" To achieve sustainable development and a
higher quality of life for all people, states should reduce and
eliminate unsustainablepatterns of production and
consumption..."
Principle 8, The Rio Declaration on
Environment and Development, 1992
I
1 Think Sangha
In May 1997 the 'Think Sangha' Buddhist group met
in the Hongen-ji Temple Hakone, Japan, to discuss consumption and
consumerism. It defined consumerism as the dominant culture
of a modernising invasive industrialism which stimulates - yet can
never satisfy - the urge for a strong positive sense of self to
overlay the angst and negative sense of lack in the human
condition. As a result, goods, services, and experiences are
consumed beyond any reasonable need. This undermines ecosystems,
the quality of life and is particularly destructive to traditional
cultures and communities and thwarts the possibility of spiritual
liberation. The meeting also considered the second key area
of consumerism which concerns its essential dynamic or the system
by which it works. This is commodification which understood more
deeply is a process of alienation and disconnection from the
traditional process of making and selling goods. The idea behind
commodification is to intervene between humans and any aspect of
our reality (like our work, products, needs, words, image,
environment, etc.) in order to create a commercial product of that
reality to be sold for profit. This is the way capitalism makes
money. It does not so much create new services or products. Rather
it seeks to enter all the possible connection points in an economic
transaction in order to distort value into price for the sake of
turning a speculative (non- productive) profit.
As a powerful social force, consumerism has
transformed citizens into shoppers. Where Western shopping
habits have been adopted by rapidly developing countries like
Malaysia, they have spawned the concept of 'cultural
imperialism’, a state of beingness in which the culture of
economically dominant Western countries has advanced to a stage of
colonisation of the less powerful cultures. The basic
'weapon' is investment power that mimics the invasive style of
colonisation. Cultural imperialism is by nature a more powerful
consequence of colonisation than say, forced occupation, because it
utilises a clever and systematic form of subjugation. Cultural
imperialism works more effectively, subtly, and silently when it
creates a sense of euphoria, elation, and excitement in the mind,
body, and consciousness of those imprisoned by the desire to shop
till they drop. These are the soothing effects of malls wherever
they are. The mall provides the haven for this form of
sophisticated imperialism, never more so than in the hot tropics
where the air-conditioned shopping experience comes with inbuilt
respite from a harsh climate.
2 Ladakh effect
Fundamentally, shopping for mass produced goods
works through giving people “what they want,” as an
integrated follow up to mass-advertising, which has told them what
it is that they want. It treats choice as fundamentally a private
matter, but by teasing out all the idiosyncratic
“wants” that we all harbour as private consumers and
creatures of personal desire, the outcomes are often irrational and
unintended. More importantly the results rapidly produce a society
we might not choose through careful deliberation. Such spur of the
moment private choices, though technically “free,” are
quite literally dysfunctional with respect to our rational values
and norms. This applies forcibly to the impact of Western
lifestyles on relatively small isolated communities, known as the
Ladakh effect.
Development pressures on this formerly
self-sufficient culture in the region of eastern
Kashmir have been systematically breaking down
traditional social and economic structures, while visions of a
seemingly superior Western lifestyle are stripping away the self-
esteem of young Ladakhis, who now routinely compare themselves with
a glamorised media version of the Western, urban consumer. As a
result, people who were once proud to be Ladakhi now think of
themselves as impoverished, primitive and inferior.
By far the largest reason that consumerism
re-structures society in a random ways is that it supports
unplanned consumption that undermines the environmental resource
base. It exacerbates social inequalities, and fuels the dynamics of
the consumption-poverty-inequality-environment system by
introducing positive feedback. The more we want, the more the
market provides. If the unplanned trends continue without change
— not redistributing from high-income to low-income
consumers, not shifting from polluting to cleaner goods and
ecologically sound production technologies, not promoting goods
that empower poor producers, not shifting priority from consumption
for conspicuous display to meeting basic needs — the world
will drift further away from the adoption of Principle 8 of the Rio
Environment Summit.
As the 1998 UN survey on human development made
clear, the real issue is not consumption itself but its the way it
restructures the global social pattern based on wealth.