The European Rationalist – In Reason We Trust

As a society we are further from turning off the porn than we have ever been. Pornography is everywhere – it masquerades as “gentlemen’s entertainment” in the form of clubs, it infiltrates advertising and there are even plans to send it to mobile phones. 

In the US, with the pornography industry bringing in up to $US15 billion (£8 billion) annually, people spend more on porn every year than they do on movie tickets and all the performing arts combined.

Each year, in Los Angeles alone, more than 10,000 hardcore pornographic films are made, against an annual Hollywood average of 400 movies.

Pornography is not only bigger business than ever before, it is also more acceptable, more fashionable, more of a statement of cool. From pieces “in praise of porn” in normally sober magazines, to Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton’s book, published last year, about making a porn film, to the news that Val Kilmer is to play the part of pornography actor John Holmes in a new mainstream movie, there is a widespread sense that anyone who suggests pornography might have any kind of adverse effect is laughably out of touch.

 

 

Coren and Skelton, former Erotic Review film critics, focus on their flip comic narrative, scarcely troubling themselves with any deeper issues. “In all our years of watching porn,” they write, in a rare moment of analysis that isn’t developed any further, “we have never properly resolved what we think about how, why and whether it is degrading to women. We suspect that it might be. We suspect that pornography might be degrading to everybody.”

With pornography, it seems as if the sheer scale of the phenomenon has, in time-honoured capitalist fashion, conferred its own respectability; as a result, serious analysis is hard to come by. Only occasionally is there broadcasting that gives any kind of insight.

The British documentary Hardcore, shown two years ago, told the story of Felicity, a single mother from Essex, England, who travelled to Los Angeles hoping to make a career in pornography.

 

Danni Ashe’s website is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Reuters

Arriving excited, and clear about what she would not do – anal sex, double-vaginal penetration – she ended up being coerced into playing a submissive role and agreeing to anal sex.

Felicity – the vicissitudes of whose own troubled relationship with her father were mirrored by the cruelty of the men with whom she ended up working – eventually escaped back to Britain.

Hardcore offered a rare, unadorned look at the inside of the industry, as did Pornography: The Musical, albeit in a more surreal form, with actors interrupting sex to break into song.

Yet what about the millions who consume pornography, the men – for they are, despite pornographers’ claims about growing numbers of female fans, mostly men – who habitually use it? How are they affected? Is pornography, as most these days claim, a harmless masturbatory diversion?

There are suggestions that a heavy diet of porn might encourage men inappropriately to expect sex. Is that true? And what about more profound effects? How does it affect relationships? Is it addictive?

Does it encourage rape, pedophilia, sexual murder? Surely tough questions need to be asked.

First, though, some definitions. According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the word “pornography” dates to 1864, when it described “the life, manners, etc of prostitutes or their patrons”.

More recently, it has come to signify material, in the words of Chambers, “intended to arouse sexual excitement”. Its most common themes, however, are power and submission. By contrast, “erotica”, which is pretty hard to find now, carries additional connotations of “amorousness” and is far less concerned with control and domination. No, it is pornography plain and simple, from venerable “wrist mags” such as Playboy, to the almost daily bombardment of teaser pornographic emails, that confronts all of us ceaselessly.

The received wisdom, pushed hard by mass-market magazines such as FHM, is that men derive a pretty uncomplicated enjoyment from pornography. That, certainly, is the argument put forward by such proponents as the British food writer A.A. Gill, who has directed his own pornographic film, and the musician Moby, who once said in an interview: “I like pornography – who doesn’t? I don’t really trust men who claim to not be interested in porn. We’re biologically programmed to respond to the sight of people having sex.”

Danny Plunkett, then features editor of Loaded, takes an equally relaxed view. “We know that a lot of people enjoy it and take it with a pinch of salt. We certainly don’t view it as dangerous.”

But is it as simple as this? One of my best friends is a man for whom pornography has apparently never held even the slimmest interest. Moby may choose to distrust him, but his sex life otherwise has always seemed to me perfectly robust. He is, however, so much in the minority as to seem almost an oddity.

For most men, at some point in their lives, pornography has held a strong appeal and, before any examination of its effects, this fact has to be addressed. Like many men, I first saw pornography during puberty. At boarding school, dog-eared copies of Mayfair and Knave magazines were stowed behind toilet cisterns; this borrow-and-return library system was considered absolutely normal, seldom commented upon and either never discovered by the masters or tacitly permitted. Long before my first sexual relationship, porn was my sex education.

No doubt (though we’d never have admitted it then) my friends and I were driven to use porn through loneliness: being away from home, we longed for love, closeness, unquestioning acceptance. The women over whom we masturbated – the surrogate mothers, if you like – seemed to be offering this but, of course, they were never going to provide it.

The untruths it taught me on top of this disappointment – that women are always available, that sex is about what a man can do to a woman – I am only now, more than two decades on, finally succeeding in unlearning.

From men everywhere come similar stories. Nick Samuels, 46, an electrical contractor – now, with a wife and four children, the very image of respectable fatherhood – says he first discovered the power of pornographic images at the age of 16, when he found a copy of Mayfair in his father’s garage. “I can even remember the picture. There was a woman walking topless past a building site and the builders were ogling her from the scaffolding. It was pretty soft stuff, but it heightened my senses and kicked off my interest in pornography. Before long, I was reading Whitehouse and then, through a friend at my squash club, I was introduced to hardcore videos.”

Si Jones, a 39-year-old north London vicar who regularly counsels men trying to “come off” pornography, admits that, for him, too, it was his introduction to sex. “As a teenager, I watched porn films with my friends at the weekend. It was just what you did. It was cool, naughty and everyone was doing it.” Set against today’s habit of solitary internet masturbation, Jones’s collegiate introduction to porn seems peculiarly sociable.

Today, boys no longer clandestinely circulate magazines after school; nor do they need to rummage through their father’s cupboards in search of titillating material. Access to internet pornography has never been easier, its users never younger, and the heaviest demand, according to research published in the New York Times, is for “‘deviant’ material including pedophilia, bondage, sadomasochism and sex acts with various animals”.

At its most basic level, pornography answers natural human curiosity. Adolescent boys want to know what sex is about and porn certainly demonstrates the mechanics. David Morgan, consultant clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Portman Clinic in London, which specialises in problems relating to sexuality and violence, describes this phase as “transitional, like a rehearsal for the real thing. The problem with pornography begins when, instead of being a temporary stop on the way to full sexual relations, it becomes a full-time place of residence”.

Morgan’s experience of counselling men addicted to porn has convinced him that “the more time you spend in this fantasy world, the more difficult it becomes to make the transition to reality. Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in. This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else”.

For most men, the way pornography objectifies sex strikes a visceral emotional chord. Psychotherapists Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon, in their book Raising Cain: Protecting The Emotional Life of Boys, suggest that objectification, for boys, starts early. “By adolescence, a boy wakes up most mornings with an erection. This can happen whether he is in a good or bad mood, whether it is a school day or a weekend . . . Boys enjoy their own physical gadgetry. But the feeling isn’t always, ‘Look what I can do!’ The feeling is often, ‘Look what it can do!’ – again, a reflection of the way a boy views his instrument of sexuality as just that: an object.

“What people might not realise when they justly criticise men for objectifying sex – viewing sex as something you do, rather than part of a relationship – is that the first experience of objectification of sexuality in a boy’s life comes from his experience of his own body, having this penis that makes its own demands.”

But the roots go back further still. Research has shown that boy babies are treated more harshly than their female counterparts and, as they grow up, boys are taught that success is achieved through competition. In order to deal with this harsh masculine world, boys can learn not to trust their own feelings and not to express their emotions. They become suspicious of other men, with whom they’re in competition, after all, and as a result they often feel lonely and isolated.

Yet men, as much as women, hunger for intimacy. For many males, locked into a life in which self-esteem has grown intrinsically entwined with performance, sex assumes an almost unsustainable freight of demands and needs. Not only does the act itself become almost the only means through which many men can feel intimate and close, but it is also the way in which they find validation. And sex itself, of course, cannot possibly satisfy such demands.

It is into this troubled scenario that porn finds such easy access. For in pornography, unlike in real life, there is no criticism, real or imagined, of male performance. Women are always, in the words of the average internet site, “hot and ready”, eager to please. In real life, by contrast, men find women are anything but: they have higher job status, they demand that they be sexually satisfied, and they are increasingly opting to combine career and motherhood.

Men, say psychologists, also feel threatened by the “emotional power” they perceive women wielding over them. Unable to feel alive except when in relationships with women, they are at the same time painfully aware that their only salvation from isolation comes in being sexually acceptable to women.

This sense of neediness can provoke intense anger that, all too often, finds expression in porn. Unlike real life, the pornographic world is a place in which men find their authority unchallenged and in which women are their willing, even grateful servants. “The illusion is created,” as one male writer on pornography puts it, “that women are really in their rightful place and that there is, after all, no real and serious challenge to male authority.”

Seen in this light, the patently ridiculous pornography scenario of the pretty female apartment-hunter (or hitch-hiker, driver with broken-down car, or any number of similar such vulnerable roles) who is happy to let herself be gang-banged by a group of overweight, hairy-shouldered couch potatoes makes perfect psychological sense.

The porn industry, of course, dismisses such talk, yet occasionally comes a glimmer of authenticity. Bill Margold, one of the industry’s longest-serving film performers, was interviewed in 1991 by psychoanalyst Robert Stoller for his book Porn: Myths for the Twentieth Century. Margold made no attempt to gloss over the realities. “My whole reason for being in this industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don’t care much for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldn’t have when they were growing up. So we brutalise a woman sexually; we’re getting even for lost dreams.”

As well as “eroticising male supremacy”, in the words of anti-porn campaigner John Stoltenberg, pornography also attempts to assuage other male fears, in particular that of erection failure. According to psychoanalytical thinking, pornography answers men’s fetishistic need for visual proof of phallic potency. Lynne Segal, professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, writes: “Men’s specific fears of impotence, feeding off infantile castration anxiety, generate hostility towards women. Through pornography, real women can be avoided, male anxiety soothed and delusions of phallic prowess indulged, by intimations of the rock-hard, larger-than-life male organ.”

Pornography, in other words, is a lie. It peddles falsehoods about men, women and human relationships. In the name of titillation, it seduces vulnerable, lonely men – and a small number of women – with the promise of intimacy, and delivers only a transitory masturbatory fix.

Increasingly, though, men are starting to be open about the effect pornography has had upon them. David McLeod, a marketing executive, explains the cycle. “I’m drawn to porn when I’m lonely, particularly when I’m single and sexually frustrated. But I can easily get disgusted with myself. After watching a video two or three times, I’ll throw it away and vow never to watch another again. But my resolve never lasts very long.”

He has, he says, “seen pretty much everything. But once you start going down that slope, you get very quickly jaded”.

Like many men, McLeod is torn. Quick to claim that porn has “no harmful effects”, he is also happy to acknowledge the contradictory fact that it is “deadening”. Andy Philips, a Leeds art dealer and, at 38, a father for the first time, says there have been times when he has been “a very heavy user”. His initial reaction, like that of many of the men to whom I spoke, is studiedly jokey: “I love porn.” Yet, as he grows more contemplative, he admits: “I’ve always used it secretly, never as part of a relationship. It’s always been like the other woman on the side. It’s something to do with being naughty, I guess.”

Again and again, despite now being married, he is drawn back. “You can easily get too much of it. It’s deadening, nullifying, gratuitous, unsatisfying. At one point I was single for three years and I used a lot of porn then. After a while, it made me feel worse. I’d feel disgusted with myself and have a huge purge.”

Extended exposure to pornography can have a raft of effects. By the time Nick Samuels had reached his mid-20s, it was altering his view of what he wanted from a sexual relationship. “I used to watch porn with one of my girlfriends, and I started to want to try things I’d seen in the films: anal sex, or threesomes.” Sometimes, he says, this was OK – “she was an easygoing person”. At other times, “it shocked her”.

Married for 15 years, he admits he has carried the same sexual expectations into the marital bedroom. “There’s been real friction over this; my wife simply isn’t that kind of person. And it’s only now, after all these years, that I’m beginning to move on from it. Porn is like alcoholism; it clings to you like a leech.”

Psychoanalyst Estela Welldon, author of the classic text Mother, Madonna, Whore, has treated couples for whom such scenarios spiralled out of control. “A lot of men involve their partners in the use of porn. Typically, they will say, ‘Don’t you want a better sex life?’ I have seen cases in which first the woman has been subjected to porn and then they have used their own children for pornographic purposes.”

When couples use porn together – a growing trend, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by – there is, says Welldon, “an illusory sense that they are getting closer together. Then they film themselves having sex and feel outside themselves. This dehumanising aspect is an important part of pornography. It dehumanises the other person, the relationship, and any intimacy”.

Even when in a loving sexual relationship, men who have used porn say that, all too often, they see their partner through a kind of “pornographic filter”. This effect is summed up eloquently by US sociologist Harry Brod, in Segal’s essay Sweet Sorrows, Painful Pleasures: “There have been too many times when I have guiltily resorted to impersonal fantasy because the genuine love I felt for a woman wasn’t enough to convert feelings into performance. And in those sorry, secret moments, I have resented deeply my lifelong indoctrination into the aesthetic of the centrefold.”

Running like a watermark through all pornography use, according to Morgan at the Portman Clinic, is the desire for control. This need, he says, has its roots in early childhood. “A typical example might be a boy with fairly absent parents, either in emotional terms or in actual fact.” The boy, wishing his parents were more present – more within his control, as it were – can grow up wishing “to find something over which he can have control. Pornography fills that space”.

But the user of pornography is also psychologically on the run, Welldon adds. “People who use pornography feel dead inside, and they are trying to avoid being aware of that pain. There is a sense of liberation, which is temporary: that’s why pornography is so repetitive – you have to go back again and again.”

Lost in a world of pornographic fantasy, men can become less inclined, as well as increasingly less able, to form lasting relationships. In part, this is due to the underlying message of pornography. Ray Wyre, a specialist in sexual crime, says pornography “encourages transience, experimentation and moving between partners”.

