Commentary
Materialism, a deepening shadow
By Julian Edney
Online Journal Contributing Writer


Jun 15, 2006, 00:59

In California lore there is the story of a 1940s gang that operated profitably on the sun-blistered highway stretching between Lost Angeles and Las Vegas. The gang would steal orange cones from a street maintenance crew and distribute them in a gentle curve across the highway in the middle of the desert. Travelers driving to Las Vegas were detoured onto a dirt track that eventually petered out in dust and greasewood, and there they would be ambushed and robbed by four men with machine guns and sent reeling back to Los Angeles in their underwear.

There are many ways to get detoured off the high path of life. Bad investments, bad marriages, the wrong occupation will all do the trick, and they all begin with legitimate-looking diversions. Whole societies can get detoured, trapped into crippling wars or imprisoned within their own borders by charismatic dictators. All start as sensible-looking ventures and on the way, nobody guesses destiny.

Our exorbitant materialism is a loss of the way. We did not come to a point of ownership-obsession overnight, nor did it descend one day like a sun-darkening cloud of locusts; it is a coloring that has been gathering slowly within. In 1966, when college freshmen were surveyed about what they were going to do with their lives, 44 percent said it was important or essential to become well off financially, but by 1996 that had risen to 73 percent. Conversely, back in 1966 a full 83 percent said it was important to develop a philosophy of life, but by1996 that had dropped to 42 percent [1]. On a graph, the ascending line crosses the declining line in a stark X; it is clear one motivation has displaced the other. Nowadays, it is rare to hear about a philosophy of life; money and property have become our main attention. We believe we are what we own.

Where is materialism taking us? Does money make us happy? Actually, Jeremy Bentham led us astray when he stated that money is the most accurate measure of pleasure. Recently a collection of studies has revealed that in fact rich people are not happier, and that adding wealth to your life does not increase your sense of well being (unless you live below the poverty line) [2]. Moreover rich nations are not always healthier: the recent discovery is that people in egalitarian nations live longer than people in richer nations that are hierarchical [3]. But people think money will make them happier, and that’s what motivates them.

Psychological studies show that it is actually companionship and family that make people happier. So we are immersed in both sides. In practice, money corrupts friendship and money problems are second only to infidelity as a cause of divorce [4]. Observe, says Yale’s Robert Lane, a simultaneous national growth of wealth and depression. In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, he puts it this way: there is “a titanic conflict between the oldest human institution, and the newest, the market” [5]. Statistics bear him out. We are richer than ever, and huge numbers are using prescription antidepressants. Severe depression is 10 times more prevalent that it was 50 years ago, and suicide is the third highest cause of death in young people.

The triumphant free market does not care. Lane says it is Darwinian, indifferent, a winnowing process, amoral, with no concern for what happens to persons.

Psychologists have begun to focus in. Tim Kasser has a book The High Price of Materialism that investigates the type of person who should thrive in the market environment: the materialistic personality. Materialists, as we might predict, believe acquisition is the solution. They watch prodigious amounts of television that touts materialist values. But when they acquire, they are not satisfied. Research shows they are also poor at personal relationships; they are anxious, alienated, and depressed; they are competitive; and college-aged materialists are more likely to be conflictual and aggressive on dates. They drink more alcohol. Death plays a bigger role in materialists’ dreams [6].

A single-minded pursuit of goods is justified by classical economics and it is loosely attached to the idea of liberty, but apparently our habit of making commodities our friends is not working.

Why? Because the drive for material goods is competitive, and since the outcome of competition is inequality, materialism is spreading us apart. Competition erodes trust, and is a gradual poison in companionate relationships. The compensation is supposed to be freedom but in practice we are all encouraged into the same want-of-wealth by the same media, particularly television, and so we conform, which means we are not free.

Summed up, over longer periods of time, the differences among us become more important than the similarities.

Today the top 1 percent of the population owns more than 40 percent of the wealth [7]. The differences between the wealthy and the poor are colossal. There is a kind of self-segregation underway, a “secession of the wealthy” into gated communities. Robert Sapolsky makes the point that as differences grow, the wealthy also become less inclined to pay taxes that go to benefit the average person, or to invest in what is average. They are simply too different. So over time as the rich get richer the middle is not raised, and these differences will compound themselves. Radical materialism becomes a threat to the unity on which any well-ordered society is based.

An obvious casualty is the concept of the common good.

Nobody uses the term any more – and it’s not that the idea of common good has faded from fashion, rather, the concept has ritually been attacked by libertarians, especially by that demagogue Ayn Rand, who dogmatically and repeatedly stated that the common good does not exist [8]. Instead, she vociferously argued for selfishness as a value.

Without a common good, community values such as peace, justice and equality cannot survive.

The writing on the wall is luminous. Unless we find a way to put the common good back in place, we can look forward to more atomization, more loneliness, more divisions, and more alienation, which sociologists will never stop reporting.

This is a shadow on the land that will be increasingly difficult to lift.

How will all this get repaired?

Because materialism is hostile to intellectual growth, it will be difficult, stumbling back, to find the right path. It is what we have to do.

Notes

1. Myers, D. G. The funds, friends, and faith of happy people. American Psychologist 2000, 55, 56-67.

2. Ryan, R.M. and Deci, E.L. On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudiamonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology. 2001, 52, 141-166

3. Sapolsky, R. Sick of poverty. Scientific American, 2005, 293, 92-99.

4. Amato, P. R. and Rogers, S J. A longitudinal study of marital problems and subsequent divorce. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 1997, 59, 612-624.

5. Lane, R.E. The loss of happiness in market democracies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. p. 33.

6. Kasser, T. The high price of materialism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

7. Kawachi, I., Kennedy, B.P. and Wilkinson, R.G. (Eds.) The society and population health reader. New York: The New Press, 1999. pp. xi-xii.

8. Rand, A. The virtue of selfishness. New York: Signet Books, 1961.