Its a horror movie…
And worse still it isn’t just on your TV. The spectacle of a society consuming itself out of existence is unfolding before our eyes as Catherine Deveny observes in The Age. Her opinion piece on the scary business of rampant consumerism is interesting but on a couple of points I thinks she is wide of the mark.
Her claim that we are just blindly following our animal instincts or as she puts it “we can’t help ourselves because we’re just mammals programmed to binge in times of plenty” is quite debatable. Whilst it might be true that in a primitive sense we have a tendency to eat when we can in order to survive, this tendency has evolved in concert with environmental issues that might have meant that such gluttony occurred on a irregular basis. Think aborigines and hunting. You might have a feast of kangaroo every now and then but there were a lot of times when you didn’t.
What does this tendency have to do with the current trend to consumer binging? Simply this, there is no associated mechanism to regulate our consumption, at least not one operating at the same time as the prevailing supply of consumerables. There is of course a mechanism that will ultimately bring our consumption back to earth, and that is the natural limit of the world to sustain 6 billion people and their associated greed.
On another level Catherine’s piece is also guilty of trivialising what is really a fundamental problem, and in so doing she avoids any critical analysis of what is driving this cult of gluttony. She seems to think it is all the fault of the people doing the buying, yet as she points out, people are following some basic instinct in this regard. Why do we feel compelled to buy our happiness? Or perhaps a more interesting question is what are we trying to achieve when we indulge in consumption. It seems that we are seeking some form of security, something that is constantly denied to us in a world where we have no power over the things that might make us actually feel more secure.
In this the mass media which the Age is part of, play a significant role. They feed us a diet of fear and loathing. The mass media is in fact the ideas manufacturing arm of big business and it is big business that really profits from consumer society, and since clearly the general population is impoverished by consumption, the real villains are not people in general but those that would and do exploit a known human condition for their own personal gain.
Which kind of brings me to the question of carbon. The G8’s little announcement regarding carbon emissions was pretty well summed up by Crikey. It is of course a pretty meaningless commitment since by 2050 the world will be deep in the pooh as a result of today’s emissions so a target for 2050 is a bad joke. However I reckon there is something that could be done about carbon and it could work. First, it has to be simple and it has to be universal, simple because we are talking about life and death and universal because the issue really does affect everyone. So what we do is impose a universal carbon tax on everyone and every faceless corporation, the same rate across the board and measure it on wealth. After all it can be argued that all of our wealth is derived from what the planet has provided so think of it as back rent. Then you put the money into building sustainable societies, which means unfortunately, giving up those things we currently have which clearly are not sustainable over any real measure of time. We can build environmental friendly and carbon neutral but bugger all of what we have now actually fits that bill. Worse still we will only get there if we pursue a radical agenda, we simply don’t have the time for softly softly.
It could be done. We have the technology now whether or not we have the will is another question entirely. More importantly is the attitude of the powerful vested interests that seem to have our politicians in a thrall, are they interested in doing something for our long term survival?