The Material Culture

Well, the ISP has been buggering about something terrible these last few days making access to the blogosphere nigh well impossible. A “major international failure” was how D described it. Anyway, before the lines all crashed down, I was able to get to Baino’s site and to this post on seasonal sales and rank consumerism which really struck me. (Please do read it to put my post into better context.) Just what is it, I wondered, that has made the world so increasingly materialistic?

Although the consumer culture is true of most places today, I thought specifically of South Africa because it’s where I am and it’s a place where everyone noticeably suffers from an incredibly bad dose of “Gotta Have”. Do bear in mind though that most here live well below the poverty line, that the vast majority struggle to put food on the table and that unemployment is high. One of the worries at this time of year is how many school leavers will pass their final year – not because there’s a worry that many will fail – but that the pass rate will be too high and there is little hope of employment for most of these children. But here’s the thing, everyone, rich and poor, have to “Have”. Interest rates are running high as it is, inflation is looking skywards and the government consistently urges low or no spending. But do the general populace heed any of this? Not a chance – they’re out there spending and buying like there is no tomorrow - buying on credit, running up debts with little or no concept of the true cost. I asked a woman I know how, when she had to borrow money for school fees and had defaulted on her electricity and municipal payments, she could even think of buying a new TV, a microwave, a ceiling fan and a computer. She said it was important to have these things or others thought less of you, to have them meant you had “arrived”. And if you had them and someone else didn’t then you were better than them. The confusion of values struck me forcibly. And perhaps I should add that this woman lives in a tin shanty in what was originally a squatter camp. Her debts are not insignificant and she regularly receives “red letters” from various credit agencies but this doesn’t seem to trouble her – so long as she “Has”, she’s fine. Yet hers is not an isolated case, and, more curiously, the “condition” is not isolated to only the impoverished. South Africa, like so many places is caught up in the mayhem of consumer greed. Gotta Have is the new culture, the new means of defining who one is.

And see, here’s the thing, in pondering the Rise of Stuff: Stuff - materialism - has become the new culture, the new religion, the new family and value system – the thing that defines us - in a world that has seen the increasing demise of the role of the nation state. And along with the watering down of nationality through globalization, there has also been a whittling away of religious influence and the break up of the family unit – as a result of both the former. In South Africa this break down is felt particularly acutely.

Apartheid saw to the destruction of the family when men were forced away from the rural areas to work on the mines, leaving women, children and old folks at home. Traditional family values were corrupted and families were scattered. In a similar way, these same people have been propelled from separate “tribes” (Xhosa, Zulu, Sotho, Venda, Tswana etc) into homogeneous South Africans at an incredible speed. They’ve also shot from rural lifestyles into cities (in the constant search for employment – so they can buy stuff) and, increasingly, the global village. They’ve gone from thatched mud huts to New York skyscrapers and the “glamourous life of plenty” through the medium of television and Hollywood movies. They’ve gone from donkey cart to jets in a few short years. Traditional religions have likewise given way first to Western religions and then the erosion of those Western religions. But it’s not just the impoverished masses who are affected, everyone is. The guy storming along the motorway in his brand new BMW 6 series or his Bentley is not really that much different. He too clings to Status as a means of defining who he is. See, where he used to business in Cape Town and perhaps Johannesburg, he now does business in Hong Kong, London and New York. Where his family used to be all around him, he now has kids in Sydney, Los Angeles, Toronto and London. Where he used to have just one family unit he now has three scattered families courtesy of his three wives. Where Church gave him direction he now thinks it’s a load of old cobblers. And so, Materialism and Fun have become his culture, his religion, his family and his value system – and, as such, his means of defining who he is.

The reality is we are “developing” so fast that we have spiraled out of control and the things that held us together, the old values, have flown out the window as we whizz through time and space attempting to (re)define ourselves. It seems that we are not yet sufficiently evolved to get along without needing to define ourselves - and so enters the Culture of Materialism. We are our stuff, and we are defined, made meaningful, by the amount and kind of stuff we own. And of course those who don’t fit the box, who do not conform, are the heathens – because they too, by definition, must be defined and boxed in some way by all those others.