Kruse Kronicle

Consumption vs. Consumerism (Final Part)

The following quote comes from David Cowan in Economic Parables: The Monetary Teaching of Jesus Christ. I almost jumped from my chair and shouted "YES!" when I came to this passage; it expresses my sentiments so well.

Economic life, in part, is about aspirations. How are we to balance our economic goals with our aspiration to be with Christ? We can't secure this using plastic – "gold," "platinum," or otherwise. We cannot allow ourselves to be seduced by slick marketing that seeks to offers us materialistic salvation. This is an aspect of the economy that we must battle with, but the battle is within ourselves. Other facets of our economic life are our work, mortgage, other debts, investments, and relationships with other economic agents. These are the day-to-day realities of living in the economy. We struggle with them, and we calculate and measure our daily life by them.

Those who would want to undermine the free-market system are escapists. They too have economic aspirations. This protest movement has its own style of dress, music, and language, branded and sold like any other commodity in the economic world. The celebrities who preach to us about the ills of free enterprise earn huge advertising contracts from major companies. They are, in effect, the chief executive officers of multi-million-dollar-a-year corporations, something along the line of "U2 Inc." and the "George Clooney Corporation." They are what they protest.

The crowds who gather to protest free enterprise and globalization warn us of environmental cynicism and poor stewardship and link these to poverty. Are they the crowds to be feared? I suggest not. The crowd Jesus faced was not a group of well-healed protestors in designer jeans, organized via the Internet. They did not cheer rock stars with wealth beyond their dreams at "poverty concerts." The crowds who gather to protest capitalism are what they protest. They fly to the protests using cheap Internet airline deals, seek the best hotel packages, and wear designer clothes. They seek identity in this economy, a cause that will set them apart, showing themselves to radically different from people in the business suits or doing an honest day's work. Where is the prophecy in that?

The protestors have become, in essence, "consumers of poverty," purchasing the feel-good factor of thinking that they have done something about the problem. Poverty is deeply troubling and complex, with many causes and with many barriers standing in the way of change. Many of the environmental problems are in poorer countries, which do not have the economic resources to tackle their difficulties. One effect of better economic management in these countries will be better environmental conditions. There are people in poor countries who can help themselves; they need the capital to invest and the know-how, not sympathy. (106-108)

Cowan says, "consumers of poverty." I might have said, "consumers of poverty activism." So much of what passes as social justice advocacy is little more than activist consumerism. Activists deride the Church for its consumerism. Churches are charged with offering ministries that merely cater to the felt needs of the congregants without calling for genuine transformation. What is being offered in its place?

Much of what is being trumpeted as emerging Christianity is precisely the same. Segments of the Church feel disaffected by the "product" and identity being offered by the Church they grew up with. New identity competitors have risen to meet the felt needs of these disaffected folks. These new suppliers cater to the felt need for activism and an identity that will distinguish the advocacy consumer from lesser evolved and out-of-style consumers of the old Christian consumerism. Populist events and online campaigns are organized so customers can have their identities reinforced by like-minded consumers. Idealistic leaders are molded for mass consumption through personal appearances, print, and electronic media. Enemies are identified and singled out (say, market economy sympathizers or U. N. skeptics) for either attack or marginalization. This, too, helps increase loyalty of advocacy consumers to advocacy products and their purveyors.

Meanwhile, precious few customers of this Christian advocacy product actually have seriously wrestled with the advocated issues. The willingness of people to polemically engage in economic issues, for instance, without ever having taken a class in economics or even making minimal effort to be acquainted with the most fundamental economic concepts, is pervasive. It should not be a surprise since the real issue is not about the poor but rather the felt needs of the advocacy consumer to advocate for justice. It is no different from the consumerism advocates deride in the "consumer Church" where discipleship is not truly about discipleship but about the customers' felt need to feel spiritual. In advocacy consumerism, the poor are made an object to satisfy the felt needs of consumers. So maybe Cowan is right after all. Perhaps they should be called "consumers of poverty."

The true pursuit of justice requires consumption. We must consume various ideas and experiences in the marketplace of ideas as we collectively seek God's wisdom. We must be vigilant in finding our identity in God and not in our systems of understanding. Regrettably, much of what represents itself as prophetic advocacy is not a healthy consumption of knowledge and wisdom but merely advocacy consumerism.

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Consumption vs. Consumerism (Part 2)

Scot McKnight completed a great series on Adam Hamilton's new book Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: Thoughts on Religion, Morality, and Politics. I have the book but haven't read it yet. I have a lot of respect for Hamilton, and I'm looking forward to reading it.

However, in the course of McKnight's review, he lifted this quote from Hamilton's book, and it is a line of reasoning I take issue with:

We have 5% of the world's population; we consume 22% of its energy resources. We expect other countries to go along with our global and national designs. We are obese while other nations struggle with starvation.

