- Isaac Cui
- Oct 22, 2020
- 13 min read
Updated: Oct 22, 2020
A good number of the Marshalls I’ve met have been very interested in environmental issues; many either want to work in climate policy or follow it carefully. In a lot of those conversations, we’ve ended up talking about consumerism and the question whether consumerism is a desirable or sustainable lifestyle.
One of the arguments I’ve seen is that consumerism is a socially constructed culture — that is, we’ve been acculturated to the idea that consumption is our (i.e., Americans’) way to the Good Life, and that this was a product of clever and continuous strategizing by advertisers aided by government and changes in our underlying economic system, all dating to the early twentieth century.
Though I’m likely oversimplifying and creating some sort of strawperson, I think this kind of argument has an implicit claim that we, as contemporary Americans, are deceived — that we have been tricked into believing that consumption is, in fact, a route to a good life when in fact satisfaction and happiness (as many studies, linked in the article above, suggest) cannot derive in full from consumption. I want to spend this post thinking through that argument and the extent to which it is helpful.
I’ll start first by saying: I’m skeptical of the claim that we are all deceived by the virtues of consumerism. For one, the argument suggests that knowledge, alone, would suffice to solve our problems — we just need to preach more about the virtues of moderation to decrease our consumption and allow each of us to lead a more environmentally conscious lifestyle. But humans have done precisely that for generations. Think of King Midas — the man who could turn anything to gold, including his daughter. Cautionary tales about overemphasizing wealth, abundance, and consumption abound in, I suspect, every culture. The mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” is deeply ingrained in ours. We know what to do. That doesn’t mean we do it.
A second issue I have with the argument: at a certain point, these kinds of arguments reek of intellectual superiority — that if some people just knew more or were more thoughtful, then our problems would go away. I sometimes think that those on the Left and Right of the political spectrum have the same problem — a sense that the other side is just too stupid to see what’s going on (“wake up!”), rather than reacting in potentially self-consistent and rational ways that are merely the product of different (perhaps warped) perceptions of reality and causal stories.
To me, the question of consumption and whether it relates to a good life isn’t an issue of deception. It’s one of will. In other words, I think we (implicitly or explicitly) choose to believe that consumption leads to a good life because to do otherwise is simply too scary.
Allow me to elaborate, first, by thinking about what we need out of an answer. Each of us desires cognitive closure, an answer to our questions to set our minds at rest. The big questions of life — what comes after life? what matters most in life? what does it mean to be ethical? — are impossible to answer absent faith in some authority: theological, philosophical, political, or otherwise. But usually those kinds of sources do not offer easy answers. That is, philosophical or religious principles might give us guidance about how to make choices, but they do not resolve all ambiguities. They cannot provide us sufficient closure and, instead, will require us to live with the discomfort of uncertainty. Reasoning by applying principles is always riddled with potential problems; it’s easier to tear down an argument and point out inconsistencies than it is to build a position.
In the alternative, those principles could purport to explain everything and guide us through a singular explanation, which will inevitably conflict with our messy, complicated, dynamic empirical reality. I read this morning a discussion of conspiracy theories where the essential argument was that the purpose of conspiracies was to deceive us about the nature of truth and learning. Conspiracies wrap the events of the world in a nice bow, providing that cognitive closure that I think all people seek. The existence of conspiracy theories demonstrates how deeply thoughtful people can find themselves in odd places. Think, too, of the philosopher who takes their principle to its logical extreme. Good judgment is informed, but not exclusively driven, by principle.
Of our two options, we have seen how the drive for cognitive closure can force us to confront our discomfort or to turn to absurdity. The third option, of course, is to withdraw — to refuse to ask the question and expose ourselves to those difficult ambiguities. It is will, not ignorance, that might lead us to live in what David Foster Wallace once called our default setting, a mode of life that is unthinking and thus resorts to our natural tendencies to be self-centered. Better not to ask a question than to leave it unanswered. It is this default state that, I think, leads to consumerism.
