Exploring the Farther Reaches of Commoditization

Introduction: The Pervasiveness of Commoditization

If commoditization can be understood, in Jack Manno’s (2000) terms, as “the pressure to transform as much of the necessities and pleasures of life as possible into commercial commodities” (p. 13), then this pressure presumably occurs at least partly as a result of human agency. However, commoditization is clearly not something we intentionally bring about; and a sentence such as “We decided to commoditize water supplies” sounds odd and inaccurate. The language available to us seems to imply that commoditization is a phenomenon we define, observe, and comment on as external observers rather than as participants, as in sentences such as “I noted a high degree of commoditization in the tourist industry,” or “commoditization has expanded to include the artistic realm.” The English language implies an artificially clear distinction between what we intentionally do, and what unfolds outside human agency; and it only poorly expresses those processes that are systemically entangled with our lives as unintended and often unnoticed consequences of our behavior. Unable to recognize the currents that carry both ourselves and the contexts that have symbiotically developed around us, we notice only the changes we consciously instigate or those that contradict our intentions. The consciously apparent aspects of commoditization are the tip of an ideological iceberg, with most of the berg hidden below the taken-for-granted surface of our lives, in the depths of our habits of thought, cultural history, and the economic systems we live within.

In exploring commoditization, then, we need to be alert to those apparently innocent structures and processes that contribute to commoditizing pressures. In this article, I want to illuminate some of the cultural, historical, and psychological aspects of industrialist life that are consistent with commoditization, tracing its roots to those cultural turning points that underpin not only the ways we think, categorize, and perceive but also, increasingly, the forms taken by the built world we think about. The pressures that commoditization exerts, therefore, do not come from an economic realm that appears superficially to be detached from other aspects of life, but from the generally unnoticed convergence between apparently distinct streams that jointly define the industrialist current.

Commoditization and Experience

A commodity is necessarily separable from its surroundings and context, either by possessing clear boundaries that give it the appearance of a separate “thing,” or by being chemically distinct from other substances. This quality of separability makes a commodity easily describable within the conceptual realm, in contrast to the often more gradual discontinuities of the natural world. Iron, for example, although naturally occurring in combination with a variety of other elements, is extracted from its ores to give a substance with a distinct melting point, tensile strength, and other measurable physical properties, so that it can be described in ways that are standardized and reproducible. Such processes lend the world of commodities a sort of constancy that is generally absent from the mobile, evolving, fluid world of nature.

While we may think of commoditization as being involved primarily in the production of consumer goods, we may be less aware that the same unreflective conceptual distinctions that underpin industrial production also represent—or misrepresent—the natural world. For example, Franz Vera (2000) has shown that the old European terms for “forest”—Latin “forestis,” French “forêts,” German “wald,” Dutch “woud”—actually referred to a mix of woods, bogs, and grassland rather than to the sort of closed-canopy woodland the term brings to mind today. Likewise, the temporal dynamics of “woodland” may involve an alternation between woodland and savanna, as Lindsey Gillson (2004) has demonstrated, so that the static classification of a place as “forest” leads to a sort of conceptual stagnation that all too easily imposes a physical stagnation. Our conceptual and linguistic “clarity,” when applied to the natural world—even with the best of intentions—is likely to produce areas of “pure” woodland that all too readily become “sources of timber.” Thus, our apparently innocent conceptual habits may, metaphorically as well as literally, prepare the ground for its industrial uses, in effect reframing the world into a storehouse of conveniently separable “raw materials.”

Similarly, language tends to represent nature as a collection of individuals “things,” each definable through its unique properties; and this amounts to a denial of ecosystemic functioning. As Steve Buchmann and Gary Nabhan (1996) have emphasized, a “biologically rich place is rich in relationships as well as in species. Conversely, the loss of biodiversity is always more than the simple loss of species; it is also the extinction of ecological relationships” (p. 25). As such ecosystem-defining relationships disappear, so there is an ironic convergence as our categorically tidy systems of classification become more accurate in their depiction of the assortment of isolated species left over from damaged ecosystems.

The commoditized world, then, contains only the most reduced forms of life, since life “in the raw” consists not only of separable entities but also of nested arrays of interactions, making it inconveniently unpredictable and various. The extraordinary diversity of a rainforest is replaced by the predictability and ecological sterility of an oil palm plantation; and seasonally varying rhythms are replaced by the fixed working hours of the production line. “Consumer goods” perfectly fit a form of experience that is based around fixed and clearly defined categories. Whereas a wolf or an oak tree exist within, and are partly defined by, their diverse ecological relationships with other flora and fauna, a dishwasher, for example, has only one purpose, and cannot be said to exist within an ecology formed by its relationships with other such items. Commodities and consumer items embody the uncomplicated causal structures of the “rational” mind, incorporating simple cause-effect relationships rather than the cognitively impenetrable systemicity of the natural order. In Manno’s (2010) terms, such items are easily transportable, depersonalized, and context independent, and so fit easily into an economic system that demands discrete and passive entities that respond to human intentions rather than their own fluctuating, contextually dependent character.

Our schooling generally prepares us to inhabit this realm of separable items connected mainly by simple economic and physical relationships. We are taught that a plant or animal is a member of a particular species, which itself belongs to a particular genus, so that the relations between flora and fauna become conceptual rather than ecological; and this separation and classification is the first stage of the assimilation of nature into the industrial order. Tim Ingold (2000) points out that in biological taxonomies, “every creature is specified in its essential nature through the bestowal of attributes passed down along lines of descent, independently and in advance of its placement in the world.” Consequently,

difference is rendered as diversity. Thus living things are classified and compared . . . in terms of intrinsic properties that they are deemed to possess by virtue of genealogical connection, irrespective of their positioning in relation to one another in an environment [italics added]. (Ingold, 2000, p. 217)

So it is that biological classification nullifies ecological realities, exporting the properties of transportability, depersonalization, and context independence into the yet-to-be-commodified world. Even our well-intentioned efforts to “save” aspects of the natural world are colored by this unthinking process of conceptual colonization, as we unthinkingly focus on decontextualized populations and species, disregarding mutualisms and other ecological dependencies, as well as the unnoticed conflict between the act of “saving” the creature and those other human activities that contribute to its extinction.

