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A Retort
By Jon Menaster | April 2, 2007
Well, looks like I riled up someone out there… this is a retort to this post by Sophistpundit (aka Adam) on my post The Wool Over Our Eyes.
First off, before I begin this retort, I’d like to point out that there is a comment system setup for people to actually comment on my posts and start a discussion. And if you are going to write something like this, common courtesy would have you inform the writer so that he had the opportunity to respond to any criticisms. But I digress; I had to read about Adam’s post through the magic of Technorati. As soon as this is posted I’m going to leave a comment and send an email letting him know about my post.
He starts off with this statement, in response to when I wrote: Why is it when you put a random collection of people together the discussion inevitably shifts towards a baseline that all people can understand, and why in our society does that baseline revolve around celebrities, movies, and sports?
One: do those discussions inevitably shift towards a common baseline? Do they really? Is there never a time when people tell their personal stories, which the others enjoy but did not exactly partake of? Do conversations always go towards some general common denominator like the movies or sports? Seems like kind of a massive generalization to use as one’s starting assumption.
Two: even if it’s granted that there is a general tendency to go for the common denominator, how exactly does one demonstrate that a “baseline” “revolves” around sports or movies or celebrities or anything, for that matter? If this guy’s any indication, I guess you don’t–you just treat it as a given.
Well I don’t know Adam, they certainly have shifted towards a common baseline most of the time I see people interacting with one another. I do know that according to James Q. Wilson in The Moral Sense, “Just as Labradors are born to fetch, we are born to bond.” Obviously I have not done a rigorous study claiming either way, and since I don’t see any material published by you to the contrary, I have to assume that you are, in fact, simply giving your opinion. For further reading, perhaps you could read Dr. C. George Boeree’s discussion of Defensive Conformity, which “is usually brought on by social anxiety — fear of embarrassment, discomfort at confusion, a sense of inferiority, a desire to be liked, and so on.” Perhaps the discussions centering around topics globally uniform to our society is a form of defensive conformity within a group setting. Again, I speak of a baseline because I draw from personal experiences such as the night I referenced at the beginning of my post, when it seemed people were most comfortable interacting through stories and ideas revolving around such society-wide concepts as sports or celebrities.
Next, Adam talks about my discussion of corporations pushing products we don’t need to us in order to increase their bottom line and my contemplating of the effects on our economy if we didn’t wastefully consume at such an aggressive pace.
The fixation of some people on the “bottom line” and “profits” as if they were the prime mover of everything is kind of hilarious. So what, Ryle, the fact that a company will go out of business unless it makes a profit somehow compels consumers to feel the need to support those companies…or are you arguing that the companies have somehow brainwashed people into buying their products, something that would not occur if we didn’t live in this fictitious “consumption drive society” you’ve concocted? What exactly is a “consumption driven society”?
Well Adam, I personally do not feel as if the bottom line and profits should be the prime mover, but I believe the literature out there supports that it is. An article in the magazine Frontline entitled Capitalisism Recycled states, “Global business firms are ultimately interested in one thing: profit“. Or perhaps the Wikipedia article on Capitalism, which reads: “From this perspective, in process of self-organization, the profit motive has an important role. From transactions between buyers and sellers price systems emerge, and prices serve as a signal as to the urgent and unfilled wants of people. The promise of profits gives entrepreneurs incentive to use their knowledge and resources to satisfy those wants.” (This quote is itself cited at the bottom of the entry as: Herbert Walberg, Joseph Bast. Education and Capitalism, Hoover Institution Press (2001) p. 87-89 ISBN 0-8179-3972-5). Therefore profit is in fact what drives the economic engine currently pushing us all forward known as Capitalism.
Of course consumers aren’t feeling pity for these corporations, I never said that. They are however inundated with shows such as MTV’s “Cribs”, which shows how the rich and famous live (awash in goods) and imply that goods are in fact what people need to be considered wealthy and prosperous. That is why people take out home loans they cannot afford (leading to the current subprime lending crisis), or car leases that make no economic sense. They feel as if when they have a nice car or a nice house that they are economically well off and thus more important members of the community. The fact that this is all over television gives credence to Marshall McLuhan, who in 1967 argued famously that the “medium is the message”. By this Marshall meant that it didn’t matter what you watch on television, just that you watched television. The ads and shows would do the work, regardless of which particular ones each individual chose to view.
