Abstract
Consumerism will be understood as a ‘folk religion’, as a contemporary everyday way to make sense of and deal with transcendence. Contrary to longstanding critiques I will argue that consumerism also carries an ethical potential that comes into conflict with the results of the capitalist order of production.
Keywords
When considering consumerism in relation to religion and in the context of critiques of capitalism, the common approach is to portray it as a continuation of the adoration of the Golden Calf, as a misguided quasi-religion. Tim Jackson and Miriam Pepper, for example, expose consumerism as a false theodicy. 1 In such assessments traditional religious and neo-Marxist (or post-Marxist) critiques converge. There is, for example, a surprising resonance across one and a half millennia between church father Augustine of Hippo in the falling Roman Empire and the prophet of the May 1968 uprisings in Paris, Guy Debord. For Augustine in his Confessions the desire for worldly goods constitutes a fatal distraction from a life focused on God; for Debord in his Société de Spectacle the staged world of commodities is a distraction from a life oriented towards liberation. For both the desire for material goods represents a dangerous temptation. From the religious perspective the ultimate threat is an contamination of faith itself by a consumer mentality. 2 Augustine senses this centuries before the emergence of a full-blown consumer culture in that he suspects that the temptation to tempt God to issue ‘signs and wonders’ does not stem from ‘the hope of salvation’ but instead from ‘the love of the experience’. 3 From the radical perspective the threat is an intoxication of the secular world ripe for a revolution by a new religious opiate. While for Karl Marx established religion famously was ‘the opium of the people’, for Debord the spectacle of consumerism constitutes nothing less than an all-out opium war. 4 The afterlife in Heaven is replaced by one on Earth—in a seduction that for the revolutionary teacher is no less satanic than it is for the church teacher. 5 But, and that is why besides their significance in the respective histories of ideas I have chosen them as witnesses, both of them realise that the threat is not what commonly is denounced as ‘materialism’. The Golden Calf—like all religious artefacts—is not venerated for what it is in itself, its material properties or value, but for a transcendent aspiration, even if the biblical account suggests a relapse into base materialism. Both recognise that the core of the distracting desire is to be sought in the longings of the imagination and not the greed of the body.
Consumerism as competition/temptation in a created world requires a theodicy—since already Augustine admits that the beauty to be found in human creativity as expressed in material goods cannot, in a Christian perspective, be understood as anything but a (however dim) reflection of God’s Beauty. Equally, if we see Marxism in its various versions (including that promoted by Debord) as a Heilsgeschichte 6 then here, too, we have a problem of theodicy: either the bribery and drugging of the proletariat that is consumerism somehow will tilt over into a contributing factor to the communist imagination—or (as pessimist post-Marxists such as, most prominently, Baudrillard 7 project) it will arrest the historical process which will end in a perennial dominance of the capitalist system. It is for the various anti-consumerist theories to deal with their own soteriological problems—I will propose that we may also think of consumerism as a folk religion along more optimistic lines by not understanding it as an aberration from a path to salvation but rather as possessing a utopian potential of its own.
Consumerism, I propose, is the folk-religious manifestation of a now dominant civil religion which Émile Durkheim has called the ‘cult of the individual’ 8 and whose high church version is the human rights discourse, a discourse to which consumerism provides the trivial everyday experience that cements the plausibility of the otherwise quite abstract notion of ‘human rights’. 9
By ‘folk religious’ I here mean the relatively un-reflected aspect of ordinary practices and beliefs that are oriented towards, or productive of, something beyond the immediate here-and-now: everyday transcendences. In this sense, folk religiosity is not seen in terms of the now classic definition by Don Yoder as an amalgamate of remnants of conquered past (‘pagan’) religions turned ‘superstitions’, mixtures of competing religious traditions (syncretism), and popular (mis)interpretations and simplifications of official religion. 10 While I am not challenging the validity of such an approach, it is important to see that (much like the Weberian tradition in the sociology of religion 11 ) it implies a hiatus between official or institutionalised religion and folk religiosity in which the intermittent influences mainly come from the more consciously reflexive ‘superstructure’ and not the more routine everyday praxis at the ‘base’. 12 It is, however, important to recognise that any official religion, any theological dogma, can only be successful if it connects, in one way or another, to the plausibility structures that are supported by the lived religious experience.