Why should the default state be in favor of consumption? To answer that question, let me invoke a few observations from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
When Tocqueville arrived in America, he was confronted with a vigorous society — in my copy of Democracy in America, his catchword for describing Americans is “restive.” Its people are constantly on the move, striving for improvement. It’s a society of abundance, freedom, and enlightenment, with people “placed in the happiest condition that exists in the world.”* Yet, Tocqueville wrote, they “appeared to me grave and almost sad even in their pleasures.” They were unceasingly trying to improve their livelihoods even as they lived in relative luxury.
Reading these passages felt resonant. Life ever since middle school has felt like a treadmill, where the goal is always to climb the next ladder: get the next good grade, apply for the next stage of school, find the next internship, move up in the ranks of the next organization. Satisfaction — slowing down and smelling the roses, as my old debate coach once put it — was, and is, a rather foreign concept.
Tocqueville described people shaping their environment; his understanding of restiveness was tied to, I think, the idea that America had this vast, “uninhabited” expanse of land. (Remember that his comparisons were always between America and what was familiar to him — France, and Europe more generally.) In a beautifully descriptive passage that really makes Americans seem Sisyphisian, invariably setting down the same path over and over again, never to achieve bliss, Tocqueville wrote:
“In the United States, a man carefully builds a dwelling in which to pass his declining years, and he sells it while the roof is being laid; he plants a garden and he rents it out just as he was going to taste its fruits; he clears a field and he leaves to others the care of harvesting its crops. . . . He settles in a place from which he departs soon after so as to take his changing desires elsewhere. Should his private affairs give him some respite, he immediately plunges into the whirlwind of politics. And when toward the end of a year filled with work some leisure still remains to him, he carries his restive curiosity here and there within the vast limits of the United States.”
I don’t think that same drive to shape our external environment is ubiquitous today (or at least, I certainly don’t feel it), but I do feel driven to be continuously productive — in many meanings of the word — in a way that Tocqueville seemed to witness. Time that I could’ve spent reading a law review article, exploring London, meeting new people, catching up with old friends, thinking more deeply about my course work — the drive to better use that time is compelling.
But the deeper insight from Tocqueville isn’t that we feel an urge to be productive; it is that we are uneasy when we are unproductive. Hence, Tocqueville described that “singular melancholy that the inhabitants of democratic lands often display amid their abundance,” a kind of “disgust with life that sometimes seizes them in the midst of an easy and tranquil existence.” The saddest and most confused moments in my time at Pomona — a time of luxury, where creature comforts were taken care of and where supportive people abounded — weren’t in late nights writing essays, three-hour-long seminars, or doing repetitive and seemingly-pointless work in a lab. They were in times of leisure, when I unexpectedly finished my work early on a Saturday night and had nothing to do, or when I stayed on campus during school breaks. To be restive, I felt, and I think Tocqueville understood, isn’t to yearn doing more. It’s to fear doing less, to dread staying still and stagnant, putrid and passive.
Tocqueville noted three sources of this restiveness. First, he pointed to materialism; the person who seeks pleasure in material goods will always seek more, to maximize their abundance in their limited life: “His remembrance of the brevity of life constantly spurs him. In addition to the goods that he possesses, at each instant he imagines a thousand others that death will prevent him from enjoying if he does not hasten[,]” leaving him with an “unceasing trepidation” in his soul.
Second, Tocqueville noted that our freedom of choice encourages frenzied restiveness. For we are constantly aware not only that we can make decisions, but that our decisions will have consequences — and that when those consequences are negative, we must blame ourselves. Under such conditions, “one will then see men change course continuously for fear of missing the shortest road that would lead them to happiness.”