The concept of a consumption driven society/economy is not all fictitious, and again a simple Google search could have saved you Adam. In an article entitled “The US Economy” published in the Indiana Business Review, Willard E. Witte, Associate Professor of Economics at Indiana University wrote, “From the end of the recession in 2001 through the end of 2005, consumption spending accounted for 78 percent of the increase in output”. Professor Witte later wrote “Consumption has held up pretty well during the past year, comprising 70 percent of growth in the first three quarters of 2006.” 70 percent of growth during the first three quarters of 2006 - that sounds like a pretty consumption driven economy to me. If 70 percent of our growth was taken away during 2006 you can bet that a lot of people would be out of work. Therefore our society is consumption based and does in fact need consumers to maintain high levels of consumption to drive the economy.
Adam then appears to go nuts over a few big assertions he wants to point out, so let’s discuss them, shall we:
1: Americans are afraid to contemplate social issues with our neighbors (true BECAUSE I TELL YOU IT’S TRUE DAMMIT)
2: We are so afraid that we allow terrible things to keep happening
3: American foreign policy caused September 11th. This one book I’m reading proves it, but I’m not really going to bother to elaborate on how.
1) How about this Common Dreams article, which discusses the issue of evolution in schools. It has a quote from Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, “Teachers are afraid to raise the issue … and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public.” Here’s a line from a website called Freepreach.org under their issues section, which states “It’s not only politics that ministers are afraid to discuss in their sermons”. This is under a heading called Hate Speech Laws.
2) In Hunter S. Thompson’s article Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail in the Rolling Stone, Hunter pontificates, “That is how it works in the victory business. You see it every time. The Weak will suck up to the Strong, for fear of losing their jobs and their money and all the fickle power they wielded only twenty-four hours ago. It is like suddenly losing your wife and your home in a vagrant poker game, then having to go on the road with whoremongers and beg for your dinner in public”. The point I was trying to make is that fear paralyzes us and drives us towards making decisions that we otherwise would not have made at a rational moment, such as the passing of the USA Patriot Act by members of Congress without having actually read the act - they were so scared by the thought of terrorism that they decided to grant the executive branch extraordinary powers in an attempt to quell the fear passing through themselves and their constituents. Or how about this quote from an article published by two Michigan State University students stating “Underlying the skepticism about the motivations of Ashcroft and Ridge in issuing warnings and changing the official threat levels has been a more general concern about the use and meaning of terrorism alert warning system. On at least two earlier occasions the threat level was raised to orange in the absence of any publicly obvious event.” Now why would that occur? Maybe it was to keep the climate of fear running strong and reinforce the need for a strong executive branch to save us from the terrorists. Maybe Not. Either way, they raised and lowered the threat levels all the time, and what do you know, but we elected George W. Bush to be our president again. Hmph.
3) Here is a fabulous article which states the case far better than I could, called Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Foreign Policy. Check this portion out: “Most Americans find it extremely difficult to accept the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington’s policies abroad. They believe that the U.S. is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, its modernity, its wealth, or just being part of the West. But government officials know better. A Department of Defense study in 1997 concluded that: “Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States. In addition, the military asymmetry that denies nation states the ability to engage in overt attacks against the United States drives the use of transnational actors [that is, terrorists from one country attacking in another].” Hmmmmm!
In conclusion, I am certainly not trying to elect myself as some sort of superior human being or pretentious bastard who has all the answers and carries the moral high ground. I am simply trying to jumpstart a discussion on what is important in our lives, and whether those things we value have historically been the same things and/or are really what matters. I could have done a better job of sourcing the post; that much I agree with Adam. However, I think that my conclusions are still at least worthy of discussion and I am glad Adam has taken the opportunity to do so. I await your response, brother. - Ryle
Topics: Blogging, Life, Philosophical Musings, Psychology |
April 2nd, 2007 at 4:04 pm
[...] A Retort [...]
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:12 am
Ah, the magic of technorati.
here you go. Enjoy!