At the heart of this secular folk religion of consumerism are an addiction to the ever-new, and an abhorrence of final commitment that implies both an imaginative longing for a beyond and a valuation of individual human life as the substrate of the imagination. I therefore suggest that consumerism does have a spiritual/utopian and ethical dimension, a dimension that is inspired by its Romantic/Protestant heritage and sustained by the structural romanticism of money. Finally, and in relation to the theme of this special issue, I will argue that this ethos of consumerism collides with the realities of capitalist processes and relations of production where they are felt to infringe on individual self-expression and self-development.
What I mean here by ‘consumerism’ is not the culture of conformity and competition as has been commonly misunderstood ever since Thorstein Veblen 13 coined his famous notions of ‘emulation’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’. While status assertion and aspiration definitely do play a role in the recognition economy of capitalist societies, 14 this aspect of ‘consumerism’ is one that always has been around—even before capitalism—and as Veblen himself argues it is nothing but a reverberation of an aristocratic habitus that has undergone a degree of generalisation. As Chris Rojek has pointed out, this pattern is applicable particularly to aristocratic societies such as Saudi Arabia. 15 When Paul Louis Metzger rejects the unabashed commercialism of some streams in current Christianity as embrace of consumerist status competition he rightly makes a connection to a return to traditional ethnic and class divisions combined with an equally traditional belief in magic rather than to specifically modern (imaginative) consumerism.
Jesus needs to cleanse the temple again today; he needs to overturn the tables of commerce and consumption, for consumer Christianity continues to turn the temple into a market. Greedy zeal for a false utopian vision of homogeneity and upwards mobility threatens to consume the church, rebuilding the wall of division between those of different ethnicities and classes through free-market consumer church-growth strategy as well as prosperity-gospel preaching to the poor.
16
Modern consumerism is not solely an expression of social position, community and difference (which consumption always was and still is). Even less is it a manifestation of sheer greed—the unfettered satisfaction of bodily desires (which, as we know from the warnings in religious texts, again must be a phenomenon much older than modern consumerism). The myth of consumerism as bland materialism may be repeated on an endless loop in academic lectures, religious sermons and, ironically, also through the mass media so central to consumer culture. But that it is untenable has been forcefully argued by social scientists who study consumerism as a material culture, most prominently by the pioneering anthropologist of consumption Daniel Miller.
17
Miller highlights that the material is meaningful in all cultures and of course we know of few, if any, religious practices that can do without the mediation of material objects. He also points out that the critique of the materialism of the masses is older than capitalism and consumerism—that it dates back into antiquity (as we can see in the example of Augustine). The critique of consumerist ‘materialism’, he contends, is elitist: What worries me is that this bogey of a deluded, superficial person who has become the mere mannequin to commodity culture is always someone else than ourselves. It is the common people, the vulgar herd, the mass consumer, a direct descendant of the older ‘mass culture critique’ of the 1960s. It is never the rounded person who is encountered within an ethnographer’s attempts to bring to the apparent authenticity of others, then we see something quite different—a world where a pair of Nike trainers or Gap jeans might be extraordinarily eloquent about the care a mother has for her child, or the aspirations of an asthmatic child to take part in sports.
18
In his cultural-historical approach to the sociology of consumption Colin Campbell makes a similar argument 19 —and he also draws attention to the growing importance of commodities that are not or not mainly material objects (services, software, music, moving images, etc.), building on his observation that the endlessness of needs/wants of modern consumers is only possible because we have left behind what he calls ‘traditional hedonism’ linked to immediate bodily stimuli and have become ‘autonomous imaginative hedonists’. 20 This imaginative consumerism began with the avid devouring of novels and developed into a desire for goods and services that cater for what could be called a ‘cinematic experience’ and which was already present in the practice of novel reading at the heart of bourgeois culture fostering a ‘habit of unlocking and extending internal spaces of experience’. 21 If, with Charles Taylor, we dig deep to uncover the roots of the western self, we find that Augustine’s Confessions are one of them, embarking on a quest to uncover the inner self and explore its endlessness.
Augustine’s turn to the self was a turn to radical reflexivity, and that is what made the language of inwardness irresistible. The inner light is the one which shines in our presence to ourselves; it is the one inseparable from our being creatures with a first-person standpoint. What differentiates it from the outer light is just what makes the image of inwardness so compelling, that it illuminates that space where I am present to myself.
22
Augustine is in awe of the vastness of this inner space that he finds in his memory, and recognising the religious dimension of such awe he battles it as the most dangerous of temptations. He tries to wrestle down the genie whose bottle he himself helped to uncork. If we are to liken consumerism to a deviant religious practice as castigated in the scriptures, it is not a cult of the golden calf or Mammon, it is that of the Serpent who alerts humans to the fact that they share in the divine creative imagination (or from an atheist perspective: that the creative imagination has always been their own).