Morgan goes further: “Pornography does damage,” he says, “because it encourages people to make their home in shallow relationships.”

Jan Woolf believes it might also prevent a relationship getting started. A former special needs teacher, she lasted only six months as a film censor in 2001. During this time, she watched hundreds of hours of hardcore videos. At the time, she was single. “If I’d been in the early stages of a relationship, it would have been very difficult, because I’d have been watching what I might have been expected to be doing, except it would never have been like that.” She left the job because the porn was starting to make her feel “depressed – I wanted my lively mind back”.

The more powerful the sense of pre-existing internal distress, the more compelling becomes the pull towards pornography. For John-Paul Day, a 50-year-old Edinburgh architect in his first “non-addictive” sexual relationship, the experience of being a small boy with a dying mother drove him to seek solace in masturbation. He says he has been “addicted” to pornography his entire adult life. “The thing about it is that, unlike real life, it is incredibly safe,” Day says. “I’m frightened of real sex, which is unscripted and unpredictable. And so I engage in pornography, which is totally under my control. But, of course, it also brings intense disappointment, precisely because it is not what I’m really searching for. It’s rather like a hungry person standing outside the window of a restaurant, thinking that they’re going to get fed.”

Day, who has attended meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous for 12 years, says, “pornography is central to my own sex addiction in as much as sex addiction has to do with the use of fantasy as a way of escaping from reality. Even in my fantasies about ‘real’ people, I am really transforming them into pieces of walking pornography. It is not the reality of who they are that I focus on, but the fantasy I project on to them”.

Like drugs and drink, pornography – as Day has realised – is an addictive substance. Porn actor Kelly Cooke, one of the stars of Pornography: the Musical, says this applies on either side of the camera. “It got to the point where I considered having sex the way most people consider getting a hamburger. But when you try to give it up – that’s when you realise how addictive it is, both for consumers and performers. It’s a class A drug, and it’s hell coming off it.”

The cycle of addiction leads one way – towards ever harder material. Morgan believes “all pornography ends up with S&M (sadomasochism)”. The infamous Carnegie Mellon study of porn on the internet found that images of hardcore sex were in far less demand than more extreme material. Images of women engaging in acts of bestiality were hugely popular.

The mechanics of the pornographic search – craving, discovery of the “right” image, masturbation, relief – makes it, says Morgan, work like “a sort of drug, an antidepressant”.

The myth about porn, as a witness told the 1983 Minneapolis City Council public hearings on it, is that “it frees the libido and gives men an outlet for sexual expression. This is truly a myth. I have found pornography not only does not liberate men, but on the contrary is a source of bondage. Men masturbate to pornography only to become addicted to the fantasy. There is no liberation for men in pornography. (It) becomes a source of addiction, much like alcohol. There is no temporary relief. It is mood-altering. And reinforcing, ie, ‘you want more’ because ‘you got relief’. It is this reinforcing characteristic that leads men to want the experience they have in pornographic fantasy to happen in real life”.

In its most severe form, this can lead to sexual crime, though the links between the two remain controversial and much argued-over. Wyre, from his work with sex offenders, says: “It is impossible not to believe pornography plays a part in sexual violence. As we constantly confront sex offenders about their behaviour, they display a wide range of distorted views that they then use to excuse their behaviour, justify their actions, blame the victim and minimise the effect of their offending. They seek to make their own behaviour seem normal, and interpret the behaviour of the victim as consent, rather than a survival strategy. Pornography legitimises these views.”

One of the most extreme examples of this is Ted Bundy, the US serial sexual murderer executed for his crimes in January 1989. The night before his death, he explained his addiction to pornography in a radio interview: “It happened in stages, gradually . . . My experience with . . . pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality is that, once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction, I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder, harder, something which gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far . . . It reaches that jumping-off point where you begin to wonder if, maybe, actually doing it will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at it.”

Bundy, as damaged as he was, stopped short of blaming pornography for his actions, though it was, he believed, an intrinsic part of the picture. “I tell you that I am not blaming pornography . . . I take full responsibility for whatever I’ve done and all the things I’ve done . . . I don’t want to infer that I was some helpless kind of victim. And yet we’re talking about an influence that is the influence of violent types of media and violent pornography, which was an indispensable link in the chain . . . of events that led to behaviours, to the assaults, to the murders.” In the understated words of Wyre: “The very least pornography does is make sexism sexy.”

The average man, of course, whatever his consumption of pornography, is no Bundy. Yet for those who have become addicted, the road to a pornography-free life can be long and arduous. Si Jones advises accountability. “Make your computer accountable, let other people check what you’ve been looking at.”

And the alternative to pornography, says Morgan, isn’t always easy. “Relationships are difficult. Intimacy, having a good relationship, loving your children, involves work. Pornography is fantasy in the place of reality. But it is just that: fantasy. Pornography is not real and the only thing human beings get nourishment from is reality: real relationships. And, anyway, what do you want to say when you get to the end of your life? That you wish you’d spent more time (masturbating) on the internet? I hardly think so.”

Guardian

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Religion is a societal entity that has subsisted since the earliest record of man’s existence. There are a multitude of religions as well as varying degrees of faith. Many religious convictions are based on spiritual knowledge or simple belief. However, science often searches for physical and mechanical understanding of knowledge. There are many issues in which science and religion clash. These issues range from the beginning of life, evolution versus creationism, to the idea of existence after death. As the advancement of science continues, physical explanations for life’s occurrences are presented. Do these explanations disprove religious accounts? Will science eventually disprove religion and render it useless? This question is analyzed in the occurrences of Near Death Experiences (NDE’s).

An NDE is defined as “a lucid experience associated with perceived consciousness apart from the body occurring at the time of actual or threatened imminent death (1).” Death is the final, irreversible end (2). It is the permanent termination of all vital functions. The occurrence of an NDE is not a rarity. Throughout time and from across the globe NDE’s have been described by many, and in these accounts there are several similarities among them. The commonalities of an NDE include a feeling of peace and connection with the universe, a sense of release from the body (often called an Out of Body Experience or OBE), a movement down a dark tunnel, the vision of a bright light, and the vision of deities or other people from their lives (2). Not every NDE contains each of these events, these are merely the most common similar events described. An NDE can range in magnitude from having all of these events occur to having none of them occur (2). There are two theories explaining the similarities among NDE’s. The scientific explanation describes a situation in which a mixture of effects due to expectation, administered drugs, endorphins, anoxia, hypercarbia, and temporal lobe stimulation create a unified core experience (3). The religious explanation claims that they are a glimpse of existence after death. The unified core experience is due to there being a destination after the body dies with a similar path for all. These two theories debate whether an NDE is simply the neural activity preparing the body for death or a preview of the beyond. To further understand the occurrences of an NDE neurobiological research has believed to have mapped the neural activity of an NDE.

The most common similarity of NDE’s is the feeling of peace, tranquility, spirituality, and oneness with all (3). This occurrence has been discovered to be associated with the release of endorphins as well as reactions between the right and left superior parietal lobe (4) (5). The right portion of this area of the brain is known to be responsible for the sense of physical space and body awareness. It is responsible for orienting the body. The left portion of the parietal lobe is responsible for the awareness of the self. During an NDE neural activity in these areas shuts down. The result of this is an inability for the mind to have distinction between the self and non-self. All of space, time, and self becomes one (4) (5). Essentially one feels as being the infinite, rather than part of the infinite because there is no realization of self. However, other aspects of the brain are still functioning and thoughts are occurring. These other thoughts are believed to be associated with the visions perceived (4). If a persons thoughts are focused on a deity or personal relation, without the ability to comprehend self, time, and space, the person may in fact see an image of that focused thought because visual neurons are still intact. It is the relation of neural inactivity in the parietal lobe combined with other activities within the human brain that are responsible for most aspects of an NDE (2) (3) (4).

The understanding of neural relationships during NDE’s has culminated in the ability to reproduce each phenomena in a controlled setting. It has been found that the intravenous administration of 50-100 mg of ketamine can safely reproduce all features of an NDE (2) and electrical stimulation of the right angular gyrus portion of the brain can safely reproduce an out of body experience (6). Scientific research has even explained why religion is emphasized during an NDE. Activation in the temporal lobe region, known as the “God Spot (7)” during an NDE is reported to stimulate religious themed thoughts (8). This research has major implications in the battle of science versus religion. It provides evidence that specific brain activity can create the perception of religion and divinity. If this is true than this brain activity can be turned off and in effect remove religion from our lives. Many wars would be stopped, borders would open up, life as we know it would change completely. However, there are many faults to this theory. The major error in the idea that understanding the mechanical brain activity of NDE’s and religion makes them useless is the assumption that the experience only exists within the brain. Begley (5) uses an example of apple pie to illustrate this point. Upon the site of a pie, the neural activity linking site, smell, memory, and emotion can all be mapped quite clearly. However, this mapping of activity does not disprove the existence of the pie. This is the precise reason the existence of God or any other religious deity or beliefs cannot be disproved. It is just as simple to believe that viewing the mechanics of the brain during an NDE or religious experience is like getting a glimpse of the tool or hardware used to experience religion (9). However, this does not prove the existence of a God, or any other belief, either. It is the principle that understanding the neurobiological mechanics of religion cannot disprove or prove the existence of God, religion, or spirituality that makes it improbable that science will eliminate religion.

Believing that science will eventually do away with religion wrongly assumes that knowledge of the mechanics of the brain and universe are capable of eradicating the importance of religion to humankind. Religion is present in society for a plethora of reasons branching far beyond the mere belief in an existence of a God. The multitude of religions, deities, and even atheism is evidence of this. Among many, the reasons for religion include fear, comfort, stability, and tradition. The NDE provides an excellent example of one of the importance’s of religion, the existence of life after death. Existence after death refutes the idea that we are simply organic material organized in a certain fashion with a certain time span of functionality. The religious belief than an DNE is a glimpse of our existence beyond life is valuable for peoples behavior in life, not just as evidence of a theory. In very few NDE’s do negative feelings occur. People often describe a “heavenly” light rather than a hell (1) (10) . This may be because of the power of suggestion (3) in that it is a common societal belief that when a person dies they are supposed to see a tunnel, a light, an angel, and heaven. So when an NDE occurs, this is what the person sees because it follows their thought process. Not many people believe that when they die they are going to go to hell. The idea of existence of a better place after death comforts and eases the pain of many who suffer in life. It can provide them with hope through troubling time whether they believe in Jesus, Buddha, Elijah, or no God at all. Religion is a tool of mankind to sustain a belief. The reasons for that belief vary among people and religions but the importance is in believing. Having a belief can instill a sense of pride, confidence, comfort, strength, and much more in a person. A single belief can provide a purpose for life. The actual beliefs of each religion are only important to the individual. However, the idea of belief itself is important to the foundations of religion. The importance of religion to mankind makes it improbable society will ever allow scientific understanding to overrule religion. Science may disprove religious stories such as Moses’ parting of the red sea, but the importance of religion goes beyond the stories. Religion is indispensable because it is a belief. For this reason science is incapable of eliminating religion.

 
References
1)Near-Death Experience, Religion, and Spirituality, a religion and spirituality article related to NDE’s
2)Ketamine Model of the NDE, Drug induced replication of the NDE
3) Blackmore, Susan. “Near Death Experiences,” Royal society of Medicine. Vol. 89. February 1996, pp. 73-76.
4)Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, Excerpts from the author
5) Begley, Sharon. Religion and the Brain. Newsweek, May 7, 2001, p. 50.
6) Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., Seeck, M. Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions,” Nature. Vol. 419. September 19, 2002. pp. 269-270.
7)God on the Brain, An article on the cross between neurobiology and faith
8)Meridian Institute, Transformational experiences
9)Tracing the Synapses of our Spirituality, Examination of brain and religion
10)Susan Blackmore Home Page, Experiences of Anoxia

 

Can Science Replace Religion? Analyzing the Neurobiology and Neurotheology of the Near Death Experience, Bradley Corr

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Over the next few weeks we’ll look at political systems and ideologies. This should enable the reader to better understand the democracies we live. We’ll start off with the basics and then move on to special interest groups and the sensitive issues surrounding corruption of various political systems, including our own.  

What is Politics?

Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions. It is the authoritative allocation of values. Although the term is generally applied to behavior within governments, politics is observed in all human group interactions, including corporate, academic, and religious institutions.

In its most basic form, politics consists of “social relations involving authority or power”. In practice, the term refers to the regulation and government of a nation-state or other political unit, and to the methods and tactics used to formulate and apply government policy.

In a broader sense, any situation involving power, or any maneouvring in order to enhance one’s power or status within a group, may be described as politics (e.g. office politics). This form of politics “is most associated with a struggle for ascendancy among groups having different priorities and power relations.”

Political science (also political studies) is the study of political behavior and examines the acquisition and application of power. Related areas of study include political philosophy, which seeks a rationale for politics and an ethic of public behavior, and public administration, which examines the practices of governance.

Why Study Political Ideologies?

The answer to this question is quite simple. Students of politics are concerned about and interested in the various principles of that intellectual discipline. It may never be known conclusively whether humans alone are capable of formulating and then utilizing abstract ideas to govern their behavior. None can dispute however that ideas about politics constitute a most important element in that realm.

Nelson Mandella, imprisoned for twenty years for his advocacy of racial equality in South Africa, was possessed of an idea about politics. The leader of the 1979 Revolution in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, planned for years during his exile near Paris, to return to his homeland with a plan of purification and change to a pure Islamic state. College students joining together in a march to protest college policies regarding ROTC programs have some motivating idea behind their actions.

While ideas are not in and of themselves ideologies, they are part of the raw material needed to produce a full fledged ideology. As will be seen below ideologies have special qualities that set them apart from other political entities. When combined with other factors such as effective leadership, persuasive rationale’, timely development, and popular appeal political ideology goes a considerable distance in the direction of comprehending things political. Nature of Political Ideologies Ideas have been called “immaculate perceptions” of an imperfect reality. This may also be applicable to the concept of political ideologies.