In the industrialized world, this transformation of complex relationalities into arrays of individual “things” inducts the natural world into the conceptual forms recognizable by conscious thought. The selective and exclusive focus of consciousness works well in detailed problem solving, but is quite unsuited to the wider awareness necessary for appreciating systemic interactions. Whereas ecological patterns are built on relations, balances, and interdependencies, conscious human thought isolates small islands of coherence, defended by multiple fissures, compartmentalizations, and denials. The most well known of these fissures involves the Cartesian split between subjectivity and the “objective” world; and the view that the latter is devoid of structure, intelligence, or spirit is implied by terms such as “raw materials,” cementing an anthropocentric arrogance into our thinking. The conceptual realm that emerges from this Cartesian isolation of our symbolic faculties from the embodied world has been constructed over centuries of technological and ideological development, relating to the real world only in carefully selected ways—as a source of “natural resources,” a test bed for scientific understandings, or a site for reconstruction according to symbolic templates. The touchstone of reality is no longer our sensed awareness of the world, so definitively rejected by Descartes, but intellectually mediated understandings that exist primarily within an internally consistent symbolic system developed in partial isolation from the material world. As the untenability of this Cartesian bifurcation of reality comes home to roost, the unintended consequences of treating the world simply as a source of “raw materials” and energy threaten to implode on our ways of living and our carefully defended subjectivities.

Complementarily, the realm of experience that Descartes rejected—the originary realm of our embodied senses and feelings—is equally distorted. Marginalized by the dominance of a narrow sort of rationality and the administrative structures associated with it, and assimilated into the commercial realm by a barrage of seductive imagery, it becomes the vehicle by which our yearnings for a fulfilling life are converted into desires for commodities. As Sut Jhally (2010) puts it, advertising

takes the images of the life people really want–a life of meaning, of connection, of socialising, of friendship, of family, of sexuality . . . and links them to objects. So advertising is both true and false at the same time. If it was simply false, it wouldn’t work but advertising is true to the extent that it reflects our real desires. (From the film, Psywar)

Just as industrial extraction processes divide up a landscape into its component minerals, “timber,” wildlife, and so on, so the commercial world separates thought, instincts, sensory awarenesses, and the remnants of cultural traditions from their original integration within the world and transplants the resulting fragments into a new economic “ecology” that is alien to and destructive of the natural order. Consequently, in a vicious circle that further degrades our humanness, we learn to distrust our senses, and so withdraw into an individualism that cements our imprisonment within an unfelt world. Human experience is thus the battleground between the two great systems—nature and industrialism—within which our lives are embedded, and human desires are harnessed, groomed, and redirected to maximize commercial advantage. In short, commoditization relates not only to particular economic and productive practices, but it also permeates our own lives; and in an ironic twist, this consistency between the reformulated character of the “consumer” and the manufactured realm we inhabit deprives us of the critical perspective necessary to recognize this permeation.

Our scientific knowledge, too—although offering insights that are in some respects accurate and penetrating—has a generally reductionist character, fragmenting natural realities into elements, compounds, forces, and so on. In thus disregarding the emergent properties of the systems which these fragments are part of, we unthinkingly point an ostensibly “objective” science toward consistency with commoditizing processes. Furthermore, the primary realities of science tend to be the abstractions—laws, principles, systems of categorization such as the periodic table—rather than the ecological realities these abstractions are induced from; and because of this tendency toward abstraction, science tends to exist within an anthropocentric, symbolic space which is only selectively and indirectly related to the natural world itself. Thus, as Jack Turner (1994) argues,

After Thoreau, our conservation ethic shifted from wildness to the preservation of wilderness, then biological communities, and recently, to biodiversity. Wildness as a quality and its relation to other qualities is now rarely discussed. This shift was broadly materialist—a move from quality to quantity, to acreage, species, and physical relations. The privileged status of classical science and its technologies in our culture virtually entailed this materialism. The world of classical science and its mathematics could not describe qualities like wildness, and what could not be described was ignored. (pp. 175-176)

So it is that those qualities of the world that are inarticulable in our dominant symbolic modes of expression silently slip into oblivion, leaving behind a transformed world that better fits our simplistic categories and seductively clear distinctions—a world that is more compatible with commodities than wild creatures.

The Historical Foundations of Commoditization

It would be entirely possible to trace the roots of commoditization even into prehistory, when a species of ape characterized by a greatly enlarged cerebral cortex developed the ability to perceive not only things in their existing form but also things as they could be made. Seeing a rock as a potential axehead, for example, illustrates the beginnings of a capacity to assimilate the world to a symbolic scheme that would eventually, when allied to technological power, provide the blueprint for a manufactured world. While this symbolic capacity is necessary for the appearance of commoditization, it clearly does not make it inevitable, since there have been culturally advanced societies in which social and religious factors have blunted any movement toward commoditization. Windmills and water mills, for example, were for many centuries used by Buddhists in India to turn prayer wheels, but were not developed for industrial purposes, as C. F. Hockett (1973) tells us. The evolution of highly developed symbolic capacities, then, can be viewed as introducing certain vulnerabilities to colonization by forms of systemic organization that prioritize interests other than those of either the individual or the natural order as a whole.