Transcendence
Thomas Luckmann identified the interpretation of the transcendent nature of human existence as the central function of religion. 23 By transcendence he meant not just the absolute beyond, the out-of-this-world which may help us understand what is going on within this our world. Transcendence here also denotes the apparently simple fact that humans do not only live in the here-and-now but are temporally and spatially extended into where and when they are not (no more, not yet) which also requires interpretations as meaningful. Unlike Nietzsche’s famous gregarious animals in his Second Untimely Meditation humans not only have a past and a future—they are historical beings in that they are their pasts and their futures (and even their possible, but not realised, alternative pasts and various potential futures). 24 The transcendent is relevant for the immanent. That this historicity is a central driver of religious search for meaning is underlined both by Augustine’s fascination with memory and the preoccupation with history underpinning the quasi-religious character of Marxism as a soteriology.
Luckmann notes that in an ever more fluid world the interpretations, the holy cosmoses constructed by institutionalised religion, which tend to undergo a process of ossification after their initial charismatic phase, are less and less able to offer satisfactory answers to problems of transcendence as they are posed in people’s everyday lives. But the problem of transcendence, which in its most immediate and profane form is one of identity construction through time and space, does not go away. To the contrary, where occupational structures are becoming more individualised and life paths more a matter of choice, it becomes more pressing—especially during adolescence. Luckmann saw popular culture taking the place of interpreter and mediator here, constituting an ‘invisible religion’. But he is not too specific about how this works, how consumerism can take on such a task—a task that, I think, has been aptly characterised by the Catholic-Romantic proto-hippie Gilbert K. Chesterton’s quest for re-enchantment of the disenchanted rationalistic/bureaucratic modern world: How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own town?
25
In other words: how can we be at once here and not-here, now and not-now, immanent and transcendent? Here the work of Colin Campbell on the historical roots of consumer culture is enlightening. Campbell traces the heritage of contemporary consumer culture back to its roots in the Romantic movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and beyond that links Romanticism back to the Reformation and the turn towards inner life and imagination which it had triggered. The aforementioned ‘autonomous imaginative hedonism’—a mentality and skill that he sees as strengthened and promoted by the Romantics and subsequently adopted by the consuming masses—still seeks pleasure through material objects, but these no longer only act as direct/immediate stimulus to the senses (as a soft cushion, a delicate perfume, a distinguished bottle of wine, etc.) but as triggers or rather launch pads and staffage for autonomously induced emotional states in daydreams and journeys into alternative realities (e.g. imagining oneself as a fairy-tale princess).
Modern hedonism presents all individuals with the possibility of being their own despot, exercising total control over the stimuli they experience, and hence the pleasure they receive. Unlike traditional hedonism, however, this is not gained solely, or even primarily, through the manipulation of objects and events in the world, but through a degree of control over their meaning.
26
This is not the invention of a completely new spiritual skill (there always have been virtuosi of the imagination—often finding niches in religious traditions as visionaries and mystics). But it is the liberation and democratisation of that latent potential.
