Perspective

Between a rock and a countertop

By ROBYN BLUMNER, Times Columnist
Published January 13, 2008

I don't have stone countertops in my kitchen. I have Formica.

In wishing my home were more of a showcase, I expend mental energy dreaming about the beautiful matt-finished raven-black granite I would get if I ever had a spare $5,000.

Yet, I don't need new countertops. My Formica ones are quite serviceable and reasonably aesthetic. Moreover, they haven't been quarried out of the earth in a damaging way.

My rational mind knows all of that. So why do I still covet stone on my counters?

I've allowed myself to be manipulated by America's consumer culture, according to a new book by political theorist Benjamin Barber. The professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland says I am a willing victim of manufactured needs - market-created desires encouraged for no other purpose than to keep this age of consumer capitalism humming. In his book Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantalize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, Barber says all this material consumption is holding adulthood at bay and killing the citizen in us all.

The book encapsulates what I've been thinking for a long time. By elevating acquisition to a preeminent life goal (go shopping was President Bush's call to the nation in response to the 9/11 attacks) we have become consumers over citizens, consumers over neighbors, consumers over readers, thinkers, activists and family members.

And today's consumer is infantalized, Barber says, by being imbued with a gimme, gimme, gimme sensibility that sharply contrasts with the work ethic that used to undergird capitalism. In capitalism's early establishment, long-term investment, risk, thrift, savings and hard work - adult values - were the virtues of success. Today, with needs in the developed world largely sated, the market has to manufacture faux needs to survive, which means making kids into consumers, and adults into impulsive, spendthrift kids (or "kidults" as Barber calls them).

The danger is that we have become diverted from our adult duties of providing a secure, solvent future for ourselves, our families and our nation. We have become a nation of debtors (and a debtor nation), drowning in soulless things, even while we lose sight of the attendant costs.

"The gloating Hummer owner may preen with macho pride," Barber writes, "unaware or simply uncaring of the fact that he drives an ecological behemoth that squanders fossil fuel resources, pollutes the environment, and makes the United States more dependent than ever on foreign oil."

The dominance of consumerism as a driving force in our lives leads to a selfish, privatized society, that all but ignores social consequences. It also helps to mask the withering of real choice.

Go into any store and the consumer is overwhelmed by the array of options. This is easily, though mistakenly, thought to enhance our freedom. We see it as a kind of marketplace democracy, with our dollar-spent as our vote.

But as Barber points out, the choices we have are trivial ones. "Go to L.A. today," Barber told journalist Bill Moyers, "you can rent or buy 200 different kinds of automobile. And then, in those automobiles, you can sit, no matter which one you're in, for five hours not moving on the freeway."

He says, what you don't have is the option of choosing an efficient public transportation system to get where you need to go. That would be a real alternative, but it is a civic choice - the kind that the domineering market helps to blot out.

"The big choices," Barber continued, "a green environment, a safe city for our kids, good education, simply are not available through private consumer choices."

This is where the market seriously fails us and where politicians who worshiped the free market, such as Ronald Reagan, led us astray. Barber calls it "privatization ideology" where government intervention is condemned and personal, market-based decisions are considered inerrant.

What we get from an aggregation of all these "I want's" are often irrational and unintended public outcomes that are "at wide variance with the kind of society we might choose through collective deliberation and democratic decision-making," Barber says.

"All the choices we make one by one thereby come to determine the social outcomes we must suffer together but which we never directly choose in common," Barber writes. (Insert Hummer example again here.)

We are told that the American consumer is the economic lifeline for the world, as if it is our duty to spend. That's another manipulation. A real contribution to our nation's future would be to save more, spend generally in response to legitimate needs, and tamp down our material consumption to make room for other parts of ourselves.

But despite all this sense, I still look longingly at countertops that are beyond my financial reach. Breaking this conformist hold is the secret to a happier life and healthier nation, I'm convinced of it.

[Last modified January 14, 2008, 08:09:17]