Clearly, there is not space in this article to excavate the entire history of commoditization up to the present day; and I want to focus neither on these symbolic foundations nor on the familiar developments of the Enlightenment, but rather on the precursors of science that appeared in the late Middle Ages. In doing so, I will draw extensively on Joel Kaye’s excellent review of these developments, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century (1998). While the symbolic vulnerabilities I referred to above may have lain dormant for many centuries before this era, it was only then that there began to emerge a shared conceptual framework that rather than being rooted in the world began to develop its own internal dynamic instead, as leading European scholars concluded that it was impossible to corral the wild and unpredictable variations of nature within any reliable set of laws and propositions. The fundamental problem scholars wrestled with was the difficulty of integrating the enormous diversity of apparently quite different creatures and other entities within some sort of coherent scheme; and the spectacular chaos of the mediaeval bestiary, with its mix of empirical observation and florid superstition, testifies to this difficulty. Thus, as Kaye (1998) relates, “philosophers believed that the certainty required of science was to be found through the application and test of technical logic rather than through direct observation of the contingent object world”; and William of Ockham was one of many who decided that “the proper objects of demonstrative science must be propositions rather than natural phenomena” (pp. 164-165). Consequently, in a fateful move that anticipated the idealism of European philosophy in more recent centuries, “natural philosophers” turned away from nature; and as Kaye remarks, there was

a concerted effort to cleanse philosophical discourse from the taint of its contact with contingent experience. Insights drawn from the experience of nature were quickly denatured–translated into propositional and logical terms deemed to be the proper subjects of scholastic debate [and] many of the most important works in natural philosophy [in the fourteenth century] contain not a single reference to personal observations of nature. (1998, p. 8)

The emerging sciences therefore produced a type of knowledge that anticipated the Cartesian approach by turning away from our sensory connections to the world rather than articulating them. As John Murdoch (1982, p. 174) suggests, “In a very important way natural philosophy was not about nature.”

How, then, could things be related within this consensual scheme? An obvious first step was to focus on properties in common to the things to be compared, disregarding nonshared properties as one chops the branches off a tree to make “timber.” According to Kaye (1998), Aristotle—still the dominant authority in the 13th and 14th centuries—had insisted that

the measure is always a certain minimum unit of the things measured, and therefore is always of the same species as the thing measured . . . [so that] all distance is measured by the foot or some other unit of length. (p. 67)

Thus, comparisons become possible by focusing on a single shared property of the things to be compared, disregarding other properties. This is the solution later suggested by Salviati in Galileo Galilei’s Dialogues (1632/1953):

Just as the computer who wants his calculations to deal with sugar, silk, and wool must discount the boxes, bales, and other packings, so the mathematical scientist, when he wants to recognise in the concrete the effects proved in the abstract, must deduct the material hindrances. (p. 207)

Two things should be noted about this tactic: first, that a physical reality is thereby inducted into a conceptual scheme and second, that this conceptual induction is the blueprint for a technological process that later would physically purify or fashion material so that its shape or chemical composition conforms to this conceptual blueprint. But in the 13th century, even comparing the same property was a challenge, given the diversity of measures available. For example, Diana Wood (2002) reports that

the tenants of one of Glastonbury’s manors owed the abbey kitchen thirty salmon a year, which had to be “as thick at the tail end as a man’s wrist”. A reeve on another Glastonbury manor claimed as his fee “a stall full of . . . hay as high as to a man’s loins.” (pp. 94-95)

Distances were equally subjective, being assessed in terms of measures such as “a stone’s throw, a bowshot, the carrying distance of a voice, or walking distance from sunrise to sunset.” These problems were gradually solved, especially during the 14th century, by the introduction of more standardized measures. During the same period, there was a progressive replacement of Roman numerals by the more mathematically agile Arabic ones, making calculation—and ultimately commoditization—more straightforward.

The view expressed by Galileo Galilei illustrates one of Kaye’s fundamental insights: that the solution to the problem of finding a common metric through which entities could be organized was not discovered by philosophers, but rather emerged as philosophy absorbed the already-rampant influence of trading relations. As Kaye relates, although in the Aristotelian tradition it was only possible to compare things that possessed some property in common, Aristotle—and following him, Aquinas—had also noted that in assessing the human value of a good, money was unique in that it was a “medium” that measures everything and therefore brings all things into relation. In keeping with this suggestion, Albertus Magnus suggested that things can be compared through their “accidental” quality of usefulness—which today an economist would refer to as utility. Aristotle had argued that the price of a good depended on the needs of each of the participants, but this was unworkable in practice, since the price could never be adequately responsive to the needs of individuals. The solution was to assess value in relation to the community rather than the individual. Thus according to Aristotle, “fair exchange” should be assessed by a human judge, but philosophers such as Odonis argued that the judge was dispensable, and that the economic system itself would ensure fairness—a belief later reproduced in Adam Smith’s faith in the “invisible hand of the market.” Thus, an initially anthropocentric system quickly gave way to one that incorporated its own dynamic of valuation; and this was the first step toward the evolution of an economic system that required—and provided—little human control or moderation. As Kaye (1998, p. 133) remarks, this system “shifted from the personal to the instrumental, mind to mechanism as the basis for establishing order and equality.”

It is hard to overestimate the impact of these ideas in turning the world upside down, the repercussions being felt even in a religious sphere that was traditionally hostile to many features of the emerging economic order. As Kaye (1998) describes this impact,

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, monetization and rationalized price-measurement had so invaded the realm of official theology that the proportion of payment to reward in indulgence could be officially fixed by Clement V at one penny of Tours for each year of pardon conferred. The repercussions of this commoditization, the sense that everything was for sale, that all ancient values and structures had a price attached to them, was profoundly experienced in every European society of this period. (p. 168)

Within this new economic order, money in no way reflected the essence of a thing, but only its usefulness. It therefore functioned to detach things from their natural context and locate them in new roles within a completely different economic system.