We can here also see the elective affinity with the capitalist market economy: 27 money as radically empty incorporates all possibilities equally—due to its ‘lack of any content of its own’, Georg Simmel in his 1900 Philosophie des Geldes argues, money is ‘the tool that has the greatest possible number of unpredictable uses’. 28 Qualitative barriers are torn down—everything that is psychologically and physically possible becomes socially possible. In the modern fairy tale, fantastic novel, movie, video game, and so on, all possibilities are open to all—you don’t need to be born a princess to end up married to a prince. ‘Only’ quantitative barriers are left (but of course that quantitative barrier put up by the unequal distribution of financial resources now becomes painfully obvious). Daydreams are thus ‘realistic’ in the sense of the ‘realism of character’ in novels. 29 They may be unrealisable in practical terms, but they are no longer completely unimaginable impossibilities. They need to be consistent and plausible in terms of how humans would act. And this, I would claim, is what makes them applicable to everyday problems with transcendence—makes them a likely candidate to fill in the gap left by religious institutions that either have become near irrelevant for people’s everyday lives or have adapted to consumer culture in a drive to beat the competition with its own stick. Everyday problems of transcendence are processed through the construction (or adoption) of individual styles that structure choices (and not only purchasing choices), creating meaningful links between past and future selves to create/maintain what Luckmann has called a ‘morally relevant biography’ where a socially accountable identity is maintained through temporal change. 30 While the consolation offered by traditional religiosity lay in the achievement of an eternal state of happiness beyond, now the promise is one of infinite continuity of ever-changing experiences—a worldly variant of the wild afterlife with which the Romantics already had replaced the Christian Heaven. 31 Georg Simmel in his 1905 philosophy of fashion unfolds how the modern fashion cycle with its dialectics of uniformity and difference, continuity and change affords support to maintaining individual and social identity not only despite continuous change but, in effect, by continuous change. 32
Or to take one of the favourite examples from the early ages of consumer studies—cigarettes: purchasing, carrying around, smoking, offering Gauloise cigarettes a student can cross-reference historico-geographical links (Paris, Debord’s old Rive Gauche, for example); developmental stage (claim to daring adulthood); future trajectories (setting out to becoming an intellectual); equate and differentiate herself from others with similar and/or differing projects (the despised stockbroker with his Davidoffs, for example); allegiances; and keep that facet of her personality alive later on when she hasn’t become an author after all but a lawyer—not ‘only’ a lawyer though, but one who has an intellectual side to her through what Grant McCracken has called ‘displaced meaning’ in which goods help the individual contemplate the possession of an emotional condition, a social circumstance, even an entire style of life, by somehow concretizing these things in themselves. They become a bridge to displaced meaning and an idealized version of life as it should be lived.
33
Both Augustine and Debord saw the romantic imagination as a major threat to the existential choice of their respective cities—that of God and that of the Revolution. Both tried to bottle it up and denounce it—Augustine as distracting gratification of the eye, Debord as false choices which undermine the real, revolutionary choice. Both complained about its banality. 34
As such, autonomous imaginative hedonism may indeed be seen as a solely individualistic way of coming to terms with the minor and major existential crises we all experience not only due to our mortality but the finiteness that is inscribed in the very notion of action. But the imagination that can (Campbell cites Coleridge) ‘under willing suspension of disbelief’ construct scenarios, alternative universes, different societies, has also a socially utopian potential.
35
Science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that By mapping possible futures, as well as a good many improbable ones, the science fiction writer does a great service to the community. He encourages in his readers flexibility of mind, readiness to accept and even welcome change—in one word, adaptability.
36
As realistic daydreamers modern consumers are, in Karl Mannheim’s terminology, virtuosi of ‘relative utopias’. 37 Ruth Levitas has emphasised the continued presence of utopian impulse even after the demise of the great political narratives of the twentieth century—and notes that this mentality is no longer sustained by philosophies and ideologies, but resides in ordinary culture—in just the same sort of artefacts (e.g. lyrics of pop songs) where Luckmann’s invisible religion hides in plain sight. 38 This utopian ability can be turned from mere consumption to focus on the conditions of production. Bandi Mbubi, for example, in his campaign for Fairtrade mobile phones (Congo Calling), which aims to end the scandalous exploitation of labourers in the tantalum mines, makes use of consumer technologies (mobile phones, social networking sites) to project alternatives.
So there appears to be ethical/utopian potential in the consumer imagination—especially when combined with the fact that for the autonomous imaginative hedonist it is easier to empathise, to place themselves into situations of distant others and get a sense (although of course not the full experience) of the suffering it may involve. Natan Sznaider has pointed out that the humanitarian sentiment is closely linked to this aspect of capitalism. 39
But before the emotional implications there is a more compelling (although less obvious) ethical dimension to the imaginative–hedonist response to the problem of transcendence. This becomes visible when we link back consumer romanticism to the structural romanticism of money, that is, underwrite Colin Campbell’s approach with that of Georg Simmel. Money as empty tool refers to an open horizon of possibilities. Even once it is spent it keeps representing the absent, not chosen choices as not-yet-chosen options. Consumerism is a culture of open horizons, a culture of open possibilities. As a culture of choice the one thing that is abhorred most in consumerism is irreversibility, final commitment. But how could that possibly be a basis for an ethical maxim?
Probation
The Catholic/Fascist legal theorist Carl Schmitt mocked this attitude which is now generalised in (small-r) romantic consumerism in the original Romantics as their political/moral occasionism—the refusal to commit to any of the projects, dreams, identities constructed in the imagination: They preferred the state of eternal becoming and possibilities that are never consummated to the confines of concrete reality. This is because only one of the numerous possibilities is ever realized. In the moment of realization, all of the other infinite possibilities are precluded. A world is destroyed for a narrow-minded reality.
