consuming morally optional

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ARTICLE

Consuming MoralityRICHARD WILK

This essay began as a set of exasperated notes while reading books about

consumption, such as Laschs (1979) The Culture of Narcissism, a complaint

about the shallowness of modern consumerism. Reading an early version

of Millers piece, The Poverty of Morality (this issue), prompted me to

revise that essay. The result is neither a critical response to Millers work nor

a completely separate and distinctive essay. We share literatures and critical

reactions,many field experiences and have exchanged many drafts, ideas and

conversations about consumption. Despite, or maybe because of, this

relationship, we do not agree about everything. Part of the difference is no

doubt due to my American perspective. I live in a state where more than

40 percent of adults are clinically obese and the roads are crowded with

mammoth sport-utility vehicles. On this side of the Atlantic it is easier to

take concepts like overconsumption and affluenza seriously. I have also

been deeply engaged for several years with the issue of global climate

change and I believe that consumption is the most urgent and fundamental

environmental issue that we face (Wilk, 1998).

My diagnosis of the role that moralism plays in the scholarly discourse

about consumerism parallels Millers. But rather than condemning the

moral thread, I suggest that consumption is in essence a moral matter,

since it always and inevitably raises issues of fairness, self vs group interests,

and immediate vs delayed gratification. These moral and ethical issues do

not arise after the fact, as justifications. Instead moral debate about

Journal of Consumer Culture

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consumption is an essential and ancient part of human politics, an inevitable

consequence of the unique way our species has developed its relationship

with the material world.

There is no question that moralizing about consumption can be strate-

gically deployed during class conflict, inter-ethnic strife, nationalist or

fundamentalist agitation, religious anti-secularism, and even trade negotia-

tions. Academics have been (often unwitting) accomplices in this ideologi-

cal warfare, and as a group we need to be more aware of the ways our

analysis both builds upon and feeds ideological warfare over consumption

(McKendrick, 1982). As Miller says, we should debunk the myths about

consumption that are retailed in these situations instead of abetting the

moral censure of particular classes and groups. More than Miller, however,

I want to focus on the kinds of consumption that are socially, ecologically

and personally destructive, and maintain my own sense of outrage at the

excesses of consumer culture. Maintaining scholarly distance while engaged

in ethical activism is always a difficult task (Wilk, 1999). First I address some

of the dangers of moralism, and then explain why I think this moralism is

both inevitable and necessary.

MORAL THEORIESWhile recent scholarship on consumption rarely addresses fundamental

moral issues directly, the morality of consumption was a central issue to the

early utilitarian economists like Smith and Ricardo. Yet when economics

began its ascendancy in the late 19th century, it systematically purged its

language of morally tinged terms. In the utilitarian level playing field of the

economists imagination, people do not make moral choices; they satisfy

utilities and reveal their preferences. If they wanted to drink gin instead of

buying food for their children, or steal instead of work, this is only a

problem of adjusting costs and benefits.

Other social sciences tried to absorb the problem of consumption into

theories they had already developed for other purposes. Consumption

became an arena where social sciences demonstrate their ultimate moral

lessons, predict the future, and present a utopic alternative (Williams, 1982).

For sociology, consumption is the product of social decay; for psychologists,

the pathology of a malformed persona; and for anthropologists, the loss of

authentic culture. The most common position in all academic fields can be

traced back to Veblens (1989) sociological approach, in which social com-

petition and emulation motivated consumption. Veblen finds this striving

motivated by false and shallow values, leading to wasteful and extravagant

consumption that diverts capital from useful ends. If Veblen is right, all of

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modern material goods and fashion are empty and arbitrary lacking

content and meaning, when we know they are actually rich in both.Veblen

gave us no criteria for telling which kinds of consumption are productive

and authentic, and which are wasteful and fake. This strain of critical

thought is very common among modern social critics, from Bloom to

Baudrillard.

Alongside the sociological tradition that criticizes consumption as

destructive to the group, is an equally moral critique that sees materialism

as a symptom of individual pathology. Freud, for example, thought that

objects are invested with meaning during a childs struggle to resolve the

conflict between love and authority. Fixation on an object occurs when the

child tries to get from the object what it no longer gets from its parents.