Humans, of course, are natural creatures as well as economic beings; and despite the attempts of philosophers such as Oresme to “naturalise” money’s power to provide order, these attempts succeeded not so much in naturalizing money as in reshaping ideas of nature to accommodate the new economy. Today we experience the legacy of this economic influence; and as Eileen Crist (1998) notes, today even fields such as ecology involve “a nexus of interconnected economic terms [such as] monopoly, advertising, budgets, efficiency, investment, value, costs, benefits, maximising, minimising, winning, losing” (p. 132). Such current understandings of the “economy of nature,” however, forget the ambivalence that such talk generated in earlier times; and Kaye (1998) refers to an intensely “dualistic attitude of admiration and fear” in which money

was seen, often by the same person, as both a remarkably successful instrument of economic order, balance, and gradation, and at the same time as the great corrosive solvent, the overturner, the perverter of balance and order. (p. 18)

Although money “shares neither material nor form with the diverse things it measures” (Kaye, 1998, p. 67), it nevertheless functioned as a useful means of comparing value; and this became the model for other disciplines such as law, mathematics, and the sciences. This fateful if apparently insignificant step transmuted a calculus of natural relations into a rational symbolic system within which the qualities possessed by things became merely incidental, of interest only to the extent that they had roles to play within the expanding universe of wealth, commodities, and commerce. Thus, interest in natural entities themselves paled as their meanings became defined instead by an entirely new and relatively self-sufficient world of economic abstractions. As Zbigniew Herbert notes, the

order of the stock market was introduced into the order of nature. The tulip began to lose the properties and charms of a flower: it grew pale, lost its colours and shapes, became an abstraction, a name, a symbol interchangeable with a certain amount of money. (as cited in Buchan, 1997, p. 108)

It hardly needs saying that these beginnings form the basis of an economic system which today dominates the world, including human life; but what is less often recognized is the extent to which they are also the basis of conceptual understandings that have complementarily shaped the way we think about the world. As Eric Mielants (2007) suggests, the

creation of the social sciences in the Western world and how they, in their own fragmented ways, think about past, present, and future conditions, cannot be separated from how Western knowledge has been used to control, colonise, and dominate the non-Western world both in reality as well as epistemologically. (p. 162)

This generally unnoticed convergence between commoditizing tendencies and our habits of thought suggests that commoditization is not so much something we can observe and study in an economic realm outside ourselves, but rather something that assimilates us into this economic realm through our ways of thinking. Thus “rational” thought complements economic relations to form a dominant or even hegemonic understanding of the world, backgrounding our emotional and sensory faculties, and leaving them as peripheral, “subjective” awarenesses that are mere distractions from “reality.” Subjective experience is thus partly split off from this scientifically defined “reality,” so that as Robert Romanyshyn (1982) observes, “what we experience is not real, and what is real is not what we experience” (p. 30). Although our subjective desires and preferences supposedly form the basis of a democratic political system, these desires and preferences are subjected to a powerful barrage of influential imagery and persuasion by a media that is itself an offshoot of the commercial world, so that as Stuart Ewen (2002) comments, “it is not the people who are in charge: the people’s desires are in charge.” Overall, then, our colonization by commoditizing pressures damages our wholeness as simultaneously emotional and thinking beings, and sweeps aside the interactions and balances of human life, culture, and ecology. As James Buchan (1997) puts it,

The land itself begins to change. The sloping meadow and the mill are no longer primarily sources of produce—of corn, hay, rye, barley, meat, wool, plums, walnuts, and flour—but of money. Forests are no longer pre-eminently places for hunting . . . but the site of a money crop called timber. The place is no longer regarded as unique, for how can it be so, if it submits to calculation and comparison in the market of wishes? (p. 59)

Qualities such as beauty become the vehicles by which our natural predispositions are harnessed within the economic system, ensuring that their fulfillment is intertwined with economic ends. Buchan (1997) remarks that

the sensation of beauty cannot survive in the age of money: for any beauty must be exploited, reproduced a million times over by every medium open to commercial ingenuity, till one can only cover one’s eyes and stop one’s ears. (p. 191)

Beauty has become a commodity, extending us into a commercial rather than a natural world.

What originated in prehistory as a minor symbolic extension of our perceptual capabilities, then, expands into and finally replaces the order of the world, redefining humanity and sweeping aside natural structure as it does so. The domesticated world bears the hallmarks of technocratic symbolism at every turn: the rectangularity of the built environment, the checkerboard of monocultures, the dammed rivers, the artificial boundaries between areas of land, marked by fences and walls, reflecting the economic separations of individual or corporation. So it is that cognitively opaque, complexly nested processes of ecological transformation yield to a sort of materialized projection of cognitive categories as the landscape becomes a static, reliable backdrop to economically profitable human activity.

The Narrowing of Experience

It is apparent, then, that just as the emergence of systems of measurement, standardization, and valuation domesticated the external world, much the same has happened to the internal realm of subjectivity. If Hume thought that reason should be the slave of the passions, modernity has viewed things differently; and today we are encouraged to cultivate an emotionally restrained rationality that is thoroughly consistent with an emphasis on “objective” science and economic calculation. This reflects a reorganization and unbalancing not of a single aspect of our lives, but of social life in its entirety, as Ernest Gellner (1988) illustrates in his comparison of “single-stranded” societies, in which social life is focused on a single criterion, and “multi-stranded” societies, in which relationships are influenced by a diversity of considerations within what we might refer to as a “social ecology”:

[I]n a complex, large, atomised, and specialised society, single-shot activities can be “rational” . . . they are governed by a single aim or criterion . . . a man making a purchase is simply interested in buying the best commodity at the least price. Not so in a multi-stranded social context: a man buying something from a village neighbour in a tribal community is dealing not only with a seller, but also with a kinsman, collaborator, ally or rival, potential supplier of a bride for his son, fellow juryman, ritual participant, fellow defender of the village, fellow council member. All these multiple relations will enter into the economic operation, and restrain either party from looking only to the gain and loss involved in that operation, taken in isolation. In such a many-stranded context, there can be no question of “rational” economic conduct, governed by the single-minded pursuit of maximum gain.

When there is a multiplicity of incommensurate values, some imponderable, a man can only feel, and allow his feelings to be guided by the overall expectations or preconceptions of his culture. He cannot calculate. (p. 44)

A “single-stranded” society, then, is governed by calculation, and is therefore symptomatic of a loss of balance between various culturally relevant factors. In turn, this loss of balance suggests a detachment from the natural world, which would otherwise exert a moderating influence on practices and styles of thought that unrealistically prioritize one factor while forgetting others. Healthy life, whether human or nonhuman, involves the balanced and fluid interaction of many factors; and while the maximization of any one factor such as profit is an index of success in the economic world, it spells ecological collapse, reducing ecosystems to collections of individuals and destroying the integrity and viability of the entire system.