40
Considering how easily the dreamers of the absolute on the Right (like Carl Schmitt himself, Martin Heidegger and many others) committed to Nazism—and how easily the dreamers of the absolute on the Left (Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács and many others) committed to Stalinism, we may accept that there may be virtue in avoidance. The utopian impulse today is a relative one not only in its realism-of-character—it is relative in its commitment to open horizons and rejection of the absolute, which puts it at loggerheads with both traditional theologies and political ideologies. But of course a reluctance to make final commitments cannot be in itself ethical as it gets in the way of forming the most basic social bonds that are indispensable for the continuation of any given society: the commitment to the next generation—a problem highlighted by Christian critics of consumerism, such as Rodney Clapp, reminding us that ‘children represent the commitment of a lifetime’. 41
One aspect of the religious interpretation of transcendence is the dynamics of probation inherent in the finiteness of existence and freedom of choice.
42
This is a central theme in the story of the Fall whose anthropological essence is captured here by John Milton in Paradise Lost: Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere, Of true allegiance, constant faith or love
43
We can only be judged if we are free—we are set free to succeed or fail, so that we can be judged. We are free to choose, but we only have limited time. We need to be able to account for our action in light of the lost alternatives. Traditional institutionalised religion (as opposed to freer forms of heroic individual searching that we find throughout history) used to help us by providing rules and guidance that limit the horizon of the legitimately possible so as to relieve the faithful from the burden of too much freedom—the authoritarian defence used by Dostoyevsky’s Great Inquisitor when questioned by the liberator Jesus.
Consumerism accentuates probation by detraditionalisation, deregulation and broadening of choice. And given that we use choices to construct identities—selecting the wrong jumper, the wrong toothpaste, the wrong newspaper and so on may undermine our personal integrity. To an extent we are able to avoid the issue and can lull ourselves in the illusion of general reversibility, of infinite opportunities to reinvent ourselves as creative occasionists: consumer culture makes a commitment to the irreversibility of reversibility. 44
But that implies an interesting ethical turn. It is a cultural, a collective choice—and we are obliged to respect the reversibility, the open potential, the creative expressivity in others as much as we feel ourselves entitled to our own. Durkheim insists that at the religious core of the human rights discourse, individualism is not pure egotism, as it implies a duty to safeguarding the individuality of others as well as one’s own: Whoever infringes on a man’s life, a man’s freedom, a man’s honour, inspires in us a sense of horror which is, in every respect, parallel to that which a believer feels when seeing his idol desecrated. Such a morality is therefore not simply a matter of healthy discipline or wise economy of existence. It is a religion in which Man is at once believer and God.
45
The problematic reluctance to commit is cancelled out by the obligation to respect developmental potential—especially in children. The way children have been made the sacrosanct centre of family life can be explained by the fact that they incorporate the concept of potentiality: ‘Children’s capacity for imagination and fantasy is central to their sacralization.’ 46
Anti-heroism, the equally historically unique aversion against killing, can be explained in a similar way. To kill is to delete potential, to cut off development. The classic hero, as he reverberates in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, could be said to yearn death on completion of mission as all is done and to live further comes with the risk of reversing achievement, to be dishonoured. The consumer hero, as absorbed into the never-ending rebirths of the clownesque adventurer/saviour in Dr Who, wants to live forever and live through infinite different scenarios. In a way the consumer of stories does precisely that in the imagination (and may find ways to come to terms with their own finitude in ‘real life’ through this).
Attacks on the imagination thence become preludes to attacks on life itself—as the Romantic Heinrich Heine with chilling prevision stated in 1821: ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.’ In this sense consumerism forms the everyday experience that makes human rights (as religio-ethical codex) intuitively plausible. This is why the reaction to book burning and its equivalents is similar to that once evoked by blasphemy. It is blasphemous as there is something sacred about novels even if they are secular in outlook. Salman Rushdie identifies that something as the realm of the imagined possible: Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and godmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.
47
But such sanctity does not extend to the economic system which facilitated such expression in the first place.