At least from the time of Classical Greece to the present thoughtful individuals have attempted to devise concepts regarding the nature of politics. These ideas have concerned political reality as it is perceived (descriptive observations), as it ought to be (normative observations), and some have gone so far as to suggest methods for altering reality in order to achieve the desired goal (prescriptive observations). Aristotle attempted to describe the political structures that existed in his era by constructing a trichotomy of types with two variations of each:

1. Rule by the Few – aristocracy /oligarchy
2. Rule by the Many – polity/democracy
3. Rule by One – monarchy/tyranny.

This rudimentary but astute design constitutes a set of concepts regarding politics but falls short of what is termed “ideology.”

Whereas ideas about politics may range from the simple to the extraordinarily complex, ideologies occupy a special niche of these “immaculate perceptions.” At their very core ideologies offer a means to understand, explain and to change political reality. There are, in other words, descriptive, prescriptive, and normative elements in political ideologies.

Sometimes hidden within these elements are assumptions about the fundamental nature of human beings, their proper relationship to one another, the ultimate destiny and purpose of life itself, man kind’s place in the grand scheme of things, the existence of principles of justice beyond those created by man, and in general stated or unstated presumptions of a most basic nature. Discovering, analyzing and challenging these elements of ideologies will enable the thoughtful student an opportunity to discover within him/her self values and beliefs that were theretofore only dimly realized.

Of equal importance is the developed ability to thoughtfully critique ideologies that otherwise might go by the wayside without being understood correctly. Characteristics of Political Ideologies Political ideologies have a number of characteristics that distinguish them from other related concepts. At the outset they constitute a rather comprehensive set of interrelated views on the nature of politics both as it is and as it should be.

As with most, if not all, human concepts, ideologies are derived from perceptions about reality and quite often from opinions about perceived problems in the human condition. It is perhaps in the nature of a significant number of human beings to be continuously dissatisfied with existent conditions. For some the answers to noted injustices lie in the relationship of mankind to God or to some other entity larger than ourselves. For others the faults are found not in the stars but in ourselves. These are the ones who may then devise political ideologies.

Frequently an ideology is initially the product of a single individual working in splendid isolation. Perhaps the best known if not a perfect example of this would be Karl Marx working for years in the archives of the London Museum. His observations led him to the conclusion that great injustices (and ultimately historical imbalances) existed that were inevitably doomed to destruction by the inexorable forces present in human society, particularly found in the process called dialectic materialism and economic determinism. Seldom, it seems, are ideologies initially produced as a consequence of group effort. It must be recognized however that the product of one person’s thoughtful reflections on the political dimensions of the human condition necessarily encompass and build on the work of preceding commentators.

Marx’s debt to the Hegelian dialectic is widely recognized. Hegel’s own intellectual advancements were based in considerable measure on traditions of Aristotelianism present in German intellectual traditions for centuries.

The second characteristic of political ideologies has already been suggested: they are produced by intellectual elites. Only those individuals with the necessary interests and skills (intellectual and communicative) are capable of devising comprehensive analyses of politics. Although any particular ideology may be modified and more completely developed with the involvement of many people over considerable periods of time, there is more often than not a single individual who may be correctly viewed as the founder if not the ultimate creator of that ideology.

Invariably the ideas of this creative individual are published in some form and disseminated among other potentially sympathetic individuals. On occasion, such as in the development of Nazism, rhetorical development may precede written elaboration. Adolph Hitler did not put on paper his hate filled views until some four years after the Nazi party had commenced its campaign to achieve power in post-World War I Germany. Dissemination and propagation of the ideology among the mass population constitutes a most important third element in political ideologies, at least of those that become forces in the world.

As long as an ideology remains only of interest to a very few intellectuals, it is unlikely to become an agent of great change in society. At this point an ideology becomes attached to what may be called a “movement.” Movements in politics by definition involve large numbers of people. These numbers seldom constitute a majority of the adult population but may involve millions of people at one time or another.

Feminism, as an example, is viewed by some as an ideology and by others as a movement. It may also be seen as an amalgam of each. It should be noted however that there have been instances when a social theory that had political implications became accepted by both political and intellectual elites but had no wide spread public following nevertheless produced important governmental policies For example, what was termed “Social Darwinism” did in the United States have very significant policy implications for the United States Supreme Court in a variety of its decisions in the latter part of the 19th Century. Despite the fact that “Social Darwinism” was never propagated widely among any large numbers of people and certainly did not become a “movement” it did provide intellectual justification for a “hands off” or laissez faire array of policies of United States governments.

Contrary to popular belief political ideologies are not fixed or static but are subject to changes, sometimes of a fundamental nature. “Revisionism” may be viewed as a curse by purists or as necessary refinements by those recognizing the imperfections in the original idea. Changes may be resultant from reasoned critiques of the initial set of concepts or they may flow from the clash of the initial concepts with a reality that simply cannot be reconciled with the ideology.

Lenin, for example, was forced by the reality of the continuation of the capitalistic states to devise the theory of imperialism as the final stage of capitalism. This “modification” of Marx was an attempt to explain why the initial predictions of continuing accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and increasingly intolerable poverty for the workers did not come about in the manner that Marx indicated. Similarly Mao Zedong found it imperative to adapt Marx to the special conditions in China in order to utilize communist ideology in that setting. A fifth trait of ideologies concerns their susceptibility to oversimplification and distortion.

Political concepts often times are quite complex and require, if they are to be understood thoroughly, extensive study, thoughtful qualifications, limited application, time frame containment and a host of other delimiters. For those who wish to use the ideology as a vehicle to obtain change in politics and society these “fine points” may be impediments to obtaining popular support. In the name of political expediency slogans may replace concepts, rallying cries may drown out qualifications, and what emerges is far from the essence of the original set of ideas.

This distortion of the original ideology brings forth the final characteristic needing elaboration. This concerns the relationship of ideology to the political movement that frequently develops as a consequence of the ideology itself. This extension of an ideology into the realm of political action gives a whole new dimension to the original set of concepts. At this point the ideology becomes a powerful motivator of individual and group behavior. The oversimplifications and distortions mentioned above enable movement leaders to develop emotional appeal for the goals of the ideology. This emotional commitment on the part of members of the movement is a powerful force of change in the world of politics.

Eric Hoffer, in his eminently readable and insightful book THE TRUE BELIEVER spot lighted how belief in a cause may produce one of the most formidable and elemental powers in human affairs: the fanatic. Such “true believers” in the cause, in the movement, in the ideas have no reason whatsoever to leave undone anything that would produce the desired end. Their property, their very lives (and those of anyone else) are all of secondary importance to the CAUSE.

The role of leadership is critical in this phase of the transformation of an ideology into a movement. Often the individual or individuals who were responsible for the ideology find themselves supplanted by firebrands, organizers, and spellbinding speakers who pay lip service to the founders but care little for the ratio decidendi in the concepts so dear to those who made the initial intellectual contributions. Lenin is reported to have once asserted that what communism meant for the Soviet Union was a means to rapid industrialization and its attending political/military/economic power. It has been noted with probable accuracy that Marx would have been surprised and possibly appalled at the manner in which his concepts of Communism had been implemented by Lenin, Stalin, the Khimer Rouge and other individuals and groups claiming the mantle of Communist.

The characteristics of political ideologies may be summarized by noting their following traits. They are:

1. a coherent set of views on politics
2. produced by intellectual elites 
3. dissemination among the mass population
4. subject to alteration 
5. susceptible to distortion and oversimplification
6. powerful motivators of human behavior
7. manipulated by political movement leaders

Having now examined some of the more important aspects of political ideologies in general, a review of selected examples is in order. Those chosen here represent the primary ideological developments in the political realm but by no means constitute the whole of the spectrum. First there will be considered what have traditionally been referred to as “moderate” ideologies. Following this will be the more “extreme” varieties and then an overview of unfolding political viewpoints that may evolve into full blown ideologies.

INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES, Dr. Jim L. Riley

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Any consideration of consumer society has to begin with recognizing its enormous success, including the exponential expansion of the middle-class and the extension of ma ss-produced cultural products in global markets. Yet despite its practical success, consumer society, and the market economy that makes it possible, has never been without its critics. The paradox here is that an economic system dedicated to fulfilling desire still generates substantial dissatisfaction, even from those who benefit the most from this system.Modern critiques of consumerism and the mass media can be found in the recent popular movie The Truman Show (1998) and Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939). Both these works express, in very different ways, the cultural anxieties created by consumer society. But while The Day of the Locust offers us valuable insights into the problems posed by mass culture, The Truman Show gives a mythic perspective that fundamentally distorts our modern situation. I present here an anthropological analysis of consumer culture that will reveal the limitations of the neo-Marxist critique of consumerism expressed in The Truman Show. The Day of the Locust, on the other hand, poses the more serious question of whether consumer society is capable of containing the violent resentments that it generates, a question which the second half of this essay will consider at more length.

1. The Truman Show

While Marx criticized capitalism as an impersonal machine that consumes labor and then discards workers, the more recent criticism is that consumers are manipulated by huge corporations into buying an endless stream of trivial products that must be soon discarded when the next hyped item for consumption arrives. In this view, the freedom and prosperity we enjoy, incredible by almost any historical standard, are illusory, for we remain enslaved to multi-national corporations.

While Marx criticized capitalism as an impersonal machine that consumes labor and then discards workers, the more recent criticism is that consumers are manipulated by huge corporations into buying an endless stream of trivial products that must be soon discarded when the next hyped item for consumption arrives. In this view, the freedom and prosperity we enjoy, incredible by almost any historical standard, are illusory, for we remain enslaved to multi-national corporations.This critique of consumer society finds its paradigmatic allegorical expression in the popular movie The Truman Show. The main character, Truman Burbank, played by Jim Cary, lives literally in a giant bubble, a climate-controlled dome where every moment of his life in secretly filmed and broadcast as a reality show to a world-wide audience. Life in the bubble appears to Truman as free but is actually governed by the show’s producer Christof. Truman’s day-to-day life is in reality a series of advertisements: his friends and family (all actors of course) are constantly touting the benefits of various consumer products to the show’s audience while they simultaneously play their roles in Truman’s life. Truman believes that his desires are freely chosen, but in fact they are scripted, predetermined by the producer, including his choice of wife, career, friends, and so on. We find out, through a series of flashbacks, that as a teenager he met a woman Lauren who offers him the possibility of true love, but because she has not been scripted as his future wife, she is whisked off the show despite anything they can do. A more conventionally beautiful blonde named Meryl is chosen as his wife, but she only pretends to love him.

The movie portrays Truman’s discovery that a world outside his bubble exists, a world which the movie suggests is more authentic or “real,” free from the manipulations of Christof, the show’s producer, whose name suggests the biblical Antichrist. If Truman could only get outside the bubble, outside the mimetic manipulation of Christof, he could desire authentically, find his true love, and live a real, unmediated life. The movie ends with Truman leaving the dome, refusing the safe yet empty fantasy world offered by the producer.

The Truman Show is a modern Pilgrim’s Progress.  In John Bunyan’s classic allegory, Christian, an everyman, discovers with the help of the Bible that he lives in the “City of Destruction” and is accordingly doomed. He must leave his friends and family and set out on the pilgrim pathway, where he encounters various obstacles, temptations, and setbacks. He perseveres, however, and finally arrives at the Heavenly City. The book ends with him crossing the “River of Death” and entering heaven. Likewise, Truman lives in a fool’s paradise until he discovers that his life is a mere sham. He sets out to leave his friends and family and encounters various obstacles; but he perseveres, and the movie ends with him stepping outside the dome to a brave new world of unmediated desire.The movie has been universally interpreted as an allegory of the sinister influence of the media upon our lives. According to a website devoted to the movie, “It is a story that reveals an essential truth about what is happening to society in the 20 century, . . . [i.e.] how the media and corporations have begun to surround us with a universe of illusions” (Sanes). In this reading, Truman Burbank is an everyman, a “true man,” analogous to each one of us. As the website puts it,

 

Thus does the movie offer us a metaphor for our own situation. The fake landscape Truman lives in is our own media landscape in which news, politics, advertising and public affairs are increasingly made up of theatrical illusions. Like our media landscape, it is convincing in its realism, with lifelike simulations and story lines, from the high-tech facsimile of a sun that benevolently beams down on Truman to the mock sincerity of the actor he mistakenly believes is his best friend. (Sanes)

In this allegory, “the producer-director of this stage-set world, who blocks Truman’s effort to escape, is the giant media companies, news organizations, and media politicians that have a stake in keeping us surrounded by falsehood, and are prepared to lure us with rewards as they block efforts at reforming the system” (Sanes).If the movie is criticized at all, it is for being insufficiently radical in its critique of the mass media. René Girard’s theory of mediated desire, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. Truman thinks his desires are his own, but he discovers that in fact they are all mediated by his mimetic rival, Christof, the show’s producer, who is mythically demonized as virtually all powerful and evil, a tempter figure comparable to Milton’s Satan. (When Truman tries to escape the dome by boat, Christof ruthlessly risks Truman’s life in a terrible storm which almost drowns him.) René Girard, in his seminal theory of mediated desire, argues that human desire (as distinct from mere appetite) is essentially imitative; that which we hold most private and personal, our desires, are not really our own: we imitate the desires of others. Put crudely, we want what others want, because they want it. Rather than a spontaneous expression of selfhood, desire is mediated by the model. The mediation of desire, however, remains generally unconscious; the stubbornly held belief that our desires are our own, and that the desired object or person is the key to our transcendent happiness, is what Girard call the mensonge romantique, the romantic lie or illusion. In Eric Gans’s analysis of this relationship, the repression of the mediation of desire is the origin of the so-called Freudian unconscious, not some repressed “event or fact” (Signs of Paradox 124). Rather than expressing our deeply held needs and wants, desire actually reflects our competitive and conflictual relationship with others; for this reason, desire is never really satisfied, as our mimetic relationship with others is an on-going given of our condition as social animals. Desire leads to conflict with the other, because the self and model both desire exclusive possession of the same object. Girard characterizes the desiring subject as the “disciple” and the mediator as the “model.” Describing the ambivalent relationship between disciple and model, he writes, 

 

 

 

The impulse toward the [desired] object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator; in internal mediation [i.e., the mediator belongs to same group or social sphere as the subject] this impulse is checked by the mediator himself since he desires, or perhaps possesses the object. Fascinated by his model, the disciple inevitable sees, in the mechanical obstacle which he puts in his way, proof of the ill will borne him. Far from declaring himself a faithful vassal, he thinks only of repudiating the bonds of mediation. But these bonds are stronger than ever, for the mediator’s apparent hostility does not diminish his prestige but instead augments it. . . . The subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model-the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice. This is the passion we call hatred.Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred. The person who hates first hates himself for the secret admiration concealed by his hatred. In an effort to hide this desperate admiration from others, and from himself, he no longer wants to see in his mediator anything but an obstacle. The secondary role of the mediator thus becomes primary, concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated. 