I've heard this stat repeated over and over again over the last thirty years. I think I first encountered it in Ron Sider's Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. It is intended to give evidence of the incredible wastefulness of American society.

But what if I were to tell you that for each hour worked, an American worker produces four to five times as much as the average worker in the world? That is the other side of this statistic. Americans consume 22% more fuel and produce 22% of the world's goods, even though they are 5% of the world's population.

Before the industrial era, the great masses of humanity had one option:

Option 1: Hard physical labor in agriculture, sunup to sundown, with very low consumption of energy resources.

With the industrial era, a new option emerged:

Option 2: Hard physical labor in factories, sunup to sundown, with more consumption of energy resources but still relatively low consumption on an economy-wide basis by today's standards.

As industrialism matured, a third option emerged:

Option 3: Very few people engaged in hard physical labor, and most tasks, once done through hard labor are done through technology directed by workers operating in safe environments while working fewer hours per week. Most of the masses were freed up for pursuits other than laborious manual labor and high energy consumption on an economy-wide basis.

That basically leaves us with two options with good and bad consequences.

1. Low energy consumption (good) and the masses locked in long hours of hard physical labor (bad).

2. High energy consumption (bad) with most people having a wide range of options that don't require long hours of hard physical labor (good.)

Ideally, we would like low energy consumption with few people engaged in long hours of hard physical labor. The problem is that growth and decline in gross domestic product correlate almost perfectly with growth and decline in energy consumption. Barring innovation, we will need to consume a great deal more energy resources to bring the rest of the planet to our level of post-industrial life. "Barring innovation" are the operative words.

A century ago, the United States had 300 million acres of land in crop production. Until then, the ratio of cropland to population had been fairly constant. Land had been plentiful, and the pressure to innovate was not strong.

If we could return to 1900 with the knowledge that the population would more than triple in the next 100 years, then project forward based on land-to-population ratios of that time, we would see that we would need another 700 million acres by century end. That is roughly the land area east of the Mississippi! So how many acres are in crop production today? Same as in 1900, about 300 million. Not only are more than triple the number of people fed and with the same amount of land, but surpluses are sold worldwide. The government pays some farmers not to grow crops to not depress food prices with too much supply.

Energy is the new cropland dilemma. Oil is the energy that moves the world today. The recent spike in oil and gas prices had far more to do with institutional investors diving into the commodities markets when other investments were underperforming than it did with the actual oil demand. That said, with India and China (one-third of the world) significantly subsidizing gasoline for their citizens, demand pressure had been rising faster than would otherwise have been the case. There has been more than enough oil for a rapidly growing world for centuries, but the price is still likely to creep higher in real terms. Concerns about carbon emissions are likely to put even more upward pressure on the price of oil. The economic pressure for affordable alternative energy and more energy-efficient technologies has risen.

The other challenge that frequently gets mentioned is the exhaustion of natural resources. Yet for 140 years, the real cost of commodities has been falling and is expected to continue on that path (the recent investor-driven spike notwithstanding.) And as Donald Hay has pointed out in Economics Today, almost everything we use today can feasibly be replaced by renewable and recyclable materials. The economic pressures to force such transitions simply have not yet been present.

The challenge of the 21st Century is creating a global economy of low energy (or at least renewable energy) consumption with few people engaged in long hours of hard physical labor. The fact that 5% of the world consumes 22% of world energy is not an indictment of American consumerism (though surely consumerism is present.) It is a consequence of having discovered how to substitute energy and technology for back-breaking human labor so the masses can be free to flourish in ways unimaginable before our era. The next step in economic evolution is how to extend this development to the rest of the world while transforming our energy sources.

Unfortunately, anti-growth activists at work wish to block this emergence. They have decided the world economy has grown large enough. With discredited Malthusian logic, they project current relationships of production and consumption forward into the future and prophecy global disaster. "Sustainable" means projecting current realities into the future as a justification for blocking growth in the present when sustainable is a moving target directly related to the technologies and economies we have available to us at any given moment.

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Consumption vs. Consumerism (Part 1)

Activism against consumerism is all the rage these days. But what is meant by consumerism?

I've been reading Economic Parables by David Cowan. He makes these observations:

"… Critics of the free market system believe that materialism is an essential element of the system. They argue that the drive toward materialism is a necessary, and evil, outcome of free market activity. The question they need to ask, however, is whether this is a true picture of the economy. They need to look more closely at the difference between consumption and consumerism.

We can classify our purchases into three categories: necessities, additional comforts, and unnecessary items. We need to buy food to live, but how much – and of what kind – do we need to live on? We might argue we need a car, but how comfortable does it need to be? We could get by driving a Ford or a Saturn rather than a Mercedes or a Porsche. Most of us buy many things that we don't really need, things like new CD players, jewelry, and the latest fashion in clothes.

