Posted on: April 28th, 2011 “They’re just trying to sell you stuff.”
Last night I had some sweet time with my Bella, my seven year old daughter has who perhaps done more for my theology than anyone over the last few years. (See here and here.)
You see, Bella attends a private school locally which, while virtuous is so many ways (not least the truly rigorous education balanced with a good measure of fun and play) is populated with children and teenagers, who, quite frankly (and unlike what is the case at City School, where Bella attended in Austin), are on the upper-most rung of the socio-economic ladder.
Of course this is not all bad. We are unspeakably grateful for the opportunity to send our kids to All Saints, and often times money brings cultural richness. However, it does pose some real challenges.
Recently Bouquet and I have noticed that Bella is getting more pretentious, that her values are shifting a little, in some subtle (or not so subtle) ways.
Last night we spent some wonderful time in the backyard around our outside fire pit (it was cold last night in Tyler!) and talked about things like being rich and being poor, and how some Christians in the past (namely the Puritans) prayed that God would spare them from both extremes.
With that conversation ringing in my mind, I spent some time this morning in Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith, and Revolution.
The passage from Eagleton which really hit me aroused in me the intensity I often feel (I am tempted to use the word “anxiety,” but I believe that Jesus has risen from the dead!) when I think about Bella’s future in this culture of narcissism, nihilism, and non-sustainable consumerism.
It is difficult for me not to think that Bella (to say nothing of her own children) will grow up in the twilight of the western culture and civilization. Such cultural decline in the west is not bad, but it will be painful for many.
And it reminded me of a conversation she and I have had over the last couple of years about television, internet, and other forms of media. She has questioned Bouquet’s and my privleging of PBS over other television networks, including our decision not to purchase a version of cable TV service other than the bare minimum (which, by the way, we purchased for the sole reason of obtaining PBS, not available here without a basic cable package).
When explaining to her my suspicion and aversion to various forms of media and entertainment such as signing up for free videos from disneychannel.com, etc., she found one argument particularly compelling:
“They’re just trying to sell you stuff.”
Through email marketing, pop-up ads, irritating and vile commercials … they are just trying to sell you stuff.
I’m so grateful that she found this argument compelling, and it made her question and begin to “see through” the glitz and glamor of Selena Gomez and the Jonas Brothers. Such attraction is full of illusion and deception, she began faintly to grasp.
Born in 1972, I still find it a rather novel concept that media entertainment is about profits, not art. And yet, this is more and more the case, and this is a part of the larger “narrative” I want to inculcate into my daughter.
If I were to take a month off to develop this narrative one text on which I would rely would be the following quotation from Eagleton, which reminds me that:
– Conservative American culture is frequently naively complicit in supporting some of the very worst tendencies and underlying forces in our culture, forces in which the principalities and the powers are utterly owning us. For example, the assumption that form and content are able to be separated without damaging content (examples: Wal-Mart, megachurches, contemporary music).
– Subtle mistakes at the beginning of the Enlightenment in the west are now rearing their full-grown, ugly heads, with demonic furor. (example: the nation-state is now a merely surveillance organization to promote the untrammeled profitability of global capitalism.)
– This narrative (which one might call post-modern) of resisting worldliness through a recognition of the baselessness of consumerism needs to be developed more and more rigorously families and churches, such that it is foundational to how we think and live. That is, only the church has the resources to withstand and resist the onslaught of late capitalist nihilism which will continue to come down the pike, until, to adapt a phrase from the late Neil Postman, we entertain and consume ourselves to death.
– Bouquet and I need to work hard to develop real, authentic relationships between our family and those who are economically struggling.
… the chief threat to enlightened values today springs not from feng shui, faith healing, postmodern relativism, or religious fundamentalism. As usual, it springs from some of the fruits of Enlightenment itself, which has always been its own worst enemy. The language of Enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy. The economic individualism of the early, enlightened middle classes has now spawned into the vast corporations which trample over group and individual rights, shaping our destinies without the slightest popular accountability. The liberal state, founded among other things to protect individual freedom, has burgeoned in out time into the surveillance state. Scientific rationality and freedom of inquiry have been harnessed to the ends of commercial profit and weapons of war. One vital reason why the United States has declared open-ended war on terror is to ensure a flow of open-ended profits for a large number of its corporations. An enlightened trust in dispassionate reason has declined to the hiring of scholars and experts to disseminate state and corporate propaganda. Freedom of cultural expression has culminated in the schlock, ideological rhetoric, and politically managed news of the profit-driven mass media.
Rational or enlightened self-interest brings in its wake the irrationality of waste, unemployment, obscene inequalities, manipulative advertising, the accumulation of capital for its own sake, and the dependence of whole livelihoods on the random fluctuation of the market. It also brings with it colonialism and imperialism, which scarcely sit easily with enlightened values. Political individualism, intended to safeguard us from the insolence of power, results in a drastic atrophying of social solidarities. The vital Enlightenment project of controlling Nature, which frees us from being the crushed and afflicted victims of our environment, has resulted in the wholesale pollution of the planet. In claiming the world as our own, we find that we have ended up possessing a lump of dead matter. In asserting our free spirits, we have reduced our own bodies to pieces of mechanism. – Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution, p 71 – 72.
6 Responses to ““They’re just trying to sell you stuff.””
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Brian W Says:
April 28th, 2011 at 10:21 amThis is an ongoing discussion in our family as well.
Fortunately our children are slowly understanding that it’s their job, in part, to ameliorate suffering in others. That seems to me to be a core counter to pretentious desire for things.
There’s also an exercise (an ironic one, considering what I do for a living), in building an astute and critical eye for marketing hype into your children. Sounds like you’ve begun the process.
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matt Says:
April 28th, 2011 at 1:06 pmBrian,
Ironic indeed! However I would expect nothing less from you.
Peace … Christ is risen!
Matt+
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Jonathan Says:
April 28th, 2011 at 2:25 pmOur culture is a consumer driven culture and I wouldnt say that all of that is bad because it creates a fluid economy that relies on invention and fuels discovery. As our economy shifts to more sustainable products and energy saving technology invention would follow that trend. Wal-Mart becomes the poster child of all that is “wrong” with America yet wal-mart creates jobs and services in a free market at prices that even the poor can afford.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs comes into effect here- only the rich can complain about “Western Society” and the demons of consumerism, and yet it is this consumption that created there empire in the first place. The poor buy the Great Value brand of toilet paper because it costs half of the “leading brand” and the quality isn’t half bad.
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Libby Says:
April 28th, 2011 at 2:49 pmThanks, Matt. Love Terry Eagleton! (And you.)
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Neal Says:
April 28th, 2011 at 5:11 pmGood post! Though I would say that the poor can be just as greedy and full of consumerism as the rich. Growing up I wasn’t poor, but we did not have a lot and yet I remember the seduction of things. The evils of greed and consumerism know no economic class.
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Mike Says:
April 30th, 2011 at 7:03 pmWow. I think I should get that book! And good for you to help Bella to understand and be on guard against consumerism – lust for things etc.
Also, What did you mean that you, “still find it a rather novel concept that media entertainment is about profits, not art” ? Do you mean it still surprises you that that is the case? or that you have to be reminded of that in the assault of advertising and hype? or something else? Would like to talk more. Hope to see y’all soon.