 

Now the mediator is a shrewd and diabolical enemy; he tries to rob the subject of his most prized possessions; he obstinately thwarts his most legitimate ambitions. (10-11)

 

 

Since the mediator competes with the self for the same object or person, the model becomes an “obstacle,” a hated and feared rival who blocks the fulfillment of desire. Despite the hatred that emerges between self and rival, the self remains ambivalently attached to the rival, since it is he who gives value or “authenticity” to the self’s desires. The rival is akin to the “other” in psychoanalytic terminology. An “internal” mediator is essentially comparable to the self, but the self’s vanity requires that his desires remain authentic, his “own”; therefore the rival is often demonized as an all-powerful obstacle that blocks the paradise of fulfilled desire. This distorted version of the mediator is the portrayal of The Truman Show.In The Truman Show, the original role of the mediator as model has been obscured, “concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated,” as Girard puts it. The movie rather begins with the premise that Christof, the mediator, is “a shrewd and diabolical enemy.” The movie therefore functions in exactly the opposite way from the realist novels of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky, whose works form the original framework for Girard’s theory (see Deceit, Desire, and the Novel). These novels reveal the mystifications of mimetic desire; the reader is able to witness how and why the revered model is transformed into a “diabolical enemy.” At the end of these novels, the protagonist typically undergoes a quasi-religious conversion which creates a new and revelatory understanding of his past for both reader and protagonist. 

 

The Truman Show recognizes on some level the anthropological truth that human desire is mediated, but the mediator of desire is mythicized as all-powerful and evil, rather than a human being similar to ourselves. Rather than accurately representing media influence, the movie misrepresents the media as the all-powerful controller of our desires. The portrayal of Christof reflects the distortions of mimetic rivalry rather than the actual power of the media in our lives.Life outside the bubble is also mystified as the realm of authentic desire. Most readers of this journal will recognize that life outside the bubble is just as mythic as life inside. The movie’s fantasy is that we can somehow get outside the situation of mimetic desire. The movie therefore has to end before Truman actually faces the reality of life outside the bubble, or the movie would degenerate into either bathos or a simplistic fantasy world easily recognized as such. A charming fairy tale the movie may be, but not a serious critique of consumer society.The disturbing part of the movie’s ideology is not its childish fantasy of being the universal center of attention, but the projection of responsibility onto a demonic other. Instead of helping people to take responsibility for their use of the media, the movie encourages a regressive projection of blame that evades the true issue.

The problem of mimetic rivalry is real, constitutive in fact of the human species. What distinguishes the human species is that the main threat to our existence is other humans, not the environment (Gans, OT 2). In Gans’s “originary hypothesis” language first emerged to mediate (and ameliorate) our relationship to other humans-not, as commonly thought, to mediate our relationship to the environment, that is, to describe the world. The threat of mimetic conflict is therefore ongoing as a function of the social nature of our existence. The potential for human violence must be continually deferred; this is the “work” of language (and by extension culture), its original, ethical function. All solutions to the problem of human violence are therefore temporary, since mimetic desire is the phoenix which is continually reborn from the ashes of satisfaction. Gans, therefore, rejects all utopian solutions, including those of the quasi-Marxist critics of the mass media. Girard, in contrast, takes a religious perspective on the problem of human violence; in Girard’s view, the only answer to our dilemma is to make God or his incarnation our model of desire, to choose absolute love over sacrificial desire. This can be a satisfying solution at the level of the individual, but it doesn’t work at the level of society. Girard fails to recognize the constructive role of consumer products in ameliorating mimetic conflict, a point to which I will return.The leftist critique of consumer society is based on a similar fantasy as The Truman Show. Christof, the show’s producer, is a Hollywood version of what Theodor Adorno calls the “culture industry.” He writes, “The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers: producing, controlling, disciplining them” (115). Consumers are completely passive in this model: “Capitalist production hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them” (Adorno 106). Just as in The Truman Show, Adorno seems to believe that if we could only get rid of these huge corporations, we could desire authentically and, hopefully, more tastefully. Certainly we would devote more money to the study of great literature, music, and art (as defined by Adorno and his colleagues). As Gans writes, “Esthetes object to the reign of money: wealth does not guarantee good taste, neither individual wealth nor the aggregate wealth of the masses” (Chronicles #25).

The neo-Marxist critique of consumerism depends upon a false distinction between authentic desire and the inauthentic desires created by a consumer culture. But what, we must ask, distinguishes between them? Most of the daily goods we take for granted in America, people living in third world countries manage to do quite well without. In fact, all of culture could be classified as superfluous. As Shakespeare pointed out long ago, culture is by definition that which exceeds “true need.” “Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s” (King Lear 2.4.266-269). The superfluous is the essential when it comes to culture. But culture is superfluous only in the sense that the ethical is superfluous. What King Lear recognizes is that the existence of the human community may be humanly necessary but is not inevitable, “natural.” Culture, as the basis of civilization, is contingent upon our continual efforts to renew and reaffirm it. The human community is always in danger of extinction. This is the moral imperative that authorizes mass culture, however distasteful we may find its products.

What is at the root of the academic hostility to consumerism, the media, and the market in general? In part, as I’ve argued above, this hostility is based on the mystification of desire. Our vanity requires that our desires remain our own, even if we must demonize the rivals of corporate advertising. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory is in agreement with mimetic theory that the perceived integrity of our identity always requires an “other”; capitalism, consumerism, and the mass media are all versions of that “other” by which intellectuals often define and defend themselves.

Capitalism is an inevitable outgrowth of a free market. Gans points out that the market is not a thing, but the collective result of the individual decisions of all of its participants (Chronicles #8 and #34). “Reification” has become the bogeyman of recent literary theory, yet the reification of capitalism is still accepted without hesitation. There is no evil demiurge of capitalism, no “producer”: the system expresses the choices of individuals. When we criticize consumer society, what we are really criticizing is the consumer choices of our fellow citizens. At bottom, this is an aesthetic issue. The academic hostility to the market is fundamentally aesthetic. My point here is not original: Gans argues insightfully that “culture” is hostile to the market because traditional culture requires “effective mimetic models, good shows. The market is not about shows, but about the organization of human efforts toward satisfying our desires and generating new ones, in the unceasing, and, we hope, unending effort to stay a step ahead of the resentments it generates” (Chronicles #25).

Intellectuals want people to consume more tastefully, in ways closer to themselves. But this criticism misses the whole point of consumption, which is to distinguish oneself. We cannot all be the best, but we can each be different; this is the meaning of the modern valorization of self-expression, the omnipresent aestheticization of our existence.

Virtually every personal decision is on some level an aesthetic decision, from the clothes we wear, to the food we buy, to our choice of career. Our very identity is the subject of aesthetic self-fashioning. Our ability to be different, if not the best, is the key to modern culture. As Girard has pointed out, humans are essentially mimetic, which means competitive and conflictual. What each of us requires fundamentally is an arena in which we can successfully compete and be recognized as such. The aesthetic is one such arena available to virtually every modern individual. As it was recognized long ago, De gustibus, non est disputandum. In matters of taste there is no dispute. The primary ethical function of consumer society is to aestheticize our daily existence, thereby deferring the resentments created by social/economic inequalities.

Consumerism, and the mass culture that accompanies it, is a necessary evil of a mass democratic society. All societies require some structuring principle to prevent unrestrained conflict and competition. Past societies, ancient, medieval, and Renaissance, were structured along more hierarchical lines. One’s place in the hierarchy was maintained in part by sheer force, as exemplified by drastic punishments for minor thefts. Public, communal rituals and ceremonies were also effective in creating a powerful sense of divine awe for political and ecclesiastical authorities. But Protestant iconoclasm, in collaboration with Enlightenment rationality, has eroded our sense of “divine” authority. In modern democratic societies, power is relatively decentralized, and authority, always vulnerable to suspicion and resentment, is limited by market forces. As Adam Smith recognized, a free market incorporates widespread competition as a positive force, rather than limiting it by rigid hierarchical distinctions. The modern world defers the potential violence of unrestrained competition by allowing each person to create individual difference, which is to say, sacrality.

If we are unique, then nobody can compete with us. The post-modern drive for diversity is built on this principle. We need as much diversity as possible to defuse the competition that threatens to destroy us. We advocate accepting each person as he or she is. Each person is special, unique, and uniquely valuable. It becomes imperative to believe this in a world without the sacral guarantees of religion. Girard underestimates the contribution of consumerism in deferring violence. The constructive function of consumerism is in facilitating individuation, or differentiation, apart from open conflict, which when unrestrained results in rigid hierarchies ruled by the most powerful and violent. Instead of killing others, we recognize their difference, asking them to recognize us in return. Consumer products, which enable this differentiation on a mass scale, are what make a mass society possible. To argue against a consumer society is to argue against a mass society. And to argue against a mass society is to dispute the legitimacy of the modern world as such.

In pragmatic terms, we don’t want to do away with our consumer society; we want to buy the things we want at the cheapest possible price. That’s why so much of the leftist criticism of the consumer society is hypocritical, since the critics themselves enjoy the fruits of this society. Furthermore, they don’t offer any realistic alternative. Corporations can and should be regulated, and of course they are already are. But these political corrections to the free market can be handled within our existing political framework. The advantage of our system is that it allows these kind of corrections to made peacefully, through political negotiation.

From an anthropological perspective, if we can truly understand the workings of mimetic desire, we can also rationally ameliorate its destructive potential. Of course, we can never completely step outside the mimetic circle, but realizing that we live within it can transform our social interactions. The postmodern era brings an increasingly widespread self-awareness of the mediated nature of desire, even apart from the influence of Girard’s mimetic theory. In fact, consumerism is often celebrated in the postmodern world, despite the efforts of humanities professors.

Recent critics, even on the left, have recognized that consumption is an active process. Michel de Certeau argues,

 

 

In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called “consumption” and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless and quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed upon it. (31)

There is an “art” or a “Practice of Everyday Life,” as Certeau puts it. While Certeau seems to romanticize consumption as potentially “subversive,” Jean Baudrillard sees it as more sinister, while still recognizing its active nature:

consumption is surely not that passive process of absorption and appropriation which is contrasted to the supposedly active mode of production, thus counterposing two oversimplified patterns of behavior (and of alienation). It has to be made clear from the outset that consumption is an active form of relationship (not only to objects, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system. (199)

Baudrillard recognizes insightfully that consumerism is not really “about” acquiring physical objects, but rather making a positive, aesthetic statement to the world (see below). As a neo-Marxist, he characterizes both consumption and production as forms of “alienation,” but the historical failure of Marxist economics in the 20th century places the burden of proof on him to offer a better system. Despite his hostility to the market, Baudrillard recognizes how consumerism transforms traditional expressions of social and economic competition:

That same ideology of competition which formerly, under the banner of ‘freedom,’ constituted the golden rule of production has now been transposed without restriction into the realm of consumption. Thanks to thousands of marginal distinctions and the often purely formal diffraction of a single product by means of conditioning, competition has become more aggravated on every plane, opening up the immense range of possibilities of a precarious freedom-indeed, of the ultimate freedom, namely the freedom to choose the objects which will distinguish one from other people. (182).It is quite possible for each person to feel unique even though everyone is alike: all that is needed is a pattern of collective and mythological projection-in other words a model. (183-4) 

 

Moreover, the ideology of competition is now giving way everywhere to a ‘philosophy’ of personal accomplishment. Society is better integrated, so instead of vying for possession of things, individuals seek self-fulfillment, independently of one another, through what they consume. The leitmotiv of discriminative competition has been replaced by that of personalization for all. (184)

 

 

Baudrillard recognizes that individualized consumption restructures the ideology of competition, the attempt to be the “best.” He emphasizes, however, the paradox that we distinguish ourselves by the consumption of mass produced products. But it is debatable that “everyone is alike,” as he puts it. On one level this is true, because we are all subject to mediated desire. But on another level, people really are different. Even something as seemingly trivial as the car we choose to drive is ethically significant to the extent that this choice is recognized as significant by others. What matters is not that all people are on some deep level unique, but that this system works to defer resentment and violence, even within the pressure cooker of a mass society. Baudrillard’s critique is founded on the utopian presupposition that freedom from mediated desire is possible.From the perspective of Gans’s “Generative Anthropology,” the paradox of consumer society is the basic paradox of the sign. The same sign which defers desire by substituting for the desired object also stimulates desire, by making the represented object more attractive. The products we consume are all “signs” that both defer and stimulate desire. Because desire is mediated by the other, it can never be completely satisfied. When we achieve the object of our desire, we are often ambivalent or even resentful towards it because it fails to resolve the mimetic situation which created our initial desire (see Girard, DDN 88-89). Rather than recognizing that it is not the poor object’s fault, we tend to blame the object itself, discarding it in favor of some other object. The ultimate object of desire is to be the center of everyone else’s desire, but even this satisfaction is unstable, because once we achieve centrality, we immediately become the object of the others’ resentment and hostility. 

