Peter Maurin and the culture of consumption

Peter Maurin, I believe it was, defined a good society as a society that made it easier to be good. He was a Catholic, as you know, so he had a particular idea of what it mean to be good. That we no longer have a shared sense of what it means to be good makes it hard to imagine the kind of society we need to be. But look, I don't want to short-circuit this post before it gets off the ground.

I thought about Maurin just now while reading this part of a post from Freddie de Boer:

I see a lot of enthusiasm, and often in unexpected places, for a new ethic of restraint, frugality and material humility.

But I insist that we confront what such a change often means. Many times I hear people argue that the working class or poor should just stop expecting so much and be smarter with their money. You can't just orphan that thought out there! Such a venture, if it's undertaken with respect and integrity, has to mean real changes to our culture. We live in a culture that doesn't just value material wealth or affluence, but revels in excess, brags about largess and profligacy, makes a virtue of ostentation and a fetish of the most obscene and useless expense. That has to change, if we're going to accept the idea that we should all be happy with less. I know people kind of detest the language of compassion in politics, but it is a cruel thing, a cruel thing, to live in a culture that values wealth and only wealth, and then turn around and tell someone that they are irresponsible and wrong to be bent on acquiring it. It's easy to tell other people to delay gratification. It's much harder to actually be the one delaying it, when VH1 and the E! network are telling you everyday that you're nothing if you don't get that purse or that blouse or that goddamn enormous television. I'm all for endorsing a modified American dream, but modifying it means a lot more than being a scold.

Additionally, those who pursue growth at great cost and see growth as our vehicle to happiness are going to have to accept that ratcheting down our definition of middle class happiness and middle class identity is going to slow growth. People spending like mad and dreaming of a life they can't really afford and we can't really offer them has some corrosive effects, but it does spur growth. I just don't know that we have the ability to continue to grow that way, the wisdom to know when to limit that growth, or the compassion to help those who find themselves outside of that river of growth.

I appreciate Freddie making these points. The cultural pressure against thrift and sensible spending, and self-control, is overwhelming. I literally cannot imagine how we reverse this. I know how we in our family reverse it, or at least combat it: we teach ourselves to say no, and we practice the habit of saying no. We're not nearly as good at it as we need to be, but we're a lot better at it than we were. We don't let TV run our family's life, either, which helps.

But we still get caught up in it. And I wonder: where does the countercultural message come from? Where do people hear any message, ever, to counter the constant drumbeat from TV and media, which is: "You won't be happy until you buy this thing or have that experience"? Who is telling people it's a lie? The churches? Please. If the churches did tell them, would they hang around to listen?

What Freddie's post brings to mind is how our permissive, hedonistic culture hurts the poor and the working class the most. You don't have to believe in God to understand social psychology, and how important it is for people who don't have much of anything to live by a code that encourages thrift, modesty and self-restraint -- because they have so very much to lose if they don't. We have created a society in which it's hard for people to develop the habits of the heart that help them achieve -- well, if you don't like the word goodness, how about health, or sustainability? Put another way, the way we're living, and the culture of consumption we've created, both are unsustainable, because they depend on a distortion of human nature. As we are learning, and shall learn.

We have got to change our lives, or we're not going to make it.

Anyway: what are your ideas for how we can change this culture to make overconsumption unfashionable? Or is that impossible in our sensate era (cf. Sorokin)? Thoughts?