used are familiar to most.
Consumerism permeates our society and in many ways it is the religion of America. James Luther Adams, a well-known Unitarian theologian, maintained that all people have a religion whether they realize it or not. "The question," he writes, "is not shall I be a person of faith, but rather, which faith should BE mine? For whether a person craves prestige, wealth, security, or amusement; whether the person lives for God, country, science, or plunder, that person is demonstrating a faith, showing confidence in something. Find out what he gives his deepest loyalty to and you've found his religion."
Look around at the world we live in. What does the soul of our society seem most deeply committed to? Teenagers murder each other for expensive sneakers to flaunt in front of their jealous peers. Middle-aged women spend their days running from shop to shop in search of Beanie Babies to stash them away in closets where they remain wrapped in plastic lest their value be diminished. Men spend more time polishing the new truck than they do playing with their children. Yet these people are unaware of the fact that they are practicing the religion of consumerism. They are instead unconsciously responding to the value system of the culture in which they live. Its message is so insidious and so effective that we all react to it in ways we may not be aware of.
I had a relative whose life I believe to be a good example of how consumerism can become a religion. Joe had a good job and a generous credit line. He had excellent taste and enjoyed nice things. Every merchant in his small town knew him as he spent a lot of time shopping and acquiring things. His home was a showplace and he lavished expensive gifts on his wife. Most people assumed his wife to be very happy. But the beautiful home was actually an unhappy place. Joe was a tyrant when it came to housekeeping. Despite the fact that he and his wife had children, Joe expected the house to be spotless at all times. He expected his wife to spend all of her time tending their things. Some rooms were declared strictly "off limits" to the kids and Joe would tie threads to the doors of these rooms so that he would know if anyone violated his sacred space. Many pieces of furniture were covered with plastic - only uncovered when company came; and, even then, only looked at, never sat upon. The kitchen was a house-beautiful spread of brand new appliances and spotless counter tops. But he made his wife actually prepare the meals and wash dishes in the basement to preserve the beauty of the kitchen. The oven was not even hooked up to the gas lines and so they kept the telephone book there. Joe bought a brand new car every few years but his children were never allowed to ride in it. He had an old van in which to transport them. He was never satisfied with what he had either. Each beautiful thing he acquired pleased him for the moment, but as soon as he had it, he felt the need to acquire something else. No wonder he was a favorite of the town merchants! Finally, his wife had had enough and she divorced him. Joe married again to a widow with three children and he set about transforming her home into another palace. He tried to convince her to send her children to live with their grandparents as they left fingerprints on the refrigerator and splashed water on the bathroom mirror. Finally, this woman also divorced him. At the end of both marriages, Joe stripped the house bare of the lovely gifts he had bought his wives. He hoarded them into his mother's garage where they sat wrapped in plastic until his premature death at the age of 49. Many of the items were still not fully paid for. At the time of his death, he was estranged from his children and two ex-wives. In the years after his second divorce, there were numerous women who all eventually left him.
As someone who knew Joe personally, it is impossible for me to conclude that Joe's deepest loyalty was to anything other than the acquisition of things. He even treated the women in his life like objects to be displayed in public and to serve him in private. He had acquired quite a few of them in his life and had worn them out and moved on to the next one. But our consumerist society teaches us that everything is expendable and there is always something newer and better "out there." What's more, we are taught that we deserve the best. Joe's religion was consumerism and materialism and nothing - not even his children - could compete with the true cause of his heart and soul.
Joe is an extreme example of a person who practices the religion of consumerism, but his story illustrates the problems that are caused by a consumerist orientation to the world.
What exactly do I mean when I say consumerist? A consumerist attitude has to do with adopting a use-it-up and move on mentality. It is the concern with material goods to the exclusion of other values and it is an attitude that the entire world exists for one's own use and pleasure. We have even made consumption into a recreational activity that we all enjoy - shopping - even when we aren't going to buy anything. A consumerist attitude extends beyond actual goods and begins to view the entire world as consumable - the environment, animals, and even other people. Pornography is a good example of a consumerist attitude applied to people. It offers a one-sided presentation of intimacy and sexuality and suggests that these things can be obtained without involvement with, or regard for, the other person. The 1:1 relationship is dissolved and replaced by a fantasy and an object. People who admit to pornography addiction report that they constantly need new images to satisfy them and thus the pornography industry is always looking for new faces.
We can see this attitude all around us. Since World War II, our goods are increasingly made to be disposable. It is usually cheaper to buy a new television set or pair of shoes than to fix the old ones. We need ever larger and more elaborate houses. And every eighteen months our computers become obsolete. Our entire world is disposable and, tragically, this often includes people.
The elderly, the disabled, the ill are not valued in our society. They are the obsolete computers of the human race. Our children and youth often fall into this category as well. Anyone who does not have a "use" as dictated by the religion of consumerism is expendable.
In his book, Seeds of Peace, A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society, Sulak Sivaraksa discusses the devastating effects that the adoption of consumerism has had upon his native Thailand. "Young people define their identities through perfumes, jeans and jewelry. The primary measure of a person's life is how much money he or she has," he writes. "According to Buddhism, there are three poisons: greed, hatred and delusion. All three are manifestation of unhappiness, and the presence of one poison breeds more of the same. Capitalism and consumerism are driven by these three poisons. Our greed is cultivated from a young age. We are told that our desires will be satisfied by buying things, but, of course, consuming one thing just arouses us to want more. We all have seeds of greed within us, and consumerism encourages them to sprout and grow."
These are probably not new ideas. We've all heard the rampant consumerism of America decried. We all know that it takes a huge toll on the environment and natural resources as we consume huge quantities of oil, wood and other resources and pollute the environment to produce cheap, and often trivial, goods. We understand that this system encourages exploitation of people the world over as they toil in sweat shops to produce our goods. And many of us try to exercise some degree of control over how much we consume and we attempt to avoid products of companies who plunder resources and abuse workers. What I hope will be new is the idea that this way of being in the world is embedded so deeply in most of us (myself included) that it is almost a religion.
Emerson said: "a man bears beliefs as a tree bears apples." Working from this quote, James Luther Adams concluded that the set of beliefs each person bears signifies his faith. Adams felt that it was crucial that one's faith be examined, for when faith is examined, we are often surprised by what our true religion is. The answer may be different for each individual, but if we asked that question about the soul of our nation, I think that we would find that our nation's religion is consumerism.
Take a little time over the next week to examine your faith. What are you ultimately concerned about? How much is your life permeated by a consumerist attitude? I suspect if more of us recognized the degree to which consumerism is OUR religion, the less our world would be dominated by it.
Maybe choose mothers will still choose JIF and we'll still have room for JELL-O. But we will no longer approach consumer products as though any more were at stake than a little bit of peanut butter or some cherry flavored gelatin.
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