Alternative hedonism might just lead us to fulfilment
A new campaign by those disaffected with our shopping culture could be a cure for anxiety and low self-esteem
Jackie Ashley
Monday April 17, 2006
The Guardian
Easter? It's about chocolate, obviously, but it is about so much else too. This is an appropriate time of year to reflect on our monotheism. We shall have one god, a jealous god, and no other gods shall we worship. Luckily, except for a few weirdos on the edges of society, we all do worship the one god, yea, the source of all happiness - shopping. It has just been predicted that we will spend £10.5bn over the four-day Easter break. Never have the British been so soaked in consumerism.
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But perhaps there is evidence of a backlash against this glossy and omnipresent deity. Next week a conference at London Metropolitan University takes place with the title Countering Consumerism: Religious and Secular Responses. This may very well get them a fatwa from Tesco. Perhaps the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, which has seen sales improve so strongly in the past six months, will be standing outside with a placard declaring "Down with the blasphemers!", and a pile of organic air-freighted fruit with which to pelt the academics.
Interestingly, the conference does not start with the traditional leftwing case against consumerism, the austere hatred of waste that British people once felt, remembered by millions as simply: "Finish your dinner, what about the children in Africa?" There is nothing wrong with that, of course, except that the notion that we should all feel guilty about enjoying material plenty was so comprehensively defeated by the consumer booms of recent decades. It feels like a lost argument from another age.
Instead, the conference promises to focus on a backlash against the shopping culture for producing too much stress and pollution, and too little real satisfaction - the dark side of the consumer culture as experienced by those who are already sated. It talks of "alternative hedonism" - what Kate Soper, one of the organisers, calls "self-interested disaffection with consumerism" on the part of consumers themselves.
This is coming at a time when many organisations, from the television watchdog Ofcom to the National Consumer Council, have been looking at the effect of the shopping culture and its ubiquitous advertising, particularly on children. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of parents are worried. Across Europe there are moves to restrict junk-food advertisements from children's television.
With good reason; work by Juliet Schor of Boston College has tried to track how children are drawn into the shopping culture. Unsurprisingly, she finds that the more children are exposed to the media, mainly television, the more avidly they become consumers. More controversially, she goes on to argue that this produces "higher rates of depression, anxiety and psychosomatic complaints such as headache, stomach ache and boredom, as well as lower self-esteem". Consumerism, says Schor, is "ailing America's children."
The point of anti-consumerism, however, is not to ban one kind of advert any more than it is to produce better labelling about the fat and salt content of food. These things are useful in themselves, but if anything they could be called pro-consumerism: by reassuring consciences, they allow us to return to the shopping frenzy with renewed energy. The point of "alternative hedonism" is to confront the frenzy itself.
And everywhere people are doing just that. It might be those anti-materialist teenagers you know, unenthusiastic about following their parents into frantic, hard-working lives. There are plenty of them, quietly jacking in university places to work as gardeners, or to sing, or simply to travel on almost no money at all. It might be those more politically conscious shopping-refusniks who see waste as a prime environmental issue. Or it could be the former professionals who have fled the City in order to live a downsized, less pressured life. Further afield, it could be the Slow Food movement of Italy and many other European countries, the insistence on good ingredients, plenty of time, laughter and enjoyment - the campaign against busyness, as much as against business.
Like most of us, I am a hypocrite about shopping, perfectly prepared to buy the sticking-plaster of a good bottle of wine or a new jacket when feeling down; spending too much time dawdling behind a supermarket trolley that is full of slightly more food than will actually be eaten by this time next week. Yet, as with many people, this learned behaviour is being challenged by a rising disgust at what is thrown out. And having just returned from Oxford Street in the cheerful company of a teenager keen to explore the latest fashions, I conclude that hell must surely resemble the blaring basement that is Top Shop's shoe department on a Thursday afternoon.
Many of us are, in short, ready to listen to anti-consumerism. The question is: what kind? Hairshirt puritanism will only ever appeal to a minority - it's a self-righteous thing, as much about psychology as real politics. No, rational anti-consumerism has to work with the grain of what many more people already feel instinctively - that time to live, just to be, is more valuable than a few more cheap shirts. It would not confront shopping directly, but would return to some recent lost battles, about shop workers' hours and the cost of air-freighting exotic foods around the world - jumping opportunistically on to issues, but always with a simple question at the back of the mind: is this really necessary, and is it making us happy?
Anti-consumerism has the capacity to unite trade-union demands for shorter hours with the environmentalist and better-lifestyle agendas that are being picked up on by the centre-right as well as the left. Though not religious myself, I note the concerns of those who are, as they ask how to live more fulfilling lives. The irreligious can ask, equally, how we can get ourselves back from the indignity of simply being consumers to the dignity of citizenship.
No politician I can think of has yet found the language and tone for a proper scepticism about the shopping culture. "Do as I do, not as I say" hardly works when politicians live such frantically busy lives and have limited their greater vision to endless growth. But alternative hedonism has something going for it: if you have the chance to laze, dawdle and slough off the tyranny of yet more shopping this Easter, you may unwittingly be part of the next revolution in political thought.
· jackie.ashley@guardian.co.uk
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