On a larger scale, all of modern society is acquisitive because of an

unnecessarily extreme repression of the individuals creative energy and

sexual power, linked to the deterioration of family and individual life in

modern industrial society. This is a constant theme in literature on con-

sumption that peoples needs and desires are a symptom of a failed attempt

to cope with the pressures of modernity, as in Lasch (1979): the desire for

goods is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the soul, the product of a self-

involved individual lost from moral purpose, for whom things have become

a substitute for relationships. This kind of psychological moralism is easily

politicized by conservative elitists,who see mass consumption as a symptom

of a democracy based on wealth and politics instead of culture, position and

education. Mass culture is a pale substitute for the real thing. However, the

same critique appears in only slightly different form among liberal com-

mentators like Barthes (1990) and Ewen (1988), who portray modern

consumption as a dream of identity or wholeness; modern life is so anony-

mous and people are so rootless and fragmented that they seek goods to

substitute for an internal emptiness, assembling a commodity self (Ewen,

1988: 79).

Marxs theory of consumer desire is embedded in his critique of capi-

talism, which alienates workers from their labor and its products. When

labor becomes a commodity, all things have monetary value, and all aspects

of life become commoditized. As people become alienated from their own

products, they seek to recapture what they have lost by consuming goods.

But because those goods are no more than factory produced commodities,

empty of the human relationships that give them meaning, they never

satisfy. The insatiable desire for goods is really a search for human whole-

ness. Marxs critique of consumer capitalism links the social, personal and

political together with a persuasive moral vision and a hardheaded politics.

Wilk / Consuming morality

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However, it also falls within the same moralistic tradition of social self-criti-

cism mentioned earlier, and it leads us back to the same dualism of the tra-

ditional and the modern. Commodity fetishism leads us into disregarding

what people have to say about their own consumption. Ultimately it pro-

poses that most desires for goods within a capitalist society are in some sense

false. At the same time, Marxs advance over Veblen and Freud was his per-

ception that fetishism is part of an economic system which exploits some

and rewards others. Marxs moralism was therefore essentially political rather

than social (Veblen) or personal (Freud).

AN HISTORICAL APPROACH TO AMERICAN MORALISMEven when writers are honest enough to admit that their own life is tex-

tured and furnished by consumer goods, theory and politics lead them to

moral judgments about consumption. Steven Fjellman (1992), in his loving

condemnation of the inauthenticity of Disney World, Vinyl Leaves, admits

to being a veritable child of Disney, and enjoying every minute of research

there. He is quite aware of the personal paradox that he also sees Disney

World as symptom, cause and symbol of everything he hates in the abstract

about modern consumer capitalism, media monopoly and the manipulative

banality of American culture.

Fjellman exhibits a very American strain of utopianism, finding in the

consumer dystopia of Disney a key to the ills of society at large. The great-

est irony is that Main Street in Disney World is a replica of the bygone

small town, which for many Americans represents a time before the con-

sumerist rat race. It is particularly important that the American utopic

vision posits a time of self-sufficient people who were satisfied with what

they had. Herzfeld (1991) calls this kind of imagery structural nostalgia.

The concerns of the present shape a particular image of the past as a kind

of inverted likeness, which helps people to rationalize and cope with the

daily contradictions of wealth and poverty, fantasy and reality, in modern

society. This utopia is usually projected into the distant past or onto primi-

tive society. Horowitzs (1985) history of American discourse about the

morality of consumption places this utopian vision within a continuing

stream of thought that emphasizes the dangers of decadence, the loss of

self-control, and the desirability of nonmaterial pursuits (1985: xi).

According to Horowitz, an earlier 19th-century moralism condemned the

putative profligacy of the poor and immigrant classes. An educated elite

tried to blame mass poverty on the poor themselves, who wasted their

resources on pleasure and immorality, drink and gambling, instead of

uplifting themselves. They sought, through scientific study of budgets and


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standards of living, to define a natural and just ideal for a working-class

familys expenditures.