Consumerist anti-capitalism
The autonomous imaginative hedonist is bound to get into conflict with the realities of capitalism. Born out of, and maintained by, the capitalist economic system, consumerism’s ethos must create dissatisfaction with the constraints, inequalities and cruelties resulting from the relations of production and the accumulation of capital: 48 inequality, which is increasing unabatedly, is not just inequality of wealth, inequality of opportunity—it is inequality of power, resulting in relations of domination. The needs, desires and dreams of the rich determine the demand in the labour market—and the demands on labour are increasing with the inequality that goes with the dynamics of capital accumulation. The dissatisfaction with one’s own grey existence is a thorn in the side of capitalism that cannot be pulled out since capitalism cannot exist without consumerism 49 while consumerism’s utopian nature points beyond the constraints of the order of total production. 50
In tourism, which Debord identifies as the vanishing point of the spectacle of consumerism, 51 the dissatisfaction with the world of production culminates in that hierarchies are reversed and the servants to capitalist production become—in a salvation on bought time—those who are being served. It is significant that with its symbolisms of journeying, flying in the skies, full-immersion baptism in the seas, tourism’s escapism is where the quasi-religious semantics of consumerism is most visible. It is here, too, that it is most obviously lacklustre and the exploitation on which it is based most scantily disguised.
Capitalism is boring and bland and consumerism is the attempt to escape that boredom of a one-dimensional existence. Not as a soteriological event finally realising some eternal truth, but rather as an immanent realisation of the infinite flight of the imagination that the original Romantics developed, using the new liberties brought by the capitalist market—only to find themselves stifled by the emerging eternal monotonies of factory production and bureaucratic administration.
Their project, whose anti-capitalist impetus is maintained in consumerism as anti-producerist appearance, is indeed an occasionist one in more than just the polemic sense Carl Schmitt used for its defamation. It is a promise to recreate the world differently from moment to moment so as to escape the permanent boredom of the eternal recurrence that are the routines of capitalist reproduction. An occasionism that strangely resonates with the theological occasionism of the Sufi philosopher Ibn al-‘Arabi: Were it not for the renewal of creation at each instant, boredom would overcome the entities, since Nature requires boredom. This requirement decrees that the entities must be renewed. That is why the Messenger of God said about God, ‘God does not become bored that you should become bored.’ So the boredom of the cosmos is identical with the boredom of the Real. But no one in the cosmos becomes bored except him who has no unveiling and does not witness the renewal of creation constantly at each instant and does not witness God as Ever-creating perpetually.
52
Where an Islamic consumerism is, as is the case in Saudi Arabia, built on the permissibility of excessive hedonism of the traditional type and status consumption, the result can be non-occasionist, unromantic boredom. I would relate this to the fact that the imaginative, the story-telling, the (if you like) romantic aspect of Islam has been marginalised by the religious authorities of the Kingdom in a hyper-rational religious modernisation. 53 Where Sufism has survived attempts to suppress it and (as in the case of Turkey) has, under the selective pressures of explicitly secularist regimes, been interiorised and to a degree privatised, the elective affinity to market romance can surface. 54 This can be channelled (as in the self-declared ‘Islamic Calvinists’ of MÜSİAD, the independent tradesmen’s and businessmen’s association) into a neoliberal producer capitalism as seen in the Anatolian boom under Özal and Erdoğan. 55 But it is also conducive to a self-expressive, individualising Islamic consumer culture that we have seen arising soon after said boom. 56
In the case of Turkey both Muslim and secular consumer citizens are increasingly frustrated by the dominance of anti-imaginatively capitalist Islamist and secularist elites that keep clipping away at their wings. I would dare to claim that the creativity and the tolerance of the Gezi Park protesters in Istanbul in 2013 are owed in part to the fact that—although what triggered it all was the opposition to a shopping mall—they are children of a consumer revolution.
57
While the communist and Islamist anti-capitalists of old were of an ascetic persuasion, we are here seeing a generation of what Kate Soper called ‘alternative hedonists’ who resent capitalism not only for its injustice but also for the restrictions it lays on the free development of people’s potential to be, at least in their imagination, all they could be.
58
As Colin Campbell argues, ‘what’s wrong with consumerism’ is not that it is bad for the soul; what is wrong are the environmental consequences and social inequality of the capitalist order of production it is currently linked up with. In fact, if we accept that there is spiritual potential in the consumer imagination we can focus on those really existing problems of consumer capitalism. Religious perspectives that place less emphasis on dogma and more on narratives and stories
59
can find themselves in alliance with imaginative consumer citizens who (as evidenced by practice of Fairtrade, despite its flaws
60
) have an intuitive understanding of the wrongs of inequality and a utopian skill of picturing alternative worlds—helped by the fact that capitalism inadvertently (as Debord states
61
) even turns dissatisfaction itself into a commodity and that the imaginative hedonist turns ‘desiring itself into a pleasurable activity’,
62
leading into a dominance of the very curiosity Augustine so vehemently rejected: When the senses demand pleasure, they look for objects of visual beauty, harmonious sounds, fragrant perfumes, and things that are pleasant to the taste or soft to the touch. But when their motive is curiosity, they may look for just the reverse of things, simply to put it to the proof, not for the sake of an unpleasant experience, but from a relish for investigation and discovery. What pleasure can there be in the sight of a mangled corpse, which can only horrify?
