Getting and Spending

Note: I realize that to say anything positive about materialism risks criticism. I am aware of the broad animus directed against consumerist culture. Many have argued, as Herbert Marcuse said, that “people recognize themselves in their commodities” and “find their souls” in them, and, as a result, often, experience alienation and mental inertia. The following essay is offered simply as an exploration, an inquiry from a less condemnatory perspective. “There is,” says Leonard Cohen, “a crack in everything./That’s how the light gets in.

I never knew just how or when the sale was conducted and finalized. All I knew was that one day they began arriving. The twenty-four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica, bound in gold-printed brown leather. They were for my brother Dennis and me, Dad explained; to help us in school, and just to look through when we want to know about anything—and Dad emphasized the word “anything.” But they were not shelved in our bedroom; no, they were prominently displayed in the family-room bookcase, immediately visible to even the most casual entrant. Only later did I understand that, for Dad, possessing and displaying the most recent edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica announced to anyone entering the room his pride at having “made it,” his long and determined and, finally, successful rise from Depression-era poverty to comfortably middle-class status.

Undoubtedly, had that dour son of Norwegian immigrants, sociologist Thorstein Veblen, entered the family room, he would have said, “Ah ha; here’s an instance of conspicuous consumption. There, sitting on those shelves, Philistinism pronounces itself, the dialect of socioeconomic class speaking in its distinctive materialistic accent.” It’s true that the purchase, while making the Britannica conveniently accessible, was conspicuously unnecessary; the school and public libraries had several sets of encyclopedias, general and specialized. And it’s true that Dad conspicuously displayed the volumes. But I also think it’s true that any Veblenesque imputation that Dad had succumbed to conspicuous materialism would be incorrect: while purchasing and showcasing the Britannica may have been self-indulgent, it was hardly immoderate or profligate—a sign perhaps, of social standing, but certainly not a substitute for his love.

Indeed, I wonder why the concept of materialism carries the implacably negative connotation it does. Why, I wonder, is it considered such a profanation? Just what, exactly, is so wrong, so vulgar, about buying and consuming things? Is it really the degrading, stupefying idolatry it is made out to be?

Materialism, we are told, is our bogeyman, our gremlin, our ogre under the bridge, our failing, our sin. And sheepishly we assume a guilty posture, genuflect and beat our breasts before the withering accusation, and ask, as did the prisonkeeper in Philippi of Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved.” “Yes, yes,” we say; “it’s true, I like to shop, to buy things. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.” And having acknowledged our sensibility, having disavowed our participation, on we go, getting and spending, and we are deemed incurably acquisitive, possessed, supposedly, by the need to possess.

But consider: things always signify in excess of their purpose, always mean more than that for which they were designed. The philosopher of technology, Andrew Feenberg, distinguishes between the “functional rationality” of a thing, its “function or aim or outcome depending on its arrangement of parts,” and its “social meaning,” the sociocultural “context of its use: how it is understood, interpreted, its signifying component.” We create that “social meaning.” No value inheres in things except that which we give it. We make things mean. We have to. Procuring the means of making meaning is part of who and what we are. Paul Lawrence, Harvard professor of organizational behavior, identifies the “need to acquire” as an innate human drive. And Jeff Mason, writing in the blog Talking Philosophy, describes human beings as irrepressible meaning makers “who cannot help but create and then leave meanings on everything that pertains to a human world.”

And consider: do we not make that meaning to do what human beings have always done, what, perhaps, we have been evolutionarily driven to do—announce ourselves, narrate and perform ourselves, for someone, even if that someone is ourselves? Why else do we paint our houses and mow our lawns and participate in marches and demonstrations and vote and pray and attend PTA meetings and wear cheesehead hats and smile at strangers and hug our children and take them to Disney World? And given the quantum semantics of things, their multiplicity of meanings, are they not well suited to the task of narrating ourselves to the gazing world? Are they not emblems of our doing and being? Why assume we are duped by commercial interests, coerced and victimized by the stuff-makers and thing-producers? Could we not say they serve our interests, not we theirs? Have they not given us a means to express who we are, to utter wherein our conception of ourselves and our accomplishments lie?

Consider even this: could it be possible that the things we buy and consume can connect us? Historian Daniel Boorstin certainly thinks so, calling them “symbols which hold men (sic) together” rather than keep them apart. How often, I wonder, is the significance of our consumerism masked by the simplistic statistics of the what and how much? How much of what we buy is intended for another, to meet a desire or need, or to give a tangible token of care and concern and nurture, or simply to gladden? Could it not be said that in such instances consumerism has a moral function? Even Aquinas taught that things are good in themselves.

Surely, someone will say, materialism can be vulgar. Vulgarity, however, is a matter of taste, and matters of taste, in addition to being irresolvably disputable, continually change. The waltz was once considered vulgar. So was whole-wheat bread. So were Shakespeare and Chaucer. Perhaps it will be argued that the vulgarity lies in materialism’s excessive desire for things. Define “excessive.” Excessive compared to what? Would we, like Thoreau, winnow our needs to shelter, food, fuel, and clothing, and those to levels minimally utilitarian? Does excessive materialism consist in an endangering, not-to-be-denied compulsion to spend far beyond the arc of one’s means, perhaps in disregard for the financial health of one’s family? If so, I suggest that, at issue, is the deeper, medical or psychological problem of addiction for which materialism is a surface emblem only.

What does it matter, finally, whether Dad bought the Encyclopedia Britannica to demonstrate his commitment to education, his concern for my brother’s and my success in school, or his pride at having achieved middle-class status. Are they not of a piece? And even if not, why should the last reason be considered less worthy than the others? Do we still resonate to some Calvinistic need for self-abasement? Would we be some latter-day Simeon Stylites, perching on a pillar for 36 years, seeking sainthood for our asceticism, our self-renunciation? Would not such an act of self-display be stealth pride?

Thoreau urged us to “Simplify, simplify,” to “cultivate poverty like a garden herb,” should we wish to enter the chastely austere “higher laws” of the world of thought. There is a kind of nobility in that, perhaps; maybe even a kind of human flourishing, but, I think, only from a rather limited point of view. For most, poverty is not ennobling; it is punishingly caustic. And as for the realm of ideas, consider University of Florida professor James B. Twitchell’s take on our propensity for getting and spending: it’s not about consuming things so much as it is “about consuming meaning, about socializing, about dreaming.” I suspect even Thoreau would have to agree there is nothing shallow or demeaning in that.