 

The resentment felt towards the object is articulated at the origin of the human in the moment which Gans calls the “sparagmos” (Signs of Paradox 133-36). We destroy and consume the object, not out of simple appetite or even desire, but out of resentment towards its failure to deliver the promised transcendence. We consume the object, thereby destroying or sacrificing it. We cannot eliminate sacrifice, but we can make it more rational in expression. And consumerism is perhaps the most rational form of sacrifice.

2. The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West’s novel is addressed to the problems created by the mass media rather than consumption as such. If, however, we consider that the images and slogans of the mass media are themselves objects of consumption, then this novel indeed falls within the subject of this essay.

Nathanael West’s novel is addressed to the problems created by the mass media rather than consumption as such. If, however, we consider that the images and slogans of the mass media are themselves objects of consumption, then this novel indeed falls within the subject of this essay.The question raised by West in this novel is whether the resentments created by consumer society can continue to be contained and deferred by the system which creates them. The paradox of the sign is exacerbated in modern society because signs are proliferated endlessly. A general cynicism, a disillusionment with the promise of transcendence emerges.

The Day of the Locust tells the story of a young artist, Tod Hackett, who comes to Hollywood to work as a set designer. The novel is rather picaresque in structure, narrating Tod’s various adventures with the outsiders and hangers-on of the movie industry, and taking us to a variety of Hollywood locations; it does come to a climax, however, in a riot that erupts at a Hollywood movie premiere and which provides the apocalypse promised by the novel’s title.Hollywood as West describes it is a hodgepodge of cheap and tawdry appearances which hide an inner emptiness rather than corruption as such. The homes are an incongruous jumble of “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles, “all composed of “plaster, lath, and paper” (61). The residents of Hollywood are similarly surreal: 

 

 

A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. . . . The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandana around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court. (60)  

 

 

The rococo homes and clothing, no matter how tasteless and absurd, reflect the basic human desire for romance and adventure, the need to transcend the mundane banality of everyday life; this desire however has assumed monstrous form due to the mediation of the movies and radio. As West comments in another novel,  

 

 

Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst. (Miss Lonelyhearts 39)  

 

 

In Day of the Locust, everyone is essentially an actor, and virtually everyone Tod comes into contact with is literally an aspiring actor or actress. Hollywood or mass culture deforms people into grotesque forms. Harry Greener, for example, an old vaudeville performer trying to adapt to Hollywood, is literally a face with no head:  

 

 

Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree. (119)  

 

 

As a result of mass culture, people are severely alienated, not so much from their environment, which they faithfully mirror, but from themselves as whole human beings. Homer Simpson, a middle-aged man directed by his doctor to retire to California for his health, is brilliantly described as disconnected assemblage of human parts:  

 

 

He lay stretched out on the bed, collecting his senses and testing the different parts of his body. Every part was awake but his hands. They still slept. He was not surprised. They demanded special attention, had always demanded it. When he had been a child, he used to stick pins into them and once had even thrust them into a fire. Now he used only cold water.  

 

He got out of bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carried his hands into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrists. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about, he lifted them out and hid them in a towel. (82)

 

 

Tod, the protagonist, is the closest thing in the novel to a whole human being. He has compassion for others and seems capable of real love; but he is surrounded by a culture in which love is not really possible. As an artist, Tod tries to resist the allure of Hollywood, but he is finally caught up in it.  

 

The foremost object of Tod’s desire is the 17-year old aspiring actress Faye Greener, who epitomizes the ephemeral glamour of Hollywood.

 

 

Tod grunted with annoyance as he turned to the photograph [of Faye]. In it she was wearing a harem costume, full turkish trousers, breastplates and a monkey jacket, and lay stretched out on a silken divan. One hand held a beer bottle and the other a pewter stein.  

 

She was supposed to look drunk and she did, but not with alcohol. She lay stretched out on the divan with her arms and legs spread, as though welcoming a lover, and her lips were parted in a heavy sullen smile. She was supposed to look inviting, but the invitation wasn’t to pleasure. . . .

Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull likes nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn’t even have time to sweat or close your eyes. . . .

If she would only let him, he would be glad to throw himself, no matter what the cost. But she wouldn’t have him. She didn’t love him and he couldn’t further her career. She wasn’t sentimental and she had no need of tenderness, even if he were capable of it. (67-68)

 

 

The men of the novel all compete for Faye’s favor in classic Girardian fashion, and they come to blows in two scenes (117, 170). Even though Tod understands the nature of Faye’s appeal, he is unable to govern his desire for her rationally. As the above description of Faye’s sexual “invitation” indicates, underneath Faye’s contrived appearance lies a curious violence, and the relationship between violence and mass culture can be considered as the main subject of the novel.  

 

The problem with mass culture as described by West is that it consists of images and figures that promise everything, but which continually frustrate by their inability to deliver any satisfaction. Hollywood thus incites to violence, and the ending reflects the supposed inability of mass culture to defer the (desiring) violence that it feeds upon. West’s description of the crowd which gathers at a movie premiere makes this point explicit:

 

 

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. . . .  

 

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. (177-178)

 

 

The anthropological content of West’s novel is that he reveals the underlying violence of consumer desire. Desire is fraught with violence; this insight is not exactly new, but West applies it to a modern context in which this message is not always apparent. In the movie theater, at home watching TV, and so on, we feel ourselves insulated from the threat of violence. West warns us that the potential for violence remains real, hidden behind the images that surround us.  

 

The unstated problem of The Day of the Locust is the lack of any sacred which would defer the violence of desire. West elaborates on this lack in his earlier novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a newspaper advice column writer. Miss Lonelyhearts (the only name given him in the novel) has an “ivory Christ” hanging on his wall, and he reads Father Zossima’s sermon on unconditional love from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Miss Lonelyhearts wants to offer this message to his readers, but he is unable to believe in it himself. Surrounded by absurd suffering undignified by any tragic pathos, he finds himself incapable of true faith. Miss Lonelyhearts lives in a modern world in which faith or love have become impossible. The very idea of absolute love is absurd and doomed to failure.

At the end of the novel, the protagonist seemingly undergoes a Dostoyevskian conversion in which he dedicates his life to God. In his first act of Christ-like love, he attempts to embrace a cripple: “He would embrace the cripple and the cripple would be made whole again, even as he, a spiritual cripple, had been made whole again” (57). But the attempt to express Father Zossima’s unconditional love ends only in more violence, as the cripple misinterprets the gesture and shoots him in a farcical struggle. Miss Lonelyhearts thus embodies the failure of religion to provide meaning and happiness in the modern world. This failure results in violence. The Day of the Locust continues West’s critique of modernity, but he turns from the failure of religion to the failure of art as a means of transcendence.

In traditional culture, high art teaches the deferral of desire as well as providing diversion: “to teach and delight” in classical aesthetics. But modern art, like Tod Hackett, has been prostituted to the movie industry. At best, serious art can only record the failure of mass culture, as Tod records “The Burning of Los Angeles” in the painting he works upon, and West records the same in The Day of the Locust. Mass culture exists on the model of pornography, much as Faye, as a figure for mass culture, attracts through her mediated sex appeal. As such, mass art teaches the wrong message, that desire can be satisfied. It makes the consumers impatient for more and more. At the same time, through the very repetition and juxtaposition of its messages, the promise of culture is revealed as empty because the ubiquitous images have lost their potency even as promise. West’s favorite technique is to juxtapose the various images of mass culture, thus revealing the arbitrary and illusory nature of cultural representation (see for example Tod’s surreal journey through a Hollywood movie lot, 130-35). As a result the consumer becomes jaded and cynical, impatient. The images which are meant to substitute for reality have lost their believability; at the same time, there is nothing to take their place. The main function of culture, to transcend the violence of desire, is thus frustrated.

West’s critique of modernity agrees in many respects with Girard’s. In Girard’s interpretation of Western history, the revelation of the Gospel text places humankind in a unique predicament. The Passion story confronts us with our own violence; we can no longer blame the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial mechanism can work only as long as it is disguised and mystified. According to Girard, “the effect of the gospel revelation will be made manifest through violence, through a sacrificial and cultural crisis whose radical effect must be unprecedented since there is no longer any sacralized victim to stand in the way of its consequences” (THSFW 203). In an increasingly secular world, without the protection afforded by myth and sacrificial religion, humans are in imminent danger of destroying themselves. Because of the Gospel revelation, we can no longer plausibly believe in the sacrificial myths that traditionally protect society from its own violence. We are forced to choose between “apocalypse now” or unconditional forgiveness. As Guy Lefort puts this point,

 

 

In a world where violence has been truly revealed and the victimage mechanisms have ceased to function, humans are confronted with a dilemma that is extraordinarily simple: either they renounce violence, or the incalculable violence that they set off risks annihilating them all, ‘as in the days of Noah’. (qtd. in Girard, THSFW 201).  

 

 

For Girard, this situation constitutes the crisis, but also the challenge and opportunity of modernity.  

 

The ending of The Day of the Locust presents a classic Girardian crisis of undifferentiation, complete with angry mob and scapegoat victim (Homer Simpson). A woman in the crowd claims that the riot began because “A pervert attacked a child,” and the crowd “agreed vehemently” (183). Ironically, this same group of people then goes on to demonstrate just how they perverted they themselves are, when one of the men takes advantage of the crunch to start groping a woman with the group’s approval. In other words, there is no meaningful difference between victim and crowd, just as in Girard’s description of the sacrificial crisis. The lack of any organized rituals of sacrifice in the modern world results in a crisis of undifferentiation which threatens the community with self-destruction. The main difference between Girard and West on the problem of modernity is that West does not apparently see Christian love as offering a viable solution.

It might be argued that West’s novel is anachronistic, since he wrote at the dawn of consumer society, in the late 30s, before the post-war economic boom. But in many ways, his novel is prescient; although consumerism delivers more now, it also promises more, so that dissatisfaction always stays one step ahead of satisfaction.

The most obvious problem with West’s critique is that consumerism marches on, becoming more and more efficient in both creating desires and recycling consumer discontent into more consumerism. Dissatisfaction is recycled back into the system as a positive force. There is no shortage of products available to express one’s dissatisfaction with consumerism. Like Marx, West failed to consider the efficiency of the free market.

But West’s point is not just that the system doesn’t work, but that it works in ways which should be rejected. Consumer culture focuses on appearances at the expense of inner reality, thus distorting people and making them into less-than-whole human beings. In some ways West’s critique harkens back to the traditional distrust of appearances in favor of inner reality. The locus classicus of such criticism is Hamlet’s rejection of “seeming”:

 

 

 

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play.
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and suits of woe. (1.2.76-86)  

 

 

 

 

For Hamlet, then, the inner reality is incommensurable with any form of representation. No one can “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery” (3.2.364-5).  

 

West goes beyond Shakespeare however, because in The Day of the Locust there is no inner reality with which to oppose the superficial appearances. The charge is that consumer culture focuses on appearances so drastically that inner reality is emptied out. There is no true substance to turn to. Even Tod’s ideals, or Miss Lonelyheart’s, are arguably self-delusions. People are deformed, incapable of love or faith, and capable only of violence, or at best an artificial life of romantic illusion, as we see in Faye’s romantic fantasies which seems to satisfy her (104-5). This is a charge which is more specific to the 20th century and typical of literary modernism, as for example in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. To make this point, however, West gives us, for the most part, caricatures rather than realistic characters. It’s not clear that modern individuals are really as bad as West makes them out to be. In any case, it’s not safe to generalize. The other problem is that this criticism assumes the existence of some prior golden age when people were whole and complete, which is not a safe assumption. The prosperity of the 20th century arguably allows more freedom for love and faith.

The problem that West points to is real, but the solution is in this case would be worse than the problem, since any cure must trample on the freedom we rightly hold as our highest value. It’s not at all clear that there is any alternative to consumer society that would be more hospitable to morality and beauty, not to mention personal freedom.

3. Conclusion

West’s critique of mass culture shares the problem of the neo-Marxist critique: they both exaggerate the problems of mass culture, and they both implicitly assume that some viable, utopian alternative exists. The only alternative to consumerism is an oppressive government that drastically limits personal freedom, telling people what they should desire. Girard’s mimetic theory should alert us to the impossibility of regulating desire. The claim of The Truman Show that a free market enables a repressive regime of corporate media power is based on an unjustified distortion of media power. The products of consumer society are not always beautiful and elegant, but they effectively serve to differentiate individuals, enabling the human community to continue. Any political/economic system can be justified only as the lesser of two evils. Giving up utopian dreams is a sign of maturity that effectively forestalls the appeal of autocratic politics.

West’s critique of mass culture shares the problem of the neo-Marxist critique: they both exaggerate the problems of mass culture, and they both implicitly assume that some viable, utopian alternative exists. The only alternative to consumerism is an oppressive government that drastically limits personal freedom, telling people what they desire. Girard’s mimetic theory should alert us to the impossibility of regulating desire. The claim of that a free market enables a repressive regime of corporate media power is based on an unjustified distortion of media power. The products of consumer society are not always beautiful and elegant, but they effectively serve to differentiate individuals, enabling the human community to continue. Any political/economic system can be justified only as the lesser of two evils. Giving up utopian dreams is a sign of maturity that effectively forestalls the appeal of autocratic politics.The anthropological problem posed by consumer society is, how can a society exist without an absolute sacred? In historical terms, modern society is anomalous. But the sacred has not disappeared; it has rather been integrated into the fabric of our culture, integrated so profoundly that we hardly recognize it as such. We don’t have any overarching, generally accepted, public sacred, but we do have a whole host of private sacreds. Each individual creates his or her own sense of the sacred, in part through consumer products. The great advantage of this system is that it differentiates people without the need for rigid hierarchies, thus maximizing personal freedom.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. 1947. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.

Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. . 1947. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. 1968. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Randall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Gans. Eric. Chronicles of Love and Resentment. 1995-2004. 5 Aug. 2004. .

—. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993.

—. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965. —. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1987.Sanes, Ken. Truman as Archetype. Transparencynow.com. 1996-2001. 29 July 2004. .

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Bantam, 1988.

West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions, 1962.