In the industrialized world, the prioritization of conscious calculation over embodied feeling is one that has colonized our lives to a greater extent than we might be prepared to acknowledge; and just as wildness has given way to cognitively ordered monocultures, so human qualities have been reshaped to fit a simpler world. Within the social sciences, and particularly within economics, there has been a strong tendency either to theorize emotions as disruptive and primitive impulses that we mostly leave behind both historically and during our own individual development, or to reduce them to forms of rational decision making.

Margaret Archer (2000a) has reviewed the stages by which (unobservable, immeasurable) “passions” are gradually converted into a form more consistent with “economic rationality.” First, passions become “pleasures,” which in turn were conceptualized by economists as “preferences,” making them both observable and measurable. This, however, was not enough, for preferences can be “ill-informed,” “defective” or “irrational,” or—as John Harsanyi (as cited in Archer, 2000b, p. 58) puts it, “distorted by factual errors, ignorance, careless thinking, rash judgements, or strong emotions hindering rational choice.” Clearly, then, what we need to know are the individual’s “true preferences, i.e. his preferences as they would be under ideal conditions”; and these have been defined by theorists such as Gary Becker as “rational choices”—“rational,” that is, because they maximize utility. Becker (1996, p. 237) tells us that intelligent individuals do not base their behavior on “fickle love,” but instead rely on “more durable characteristics.” Indeed, the treatment of others as commodities reaches its nadir in Becker’s “economic” approach to social life; and he advises us to avoid beggars and potentially expensive partners in order to reduce undesirable emotions such as guilt or the pains of love. Thus as Archer (2000b, p. 63) notes, “cash [becomes] the common denominator between emotions and anything else which is rationally chosen.” Family relationships are effectively interchangeable with material goods according to the principle of utility maximization, as Becker (1976) makes clear:

As consumer durables, children are assumed to provide “utility.” The utility from children is compared with that from other goods via a utility function or a set of indifference curves. The shape of the indifference curves is determined by the relative preference for children. (p. 173)

What has happened here is that because passionate, ethical individuality is out of place in a world of bureaucratic order and economic determinism, the individual has been redefined and shaped to precisely match this commoditized world; and to the extent that we fail to live up to this billing, we are viewed as “irrational,” “emotional,” or “ill-informed.” While we may still fall sadly short of the sort of rational perfection envisaged by rational choice theorists, there is no doubt that both historically and in terms of individual development we have moved a considerable distance in that direction. Theorists as disparate as Freud (1952, p. 170), who advocated a “dictatorship of the intellect”; Descartes, who defined us as essentially thinking beings; and Piaget, who understood “operational” thought as a capacity to move unemotionally within the symbolic world of rational possibilities, all view emotions and feelings as unwelcome distractions from rationality. We are socialized into this sort of world; and Edward Sampson (1981), among others, has documented the way schoolchildren are taught to delay gratification by maintaining a “cool,” detached, abstract relation to a desired object.

While rational choice theorists such as Becker may exaggerate the extent to which such “rationality” governs contemporary behavior, a materialistic emphasis is a well-researched social trend. For example, Jean Twenge (2006, p. 99) tells us that “1990s high school students were twice as likely as their 1970s counterparts to say that ‘having a lot of money’ was ‘very important’.” The influence of the economic metaphor within social life has, in more subtle forms, penetrated even the most intimate areas of our personal lives. All too often, an empathic reaching-out to the other is replaced by an economically inspired calculus of costs and benefits as we consider whether we are “giving too much” or whether the relationship “feels unequal”; and as Alan Bloom (1993) puts it,

Abstract reason in the service of radically free men and women can discover only contract as the basis of connectedness–the social contract, marriage contract, somehow mostly the business contract as model, with its union of selfish individuals. Legalism takes the place of sentiment. (p. 27)

There is clear evidence that this materialistic focus has damaging effects on our personal well-being; and Tim Kasser (2002) notes that

Strong materialistic values are associated with a pervasive undermining of people’s well-being, from low life satisfaction and happiness, to depression and anxiety, to physical problems such as headaches, and to personality disorders, narcissism, and antisocial behavior. (p. 22)

Consistent with these findings, Robert E. Lane (2001), drawing on a wealth of research on the effects of prioritizing material wealth, asks us to consider

the following paradox: market rationality leads the materialist to pursue wealth; more wealth (beyond the poverty level) has little effect on well-being. Furthermore, something about the kind of people who choose (if that is the verb) to be materialists is associated with low life satisfaction. Materialists, economic men, endowed with the qualities that economists assume are the characteristics of winners, tend, in fact, to be losers from the start. (p. 158)

Similarly, our moral universe has been deeply influenced by the economic metaphors of comparative values and trading. For example, while the proscription against torture has traditionally been considered an absolute one, it has recently been talked about as a harm to be balanced against its benefits. Likewise, as Frederick Buell (2003, p. 227) puts it, “no longer was wildness, as Thoreau wrote, ‘the preservation of the world’. Now wildness was the patentable instrument of a specific set of new industries.” In keeping with this molding of morality to fit commercial or political requirements, ecological health is today often viewed as a benefit that is separable from, and often balanced against, “human interests”—as if our interests could somehow be detached from the well-being of the natural order that sustains us. Increasingly, environmental concerns are viewed as one factor within a larger, economic frame, as if the latter has replaced the natural world as the ultimate context within which we exist. This inversion is often factored into political decision making, as an incident reported by George Monbiot (2007) suggests:

Sir David King, the British government’s chief scientist, proposed that a “reasonable” target for stabilizing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 550 ppm CO₂ . . . It would be “politically unrealistic,” he said, to demand anything lower. Simon Retallack from the Institute for Public Policy Research reminded Sir David that his duty is not to convey political reality but to represent scientific reality. King replied that if he recommended a lower limit, he would lose credibility with the government. It seemed to me that his credibility as a scientific adviser had just disappeared without trace. (p. 107)