After World War I, the moralist agenda shifted to a critique of middle-

class society which portrayed the new mass consumption as fundamentally

corrupting. People now sought goods as empty rewards, to compensate for

the loss of real values that used to be provided by direct experience and

work. Consumerism became the major theme of a critique of modernism

in general, especially in the hands of conservative sociologists like Carle

Zimmerman (1936), who contrasted a life of egoistic sensation, immedi-

ate rather than deferred consumption, direct sensory experience, and

selfish hedonic pleasure, with traditional and isolated people who had

social stability, deferred gratification, altruism, and a commitment to

community.

There is an element of predictable class conflict to all this, the sound

of the privileged defining the pleasures of the poor as inferior, part of a war

of high culture against popular culture that can be traced through the

worlds stratified societies. Those with wealth attempted to define their

superiority in terms of things unobtainable with mere money breeding,

taste, and refinement. To use Bourdieus terms (1984) there was an increas-

ing stress on cultural capital obtained through family ties and elite education

as material capital became more widespread.

The American lesson shows that moralizing about consumption can be

put to many different political purposes by various classes and critics.

Horowitz demonstrates that different discourses about needs lie behind

each position,while ultimately there are no absolute standards of need. One

persons necessity can be anothers luxury. Even in the public sphere of

objective scientific fact, the American governments definition of the

minimum household budget, the official definition of necessities and lux-

uries, has repeatedly been subject to political manipulation. How much

tobacco was a necessity to a working class family? Why was money for

movies (almost 1% of the total) included in the emergency level WPA

budget for a family on the verge of starvation in 1935, while films were

considered a luxury just 10 years earlier (Horowitz, 1985: 156)?

What all these moralistic blandishments have in common is that they

condemn only particular forms of consumption. No modern traditions rec-

ommend that everyone drop their worldly possessions and take to the road,

begging bowl in hand.What most moralists argue instead is that some kinds

of consumption are good, others bad. A thousand impressionist paintings

are uplifting, a thousand pairs of shoes are indulgent. Gold bars in the bank

are prudent, a gold cross is holy, gold chains around the neck are cheap and


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flashy. And they make distinctions between good and bad consumption on

the basis of the social and economic positions of the consumers. A bank

manager in a Cadillac is respectable, while a bank teller who cannot send

his children to college because he is driving a Cadillac is reprehensible.

My point is that moral pronouncements about consumption are

inevitable, but not that they are arbitrary; on the contrary, they are highly

patterned, and they have a social and historical context. The United States

has its own particular history of moral debate about consumption, and we

should expect to find equally complex and rich histories elsewhere. Moral-

ism about consumption is a social phenomenon that cries out for more

study. We need to know more about who makes moral arguments, how

these arguments are deployed, what kinds of effects they have on others,

and how inequality is justified and rationalized by both rich and poor in

many different social contexts (e.g. Belk et al., 1989).

MORALISM AND THIRD WORLD CONSUMPTIONThe same kind of historical and social context that helps us understand the

moral critique of American consumerism also needs to be applied to moral

discourses about underdevelopment and consumption. There are echoes of

19th-century moralism in the idea that poor countries remain poor because

they waste their resources on showy public works, or through corruption

and the high living of leaders. But when we look at the prevailing theories

about third-world consumerism the parallels are much stronger with the

early 20th century moralism described by Horowitz. The consumers of the

third world are accused of accepting false idols, of trading away their real

valuables for cheap flummery, of the same kind of emptiness and anonym-

ity that frightened American social critics of the rising middle class.

Theories of underdevelopment include a number of different ideas that

can be grouped together as the global hegemony theory. A typical text is

Mattelarts Transnationals and the Third World:The Struggle for Culture (1983).

The thesis is that the transnational and multinational corporations, now the

most powerful entities in the world economy, want to supplant and destroy

local and national cultures. They substitute a bland consumer culture of

homogenized global brands like Kleenex tissues, McDonalds and Bayer

aspirin. In every place the local elite is recruited as agents for multinationals,

inculcated with a notion of progress that favors the products and ideas of

western metropolitan centers and commercial American popular culture.

The masses are seduced unwillingly through the temptations of mass media,

cheap entertainments and goods that offer empty promises of health,wealth

and satisfaction.