 

Anthropoetics 10, no. 2 (Fall 2004 / Winter 2005), Consumer Society and its Discontents: The Truman Show and The Day of the Locust, Peter Goldman, Department of English, Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah 84105, http://web.archive.org/web/20071103170809/http://www.westminstercollege.edu/, pgoldman@westminstercollege.edu 

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The following article is adapted from “The Simpler Way: Working For Transition From Consumer Society To A Simpler, More Cooperative, Just And Ecologically Sustainable Society.” by Ted Trainer, P. O. Box 184 Panania, Australia 2213, And Social Work, University Of NSW, Kensington 2052. Although, as a rationalist I do not see it as a soluion, it covers some aspects and perspectives of present day society that many will find useful. “The Simpler Way” referred to in the article is covered at http://web.archive.org/web/20071103170809/http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/ 

With the grossly unsustainable and unjust nature of our society, radical changes are required. There must be extreme changes in lifestyles, the economy, the political system and the geography of settlements.  However the biggest problem we face is the culture of consumer society.  It is built on some strong and largely unrecognised values and ideas that are mistaken – that are driving us into rapidly increasing global problems and will soon lead to our destruction if they are not abandoned.
 
The changes we must make in the economy, the political system, the geography of our settlements and our technologies, are huge and radical but could be made quickly and easily — if people in general understood that they are necessary for our survival, and that they would enable a better quality of life than we have now.  At present there is almost no understanding of any of this among governments or people in general, and therefore it is difficult to be anything but very pessimistic about our chances.  There is almost universal obsession with affluence and economic growth among economists, politicians, media and ordinary people. These goals are seen as the way to solve problems when in fact they are the basic cause of our problems.  For fifty years a few have been trying to draw attention to this fundamental cause of our problems, with almost no success because no one is prepared to even think about any challenge to the limitless pursuit of wealth.
 
The basic factors driving our society into increasing difficulties have been deep within Western culture for several hundred years.  This makes clear how huge and difficult the transition has to be – we will not get through the coming century in reasonable shape unless we scrap and remake much of Western culture.  (There are of course many elements in it that culture that are admirable and need not be changed.)
 
The following passages indicate some of the main values and ideas we must rethink.  
 
1.  VALUES.
 
 With respect to values, there are three crucial clusters.
 
1.     AFFLUENCE,  WEALTH,  MATERIAL CONSUMPTION
 
Above all else, the urgent global problems facing us are due to the fact that we in rich countries have rates of per capita resource consumption that are far beyond those that all people could have, or that can be kept up for us for long.  The limits to growth analysis of our global situation shows that we should be trying to reduce these rates to something like 10% or less of their present rates, and that we should completely abandon any idea of increasing “living standards” over time, or economic growth. (See The Limits to Gowth.)
 
However raising “living standards” and the GDP is the supreme commitment in virtually all countries.  People are fiercely obsessed with wealth.  They want more money to buy more things, they want bigger houses, more expensive cars and clothes, and travel.  They define identity and status by reference to the expensiveness of their possessions.  They want new and luxurious things.  All this has become much worse in recent decades as increasing affluence have become accessible to more people.
 
We now have a large middle class and under them a larger “aspirational” class who want to move up (and those below them with little chance are no less eager for more wealth).  Obviously the top priority for the capital-owning class is that sales must constantly increase. All this ensures that governments must take as the supreme national goal the limitless increase of economic output.
 
It is no exaggeration to say that the quest for affluence is by far the most important cause of the world’s many alarming problems.  Because people are trying to live with much higher resource demands than are possible for all, there is resource depletion (see The Limits to Growth Analysis), ecological damage (see The Environment Problem), the deprivation of the Third World via the “development” that allocates its wealth to the rich countries (see Third World Development), and the need for rich countries to maintain the global empire (see Your Empire).  It is also the main factor generating armed conflict and war in the world.  As all scramble for the dwindling resources it will inevitably become a more dangerous world in coming decades.  (See Peace and Conflict.)
 
So no factor is more important in our predicament than the value put on material wealth, yet there is in effect an adamant refusal to think about whether this is a problem.
 
The required alternative.
 
It must be emphasised that what is required to defuse global problems is not acceptance of “living standards” that are so low that there must be deprivation and hardship.  The Simpler Way is about frugal, non-affluent lifestyles, but these can be perfectly sufficient for material comfort, hygiene, etc., while enabling a higher quality of life than most people have now.  The Simpler Way solves the problem of affluence by offering values and satisfactions that are “rich” but do not require many non-renewable resources.  (See The Rewards in The Simpler Way.)  Consider having to work for money only two days a week, living in a beautiful landscape crammed with artists, craftsmen and gardeners, with fabulous musicians and actors, with many festivals and celebrations, and with a strong and supportive community.  Consider especially the fact that all would be secure from unemployment, poverty and loneliness, and would have a valued contribution to make.
 
A major reason why there is such obsession with consuming at present is because there is not much else to do.  In The Simpler Way all people have as many interesting and worthwhile things to do all day as they can fit in, including the working bees and concerts, participating in art and craft activities, committees, being involved in governing, and “working” in their own household economies.  There are far more important and satisfying things to do than go shopping.
 
There can be much satisfaction in living frugally and self-sufficiently, in repairing and keeping things going, in saving and recycling and using up wastes, in making things.  When one understands the scarcity of resources it can be a source of satisfaction to know that you have been able to keep a jumper or rake handle going for years.  Old and worn, patched and cheap things become valued, attractive, and new and expensive things can become seen as problematic, distinctly unattractive and to be avoided if possible.  Above all there is the satisfaction from creativity, making things; growing perfect food, cooking, making furniture and clothes, works of art…and houses!
 
Of course this is far from the way most people see things.  They idolise and desire the most lavish and expensive and luxurious things, and status comes from having them, so it will probably be very difficult to reverse these powerful tendencies.  The coming era of increasing scarcity will help us to make these changes, but it is important that we portray them not as undesirable steps that must be reluctantly taken to save the planet.  They should be seen as part of the move to a much more active, productive, cooperative, worthwhile and enjoyable way of life.  (More detail on this theme is given in The Way I Live.)
 
Finally, affluence is not good for you!  It undermines sensitivity and appreciation, and the ability to enjoy simple everyday things.,  Consider Kerry Packer, Australian media mogul, who bet $4 million in one sitting once.  Anyone who must go to such an extreme for a thrill is not psychologically, spiritually well.  Compare with the little old lady I knew who got great delight from roadside flowers or birdsong (see The Spiritual Significance of the Simpler Way.)  Being increasingly able to purchase increasingly expensive, luxurious, spectacular things and experiences debauches; it desensitises.
 
 
2. COMPETITION.
 
Our society is intensely, indeed pathologically, competitive!  The economy is organised in terms of firms competing for sales and people competing for jobs.  Government is largely about groups struggling against each other to get into power, and groups struggling against each other to get favours from government.  We go about disputes via an adversarial legal system (e.g., with little emphasis on conflict resolution or mediation.) “Education” is competitive; it is about striving for the best credentials to get into the best jobs.  People compete for status.  And sport is intensely competitive.
 
The problem with competition is that someone wins!  This is a winner-take-all society, and with the triumph of the neo-liberal ideology the winners are racing away from the rest of us at an accelerating rate (See Inequality.)  We accept arrangements which pit the strong and the weak in ruthless competition “..on a level playing field” (especially when all have to bid in the market place), then we docilely accept the few who are richest and strongest taking most of the available wealth.  This is not the way a civilized society functions!  In a satisfactory society, such as a normal family, the overriding principles determining what is done are cooperation and a concern for the needs of all.  You make sure that those who are weakest or in most need get first priority, and you make sure we cooperate to do what is necessary.  If you don’t have this attitude then the urgent needs of those least able to compete, and of the environment, will be ignored.  This is obviously the situation in our present society.
 
The conventional view is that “…competition brings out the best in us.  People work hard to improve the goods and services they are selling, and workers strive to improve their skills to get the available jobs.”  This is quite misleading.  Firstly any benefits of competition, such as effort and efficiency, might be achieved by other means.  We don’t run households on competitive principles.  Secondly the benefits are often outweighed by the costs, losses and damage that competition brings.  In general it is much better, far more “efficient”, far more socially desirable and far more pleasant to organise things cooperatively!  There is abundant and clear evidence on this.  (See especially the book by A. Kohn, No Contest!, .)  This evidence shows that if you want an inefficient way to organise personnel within a firm, make them compete against each other, and if you want an inefficient way to organise learning, make students compete against each other.
 
Kohn points out that when people compete much of their energy goes into worrying about and disadvantaging the others, as distinct from into performing the task at hand.  When people cooperate in learning each benefits from the insights of others.  It is much better if all people in a firm are thinking about each other’s task and feeding in ideas and assistance and support.  In an economy there are huge costs from competition, including the wastage in all the business failures, the legal conflicts, and the zero-sum “marketing” warfare aimed at taking sales from each other.  In this economy almost all compete against each other to try to sell something – when in a sane economy we could all live well on a small fraction of all that effort and resource use.
 
At the global level competition fuels the predatory domination of Third World countries by the rich world – the struggle for markets, resources and wealth that the rich win, thereby condemning billions to poverty and inappropriate development.  And what are the chances for global peace when all poor countries want to join India and China in competing their way to rich world living standards?
 
Even if cooperation was less “efficient” than competing, it would be much nicer if we could all work cooperatively.  The right focus and climate for human societies is working together, mutual aid, helping and nurturing.  Competing is infantile, not morally acceptable, and indeed pathological.
 
It is important to recognise that cooperating implies giving way from time to time, being willing to let someone else have what you could have taken.  It means that those who could have won in competition are willing not to take more than their fair share.  This is quite foreign to the mentality of winner-take-all society.  The strong do not want to have to accept only their fair share; they want the freedom to take as much as they can get.  People in general think this way, even though most of them are far from rich or able to be winners.  They think that those who are rich deserve their privileges, because they got to the top in competition, those who win deserve the prizes, and the losers would also eagerly be winners and takers if they could.
 
Another way of talking about this theme is in terms of the distinction between individualism or Liberalism on the one hand, and collectivism on the other.  The philosophy of Liberalism advocates that we compete as individuals seeking to maximise our own advantage or self-interest.  It claims that the individual should have much freedom to do what he wants and that this will benefit society because individuals have a strong incentive to set up firms which will produce things people want, etc.
 
While it is in principle desirable that individuals have much freedom to do what they wish, it is not possible to have a society without many restraints on freedom, e.g., it is not satisfactory if all have the freedom to drive on whatever side of the road they prefer.  A major cause of global problems is the fact that at present the rich and powerful have far too much freedom, especially to take the markets and livelihoods of others. Again just glance at the Inequality documents to see what this freedom is leading to.
 
In other words it is not possible to have a satisfactory society unless people have a strong collectivist outlook, i.e., unless they put much value on things like the common good, the welfare of others, the public interest, standards, the welfare of the least fortunate, public assets, institutions and traditions.  These values are weak in consumer society, and they are being undermined by the triumph of Liberalism.  It is not possible to have any society made up of individuals motivated only by desire to maximise their own advantage.  Society is something in addition to individual self interest; if there is no value put on public goals, assets, standards, practices, or the welfare of others, then there is no society.  There is little doubt that in recent decades people have become more greedy, self-interested, callous and indifferent to civic affairs. (See Human Nature.)
 
“But isn’t human nature selfish and competitive?”   Humans have a nature that enables them to develop values, habits and ideas that are intensely selfish or intensely cooperative.    It all depends on the culture they grow up in.  The Amish are extremely peaceful and cooperative, the tribal Mundugamor and Maori were extremely aggressive.
 
One element in the competitive syndrome is the obsession with success, achievement and status in Western culture.  Success in life is defined in terms of beating others in the competition for wealth and position.  People slave to “achieve” in school and in the company to “get ahead”.  People admire the achiever, even when the achievement is some trivial thing like a sporting prize or record.
 
There are powerful forces in consumer-capitalist society driving us to individualism.  We have no choice but to struggle as individuals to survive if not win.  In The Simpler Way this will be reversed.  The conditions, especially our intense dependence on each other, on our local social systems and on our local ecological systems will make us think and behave much more collectively.  There is no reason why this needs to interfere with important individual freedoms.  To call for a much more collectivist outlook is not to advocate big-state or authoritarian centralised control.  It would result in taking more social control of economic affairs, because that’s the only way good but profitable objectives can be achieved.  However this can be done via participatory means at the local level.
 
The coming era of scarcity will help us to overcome this problem syndrome, because people will be forced to see that their chances will be much better if they cooperate in developing more self-sufficient local economies.  They will realise that they must have local gardens and bakeries and that they will not develop a satisfactory economy unless they discuss and plan and work together.
 
The second thing that will help us is the fact that people will (re-) discover the satisfaction that comes from cooperating.  The Simpler Way involves strong community.  People are thrown together in committees and working bees and they will find that this is much nicer than competing as isolated individuals.
 
Again it is appropriate to emphasise that we will be helped by our acute awareness of our dependence, on each other, on our local social systems, and on our local ecosystems. The Simpler Way requires but also reinforces mutual assistance and concern to see the other flourish, because all will be acutely aware that their own welfare depends entirely, not on their own talents or wealth, but on whether the local community, economy, political system and ecological system are working well.  Whether all live well will depend on whether their locality looks after its bakers and musicians, etc.  All will therefore have a strong incentive to think about the welfare of others, and to contribute to it.
 
Easily overlooked are the synergistic effects here.  If I beat you to a parking space you feel bad and are more likely to treat the next person badly. Competition results in worse than zero-sum outcomes. But when one person helps another that person is more likely to be nice to the next person, and the goodness multiplies. 
The main concern in The Simpler Way will be to nurture, to do things that help others to flourish.  We will understand that this reinforces conditions we benefit from. The “prosperity” and happiness of others is not only not achieved at my expense, it will lead them to do nice things for me, and it will make me feel good to have made them feel good.
 
Why will we think this way?  Do we all have to become saints before this is possible?  Again, we will be like this because a) we will be in a situation where helping each other is obviously the best way to survive , b) we will realise that cooperating is nice!
 