63
One could reply that, at least, this curiosity means that the evil in the world does not go unnoticed and unchallenged—a humanitarian concern that is shared by religious and secular activists.
A religious practice, however, that joins in with Augustine in his gratitude that God’s law ‘permits the free flow of curiosity to be stemmed by force’ and advocates the ‘bitter medicine’ ‘from the schoolmaster’s cane to the ordeals of martyrdom’ 64 will find a formidable and tenacious adversary in the folk religion of consumerism. And so will any other pedagogy of canes and martyrs.
Footnotes
1.
Tim Jackson and Miriam Pepper, ‘Consumerism as Theodicy’, in L. Thomas (ed.), Religion, Consumerism, and Sustainability (London: Palgrave, 2011, pp. 17–36).
2.
M. Z. Varul, ‘After Heroism: Religion vs. Consumerism’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 19.2 (2008), pp. 237–55.
3.
Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), p. 242.
4.
Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), p. 41.
5.
Debord, La Société du Spectacle, p. 24.
6.
K. Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949).
7.
Jean Baudrillard, La Société de Consommation (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
8.
Émile Durkheim, ‘L’individualisme et les intellectuels’, Revue Bleue 10 (1898), pp. 7–13.
9.
For a discussion of Durkheim’s notion of the ‘sacred’ and its secular expression see W. S. F. Pickering, ‘The Eternality of the Sacred: Durkheim’s Error?’, Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 69 (1990), pp. 91–108.
10.
Don Yoder, ‘Toward a Definition of Folk Religion’, Western Folklore 33.1 (1974), pp. 2–15.
11.
E.g. S. F. Ülgener, Dünü ve Bugünü ile Zihniyet ve Din (İstanbul: Der Yayınları, 1981), pp. 35–38.
12.
For the reinterpretation of the base/superstructure metaphor in terms of routine and reflexive practice see my ‘From Elective Affinity and Selection to Base/Superstructure and Back: Resuscitating Some Dead Dogs’, Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, Leeds, 23–25 April 2014. For a critique of the dominant understanding of folk religiosity as embodied in the ‘Yoder definition’ see Leonard Norman Primiano, ‘Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife’, Western Folklore 54.1 (1995), pp. 37–56.
13.
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899).
14.
M. Z. Varul, ‘Waste, Industry, and Romantic Leisure’, European Journal of Social Theory 9.1 (2006), pp. 103–117.
15.
Chris Rojek, ‘Leisure and the Rich Today: Veblen’s Thesis after a Century’, Leisure Studies 19.1 (2000), pp. 1–15. Theeb al-Dossry found that in Saudi Arabia consumerism is fuelled mainly by a dynamic of tribal competitiveness, obligatory generosity and the agonic gift exchange that is traditional Arab hospitality. See Theeb al-Dossry, ‘Consumer Culture in Saudi Arabia’ (PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2012).
16.
Paul Louis Metzger, Consuming Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: WEerdmans, 2007), p. 85.
17.
Daniel Miller, ‘The Poverty of Morality’, Journal of Consumer Culture 1.2 (2001), pp. 225–43.
18.
Miller, ‘The Poverty of Morality’, p. 229. Miller provides a strong empirical case for this claim in his work on North London consumers in his Theory of Shopping (Cambridge: Polity, 1998).
19.
Colin Campbell, ‘What is Wrong with Consumerism? An Assessment of Some Common Criticisms’, Anuario Filosófico 43.2 (2010), pp. 279–96, esp. pp. 284–88.
20.
Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
21.
F. H. Tenbruck, ‘Bürgerliche Kultur’, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie Sonderheft 27 (1986): Kultur und Gesellschaft, pp. 263–85, at p. 271.
22.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 131.
23.
Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
24.
F. Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachttheil der Historie für das Leben (Leipzig: Kröner, 1924).
25.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Doubleday, 2001), p. 2.
26.
Campbell, The Romantic Ethic, p. 76.