Third, and finally, equality (and implicitly, opportunity) enables people to always strive for more. Ambitious people “willingly fancy that they have been called to great destiny” because of their self-confidence and an environment that tears down barriers to entry. The result is “the competition of all[,]” for everyone is now in the rat race to climb to the top of the meritocratic pyramid.
Each of these factors explains the drive to improve. But, remember, restiveness is more properly understood as a fear of stagnation, not just a yearning for improvement. How might each of those factors relate, then, to this fear?
Tocqueville thought that the materialism he observed among Americans was asinine. Americans “rush[ ] so precipitately to grasp” the goods of the world. They “grasp[ ] them all but without clutching them,” and the American “soon allows them to escape from his hands so as to run after new enjoyments.” In thinking about materialism, our gut instinct might be to expect hoarding — to hold on to everything, clutching ever tighter even as their worth to us is minimal. But Tocqueville observed the opposite. Implicitly, then, the value of new goods to the American, in Tocqueville’s eyes, adhered in the acquisition of new things, not in the ownership of good things. From a social scientist’s perspectives, we might say that materialism understood in this Tocquevilliean sense is either a result (or aspect) of restiveness; we’d have endogeneity problems attempting to separate the two (which is problematic given Tocqueville’s argument that materialism is a cause of restiveness: “The taste for material enjoyments must be considered as the first source of this secret restiveness revealed in the actions of Americans of the inconstancy of which they give daily examples.”). Perhaps the better way to think of the causal relationship is to posit that people know, in the end, that materialism in itself is not fulfilling, but that the acquisition of new, better goods acts as a salve — a temporary distraction to prevent the brooding existential angst from boiling to the surface. The result is that a willfully naive belief in material spurs restive activity, to stay on the move so as to prevent deeper contemplation.
Tocqueville also pointed to freedom as a source of restiveness. Here, the argument is that our ability to make choices leads us to fear that our choices were not optimal for getting to the Good Life, and that that fear leads us to keep changing our decisions as we learn new ideas. Here, though, I think Tocqueville’s observation was prescient even as his argument wasn’t. I don’t think a fear of our decisions being right necessarily leads us to constantly change them; such fear can easily result in indecision. But I think there’s a new factor today that Tocqueville wouldn’t have anticipated. Today, people’s personal and private lives have become public. Social media enables us to constantly benchmark ourselves — Alastor is with friends today, Johan just got a new job, Alice got engaged, as I am scrolling through my newsfeed wasting away my time. Implicit social pressure deriving from rendering the private public heightens the perceived risks associated with our decisions and makes action feel more obligatory. The import of that exposure is compounded by Tocqueville’s third factor: equality. When we see similarly situated individuals to ourselves — people who went to school with us, who came from similar backgrounds, who studied in the same fields — succeed, then we know all too well how far up we could go. As a corollary, we are instilled with a greater fear of stagnation. We do not want to be left behind the pack.
The concept of restiveness can help us understand our relationship to consumption. Note that while restiveness derives, to a certain degree, from consumption, I think it also entrenches our desire to consume. Our continued sense of self-improvement, of staying on a path onward and upward, helps us justify material reward; we have sacrificed, and our sacrifice ought to be rewarded by acquiring greater goods. This compensatory sense of consumption inheres in the stories you hear about highly-paid business people or lawyers, those zealots who work inhuman hours for inhuman amounts of money, such that they can reward themselves with inhuman goods far from that which they, as humans, need but seemingly proportionate to that which they, as machine-like workers, deserve.
Moreover, the concept of restiveness helps pull our attention to the importance of acquiring new goods, beyond their utility or long-term value. We are drawn by the prospect of something new and different to cover the void that would form from extended contemplation. Like dogs distracted by squirrels, our attention is easily pulled away from the questions in life in favor of getting the latest technological upgrades. Restiveness is an important element for thinking about consumption because it helps us understand why consumption, and not just ownership of goods, is so comforting. It offers the continuous change we yearn for, that temporary bulwark against stagnation.