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An anthropological adaptation of this approach is offered by Philibert

(1989), who argues that third-world consumption is a form of neo-

colonialism, in which cheap copies of metropolitan consumerism displace

local culture. Acculturated individuals purchase objects in order to attain

modernity and sophistication, but there is never enough behind the image.

Their desire is forever renewed but never satisfied (p. 63).This idea of global

hegemony requires the same kind of radical separation of the modern

from the traditional that stands behind other kinds of consumer moralism.

Philibert contrasts pre-capitalist systems where objects are signs of social

positions, to capitalism, where objects are themselves the objects of

economic competition. He uses this dichotomy to contrast the authentic

consumption of pre-capitalist societies with the dreamlike sleight-of-hand

where objects substitute for real social connections.

Similarly, Lundgren (1986), working in Belize on children and their

desires for foreign goods, sees blonde, blue-eyed dolls as an example of

third-world people accepting a hegemonic ideology of their own dark-

skinned inferiority. The blue-eyed doll is a token or symbol of Belizeans

aspirations to be white, powerful and American. In this interpretation,

spending money on useless dolls, like national spending on show projects

like dams and model cities, is a form of wish fulfillment where the symbol

replaces reality (cf. Wilk, 1995).

One glaring problem with the consumer imperialism thesis is that it

depends on selective false consciousness. Only a small elite group takes an

active hand in manipulating symbols; everyone else is too stupid or deluded;

they are doomed to emulation, wasting their money on blue-eyed dolls.

This is an attractive idea from one moral perspective, since it preserves the

status of Belizeans as innocent victims of powerful outside ideologies. But

it simultaneously condemns those victims false consciousness, and exiles

them to a shadow world of empty mimicry where they are no longer as

fully aware as the all-seeing anthropologist. We have to ignore a century of

consumer research that finds all peoples motivations for buying goods to

be complex, deeply symbolic, social, personal and contextual.

MORAL CONTRADICTIONSThese cases (including Millers own extensive work on Trinidad) show us

that we need to go beyond seeing the desire for goods like the blue-eyed

dolls as deluded, fetishistic, or dominated, as false consciousness. My own

work on consumption in Belize has consistently emphasized the role

Belizeans play as agents of change, and I have repeatedly argued against

those who would contrast todays shallow consumerism with a mythical past


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when Belizean culture was authentic. Condemning third-world consump-

tion as imitation and domination denigrates peoples creative, resistant and

expressive capabilities, and ignores the ways they take and use foreign goods

for their own purpose.

At the same time it is clear that people in developing countries cannot

make free choices about goods. They are not simply absorbing foreign

goods into their culture, and they often do not anticipate the way their con-

sumption will change the economy and culture of their country.Those who

have not been previously exposed to sophisticated marketing and advertis-

ing technologies are indeed vulnerable to fraudulent and extravagant claims.

Markets and prices are often manipulated in order to lure people into

dependence on foreign goods with cheap prices, to eliminate local alterna-

tives, and then raise prices once people have no other options (Wilk, 1997).

Coercion and seduction to buy products really do take place, in the context

of debt servitude, captive labor forces, and company stores (Ger and Belk,

1997).

Within every developing country there are groups that are particularly

vulnerable to addictive and exploitative forms of consumption. Aside from

the many historical cases where alcohol has helped destroy communities,

and the plagues of opium that afflicted hundreds of millions in Asia in the

19th century,we can see similar forms of destruction going on today (Cour-

tright, 2001). For example, public and social life in Belize has been devas-

tated by an epidemic of crack cocaine during the last 15 years. Groups

affiliated with Los Angeles street gangs fight for control of the local trade,

leading to armed conflict that takes a constant toll on bystanders. In a sense

we are all like crack addicts in a consumer society. On the one hand, we

make choices consistent with our beliefs and culture, we consume to solve

practical problems, to express ourselves, create social worlds, and build social

connections with other people. On the other hand, we also make choices

that are immediately or ultimately self-destructive, that erode or sever our

connections with family and friends, and cause misery and pain to others

in our communities. Most Belizeans I have met are perfectly aware that the

same system that brings them flush toilets and refrigerators has also pro-

vided crack and the ridiculously expensive Nike running shoes that their

children insist on. Almost everyone in consumer society must deal with

temptations and involuntary habits; I tried to give up smoking for 15 years,

and now I eat too much for my own good.