27.
See M. Z. Varul, ‘The Eccentricity of the Romantic Consumer: Campbell, Simmel and Plessner’, 4th International Plessner Conference, Rotterdam, 16–18 September 2009.
28.
G. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1990, 2nd enlarged edition), p. 212.
29.
R. Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (London: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 49; G. Currie, ‘Realism of Character and the Value of Fiction’, in J. Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 173.
30.
Luckmann, The Invisible Religion, p. 48.
31.
Ph. Ariès, L’homme devant la mort. II. La mort ensauvagée (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985), p. 125.
32.
Georg Simmel, ‘Fashion’, American Journal of Sociology 62.6 (1957), pp. 541–58. See also Sophie Woodward’s ingenious study ‘Looking Good, Feeling Right’, in S. Küchler (ed.), Clothing as Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2005, pp. 21–39).
33.
G. McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 110.
34.
Augustine, Confessions, p. 243; Debord, Société de Spectacle, p. 54.
35.
Campbell, The Romantic Ethic, p. 76.
36.
Arthur C. Clarke, The Collected Stories (London: Gollancz, 2000), p. x.
37.
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (San Diego, CA: Harvest, 1985), p. 184.
38.
Ruth Levitas, ‘Looking for the Blue: The Necessity of Utopia’, Journal of Political Ideologies 12.3 (2007), pp. 289–306.
39.
Natan Sznaider, The Compassionate Temperament: Care and Cruelty in Modern Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).
40.
Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), p. 66.
41.
R. Clapp, ‘The Theology of Consumption and the Consumption of Theology’, in R. Clapp (ed.), The Consuming Passion: Christianity and the Consumer Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), p. 194. Similarly e.g. the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams in Lost Icons (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2000), p. 23.
42.
U. Oevermann, ‘Ein Modell der Struktur von Religiosität’, in M. Wohlrab-Sahr (ed.), Biographie und Religion (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1995).
43.
John Milton, Paradise Lost (London, 1754), p. 188 (III, 102–104).
44.
Also see M. Z. Varul, ‘The Healthy Body as New Religious Territory’, in C. Brace et al. (eds.), Emerging Geographies of Belief (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011, pp. 239–54).
45.
Durkheim, ‘L’individualisme’ (my translation).
46.
B. Langer, ‘Commodified Enchantment: Children and Consumer Capitalism’, Thesis Eleven 69 (2002), pp. 67–81, at p. 73.
47.
Salman Rushdie, Is Nothing Sacred? (London: Granta, 1990).
48.
For a more extensive exploration of the contradictions between consumerism and capitalism see M. Z. Varul, ‘Towards a Consumerist Critique of Capitalism’, Ephemera 13.2 (2013), pp. 293–315.
49.
That much is true in Marxist critiques of consumer culture; see e.g. F. Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
50.
As the grandmaster of critical theory grudgingly acknowledges; see T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1951), p. 8.
51.
Debord, Société de Spectacle, p. 55.
52.
Cited by W. C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (New York: SUNY Press, 1989), p. 105.
53.
E.g. A. Ahmed, Postmodernism and Islam (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 206.
54.
M. Z. Varul, ‘The Sufi Ethics and the Spirits of Consumerism’, Marketing Theory 13.4 (2013), pp. 505–512.
55.
D. Yankaya, La Nouvelle Bourgeoisie Islamique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013).
56.
Ö. Sandıkçı and G. Ger, ‘Constructing and Representing the Islamic Consumer in Turkey’, Fashion Theory 11.2/3 (2007), pp. 189–210.
57.
For the Muslim anti-capitalist case present among the protests see İhsan Eliaçık’s article in this special issue.
58.
K. Soper, ‘Re-thinking the “Good Life”: The Citizenship Dimension of Consumer Disaffection with Consumerism’, Journal of Consumer Culture 7.2 (2007), pp. 205–29.
59.
As advocated as a contemporary approach to teaching Christianity by E. D. Reed, R. Freathy, S. Cornwall and A. Davis, ‘Narrative Theology in Religious Education’, British Journal of Religious Education 35.3 (2013), pp. 297–312.
60.
M. Z. Varul, ‘Consuming the Campesino’, Cultural Studies 22.5 (2008), pp. 654–79.
61.
Debord, Société de Spectacle, p. 55.
62.
Campbell, The Romantic Ethic, p. 86.
63.
Augustine, Confessions, p. 242.
64.
Augustine, Confessions, p. 35.