If this convoluted analysis is correct, then thinking about consumption isn’t a question of knowledge, or of intelligence, or of economic studies that show how consumption won’t help us feel happier. Our relationship to consumption is an existential one, a question that gets at the heart of why (and more importantly, whether) we choose to live the way we do, and, in particular, why we feel an urge to be constantly in motion and whether we ought to.
Posing these questions suggests that they are answerable. They aren’t. We live our lives by making decisions often shooting from the hip; we don’t have coherent philosophies that inform our decision making in most instances. And the forces that influence our worldview are deeply seated and mostly out of our control. The more important question, as David Foster Wallace suggested, often isn’t “what” the right decision is. It’s “whether” we make a decision through conscious analysis versus instinct, heuristic, or tradition, and whether we can live with ourselves having made those decisions deliberately.
We can’t answer the question of how to consume by saying we should stop consuming — we are, after all, embodied individuals, forever fighting entropy by consuming more energy. We can’t refuse to pose the question of consumption, lest we leave our decisions to the whims of our restive condition. Why we choose to produce, why we feel the need to be in motion, and why we seek the palliative of consumption are discomforting questions that we can only ask — and, even more discomfortingly, leave unanswered.
* I should note that the entire argument in my blog post (both mine, and my references to Tocqueville) is not empirical. As I hinted at in my last blog post, I think many forms of social commentary and analysis are better interpreted as ways of thinking about the world (and in turn as reflections of the author’s worldview) than as good descriptions of how the world works. Tocqueville, for example, thought equality was the defining characteristic of American society in a time in which slavery existed and despite personally witnessing the removal of Native Americans from their land. Such contradictions don’t necessarily mean his insights are wrong, in my opinion. After all, there are even more fundamental reasons to think his analysis might not help us today, written as they were nearly two hundred years ago. Rather, I want to hold up our current society to the light of his scrutiny, not to directly transplant his empirical observations as if they were scientifically accurate descriptions of our current society.
* * * * *
Rose: I’ll highlight two of them. First, this last week was the first time that I felt like I really got to meet some of my classmates. They were really interesting people, and I appreciated getting to learn more about Britain — its schooling system, the different places in the UK (which places are “posh” and which aren’t), how students think about LSE and other universities in the UK, and so on. (Apparently Surrey, a place I know only because it was referenced in a wonderful Harry Potter scene, is a very posh place.)
Second, I’ve continued doing tourist-y stuff in the UK. The flat went out for a night stroll along Regent’s Canal, which was honestly beautiful and a surprising pleasure of London. (I don’t know about you, but I don’t associate London with canals!) The next day, we went for a winding walk in the Westminster area of town — we saw Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Whitehall, and many other things. We also walked through four of the eight Royal Parks in London — Green Park, Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens, and St. James’s Park. The last one was particularly cool because there were a ton of waterfowl (ducks, geese, swans, a pelican!).
Bud: I joined a reading group at LSE dedicated to the literature on race in American and British politics, and we had our first meeting today. We read Cheryl Harris’s classic article, “Whiteness as Property,” which I had read excerpts from for a class a year ago but had never read fully. It was well worth reading in full. I think in the pressure of reading for a class, you read for a particular reason — your goal is to situate the piece with other readings and to anticipate why the professor wanted you to read it. But there’s a kind of liberty associated with reading something outside of class and thinking it through more organically, I think. I’m glad to have a group of people to read and think through the literature with.
Thorn: Our sink and its garbage disposal system (called the Garchey System) is quite gross, and the flatmate who has been here for a year said that they bring in a professional to clean it every three months. But you’re supposed to clean the system 3–4 times a month. So I figured out how to do it last Friday and did it. It was . . . an unpleasant experience — one that I might write more about sometime if I ever get pictures. The positive side, though, is that things feel wonderful after the process.
Future topic ideas:
* I think next week has to be about the election. If you can and haven’t already, go vote!!