This is why we have to do more than testify to the active agency of

the poor, for their ability to take the foreign and incorporate it into new

kinds of authentic local culture. All forms of consumption are morally


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ambiguous and problematic, whatever ones social role or position in the

world system. Consuming can be constructive or destructive, coercive or

free, a medium of domination or resistance, or both at the same time. These

become truly moral issues because there are so many contradictory goods

and bads where choices are not clear-cut. The one constant is that the

motives and outcomes of consumption inevitably raise moral debate. And

there are good reasons why it should.

WHY CONSUMPTION AND MORALITY CANT BE SEPARATEDOne reason consumption raises moral issues is because it is so central and

encompassing in modern society. Cross s (2000) history of the 20th century

argues that consumption gradually became the channel for dreams, a means

of counting time, the blueprint for progress and the embodiment of success.

Given this burden of meaning, how could we expect to discuss consump-

tion without raising issues about the state of the world and the direction it

is taking, requiring value judgment at every turn? Consumer culture has

expanded in concert with its critical discourses from right and left, vision-

aries and realists, rich and poor.This suggests that the moral dilemmas posed

by consumption are fundamental to the process that drives consumption to

begin with.

The role of moral discourse in maintaining everyday consumption is

well described in Millers (1998) A Theory of Shopping,where purchasing and

gifting appear as acts of love and sacrifice. Mark and Mimi Nichters (1991)

work on eating disorders among children in the United States provides

another model of how moral contradictions drive particular patterns of

consumption. They found that American kids, like their parents, show a

great deal of anxiety about their eating, and many children are on diets by

the time they are eight years old. The paradox is that dieting does not actu-

ally lead to thinner kids instead dieting and binge eating go together. More

concern and anxiety does not lead most people to actually cut down on

their consumption. Instead people pursue a cycle in which eating becomes

both sinful and enjoyable, and afterwards they atone and feel guilty by

dieting. The guilt eventually fades, and the cycle begins again when the

person feels that they have suffered enough,and deserve a reward.The moral

weight attached to eating actually drives expanded consumption.

The Nichters suggest that this sin/guilt cycle provides the basic rhythm

of consumer culture. Each day is divided into periods of restraint, work and

discipline, and periods of rest, release and consumption. We get coffee

breaks, and go back to work, take a lunch break, work more and then go

home to consume. The workweek, the year, and lifetimes all alternate hard


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work and moral discipline, with relaxation and eventually retirement. This

cycle links our consumption to work in a direct way, and suggests that the

pleasures of consumption are intimately linked to pain and sacrifice. You

cannot have one without the other. This is why virtuous diet foods are

advertised alongside luscious sinful cakes and extravagant dishes.

The moral and intellectual critique of consumption may therefore be

seen as having a secure role in the dynamics of consumer culture itself. Like

a priesthood, intellectuals provide a voice of constraint and discipline, an

essential counterpoint to the incentives to indulge and release that pervade

mass culture. Intellectuals and lawmakers are there to give voice to the

destructive possibilities inherent in the world of goods. Miller does a valu-

able service by asking us to question this role, and to find ways to go beyond

it. But moral discourse does more than occupy a structural position, conceal

interests, or provide satisfying and self-serving explanations. It also deals

directly with real fundamental and perennial problems that all human beings

have in common in dealing with each other and the material world.

MORAL CONFLICT OVER CONSUMPTIONIn any social setting, people confront a series of basic problems over the

implications of consumption. These issues revolve around problems of dis-

tributive justice, balancing the goals and desires of people, the ownership

and control of objects and resources, and the problem that consumption

can destroy or deplete resources. Because each persons consumption affects

others, the issue of the common good can never be escaped. People have

to monitor and find ways to police each others behaviour, to prevent free

riding and tragedies of the commons. And in almost any environment

people have to think about balancing immediate gratification with the

longer-term requirements of the future, including the needs of future

generations.