We all draw the line on our spending according to our means. …We can only stand in awe at the seemingly endless things that money can buy, if we have the wealth to buy them. In contrast, we can only wince at the daily struggles of those too poor to pay for the basic necessities of life.

In the divine economy, Jesus turns this all on its head. …" (89-90)

Cowan writes this in his reflection on the Parable of the Rich Fool in Luke 12:13-21. The rich man in story has amassed possessions far beyond what he could use and enjoy. He has so much that he has to tear down his storage facilities and build bigger ones to hold it all. Though not explicitly stated, surely the story implies that he is doing this in the presence of many hungry and in want.

Kenneth Bailey adds this observation about the parable:

Literally translated, the text [v. 17] says, he "dialogued with himself." This is a very sad scene. In the Middle East, village people make decisions about important topics after long discussions with their friends. Families, communities and villages are tight knit together. Everybody's business is everybody else's business. Even trivial decisions are made after hours of discussion with family and friends. But this man appears to have no friends. He lives in isolation from the human family around him, and with an important decision to make the only person with home had can have dialogue is himself. (Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, 303)

The rich fool has become thoroughly isolated from genuine community and finds solace in his possessions. Isn't this the very essence of consumerism? Upon making his decision to build more storage capacity, he dies. Jesus asks us to reflect on the value of the man's possessions.

At its core, consumerism is about trying to meet legitimate desires for identity and security through illegitimate means of excessive acquisition and consumption. Our identity and security can only truly be found in God. Legitimate acquisition and consumption flow out of our relationship with God and our relationship with those with whom we have been called into community.

All of us consume. We all participate in consumption. There is nothing improper about being a consumer. Being a consumer does not mean being trapped in an ideology of consumerism. Consumption is essential to human flourishing, which is about far more than having the bare minimum of food, clothing, and shelter. Human flourishing is about having time for relationships. It is about being surrounded by things of beauty inside our homes and the world surrounding us. It is about opportunities for learning, exploring, and creating. It is about having a degree of security. It is about being entrusted with resources through which we enhance our lives and the lives of others. These all require consumption beyond what we need in the pure materialist sense.

Anti-consumerism activists frequently treat "wealthy" and "consumerist" as synonyms. Some wealthy people have succumbed to consumerism, but many people aren't wealthy, including those among the poor, who have fallen prey to consumerism as well. Watch an episode of Clean House sometime and see how consumerism has taken hold of some average folks' lives.

Furthermore, many wealthy people are not consumerists. Studies of millionaires show that most live well below their means in median-priced homes, drive used cars, don't buy expensive clothes, and are quite frugal with their expenditures. That is how they became wealthy. Less than 20% became wealthy through an inheritance.

I point out that consumerism is not as easy to spot as it might appear. In fact, I suspect the most common definition of consumerism is "someone who spends at least a little more than I do." Yet few of us doubt its presence among us.

Clearly, advertisers want to induce people to buy their products. Products are strategically placed in stores to induce sales. The home shopping channels provide an endless parade of stuff for the compulsive shopper. Advertisers strategically place their aids to motivate children to bug their parents into getting them more toys. But is this peculiar to capitalism? No.

The roots of consumerism are far deeper than the arrival of free market economies in the past century or two. Indeed when John Bunyan published Pilgrim's Progress 330 years ago, Vanity Fair was the epitome of consumerism. The roots go back at least 2,000 years to Jesus and his rich fool. They go back centuries before that to the teacher in Ecclesiastes with his warning of vain pursuits. Free market economies did not originate from consumerism or depend on it. Yet their integrative and productive powers can place us ever in the midst of a destructive Vanity Fair. It is a dangerous development if the people in the marketplace are not equipped with virtue and wisdom.

I submit that it is the church, not the market economy, which is most responsible for the rise of consumerism. Market economies essentially reflect the values of the players participating in the economy. The church lost its influence due, not in small part, to sacred versus secular dichotomies that led factions of the church to unthinkingly embrace models of behavior from an increasingly secularized business world or to scapegoat the economy as the culprit for fostering destructive behaviors counter to the virtues that church should have been instilling all along. Frankly, some anti-consumerism activism is merely factions of the church diverting blame to the economy for the church's failure to integrate economic life with our Christian discipleship effectively. The reality is that when the church fails to present a compelling vision of how life has abundant meaning in relationship to God and community, the culture will find a substitute.

We all consume, but too many of us find our identity in what we consume. We behave like the rich fool. But there were rich fools in Jesus' time in a completely different economy. Therefore, should our attention be primarily on market economies that merely reflect a human impulse that predates market economies, or should it be on the communities God established to bring transformation to humanity and have failed to do so?

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