Individualism.
 
The competition theme is closely related to individualism.  Whereas tribal cultures are very collective, western culture emphasises the freedom for individuals to pursue their own interests.  This has its origins in the long and painful struggles against rule by autocratic kings, the French and English revolutions and the emergence of Parliamentary rule.  Obviously there are valuable elements here but the neo-liberal triumph is making individualism into a socially destructive force now.  It in effect endorses the quest to maximise self interest and it neglects and de-emphasises collectivism, i.e., concern for the public good, and especially for the welfare of those least able to win in the competitive struggle.  It accepts that the individual’s welfare depends on the individual’s capacity to provide for himself.  It denies the importance of public wealth in enabling a high quality of life for all, and of the importance of all taking collective responsibility for the welfare of all. 
 
What we want here is not any imposition of greater state control over individuals, reducing their freedom.  We simply want to see greater concern for the welfare of others and for the public good; i.e., a more “collectivist” outlook.
 
3.  PASSIVITY, APATHY -LACK OF CITIZENSHIP
 
In consumer society there is widespread and increasing political apathy. People tend not to be very concerned about social issues, and there is little interest in critical thought about society.  There is acquiescence with the way society works and little or no significant dissent, let alone call for radical system change.  People do grumble, e.g., about politicians, but they accept things like the existence of unemployment and the distribution of wealth and power.  Above all they accept being governed; they have no concept of governing themselves.
 
Ivan Illich discussed this in terms of the passivity that come with consumer society. The individual’s role in such a society is as a “passive consumer of pre-packaged goods and services”.  It is crucial for capitalism that the individual produces little for himself but purchases as much as possible.  Therefore things are done for you by corporations, governments and professionals.  Subsistence and self-sufficiency are seen as backward, characteristic of tribal and primitive societies. People even leave their own health to doctors, knowing little about diet, fitness or first aid, and just go to the doctor to be fixed up when something is wrong.
 
At the global level there are many extremely serious problems that would be solved very quickly if people cared enough to demand action, such as banning the use of landmines or depleted uranium weapons.  The grotesque injustice in the global economy would be eliminated quickly if even a few were as annoyed about it as all should be. All this can be put in terms of a lack of social responsibility. (For a detailed discussion, see Social Responsibility; The Biggest Problem of All?)
 
In a good society and a world which had solved its big problems citizens would be highly socially responsible.  They would understand, be interested in, care about and seek to fix their social systems.  We are a very long way from such a situation.
 
There are powerful forces at work in consumer society generating this situation.  Many are busy and stressed and have little time or energy left for civic afairs.  Neighbourhoods are dormitories, designed without community in mind.  Corporations want you to do nothing but self-indulge and consume.  Governments do nothing to stimulate community or local self-reliance.  Councils and professionals do everything for the individual so there is no need to get together to fix or run things in the neighbourhood. People watch 3 to 4 hours of TV each day.  The “hidden curriculum” of school teaches people to do what they are told, take no initiative and take no responsibility for what they are learning (teachers make all the important decisions).  Media give superficial accounts so it is impossible to form a confident understanding of issues.  Academics self-indulge in their specialisms and contribute little to the clear and simple overviews that would enable people to follow public issues.  The media and commerce work hard at confining minds to consuming.  They spend $550 billion p.a. on their marketing” effort.
 
The term “Postmodern society” has been applied to the situation many believe we are in; a condition of stupefied preoccupation with trivia, especially created by the electronic media.  People are focused on TV, sport, fashion, celebrities, popular music, spectacles such as football grand finals, Olympic games, fantasy etc.  The attention span is very short, trained to the fleeting thrill or image momentarily attended to then dropped for the next one.  Experiences are ephemeral and fractured, unconnected.  One meaningless but attention-catching image or experience is followed by another, so there are moment to moment preoccupations, but no enduring meanings.  It’s throw away experience, a parade of transient, trivial, mildly attention-getting trashy experiences.  Products are used up and dumped and one moves on to the next.  Self-indulge; consume now, have fun. Sensitivity is blunted. Identity comes from symbols, brand loyalty, designer labels.  One does not attach to lasting causes, values, commitments.
 
There is little sense of what is important and what is trivial.  There is no anger or radicalism.  There is discontent, but it is with personal situations and experience and not with the social conditions or forces causing individual hardship or anxiety.  There is no concern with global injustice.  There is no concept of oppression, no dissent, no thought of challenging the system.  Hence authorities have no need to expend effort to put down resistance…there isn’t any.  Indeed what do discontented postmodern people do…that’s right, go shopping!
 
The situation seems to be getting worse.  Evidence  (e.g., from Hugh McKay) indicates people are increasingly disenchanted with politics and are retreating into their private concerns.
 
All this is to be expected from capitalism late in the day.  It generates the mindless consumption of trivia, firstly by taking away purpose.  People have no need to take responsibility, think about their community or public issues, because they live as individuals not members of any community, and everything is done for them by some corporation or bureaucracy.  Their role is to work and then consume.  They do not have to think about getting together to manage the village commons or run the local co-op or aged care facility.  Capitalism has taken most functions from people, and will happily provide them for a fee. It has cast large numbers into struggling to cope, into boring jobs, and no jobs.
 
The Alternative.
 
The Simpler Way cannot work without a great deal of social responsibility.  It requires active, conscientious citizens.  This is because the local community must run many things, so they must make the decisions, organise the committees and working bees, run the water and energy systems.  These things will mostly not be done by councils or distant governments.  In the coming era of intense scarcity we will not be able to afford much government.  Therefore the necessary steps will not be taken unless people discuss issues, think carefully and critically and come to meetings and take responsibility for their own community.
 
The history of human emancipation can be seen in terms of the development of social responsibility.  For over the last 12,000 years, since beginning to leave tribal ways, humans have suffered countless tyrannical kings and regimes, which they could have thrown off at any time had enough people decided to do it.  Today it is unbelievable how tiny elite classes can dominate, taking most of the wealth and privileges, while exploited and deprived masses just accept their miserable fate.  In many situations brutal action keeps elites in power while people acquiesce in arrangements which they could easily get rid of if they chose to.  Ghandi said of the British colonial domination of India, “If Indians just spat the British would drown.”  In present society the domination is much more obscure and subtle, but it is extreme. (About 1% of Americans have 33% of wealth, 80% share 14% of it.)
 
Humans will not have achieved political maturity until ordinary people cease to accept being governed and take responsibility for governing themselves.  This is the basic principle in Anarchist political philosophy.  People should never be governed – they should govern their own communities through participatory processes.  No person or institution should have any power to rule over anyone else, including elected officials or political “representatives”. When some have the power to rule over others, even as elected representatives, they are very likely  to start ruling in the interests of the rich and powerful.  We will have achieved political maturity only when we have thrown off all elements of “being ruled”, of some having power over others, and have learned to rule ourselves cooperatively via a participatory democracy of equals. 
 
 
2.  IDEAS AND WORLD VIEW.
 
Following are some of the ideas in Western Culture which are contributing to our problems. (These merge with values.)
 
 Progress”, “development”, expansion and growth.
 
The idea that progress is possible and that it is desirable is only about two hundred years old.  Before that people didn’t expect to see any change in their society over a lifetime.  They would have hoped for emancipation in the afterlife but it was not expected on earth.   However we are now used to “progress” and we think it is important and inevitable. 
 
Progress is mostly defined in terms of scientific and technical advance, and increase in material living standards and GDP, as distinct from improvement in quality of life of “social capital”, citizenship or moral standards.
 
Expansion; growth is good.  Set up branch plants, spread, take over, conquer, build a bigger corporation, build an empire, get richer… there is no concept of sufficiency or stability.  Limitless economic growth.  The Simpler Way is about stability, zero growth.
 
Modernisation for the Third World.  “Development” means scrapping tribal and traditional ways, especially “subsistence” production for self-sufficiency, and entering the market to produce only for sale.  Let the market determine all…attract foreign investment…that will maximise growth and GDP, which equals “development”.  Modernisation means adopting consumer lifestyles.
 
Bigness is good.  Big houses. Big corporations.  Big cars.  Big complex systems.  The Simpler Way alternative accepts that “Small is beautiful”.
 
Cleverness, intelligence is admired; We “can do.” There are no limits to knowledge or human technical capacity…someday we will colonise the planets.  Hubris…we humans can master and control nature.  Rationality, technique…we can make battleships …(but we do not have the  wisdom to avoid using them.)
 
Control of nature.   Science in seen as conquering nature, forcing her to reveal her secrets and to do things she would not choose to do.  Humans are seen as separate from and in control of nature.  We do not focus on accommodating to nature’s ways and seeking to live humbly and appreciatively in harmony with them.  Permaculture tries to work with nature, whereas modern agriculture is a battle against nature, seeking to force her to do things she is not inclined to do (e.g., keeping “weeds” out of our fields.) Science dissects nature, takes it apart to see how it works, in an effort to master and control it.  Western culture has little sense of “earth bonding”, a concept central to tribal and peasant societies. Nature exists for us to exploit; it is OK to rip up and use up forests and mountains.  Yes we think about conservation…but mainly so that there will be resources left to exploit later.  There is little acceptance of the “Deep Ecology” idea that nature has rights.
 
Hierarchy, Domination, Power, Privilege, Status, Inequality
 
One of the strongest tendencies in the Western mind is the readiness to accept hierarchical systems.  We organise society in terms of ranks of people who have power over those below them.  Those on top take it for granted that they have the right to boss those under them, and those underneath willingly accept orders.  This makes bureaucracies and armies work but the same dispositions are also through just about all of society’s institutions.  We do not see people as equals in status and power.  We think of some as of higher status and rightly having more power than others.  This is the form taken by schools, governments, and firms.  Most people find it impossible to imagine any other way…”How could you have equality of power in a school?”
 
Significant differences in wealth and privilege are accepted.  It is alright that some are very rich and can own mansions and newspapers while others have too little for comfort.  We do not have rules which prevent some from becoming very rich.  People like power, like to be on top, like to dominate.  They see power differences as normal.  There are leaders.   We must have a President.  Some are born leaders.”  Even thoroughly detestable tyrants and kings are tolerated. Most people accept royalty and see nothing repulsive about the idea that some people claim this kind of superiority, power and privilege.  Status is a matter of rank, level of power or wealth, as distinct for example from being a matter of one’s quality as a person or citizen.  Much effort goes into pretending, trying to give the impression that one is of high status via clothes, property, style and manners.
 
Inequality is therefore accepted.
 
People accept the fact that a few are obscenely rich, many are very rich…and many are quite poor.  They do not say “This is outrageous!  Let’s get rid of such a disgusting situation.”  Even people who are very poor do not seem to object.  All seem to think the rich deserve to be rich and the poor had their chance.  All want the opportunity to rise to be among the rich few.  How many would say, “I do not want to be part of a society in which there are rich and poor people – it is disturbing that some can be very rich while some go without necessities.”  lf many thought like this something would be done.  It is a winner-take-all society. It is OK that some can take far more than they need, and most people want to be one of the winners.
 
Tribal people are wise enough not to want or tolerate inequality.  Mostly their “leaders” are only like chairmen, unable to get their way unless everyone agrees with their proposals.  They are not interested in becoming rich and status comes from reputation, for instance as a hunter or musician or herbalist.  Many tribes have rules and customs which prevent a few from becoming rich.
 
Elitism
 
The Anarchist philosophy emphasises that no one should ever have any power over anyone else, and that we should organise social institutions on this principle.  They want groups to practice participatory democracy whereby all discuss and make the decisions.  They do not accept that leaders, heroes and saviours are necessary.  We ordinary people can and should get together to solve our problems and run things well. Yes some people will come up with more good ideas than others, but no one should have more power to say what we will do.  We will make sure everyone shares chairing the meetings, partly because that’s good for personal development, it increases our community’s stock of skills, and most importantly, it asserts the principle of as much equality in power and status as is possible.  In the new communities of The Simpler Way everyone will have an important contribution; even bringing in the firewood is helpful.
 
In The Simpler Way the strength of our community will depend on the extent to which we can all come together to take responsibility and work out what to do and get the job done.  It will not be strong if all are not included and if all do not feel they have a valued contribution to make.  Only this climate can bring out the productive power of all, which will be needed. So the most able will always try to help others to develop their capacities and foster a cooperative effort, rather than take control of the situation.
 
 This will feed into our attitude to heroes and winners…we will not have any!  We will not be interested in them and we will not need them.  We will seek to avoid competitive situations where someone will be the winner. We will not be interested in records or grades or who won… that’s infantile.  Nor will we value saviours or great leaders.  We do not need superior individuals to solve our problems because we know that ordinary people can work together to solve problems.  It is not good for us to idolise the expert, elite, winner, guru, great leader, record holder, or those who stands out as superior.  That contradicts collective strength and de-values the worth of the ordinary person.   Expertise and skill are important in The Simpler Way, but being “the best” isn’t.  Status is a matter of reputation and respect, built up from long acquaintance within the community.  It is not a matter of rank.  There is no point pretending, because people know you well, they know how well you can fix a windmill, how often you turn up to working bees, are helpful, can persevere, be cheerful when there’s a problem, and what skills and qualities you have.  Even the smartest engineer in town will know he can’t bake a dinner as well as granny.  We all have our different but crucial contributions to make to a happy community.
 
In hierarchical society there is a readiness to accept domination and exploitation,  The concern is to take advantage of others if possible and to force them to do things they do not want to do.  If someone has to sell cheaply it is alright to pounce on a bargain. The incentives are for one to get ahead at the expense of the other. These are not nice, friendly ways of thinking or acting.  Again the conditions of our new small self-governing communities will push us to be cooperative and equal.   People will see that if they try to retain elitism then the cooperative ethos that is essential for our town’s survival will be damaged.
 
