Cultures of Consumption/Consuming Cultures
The modern/westernized/industrial/post-industrial way of life is not sustainable. Even the crunchiest of the green folk who ride their bikes to work and buy their food from the farmer’s market are leading a gluttonous unsustainable lifestyle. How? The cost of living (in terms of natural resources) in this modern world is simply too high to last long. As India and China also follow the industrial model of development, and their per capita rates of consumption of natural resources rise we are in for some serious scarcities and price increases in commodities such as wheat, petroleum, fish, and even water. We are currently in a race to develop efficient technology that can sustain our way of life before scarcity of natural resources and abundance of natural disasters makes it impossible to continue.
The above may be a gross generalization, but I think it gets at an important trend. As I noted in my previous post, The United States’ 5% of the world population consumes 30% of its resources, and as other societies (especially the billion-member ones) “develop” towards our standard of living and consumption-we’re all in for some tight times unless the pace of technology fueled by this mass consumption can outstrip the dual threats of increased consumption by an increased population of mass consumers. If modern science can pull this off then Hooray! The whole world can eat and live like Americans, and once a few economic and political kinks are worked out, the current goals of global development will be achieved. But if not…
Before I go any further I feel the need to clarify some things. My first post essentially attempted to question the widely-held belief that the middle-class Euro-American way of life is what the world should aspire to. I was not saying that it’s fun to be poor in the Third World. I’ve been poor in urban Africa and its no joyride. However, my relatives in the village who were significantly “poorer” and “underdeveloped” than my family had a much higher quality of life (in my and their opinion). So the first post was mainly about exposing and questioning the way we think about poverty and development. In this post I hope to give (and hope I have already given) a few reasons why (barring amazing scientific innovation) progressing along the commonly-held paradigm of development would not be a good idea.
One goal of development that is currently gaining a lot of currency is sustainability. Like all seals of discourse “sustainability” has been used and misused in a number of different ways. For this post I’ll say that sustainable ways of life are those that can continue indefinitely within the constraints of their natural environments. I say ways of life, and not way of life for 2 reasons:
1)there is no one sustainable way of life
and 2) all ways of life influence each other, as globalization is showing us.
One example of point 2, is the so-called “genocide” of indigenous people described by Wade Davis and numerous other anthropologists. The United States and Europe do not have within their borders the natural resources to maintain current levels of consumption and so they must look elsewhere for these resources, goods, and now, services. These resource extraction operations often destroy or deplete the natural environments of people leading seemingly sustainable ways of life (Shell in Niger delta, Forestry operations in Southeast Asia, Fisheries in Lake Victoria, and the sugar plantations of the Carribbean). This disruption of natural environment makes the traditional ways of life of the people inhabiting these regions impossible forcing them to migrate or assimilate (often at the lowest levels) into the modern society that made theirs extinct. Now I’m not saying that I’m against trade at all, but I don’t think that “fair trade” in any sense of the term is possible given our current consumption rates.
Our current culture of consumption has to consume other cultures to survive. One interesting side-effect of this is the creation of the global culture market: members of endangered cultures commodify their culture, making World Music CD’s, giving tours for foreigners, opeining ethnic restaurants, teaching dance classes, etc. Our culture of consumption turns cultures into commodities to be consumed. But I digress…
The natural resource demands of current Euro-American lifestyles necessitate the removal of resources necessary for other ways of life to sustain themselves. The reason I privilege many so-called “indigenous” and “primitive” ways of life is that, to me, they appear to be sustainable. That is, they do not have to consume other ways of life in order to survive (however, this is not true of all “indigenous” or “primitive” cultures by any means). So if sustainability is to be one of the goals of development, perhaps we should look to learn from existing sustainable cultures instead of trying to “develop” them into our non-sustainable image.
Sustainable ways of life seem to be based on a cyclical model of interaction with natural resources much like the water cycles and food chains we learned about in primary school. To me this implies a resituation of man as a part of nature, rather than apart from nature (as European Enlightenment philosophers and their intellectual descendents often implicitly posit). The proponents of the GAIA hypothesis were merely restating what every 5-year-old in a sustainable culture knows, “We are in a give and take relationship with the Earth.”
Friday, 19 January 2007
Development and The Myth of Progress
Development and The Myth of Progress
Since Hegel, Western European writers and leaders have been pushing the idea of progress, putting darkness, savagery, the past, and societies outside of Western civilization on one end of the spectrum, and light, consciousness, technology, the future, and the modern Western world at the other end. Of all the civilizations and cultures that once lay beyond the dominion (and ken) of Western civilization, those located in Africa have been portrayed as the furthest back on the dark end of the continuum. Hegel wrote, “Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained-for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World-shut up; it is the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night.” Despite the incredible ignorance and falsity of this embarrassing pronouncement, it still echoes in the minds of people of all colours around the world.
Today, we divide the world into “developed” and “developing” regions, with virtually all of Africa (and most other places where the descendents of Western Europeans are a minority) falling into the latter category. The implication being that these regions of the world are or should be trying to become like the “developed” world. It seems as though the spectrum of progress hasn’t changed much since the days of Hegel and colonization. Back in that day there were missionaries and colonial administrators and educators pushing Christianity, the backwardness of non-Western societies, and the bright future of European civilization, technology, and culture. One of the stated goals of the French colonial policy in Africa was cultural assimilation-to better the primitive Africans by transforming them into little dark Frenchmen and women. Now there are Western-educated aid workers, politicians, professors, and organizers pushing the materialist religions of free-market capitalism and Marxism (both ideological descendents of Hegel’s philosophy), the backwardness of non-Western societies, and the bright future of modern technology and the American way of life. One of the unstated goals of globalization seems to be the cultural assimilation of poor Africans into the American middle-class culture of consumption. Unfortunately, this “new” spectrum of progress seems to have become almost universally accepted on both sides of the have/have-not divide.