This tendency for even fundamental aspects of reality to become negotiable pawns within an assumed political and economic landscape is an inherently conservative one that obscures critical thinking and spontaneity. If subjectivity is identified with the sort of economic rationality that also finds expression in the structure of the built world, a sort of hegemony settles on the earth as “reality” and our ways of understanding mutually reinforce each other. Conversely, any residual aspects of our makeup that find it difficult to survive within this hegemonic “reality”—such as passion, intuition, integrity, wildness, or ethical preferences—are pathologized, despite the lip service paid to creativity, free speech, and democracy; and those who insist on maintaining these qualities tend to be regarded as “loose cannons.” Unwanted qualities are also bureaucratically excluded. For example, Ben Stewart (2009) reports that at the recent trial of the 29 climate change protesters who hijacked a train carrying coal to Drax power station in Yorkshire, Judge Justice Spencer banned any consideration of climate change. An emphasis on economic rationality therefore reinforces “centripetal” social tendencies, favoring the existing system rather than encouraging critique, transcendence, and the generation of alternatives. Here we can see commoditization as a multifaceted pressure in which technological, legal, epistemological, and psychological processes are all sucked into conformity with an internally self-consistent system.

This internal consistency between the various components of industrial society gives rise to a misleading but pervasive aura of normality and inevitability that permeates the entire social sphere. What this seductive illusion of inevitability conceals, however, is the cost to the natural order, whether in the realm of embodied human experience or in the world “out there.” Garrett Hardin’s (1968) well-known account of the “tragedy of the commons,” in which each herdsman gains from pushing the common grazing resources to the point of collapse, elegantly illustrates how the ideal of the “rational” person and the objective of maximizing individual utilities leads directly to environmental disaster. In Hardin’s words, “ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons” (p. 1245).

Humans, therefore, are not simply the villains of the commoditization drama, and the destruction is not simply external to ourselves. While it is clear that regarding a forest merely as a source of “timber” is likely to lead to ecological destruction, it is less obvious that this process rests on a prior colonization of the embodied experience of those who plan and carry out the felling. Although we find it difficult to recognize the ideological distortions of our own being, the implications for our own subjectivity of an ostensibly “rational” understanding will sooner or later become inescapable. As John Rodman (1977) observes,

the unity of experience tends to reassert itself in the long run, despite the dichotomies that we draw across its surface. Descartes’ depiction of beasts as machines was followed by the proliferation of mechanistic models of man; Marx’s indictment of capitalist industrialism for treating human workers as machines is followed by . . . Singer’s indictment of factory farming for creating the monstrosity of “animal machines”; the Natural Resources Journal is followed by the Journal of Human Resources; and Darwin’s projection onto nature of a model derived from man’s “domestic productions” (plant and animal varieties created by artificial selection) now returns to haunt us as the prospect of the genetic engineering of human beings by human beings, as the literal fulfilment of the metaphor of domestication. (p. 104)

Darwin, in fact, was perceptive enough to recognize the effects on subjectivity of the scientific enterprise in which he was engaged. In his autobiography, he records the contrast between his early feelings of awe on encountering Brazilian rainforest, and his later, more detached attitude, remarking (Darwin, 1958) that “now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions and feelings to rise in my mind. It may be truly said that I am like a man who has become colour-blind” (p. 91). This loss, he adds, “is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature” (p. 139). The irony of this passage is that by noting and commenting on this process of “enfeeblement,” Darwin demonstrates his own transcendence of it.

In summary, the dualistic division between an aggrandized subjectivity and the “objective” materiality of the world, far from enriching the former, ultimately degrades it. We cannot remain fully human beings in the midst of a lifeless realm of “facts” and “stuff”; and the implicit assumption that we can rests on a mistaken understanding of selfhood, since self and world are dialectically related to each other. In contrast to the sort of rational, self-interested, consumption-oriented mode of being envisaged by economists, a healthy subjectivity in a healthy world is one that can freely move between a focus on the self and an unbounded ability to reach out empathically to others. This sort of constantly varying openness to a world in which we are emotionally embedded is becoming harder to maintain as we find ourselves anchored within a largely manufactured realm of discrete commodities governed by a calculus of individual interest and efficiency. In short, the “logic” of individual self-interest within a commoditized world is one that rests on a prior exclusion of ecological realities; and our subsequent blindness for these realities will ultimately be fatal to the industrial project.

This, then, is the current predicament of the person within industrial society. A specific symbolic system that conveys a partial and reductionist representation of the real world, having initially developed largely in isolation from the world, returns to restructure the world it left behind. Our conceptual abilities, isolated from our empathic and emotional intelligence, generates a necessarily simplified representation of the world, leading to a technologically realized material simplification that obliterates whatever cannot be simplified.

Commoditization and Ecology

To illustrate some of the differences between commoditized and uncommoditized modes of life, consider Steve Buchmann and Gary Nabhan’s discussion of the diverse relationships between humans and bees. In the ancient Malay honey-hunting tradition, the hunters face the ferocity of the Asian honeybee in forest canopies 90 feet above the forest floor. Using a strictly prescribed ritual that precisely specifies the appropriate procedures, the hunters gather and then lower the honeycomb in hide buckets, in a practice that is attuned to the ecology of the forest and so is sustainable—although it is now threatened by the deforestation that impinges on both the giant Tualang trees in which the bees make their hives and the flora on which they feed. The rituals involved are not only of ceremonial value: as Buchmann and Nabhan (1996, p. 148) report, a few weeks earlier one of the assistants “didn’t heed the warnings [and] was attacked by bees from just one colony, [receiving] over 200 stings. . . .”