Takers
 
One of the most disturbing strands in Western culture is the readiness to take what others had.  Stealing and thuggery are supposed to be wrong, but consider our record.  Westerners throughout history have found it very easy to push others off their land and simply take it.  Consider the expansion into the Third World starting with the brutal conquest of the Americas 500 years ago.  In a short time native American populations were almost entirely killed off.  The British fought 72 colonial wars to take more than half the world as their empire.  They didn’t think twice about taking Australia from its native people.  The Americans pushed the Indians off their land.  The Western mind seems to have had no difficulty doing such things.
 
Consider the history of international relations.  This has basically been little more than the history of attempts by one nation to dominate others, to conquer, to take the wealth of others, to plunder.  Western international relations and foreign policy today are not far from the morality of the thug.  Relations are often polite and without physical aggression, but they are usually about using weight to get as many of the available resources, markets, territory etc. as possible.  Consider the chaos, warfare, and likely future of the Middle East and Central Asia, the arena in which the West is now locked in struggle against Russia and China to control the world’s dwindling oil supplies.
 
This connects with the readiness to brutality, vindictiveness and aggression that is easily triggered in the Western mind, especially if righteous indignation can be summoned.   People eagerly consume brutally violent movies.  Computer games are saturated with slaughter.  “Make my day”.  People can quickly take the opportunity to attack, injure, destroy, vanquish.  The Christian ethic is supposed to be to turn the other cheek, not to hit back, to love one’s enemies.  But to do business in a market is to risk predation.  People are likely to take advantage of you, cheat you.  It is OK to “make a killing”, and to try to drive competitors into ruin by taking their business.  Law is about contests where one party wins in absolute triumph, not about sitting down to look for a sensible win-win outcome, or compromise. (In The Simpler Way there are village elders who mediate between people with a problem.)
 
The limitless acquisitiveness in Western culture also connects with these brutally predatory elements. Take as much as you can get.  There is no concept of sufficient.  Winner take all is OK, don’t worry about the “losers”.  There is in rich countries close to no concern at all with the way their affluence and comfort help to cause the deprivation and misery of billions of other people.
 
Eisler’s book The Challice and the Blade argues that for 1500 years an “Old European Civilization” thrived in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a very peaceful, equal and participatory culture, and a strong environmental sensitivity evident in the worship of Gaia the Earth Goddess Mother.  This culture was eventually overrun by a dominator culture, which Eisler says we still suffer in the West. 
 
The conditions of The Simpler Way will sweep all this away.  We will realise that we must be cooperative, helpful, nurturing, or our societies will not survive, and we will find these ways rewarding.
 
In “participator” society the basic concern will have to be to cooperate with, help and nurture the other.  It will not be a zero-sum situation where what I get you can’t have.  If we are so silly as to compete for individual advantage out town will die.  But if I help you then you will help me and others and then others will help me. Synergism works its miracles.  Goodwill multiplies.  And above all, helping and working cooperatively with others not only builds community solidarity – it is enjoyable!
 
Work
 
Some of the silliest unexamined assumptions and habits in Western culture are do with work.  Firstly far too much of it takes place!  In a sane economy we would live well on about one third as much as is done now.  Yet work time is increasing and work conditions are deteriorating.  (In 2006 40% of Americans work for the below-poverty line income of $5.15 an hour.)  Work has been largely destroyed in capitalist society.  For many it is not a source of enjoyment or personal growth.  In the new economy it will be both.  In consumer society people firmly believe in the moral worth of working hard.  They despise laziness, even though we need a lot more of it.  In consumer society work is mostly seen as an unpleasant means to a valued end, e.g., earning the money to spend on something nice.  Thus most people are probably wasting about half their waking lives in the effort to enjoy the other half. 
 
In the Simpler Way there will be far less produced and consumed, and producing will be enjoyable.  Working hours will be short.  Work will be at a relaxed pace, under the control of the producers.  Work will be highly varied for the many who desire that, and making many different contributions throughout the day.  There will be no drudgery.  Much work will be cooperative, e.g., on working bees.  Most work will be in homes, in gardens, in kitchens and community cooperatives.  Much will be in craft mode of production.  The distinction between work and leisure will collapse; people will enjoy producing and will do a lot of producing during their “leisure time, e.g., in gardens and crafts.
 
The importance of enthusiasm.
 
Perhaps the worst aspect of consumer-capitalist society is the gulf between the zest for life and enjoyment all could experience, and the stunted, stressed, spiritually impoverished lives most people are forced to endure, in even the richest countries.  Again depression, stress and mental illness are at epidemic levels.  Americans average 4 hours TV watching per day.  These phenomena are due to lack of purpose, lack of enthusiasm, lack of worthwhile things to do.
 
About the worst thing that can happen to a person is to lose purpose.  What matters above just about all else is having things you want to do, are interested in, hope for.  To a large extent consumer-capitalist society has taken significant, worthwhile purpose from people.  Consider Aborigines, homeless, tribal people, impoverished, unemployed, disabled and aged people.  Most of them have nothing to do, no role, no contribution, no status or respect from their contribution.  There is no interest in designing a society that would give these people important things to do (that would detract from the amount corporations could supply).  Indeed this economy prides itself on the way the smart powerful few, the Wal-Marts, can take business and livelihoods from many others and dump them into boredom and purposelessness.  No surprise that we have ever-increasing problems of depression, drugs, crime and self-destruction.
 
Thus the main reason why people devote themselves to Postmodern mindless trivia, TV, sport, celebrities, hedonism fantasy…and shopping, is because there isn’t much else to do.
 
The Simpler Way solves all this, automatically.  All have important things to do, in a supportive community, full of artists and gardens, all know that their welfare depends on keeping the locality in good shape, and all are respected and valued for their contribution to this end.  All will be acutely conscious of their beautiful surroundings, the landscape, the community, well run systems, their powerful political system, their institutions, the fact that they have built and that they run an admirable society, a society to be proud of.
 
It would be difficult to estimate the power, energy and creativity that will be released by this change in the situation individual’s experience.  At present huge amounts of potential energy, time, skill, responsibility and are locked up in those people sitting watching TV, when they could be thrashing around their town doing things, helping, discussing, building, creating, caring for others and thinking about what would improve their town.  What miracles could be perform in our neighbourhoods and to the quality of life there if we released 28 hours enthusiastic effort per person per week!
THE VALUES AND WORLD VIEW OF CONSUMER SOCIETY; THE BIGGEST PROBLEM. http://web.archive.org/web/20071103170809/http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/
 

THE SIMPLER WAY: WORKING FOR TRANSITION FROM CONSUMER SOCIETY TO A SIMPLER, MORE COOPERATIVE, JUST AND ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE   SOCIETY. Ted (F.E.)Trainer, P. O. Box 184 Panania, Australia 2213, and Social Work, University of NSW, Kensington 2052.

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Antropology is an intellectually challenging, theoretically ambitious subject which tries to achieve an understanding of culture, society and humanity through detailed studies of local life, supplemented by comparison. Many are attracted to it for personal reasons: they may have grown up in a culturally foreign environment, or they are simply fascinated by faraway places, or they are engaged in minority rights issues – immigrants, indigenous groups or other minorities, as the case might be – or they might even have fallen in love with a Mexican village or an African man. But as a profession and as a science, anthropology has grander ambitions than offering keys to individual self-understanding, or bringing travel stories or political tracts to the people. At the deepest level, anthropology raises philosophical questions which it tries to respond to by exploring human lives under different conditions. At a slightly less lofty level, it may be said that the task of anthropology is to create astonishment, to show that the world is both richer and more complex than it is usually assumed to be.

To simplify somewhat, one may say that anthropology primarily offers two kinds of insight: First, the discipline produces knowledge about the actual cultural variation in the world; studies may deal with, say, the role of caste and wealth in Indian village life, technology among highland people in New Guinea, religion in Southern Africa, food habits in Northern Norway, the political importance of kinship in the Middle East, or notions about gender in the Amazon basin. Although most anthropologists are specialists on one or two regions, it is necessary to be knowledgeable about global cultural variation in order to be able to say anything interesting about one’s region, topic or people.

Secondly, anthropology offers methods and theoretical perspectives enabling the practitioner to explore, compare and understand these varied expressions of the human condition. In other words, the subject offers both things to think about and things to think with.

But anthropology is not just a toolbox; it is also a craft which teaches the novice how to obtain a certain kind of knowledge and what this knowledge might say something about. And just as a carpenter can specialise in either furniture or buildings, and one journalist may cover fluctuations in the stockmarket while another deals with royal scandals, the craft of anthropology can be used for a lot of different things. Like carpenters or journalists, all anthropologists share a set of professional skills.

Some newcomers to the subject are flabbergasted at its theoretical character, and some see it as deeply ironic that a subject which claims to make sense of the life-worlds of ordinary people can be so difficult to read. Now, it must be interjected that many anthropological texts are beautifully written, but it is also true that many of them are tough and convoluted. Anthropology insists on being analytical and theoretical, and as a consequence, it can often feel both inaccessible and aven alienating. (Since its contents are so important and – arguably – fascinating, this only indicates that there is a great need for good popularisations of anthropology.)
Anthropology is not alone in studying society and culture academically. Sociology descibes and accounts for social life, especially in modern societies, in great breadth and depth. Political science deals with politics at all levels, from the municipal to the global. Psychology studies the mental life of humans by means of scientific and interpretive methods, and human geography looks at economic and social processes in a transnational perspective. Finally, there is the recent subject, controversial but popular among students and the public, of cultural studies, which can be described as an amalgamation of cultural sociology, history of ideas, literary studies and anthropology. (Evil tongues describe it as ‘anthropology without the pain’, that is without field research and meticulous analysis.) In other words, there is a considerable overlap between the social sciences, and it may well be argued that the disciplinary boundaries are to some extent artificial. The social sciences represent some of the same interests and try to respond to some of the same questions, although there are also differences.

Moreover, anthropology also has much in common with humanities such as literary studies and history; philosophy has always provided intellectual input for anthropology, and there is a productive, passionately debated frontier area towards biology.

A generation or so ago, anthropology still concentrated almost exclusively on detailed studies of local life in traditional societies, and ethnographic fieldwork was its main – in some cases its sole – method. The situation is more complex now, because anthropologists now study all kinds of societies and also because the methodological repertoire has become more varied. This book consists in its entirety in a long answer to the question ‘What is anthropology?’, but for now, we might say that it is the comparative study of culture and society, with a focus on local life. Put differently, anthropology distinguishes itself from other lines of enquiry by insisting that social reality is first and foremost created through relationships between persons and the groups they belong to. A currently fashionable concept such as globalisation, for example, has no meaning to an anthropologist unless it can be studied through actual persons, their relationship to each other and to a larger surrounding world. When this level of the ‘nitty-gritty’ is established, it is possible to explore the linkages between the locally lived world and large-scale phenomena (such as global capitalism or the state). But it is only when an anthropologist has spent enough time crawling on all fours, as it were, studying the world through a magnifying-glass, that she is ready to enter the helicopter in order to obtain an overview.

Anthropology means, translated literally from ancient Greek, the study of humanity. As already indicated, anthropologists do not have a monopoly here. Besides, there are other anthropologies than the one described in this book. Philosophical anthropology raises fundamental questions concerning the human condition. Physical anthropology is the study of human pre-history and evolution. (For some time, physical anthropology also included the study of ‘races’. They are no longer scientifically interesting since genetics has disproven their existence, but in social and cultural anthropology, race may still be interesting as a social construction, because it remains important in many ideologies that people live by.) Moreover, a distinction, admittedly a fuzzy one, is sometimes drawn between cultural and social anthropology. Cultural anthropology is the term used in the USA (and some other countries), while social anthropology traces its origins to Britain and, to some extent, France. Historically, there have been certain differences between these traditions – social anthropology has its foundation in sociological theory, while cultural anthropology is more broadly based – but the distinction has become sufficiently blurred not to be bothered with here. In the following, the distinction between social and cultural anthropology will only be used when it is necessary to highlight the specificity of North American or European anthropology.

As a university discipline, anthropology is not a very old subject – it has been taught for about a hundred years – but it has raised questions which have been formulated in different guises since antiquity: Are the differences between peoples inborn or learnt? Why are there so many languages, and how different are they really? Do all religions have something in common? Which forms of governance exist, and how do they work? Is it possible to rank societies on a ladder according to their level of development? What is it that all humans have in common? And – perhaps most importantly: What kind of creatures are humans; aggressive animals, social animals, religious animals or are they, perhaps, the only self-defining animals on the planet?

Every thinking person has an opinion on these matters. Some of them can hardly be answered once and for all, but they can at least be asked in an accurate and informed way. It is the goal of anthropology to establish as detailed knowledge as possible about varied forms of human life, and to develop a conceptual apparatus making it possible to compare them. This in turn enables us to understand both differences and similarities between the many different ways of being human. In spite of the enormous variations anthropologists document, the very existence of the discipline proves beyond doubt that it is possible to communicate fruitfully and intelligibly between them. Had it been impossible to understand culturally remote peoples, anthropology as such would have been impossible. And nobody who practises anthropology believes that this is impossible (although few believe that it is possible to understand everything). On the contrary, different societies are made to shed light on each other through comparison.

The great enigma of anthropology can be phrased like this: All over the world, humans are born with the same cognitive and physical apparatus, and yet they grow into distinctly different persons and groups, with different societal types, beliefs, technologies, languages and notions about the good life. Differences in innate endowments vary within each group and not between them, so that musicality, intelligence, intuition and other qualities which vary from person to person, are quite evenly distributed globally. It is not the case that Africans are ‘born with rhythm’, or that Northeners are ‘innately cold and introverted’. To the extent that such differences exist, they are not inborn. On the other hand, it is true that particular social milieux stimulate inborn potentials for rhythmicity, while others encourage the ability to think abstractly. Mozart, a man filled to the brim with musical talent, would hardly have become the world’s greatest composer if he, that is a person with the same genetic code as Mozart, had been born in Greenland. Perhaps he would only have become a bad hunter (because of his famous impatience).

Put differently, and paraphrasing the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, all humans are born with the potential to live thousands of different lives, yet we end up having lived only one. One of the central tasks of anthropology consists in giving accounts of some of the other lives we could have led.

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