Moreover, consumption raises another very fundamental moral

problem: the need to define limits to individual autonomy, and to recog-

nize that people can and do make bad decisions about their own con-

sumption. Humans have found and created an amazing variety of drugs,

most of which can become addictive and destructive to both the user and

those who depend upon them. The moral question as to when a group has

the right to control the self-destructive consumption of an individual is

longstanding, and has no simple solution. Many forms of consumption have

an addictive quality, and compulsive gambling and shopping are widely

recognized as social as well as individual problems (OGuinn and Faber,

1989). People really do spend all their money on drugs, leaving their


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children destitute and starving. They do drink themselves to death. Faced

with a friend or relative who is destructively addicted, anyone is forced to

face moral questions,which have a tangible basis in the everyday, not in aca-

demic or intellectual discourse (though we can expect authorities to have

a lot to say about the morality of addiction).The moral issues raised by con-

sumption therefore have (at least) a dual nature; they are both grounded in

common human experience, in practical reason, and at the same time they

are part of public discourse about morality, a discourse that has a broader

cultural, symbolic, and political context.

This should help us distinguish between the rhetorical discourse about

Americanization and real influence by the United States on global patterns

of consumption. In the first, countries around the world debate the issues

of local and global, past and future, using the United States as a rhetorical

symbol (Wilk, 1993). The USA can symbolize everything from affluent

democracy to the Great Satan. In the second, the tremendous economic

and political power of the United States has direct effects on consumption

everywhere on the planet. For well over a century the United States has

extended its global power through aggressive marketing of consumer prod-

ucts, undercutting prices of local farms and industries, anchoring insti-

tutions like multinational corporations and the International Monetary

Fund that have transformed the economy everywhere (see Greider, 1997).

There is only a loose and variable relationship between the moral rhetoric

about Americanization and the complex morality of Americas role as a

consumer in the global economy far and away the largest per capita user

of energy and material, and the largest emitter of waste.

OVERCONSUMPTION?Every community makes some attempt to regulate the consumption of

individuals when it causes damage to others (though in many states the

leaders are exempt from the rules). During the last two centuries, the scale

of trade, communications and migration has extended the size of the con-

sumption community, and now it includes most of the world. The con-

sumption of one group can have direct consequences on resources and

people at a vast distance. When business partners in Hong Kong cement

a deal over a $2,000 delicacy (for example the lips of exotic fish) in an

exclusive restaurant, they are helping kill the last remaining reefs in distant

parts of the Pacific ocean (Safina, 1997: 384407). The pursuit of con-

venience through fast-food meals, besides fueling an epidemic of obesity,

has driven the complete reorganization of agriculture in the United States

and many other countries, concentrating ownership in corporate hands,


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disempowering labor, increasing pollution, and compromising the quality

of the entire food chain (Schlosser, 2001). Looking at almost any com-

modity chain, one can trace connections all across the globe, linking groups

of people who may not even know of each others existence. Because

affluent people are so far removed from the consequences of their con-

sumption, conventional social and moral controls seem to have little force.

Even with the best intentions, most people simply have no access to the

information they would need to make moral choices about their own

consumption.

From this perspective, what is needed is a new kind of moral debate

about consumption on the global scale, a discourse that cannot be contained

by the moral values of a single culture. The conventional setting for this

kind of discourse has been in international political meetings like the

United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World

Bank, and now the World Trade Organization (WTO). Moral issues are

almost always subordinated to the economics of costs and benefits. Only in

the last 15 years, with the emergence of global atmospheric change as a

central environmental issue, has international debate about consumption

and morality become more explicit (Camacho, 1995).

