The Dangers of Consumerism and apparently Christianity

This last week had a whole host of themes, which might make this post a little jumbled and jumpy; consumerism, spirituality, christianity, western mindset, and even a little feminism thrown in there. With that said, though, I think I will focus a little bit more on the consumerism and Christianity aspect.

I'm glad Professor Rouzie said that, to an extent, there is truth to the idea that money can buy you happiness, mostly in the sense that the constant worry of paying bills and knowing where your next meal will come from is relieved with a good job and salary. Durning wrote in his essay, "The happiness that people derive from consumption is based on whether they can consume more than their neighbors and more than they did in the past." I personally disagree that everyone is driven by this imaginary competition to do better than their neighbor. Is it still a driving factor? Yeah, I think so. In grade school my friends were constantly telling me how "rich" I was but I had difficulty seeing their point. We lived in the same neighborhood, we went to the same crappy public school. But I had the nicest house, I had two TVs, and all kinds of video game systems to play with.

I had more stuff. Was I happy? Well, yeah, I was hardly ever bored.

But what about now? I am currently living in a dorm room that's barely big enough to qualify as anything but a closet - the lack of elbow space does annoy me and it always takes some getting used to - and yet I feel probably just as happy and fulfilled as I did ten years ago with the three-story house. Why? Well, I have great friends here, at the very least, but I was also able to squeeze in some of my most prized possessions: my Calvin & Hobbes books, a couple of Fantasy novels, my laptop, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Game Cube, my SLR digital camera, and my book of DVDs and video games. Just as my friends make up a part of my life so do some of the items that I possess and I can honestly say that I would be a far less fulfilled person without one or more of these items. Seem silly? Perhaps but there is a certain something about the material things we get that drives the very reason we insist on buying them: escapism.

As an artist and a writer, I am constantly looking for a new story to get lost in and even though I may read the same books and play the same games over and over again, I can honestly say that I always get even a little bit of entertainment from them. Material things can make you happy, it all depends on how you use them.

To an extent in Alan Durning's essay, I think he misses the point. He says, "Luxuries become necessities between generations as well. People measure their current material comforts against the benchmark set in their own childhood. So each generation needs more than the previous did to be satisfied" (774). Actually, my parents often reminisced about the frugality of their childhood to curb the materialism in my brother and I: "When I was a kid, we would go to the local burger joint and get a large drink, maybe once a month, and I had to share it with my three sisters. We never had individual pops. That was outrageous!"

But, to get back to the point, I don't think everyone actually measures their happiness based on what items they have. In my family, it's all about job satisfaction. I do not think anyone in my family has ever really and truly enjoyed their job. If they did, it certainly was not for long. We spend about 90% of our adult life doing work and rarely, if ever, does a person find satisfaction with it. If we spend 90% of our time working, then our job will most certainly factor very largely in the happiness scale.

I have worked at Dairy Queen for four years. I not only hate it, I loathe it. The very summer's beautiful hot days were tainted by the fact that I had to go to work and go through the same motions minute after minute, serving hoards of people. I do not work during the college quarters and I could not wait to get back to school and away from that miserable aspect of my life. Well, since I'm going into video games, job satisfaction should be much higher when I actually get a job.

I find it very surprising that Durning bases his whole essay on the evils of consumption and yet when he gets to the part about the most fulfilling aspects of our lives, he doesn't think for an instance that being happy with our job would factor in to how happy we are totally? He brushes over it but he turns away from that avenue almost as quickly as it presents itself:

"Similarly, analysts such as Scitovsky believe that reported happiness is higher at higher incomes largely because the skilled jobs of the well-off are more interesting than the routine labor of the working class. Managers, directors, engineers, consultants, and the rest of the professional elite enjoy more challenging and creative pursuits, and therefore receive more psychological rewards, than those lower on the business hierarchy" (775).

And for the record, my dad is an engineer and my mom has a masters in business and works at a bank, so they are among those "professional elite" but after thirty or forty years of putting up with the same thing, work loses the interest it once had.

Next up on the chopping block is Lynn White Jr.

Now he and I can actually agree on something: we both dislike Christianity. Him because of the psychological impact its had on the way our country thinks and me because the evangelists attempting to hijack the elections and apparently turn the country into a Christian theocracy are pretty scary, even as much of a minority as they are. I also dislike it because of the way it affected some of my friends and eventually came to dominate their lives.

To begin, I love how he starts his essay with an example of a new plow created to create suitable conditions for growing crops and implies a cold and calculating attitude to the peasants who used it. "Man's relation to the soil was profoundly changed. Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature" (406). So, peasant farmers from the 7th century are now evil simply because they used an instrument that allowed them to live and feed their families.

Now, this will seem like a silly analogy but there is a game called Bioshock, where you play as a man who has inexplicably found himself in this chaotic underwater city where the people are murdering each other to stay alive. There are these creatures that walk around, carrying a lot of money and energy that is essential to the survival of your character. However, they do not attack you. They simply wander around, living peacefully, but the game requires you to attack them or you cannot go on to the next level. Without this requirement, I would simply let them be. They are not doing anything to me and despite all the valuable items they carry, it wastes quite a bit of ammo to kill them.

Needless to say, humans are a common sense creature. If they did not have to "rape" the fields to grow their food then they wouldn't. Plowing them in this violent manner, as the text describes, is time consuming and it takes group work and a bunch of oxen to do it. If it could be done with two oxen and a man, no one would waste time pooling their resources to "attack the land." Furthermore, their being Christian had nothing to do with them developing new technology to stay alive. They could be Buddhist and still they would have to resort to such harsh means. That is the power of survival.

Furthermore, I remember watching this documentary on Christianity and it pretty much covered how very astrology-based it is and how it borrowed virtually every one of its elements from the other religions of the day. I believe it was called Zeitgeist, but the dominant religion that was constantly compared to Christianity was the Egyptian religion which was around looooong before Christianity came into being. Needless to say, I have a difficult time believing that Christianity is the first anthropocentric religion. It would not have become a dominant religion or come into being at all if people at the time, to an extent, did not believe that the land was there for the taking. They had the lion in cages, they rode the largest land mammal on the planet, the elephant, of course they would have thought pretty highly of themselves.