Thousands of miles away, the Mayans of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico also hunt honey, this time from “at least 17 species of native stingless bees [that are] effective pollinators for no fewer than 16 agricultural crops grown in the area” (Buchmann & Nabhan, 1996, p. 156). Furthermore,

the Mayan tradition of caring for native bees was well established in prehistoric times, as the sacred Mayan texts known as the Chilam Bilam attest. The fate of humans and bees are often intertwined in Mayan stories and rituals. When a beekeeper dies, for example, the inheritor of his hives must immediately go to the bees and tell them of his death, assuring them that they will remain cared for. The new beekeeper must not visit the cemetery, or help prepare the corpse for burial, for fear that he will bring sadness back to the hive. Any incidental contact with death must be followed by a ritual washing of the beekeeper’s hands and arms before he dares to touch the hives. And if a bee is accidentally killed, it is tenderly folded into a leaf, then buried. (Buchmann & Nabhan, 1996, p. 156)

Bee-related ceremonials were richly integrated into the cultural life of the Mayans; and some of these survive today, although yields are now low due to widespread deforestation. Buchmann and Nabhan remark that

these older forms of beekeeping [were] rooted in a respect for the magic of the bees, and imbued with rituals to keep their human stewards humble and grateful that their relationships worked. In short, both ancient apiculture and living Mayan meliponiculture had cultural manifestations that guided them pragmatically, ethically, and spiritually. (p. 166)

The use of bumblebees as pollinators in intensive tomato production provides a telling contrast to these two indigenous varieties of human-bee relation. Buchmann describes how he entered an Arizona greenhouse occupying 10 acres, filled by tomato plants rooted in “white plastic bricks [containing] rock wool, sensors, and emitter tubes,” “monitored by the water-stress sensors,” with computer-controlled temperature and humidity, and serviced by a “meager workforce” of “local Hispanic residents [who] found the tomato factory far more lucrative, and far more regimented, than the ‘dirtier’ fieldwork of their youth.” Pollination occurred by means of specially bred bumblebees, “raised in total isolation from truly wild bumblebees, under rigorous hygienic standards, using the latest hi-tech insectary methods,” and given access to a solution of artificial nectar labeled, “Bee Happy” (Buchmann & Nabhan, 1996, pp. 162-163). Weeds were virtually absent and insect pests rare. In contrast to the Malaysian and Mayan situations, Buchmann and Nabhan note the absence of any “cultural context,” remarking that bumblebees were “treated as just another high technology, albeit a biotechnology. For most glasshouse tomato growers, Bombus occidentalis . . . was simply a more cost-efficient” means of pollination (pp. 166-167).

What is striking here is the isolation of the tomato-growing enterprise from both the surrounding ecology and the surrounding cultural context. The tomato operation is as detached from its surroundings as an alien spacecraft would be. Any unwanted species are simply excluded from the growing environment; and interaction between humans and plants or bees is reduced to the bare minimum necessary. I wonder about the impoverishment of the lives of workers, paid to carry out tasks that have little cultural or personal meaning. I wonder about the nutritiousness of the tomatoes, bred for size, uniformity, and appearance. And I wonder about the ecological sterility of the tomato farms, with their isolation from all insects and plants other than those specially imported. Past experience teaches us that such an exclusive focus on a single aim—in this case, the maximization of profit—carries with it costs that are often indirect, hidden, and externalized. I am reminded of the long rows of cots that characterized post–World War II orphanages, in which infants were efficiently fed, clothed, and washed, but utterly deprived of human love and contact, generating infant mortality rates that were often more than 30%, as well as incalculable emotional damage among the survivors (Blum, 2002). If life, whether human, plant, or animal, is reduced to a calculus of “efficiency” or “profit,” then ecological, emotional, and cultural structures are necessarily eliminated, wiping out meaning, diversity, and interactional richness, and leaving an ecological and emotional desert. Perhaps the major lesson to be learned here is that ecology and human meaning enrich each other, and both are impoverished when they are torn apart. If commoditization involves the fragmentation of ecosystems into discrete materials which are then reconstituted, sold, and consumed within a separate commercial system, then the gains in material standard of living need to be offset against the more elusive and never-advertised impoverishment of connectedness and meaning.

Socialization Into a Commoditized World

Since commoditization is a recent development in evolutionary terms, it is not an influence that we are attuned to in an embodied sense; and so our symbolic faculty, being more readily “programmable,” becomes the vehicle of our colonization in a socialization process that extends throughout childhood. That this is neither an inevitable nor a universal developmental pathway is suggested by research showing that most tribal societies draw the distinction between the human and nonhuman realms in a much less absolute way than we do, so that other creatures and plants, as well as aspects of the “nonliving” world such as the wind or mountains, exist within what Tim Ingold (2000) refers to as a “sentient ecology”—“based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities, and orientations that have developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in a particular environment” (p. 25). Among such peoples,

There are not two worlds, of nature and society, but just one, saturated with personal powers, and embracing both humans, the animals and plants on which they depend, and the features of the landscape in which they live and move. Within this one world, humans figure not as composites of body and mind but as undivided beings, “organism-persons”, relating as such both to other humans and to non-human agencies and entities. (Ingold, 2000, p. 47)

This attunement to the landscape is often inverted by cultural theorists who balk at the notion that the nonhuman world has its own structure and intelligence regardless of how we perceive and interpret it. “Astonishingly,” Ingold relates, “meanings that people claim to discover in the landscape are attributed to the minds of people themselves and are said to be mapped onto the landscape” (2000, p. 54), thus protecting the commoditization-friendly Western orthodoxies of conceptual priority and cultural construction.

In nonindustrial societies, then, as Ingold (2000) continues, “both humans and the animals and plants on which they depend for a livelihood must be regarded as fellow participants in the same world, a world that is at once both social and natural” (p. 87). That this absence of division between the human and nonhuman realms may be somewhat embedded in our nature is suggested by the finding that even in industrial societies, young children often spontaneously relate to other creatures as social beings rather than as “things,” needing little encouragement to view nature as alive and intrinsically valuable or to form relationships with animals. As Stephen Mithen (1998, p. 51) suggests, “Give a child a kitten and she will believe it has a mind like her own.”