While I enjoy my super-sized fries and time-saving appliances as much as the next American, I also recognize that the United States is far from being the exemplary society to which all others should aspire. Many Americans still struggle to make ends meet, and we have the largest per capita prison population of any nation in the world. People of colour are over-represented in both of these groups. The Americans who do “make it” often find that their material success doesn’t translate into happiness or even contentedness. Most Americans are unhealthily overweight, which is symbolic of the fact that although we make up 5% of the world’s population, we consume 30% of its resources. It’s simply not possible or prudent for the “developing” world to copy the American way of life—the world simply doesn’t have enough gasoline, plastic wrap, or Prozac.
There is no linear trajectory of development, with Africa on one end and the United States on the other. This illusion of progress and American superiority has been maintained by rewriting history to make the past look worse than the present, and associating present-day non-American societies with this dark past. All of us well-intentioned people who live, work, or go to school in the so-called “developed” world need to be very careful to avoid this kind of thinking if we want to “help” those on the African end of the continuum. We’ve all been somewhat indoctrinated with Hegel’s imperialist delusion, which is fast becoming a very real nightmare for the postcolonial poor. But we can only really help the poor and destitute of the world after we’ve rid ourselves of the ideology that makes them destitute and poor.
. Every society has its own dynamic history of progress or regress that must be considered on its own terms. Living on less than a dollar a day isn’t so bad if your cost of living is much lower or you’re living in a place where dollars don’t mean that much. There are several “primitive” societies in India and Western and Southern Africa that have achieved infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the United States, and residents of many so-called “developing” nations such as Nigeria consistently score higher on polls of happiness, contentedness, and optimism than citizens of the US, Canada, and even the Scandanavian socialist wonderlands.
It’s no accident that many Americans have turned to Buddhist meditation, African dance classes, Indian cuisine, and soul-searching service-vacations in Latin America. Perhaps without realizing it, they’re turning Hegel’s continuum on its head, suggesting that the “developed” world, in some ways, should be progressing towards the Third World.
Since Hegel, Western European writers and leaders have been pushing the idea of progress, putting darkness, savagery, the past, and societies outside of Western civilization on one end of the spectrum, and light, consciousness, technology, the future, and the modern Western world at the other end. Of all the civilizations and cultures that once lay beyond the dominion (and ken) of Western civilization, those located in Africa have been portrayed as the furthest back on the dark end of the continuum. Hegel wrote, “Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained-for all purposes of connection with the rest of the World-shut up; it is the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night.” Despite the incredible ignorance and falsity of this embarrassing pronouncement, it still echoes in the minds of people of all colours around the world.
Today, we divide the world into “developed” and “developing” regions, with virtually all of Africa (and most other places where the descendents of Western Europeans are a minority) falling into the latter category. The implication being that these regions of the world are or should be trying to become like the “developed” world. It seems as though the spectrum of progress hasn’t changed much since the days of Hegel and colonization. Back in that day there were missionaries and colonial administrators and educators pushing Christianity, the backwardness of non-Western societies, and the bright future of European civilization, technology, and culture. One of the stated goals of the French colonial policy in Africa was cultural assimilation-to better the primitive Africans by transforming them into little dark Frenchmen and women. Now there are Western-educated aid workers, politicians, professors, and organizers pushing the materialist religions of free-market capitalism and Marxism (both ideological descendents of Hegel’s philosophy), the backwardness of non-Western societies, and the bright future of modern technology and the American way of life. One of the unstated goals of globalization seems to be the cultural assimilation of poor Africans into the American middle-class culture of consumption. Unfortunately, this “new” spectrum of progress seems to have become almost universally accepted on both sides of the have/have-not divide.
While I enjoy my super-sized fries and time-saving appliances as much as the next American, I also recognize that the United States is far from being the exemplary society to which all others should aspire. Many Americans still struggle to make ends meet, and we have the largest per capita prison population of any nation in the world. People of colour are over-represented in both of these groups. The Americans who do “make it” often find that their material success doesn’t translate into happiness or even contentedness. Most Americans are unhealthily overweight, which is symbolic of the fact that although we make up 5% of the world’s population, we consume 30% of its resources. It’s simply not possible or prudent for the “developing” world to copy the American way of life—the world simply doesn’t have enough gasoline, plastic wrap, or Prozac.
There is no linear trajectory of development, with Africa on one end and the United States on the other. This illusion of progress and American superiority has been maintained by rewriting history to make the past look worse than the present, and associating present-day non-American societies with this dark past. All of us well-intentioned people who live, work, or go to school in the so-called “developed” world need to be very careful to avoid this kind of thinking if we want to “help” those on the African end of the continuum. We’ve all been somewhat indoctrinated with Hegel’s imperialist delusion, which is fast becoming a very real nightmare for the postcolonial poor. But we can only really help the poor and destitute of the world after we’ve rid ourselves of the ideology that makes them destitute and poor.
. Every society has its own dynamic history of progress or regress that must be considered on its own terms. Living on less than a dollar a day isn’t so bad if your cost of living is much lower or you’re living in a place where dollars don’t mean that much. There are several “primitive” societies in India and Western and Southern Africa that have achieved infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the United States, and residents of many so-called “developing” nations such as Nigeria consistently score higher on polls of happiness, contentedness, and optimism than citizens of the US, Canada, and even the Scandanavian socialist wonderlands.
It’s no accident that many Americans have turned to Buddhist meditation, African dance classes, Indian cuisine, and soul-searching service-vacations in Latin America. Perhaps without realizing it, they’re turning Hegel’s continuum on its head, suggesting that the “developed” world, in some ways, should be progressing towards the Third World.
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