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The Response
to Affluence at the End of the Century
By Daniel Horowitz
 On July 15, 1979, President
Jimmy Carter delivered a talk, commonly known as the "malaise" speech,
to a television audience of 65 million Americans. He evoked
a nation plunged into crisis by excesses of affluence and
suggested a comprehensive energy policy as a solution. Like other
public figures who had spoken to the nation at a time of crisis, he
offered a jeremiad that highlighted the sins of excess and called
on citizens to repent by consuming less.
Not long after his speech,
the United States began to experience two decades of sustained
economic growth. By the end of the 20th century, a torrent
of books, Web sites and television shows suggested how people wrestled
with the consequences of prosperity. Among the most compelling
reactions to affluence toward the end of the 20th century were impassioned,
morally charged critiques of consumer culture. The voluntary
simplicity movement attracted millions of dedicated followers
who "downsized" in order to live more uncluttered
and purposeful lives, free of the excesses of commercialism. Millions more
turned to Eastern religions for an alternative to an interminable chase after
vacuous material satisfactions. In late 1997 and 1998 PBS aired two programs, "Affluenza" and "Escape
from Affluenza," that described a society sick with the excesses of
affluence. With Simple Abundance, Sarah Breathnach offered a daily diary
designed to inspire women to exchange spiritual plenty for its material counterpart
by infusing daily activities such as shopping with sacred meanings.
Activism
against commercialism found expression in many venues. Culture jammers
took dramatic stances against hype and commercialism. Animal
rights and environmental activists campaigned against the ways human
beings exploited nature. The Buy Local movement put one version of
moral spending into practice. Evangelical Christians campaigned against
media conglomerates for their depictions of violence and
their undermining of family values. In the late 1990s students and
protestors campaigned against the excesses of globalization, in the
process emphasizing the link between consumption of sneakers in the
First World and exploitative labor conditions in the Third.
The most
powerful critiques of consumer culture came in a series of
serious and accessible books published between 1999 and 2001.
In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam offered an immensely influential analysis
of the decline of social capital since the late 1960s that resulted
in people bowling (or praying, volunteering, politicking) alone rather
than in groups. The causes were many, but prominent among
them was the way media had privatized people's lives, resulting
in the erosion of the reciprocity that social networks had provided. With
Luxury Fever the economist Robert Frank explored how the "virus" of
extravagant spending had infected the society. In Do
Americans Shop Too Much?, Juliet Schor answered the question in the affirmative. In his best-selling
Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser analyzed the adverse impact that the consumption
of fast foods had on working conditions, health, farming, demography and
the environment. These books put forth progressive versions of a politics
of consumption that, sensitive to issues of equity and the environment,
might restore a sense of balance to the nation's engagement with
affluence.
In contrast to these moralists, post-moralists
rejected the puritanical strain in American cultural criticism. They
sought to move beyond the jeremiad, emphasizing not cleansing but
accepting and even celebrating consumer culture. They understood people's longings for affluence
as inevitable and genuine. They explored the utopian and liberatory possibilities
of consumer culture. A conservative and populist version of post-moralism
emerged in the writing in James Twitchell's
Lead Us into Temptation, where he mixed hints of cultural elitism with
an extraordinary grasp of the processes that drive consumer culture. He
saw the pursuit of materialism as something that drew on our love of goods
and that filled genuine needs in a thoroughly democratic process. If Twitchell
offered a populist but culturally conservative version of post-moralism,
Jesse Lemisch put forward a populist but politically radical one. In a
2001 issue of the journal New Politics he criticized Ralph Nader (whom
he supported in 2000) and the Green Party for "abstemiously" turning "their
backs on people's reasonable and deeply human longings for abundance,
joy, cornucopia, variety and mobility, substituting instead a puritanical
asceticism that romanticized hardship, scarcity, localism and underdevelopment." Instead,
Lemisch hoped for a utopian cornucopia of abundance he believed possible
under socialism.
I end with affluence and nationhood in
response to 9/11. During the energy crisis of the 1970s, President
Jimmy Carter called on citizen/consumers to repent of their self-indulgent,
materialistic ways. After the tragic events of 9/11, the response
was very different. Now the moralists about consumer culture were
Islamic fundamentalists whose response to American affluence was as
troubled as their actions were reprehensible. In the United States
the president, though on occasion half-heartedly issuing a call to
national service, had no interest in urging Americans to sacrifice.
There was no sustained call, involving either more careful use of energy
or alternative technologies, for a focused and dramatic effort to free
the nation from the power of Middle Eastern oil. An external threat of
unimaginable dimensions, a recession, corporate scandals and bankruptcies,
and a declining stock market prompted Americans to understand that the
consumer was a critical factor in the nation's health and survival.
We would have to spend our way out of this danger, millions of Americans
believed, so that the enemies who had attacked us would not win. The consumer
was in the saddle, and unlike the situation the nation faced during World
War II or the energy crisis, there seemed no turning back from a full embrace
of affluence and a commercialized consumer culture. A January 2002 cartoon
echoes that response: in it a woman pushing a shopping cart wears a sweatshirt
that reads "Ask
not what you can do for your country: SHOP."
Daniel Horowitz, Mary Huggins Gamble
Professor of American Studies, directs the American studies
program at Smith. This essay is adapted from the epilogue of The
Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer
Culture, 1939-1979, published in February by the University
of Massachusetts Press. |
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