The problem of climate change has no natural boundaries since the

atmosphere is a common resource. The entire planet is the subject of a

massive uncontrolled experiment, in which a minority of the population is

doubling the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases during a

single century, with no idea of the consequences for the future. There is no

way to approach the issue without starting with the fact that about 20

percent of the worlds population is responsible for 80 percent of the green-

house gases. All the economic activity that produces these gases is ultimately

driven by consumption (Stern et al., 1997). When the average consumer in

the United States is using materials and energy at 20 times the rate of

Africans, we cannot envision any kind of action that does not rest upon

some moral foundation in concepts of fairness, rights and consequences for

the future. Much of the texts of the Agenda 21 agreements and the Kyoto

accords on climate change are actually concerned with the different moral

positions about who is to blame,who is responsible for action, and who will

bear the costs. The Kyoto accords take a moral position that countries that

have polluted the most in the past should pay the most clean-up costs, and

poor countries should not have to pay the costs of reducing their emissions,

even if they are major polluters. Since then the Republican Party in the

United States has insisted that this scheme is unfair.

While global moral discourse has had a slow and uneven start in the


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official political arena, new kinds of activist and oppositional movements

have been growing in many countries that take global consumption as a

central moral issue.While the recent demonstrations against the WTO have

been very heterogeneous, the publications and statements of many partici-

pants make explicit reference to consumption issues. While some of the

arguments are familiar appeals to a mythical self-sufficient past, condem-

nations of false consciousness and the like many in the anti-WTO move-

ment have a very sophisticated understanding of trade issues, multinational

corporations, commodity chains, and the effects of structural adjustment

policy (e.g. Global Exchange, 2001).

At the same time that people are questioning the global social and

environmental effects of consumer culture, other organizations challenge

the taken-for-granted assumption that greater consumption makes people

happier. In the United States this movement has acquired the dubious labels

of voluntary simplicity or simple living, forming a heterogeneous group

that includes neo-primitivists, romantic back-to-the-land localists, people

looking for ways to downshift to less stressful jobs, environmental activists,

and retirees (Etzioni, 1998). Some of the major texts have sold millions of

copies (e.g. Dominguez and Robin, 1999). Many of their arguments are

traditional American consumption moralism. They often idealize native

peoples as primitive ecologists, and are willing to condemn people in

developing countries because they aspire to even a fraction of American

affluence, instead of appreciating their authentic poverty. But while they

argue that people would ultimately be much happier if they were less inter-

ested in consumer goods, and more engaged with their local communities,

most also place their moral stand in the context of an overpopulated world

with limited resources. Many members of the movement argue that the

American mode of consumption is immoral because it depends on the

poverty of others and because the world cannot sustain it: how can we live

like this while the rest of the world barely has clean water? These are the

only people I know who are developing a real political and personal

program for reducing consumption. Faced with people whose commit-

ments I respect, who are working to make necessary changes in the right

direction, I find myself uncomfortable about attacking their moral ideol-

ogy. If their moral and religious arguments have a real effect, why should I

pick them apart?

I certainly agree with Miller that all human life is based on material-

ism, but I firmly believe that not all materialism is equal. We do not have

to be nave accomplices to misguided moralism, and we certainly need to

get our facts straight before we jump to take positions that condemn certain


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kinds of consumption. Like Miller, I was drawn to consumption as a

research issue just because it seemed a central moral problem, and I agree

with him that moral issues can never be separated from consumer culture.

But from my perspective, those who engage in moral discourse about con-

sumption, both on the left and right, are potential allies, even if their his-

torical analysis is weak. We should certainly convince them that their

arguments should not rest on mythical others, or caricatures of the poor.

But the overriding issue is an increasingly likely future in which everyone

will suffer from the damage done to our planet. It is more important to

attack the regime that drives the destruction, not other critics of that

regime, no matter how misguided.

While writing this essay I received an email describing a protest by

religious leaders and environmentalists outside a car dealership in Massa-

chusetts, asking shoppers to buy something other than a gas-guzzling sport-

utility vehicle. As Bill McKibben, one of the organizers said:

These lots are where Americans make the most environmentally

significant decisions of their lives, and thats why a hundred of us

were there, in the pouring rain to remind our neighbours that

these private decisions have a public dimension. That in this

case, how they spent their money was not absolutely their own

business. (2001)

I agree, and while I may have cause to be suspicious of McKibbens agenda

(and I dont agree with a lot that he has written), I will be right out there

protesting along with him, the next chance I get.

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Richard Wilk is ???? Address: ???? [email: [email protected]]


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consuming morally optional

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