Dialogues
Seven Voices
Growth

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Compiled by
Alexander Manu

Consumerism, Triviality and Obsolescence

Christopher Lasch •

Speculation about progress...has reached something of a dead end. As the twentieth century draws to a close, we find it more and more difficult to mount a compelling defence of the idea of progress; but we find it equally difficult to imagine life without it.

Thomas Berry •

Our sense of endless progress emerges from the millennial expectations of our scriptures. From the prophetic period onward our scriptures speak to us of a period when the human condition would be surmounted, when justice would reign, when the fruits of the earth would be available in lavish abundance. All this fostered a profound resentment against our human condition.

We somehow did not belong to the community of earth. We were not an integral component of the natural world. Our destiny was not here. We deserved a better world, although we had not even begun to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of this world or the full measure of its entrancing qualities.

Christopher Lasch •

The nineteenth-century cult of success placed surprisingly little emphasis on competition. It measured achievement not against the achievements of others but against an abstract ideal of discipline and self-denial. At the turn of the century, however, preachments on success began to stress the will to win. The bureaucratisation of the corporate career changed the conditions of self-advancement; ambitious young men now had to compete with their peers for the attention and approval of their superiors. The struggle to surpass the previous generation and to provide for the next gave way to a form of sibling rivalry, in which men of approximately equal abilities jostled against each other in competition for a limited number of places...The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the confidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told that they had to sell themselves in order to succeed.

Thomas Berry •

When the absurdity of progress through exponential growth was indicated a few years ago in a work entitled The Limits to Growth, a general outcry could be heard across the country. That outcry was more than a justified criticism of the specific data or the time scale of future events. It was resentment against the indication that the dynamism of our consumer society was the supreme pathology of all history.

Jacques Ellul •

The material basis is, in fact, the enormous technical progress of the modern world. This progress restores to man the supernatural world from which he had been severed, an incomprehensible world but one which he himself has made, a world full of promises that he knows can be realized and of which he is potentially the master.

He is seized by sacred delirium when he sees the shining track of a supersonic jet or visualises the vast granaries stocked for him. He projects this delirium into the myth through which he can control, explain, direct, and justify his actions and his new slavery.

The myth of destruction and the myth of action have their roots in this encounter of man with the promise of technique, and in his wonder and admiration.

Christopher Lasch •

Progressive optimism rests, at bottom, on a denial of the natural limits on human power and freedom, and it cannot survive for very long in a world in which an awareness of those limits has become inescapable. The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder, on the other hand-three names for the same state of heart and mind-asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity. In the troubled times to come, we will need it even more than we needed it in the past.

Jacques Ellul •

We cannot say with assurance that there has been progress from 1250 to 1950. In so doing, we would be comparing things which are not comparable. Certainly, an airplane which, after all, exists concretely seems like progress, compared with dim historical memories. Therefore, it is advisable to limit ourselves to saying that there has been progress since the beginning of the industrial era, which was founded on the breakup and destruction of the noncomparable and vanished old order. For modern man with his peculiar orientation&emdash;which has material possessions and "stomach" as the central values&emdash;the period of great hopes indeed arrived. And these hopes are the same (even if the forms differ) for a man met at random and for a great economist.

Christopher Lasch •

The idea of progress alone, we are told, can move men and women to sacrifice immediate pleasures to some larger purpose. On the contrary, progressive ideology weakens the spirit of sacrifice. Nor does it give us an effective antidote to despair, even though it owes much of its residual appeal to the fear that its collapse would leave us utterly without hope. Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity.

Thomas Berry •

The difficulty of our times is our inability to awaken out of this cultural pathology. Thousands of articles have been written and a long list of books could be compiled concerning this commitment to progress and to the sense of unlimited growth that it evokes. Yet its control over the human venture remains more vigorous than ever Whatever the validity of the original vision of an unfolding spiritual progress, this vision has proved too much for humans to manage in any disciplined way.

The difficulty is that this dream of a millennial transformation to be achieved by science and technology under the direction of the modern corporation is thought of as the singular reality controlling all things and giving meaning to the whole of history. This vision alone makes life worthwhile. That is why the millennial vision is so important to the advertising industry, with its projection of a paradise that can be obtained through product consumption, any product.

Christopher Lasch •

The best line of defence, as we have seen, links progress to an indefinite expansion of the demand for consumer goods. The expansion of demand, however, presupposes conditions that no longer obtain. It presupposes a constant revision of material expectations, a never-ending redefinition of luxuries as necessities, continual incorporation of new groups into the culture of consumption, and ultimately the creation of a global market that embraces populations formerly excluded from any reasonable expectation of affluence. But the prediction that "sooner or later we will all be affluent," uttered so confidently only a few years ago, no longer carries much conviction.

In view of the present rate of population growth, the attempt to export a Western standard of living to the rest of the world, even if it was economically or politically feasible in the first place, would amount to a recipe for environmental disaster. In any case, the advanced countries no longer have the will or the resources to undertake such a monumental program of development. They cannot even solve the problem of poverty within their own borders. In the United States, the richest country in the world, a growing proletariat faces a grim future, and even the middle class has seen its standard of living begin to decline.

Thomas Berry •

What we seem unwilling or unable to recognise is that our entire modern world is itself inspired not by any rational process, but by a distorted dream experience, perhaps by the most powerful dream that has ever taken possession of human imagination. Our sense of progress, our entire technological society, however rational in its functioning, is a pure dream vision in its origin and in its objectives.

Christopher Lasch •

The worst is always what the hopeful are prepared for. Their trust in life would not be worth much if it had not survived disappointments in the past, while the knowledge that the future holds further disappointments demonstrates the continuing need for hope. Believers in progress, on the other hand, though they like to think of themselves as the party of hope, actually have little need of hope, since they have history on their side. But their lack of it incapacitates them for intelligent action. Improvidence, a blind faith that things will somehow work out for the best, furnishes a poor substitute for the disposition to see things through even when they don't.

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