For example, the children studied in Gene Myers’s (2007) research quickly formed relationships with nonhuman animals, expressing concern for their autonomy and well-being, and recognizing their “subjectivity–a sense of the animal as possessing its own interior life and goals” (p. 50). There is a sense, too, that through such relationships, the child’s own subjectivity is being enhanced and extended, as in the following exchanges:

Another child extends this empathic sense of safety:

Such empathy, however, is frequently at odds with the more detached, “objective” understandings emphasized in schools. For example, the teacher tells 5-year-old Joe that many baby turtles do not survive into adulthood, but instead become part of the food chain:

[A little turtle] gets eaten by other animals and that’s important too because if all the baby turtles that hatched out of eggs lived, we’d have far too many baby turtles, so some of them have to die to feed other animals and that’s part of what we call the food chain. Everybody in the wild kind of eats everybody else. (Myers, 2007, p. 154)

What is being taught here, then, is the priority of instrumental relations over the overwhelmingly empathic relations that, as Myers shows, characterize children’s spontaneous relationships with animals. Animals, children are taught, are not so much fellow creatures as pests, sources of food, and so on. In other words, the children’s empathy with and concern for other creatures is overlain by a symbolic web wherein the natural world becomes an array of taxonomically catalogued, scientifically understood, entities that can be utilized as “raw materials,” ready to be transformed by the industrial economy into saleable commodities. It is clear from the children’s views reported by Myers that they generally resist this replacement of a felt relation by a more detached conceptual relation; and other research suggests that socialization into a conceptual realm consistent with commoditization may be only partially successful. For example, an 18-year-old student interviewed by Cynthia Thomashow (2002) traces the beginnings of her environmental activism to the sale of a piece of land:

My parents betrayed me by selling this piece of land. I used to wander there, spend time thinking and sorting out things. I loved playing back there. As the bulldozers moved in, I remember feeling like my arms and legs were being torn from my body, I felt it deep down inside myself, like I lost a part of myself. It was awful and sad and unreconcilable. . . . I will never forgive them. (p. 265)

Commoditization, then, does not only involve the transformation of the “external” world into commodities. It can also be understood as part of a larger set of transformations that include the prior reorientation of experience away from an empathic relation to the world toward a more instrumental one. As Susan Buck-Morss (1975, p. 40) puts it, “the first great cognitive leap is the prototypical experience of alienation. It is the ability of the child to divorce subject from object, hence to grasp the building block of . . . industrial production.”

Summary: The All-Pervasiveness of Commoditization

The above analysis is not intended to suggest that the industrialization of the world, or the commoditization of nature and experience, are inevitable consequences of the growth of human symbolic ability. To use a dangerous metaphor, if the brain is understood as a piece of “hardware,” then it is programmable in different ways; and the diversity of cultures and attitudes to the natural order that still survive in patches across the globe demonstrates that while commoditization may reflect the vulnerability of the symbolic order to colonization by destructive “viruses” such as that of industrialism, other cultural directions are entirely possible.

However, it is misleading to think of commoditization as a cultural direction at all. Rather, it reflects the absence of culture, the driving out of culture by a force alien to it. The word “culture,” as Edward Casey (1993, pp. 229-230) points out, was originally derived from the Latin cultus (worship), and is associated with terms such as “cultivation” and “agriculture,” implying the embedding of the human world within the natural order. Commoditization, in contrast, involves the radical disembedding of human praxis from the natural world and the destruction of cultural frameworks that previously might have rooted us into nature. Significantly, the current use of the word “culture” as an ethically neutral umbrella term for any way of life regardless of its rootedness in or alienation from the natural order abandons important integrative qualities of culture and substitutes a vague reference to an amorphous assortment of disparate and often contradictory elements. Thus, discourses and cultural forms that were once consistent with and supportive of the natural order become more detached and ethically neutral, paralleling the reduction of ecosystems to passive “raw materials.” The changes that underpin commoditization colonize the farthest reaches of human life so that nothing remains as it was before, coloring our psychological and social functioning, colonizing the language we use and permeating our thought processes. The gradual and insidious character of these changes allows them often to pass unnoticed, so that they become part of the taken-for-granted background of contemporary events. This is as true of academia as elsewhere; and while it is acknowledged that scientific understandings of nature often possess a reductionist quality that is consistent with the material reduction of ecosystems to raw materials, it is less frequently recognized that currently fashionable arguments that wild nature is “socially constructed” or “a product of civilisation,” or that it is essentially structureless or even a “romantic fantasy,” can also be understood as part of the deeper tide that is sweeping the entirety of life toward an alienated and unsustainable existence. Our ability and willingness to recognize the character and pervasiveness of these destructive and ultimately unsustainable changes will significantly determine the future of life on earth.

There are several conclusions that we can draw from this discussion. First, commoditization is not simply something that humans “do” to their “environment” but also a process that infuses our own experience and praxis. Just as commoditization transforms entities in the outside world to take their place in the capitalist economy, so the person becomes the consumer and the worker—a transformation that is mostly unconscious and beyond the individual’s control and understanding. Second, these processes constitute a replacement of the natural and cultural structures we originally inhabited by an entirely different form of structure; that is, industrialism is hostile to and incompatible with both the original ecologies our ancestors knew, and the traditional forms of culture that integrated human life into ecosystems. Thus, the destruction of ecosystems is always, simultaneously, a cultural loss; and the reverse is also true, since the loss of cultural connections between humans and other species is an ecosystemic shrinkage that isolates humans from the rest of nature.

This radical transformation of our ecological and cultural landscape should be recognized as a systemic process that, while it assimilates and employs human ingenuity, extends well beyond our ability to understand it. As industrialism has evolved, its emergent properties have increasingly developed beyond conscious control and awareness, and the human belief that we are somehow “in control” of its direction has become correspondingly delusory. To revisit the issue with which we began this article, the portions of events we consciously control, as well as those that are entirely unrelated to our actions, diminish as the world and everything within it is caught up in a new integrative dynamic that is sweeping all before it; and paradoxically, the more we humbly grasp the extent of our powerlessness, the more likely we are to be able to exert some sort of influence over the future of humanity and our fellow life-forms on this planet.