Photo by Manuel Van De Weijer
In case you’ve missed it, I’d like to point out to you that most people in our society have to work pretty hard to make a living. And in order to work pretty hard, they have to cultivate values like discipline, diligence, stamina, responsibility and so on. Now, suppose that these work-related values were so strongly held by most people that conflicting values such as self-indulgence, leisure, and hedonism were scorned. These super-workers would create a fabulous economy, right?
Wrong. These super workers would be terrible consumers. They would have little time to listen to music or watch TV, and they wouldn’t see the point. The pleasures of fine food and fast cars would hold little appeal. These people would produce lots of goods and services but they would be uninterested in buying them. Fairly quickly, an imbalance between production and consumption would bring the economy to a standstill.
Our society has hit upon an interesting solution to this problem: our culture encourages the simultaneous commitment to values of work and values of consumption, even though these two realms of values may be in conflict. Ideally, we are disciplined, diligent and all that, but we are also self-indulgent and committed to the pursuit of pleasure.
There are some social and psychological costs to this “work hard, play hard” situation, but they aren’t really where I want to focus today. Rather, I simply want to point out that the realm of entertainment is typically where we learn and indulge the values of consumption. And the devilishly clever thing about this is that we thereby avoid confronting the contradictions between our two sets of values. Because we have convinced ourselves that the values we indulge in entertainment aren’t real, because entertainment is just play, we feel just fine about holding these values and denying them at the same time.
In a previous post I pointed out that the world of entertainment includes plenty of sexualized depictions of younger teen-agers. People value these depictions; they exist because people like to look at them. But few of those people will say “I value sexualized depictions of children.” Instead we all look the other way, because you can’t take entertainment too seriously, it’s just for fun, etc. etc. Shadow values, very convenient.
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This reminds me of the book “The Romantic Ethic And The Spirit of Modern Consumerism” which similarly points to the “other Protestant Ethic”. And searching through your book on Amazon, I see you reference it too!
One question that it raises for me (and maybe this is also in your book): haven’t the traditional work values of discipline and deferred gratification been discarded today? Most of the discourse about work life seems to idealize fulfillment, enjoyment, loving what you do – basically consumer values. Issues of the Gen-Y sense of entitlement at work also come up often, suggesting that the consumer values are dominate our lives completely. Maybe the protestant ethic is the shadow?
Colin Campbell’s book on consumerism had a tremendous influence on me, it’s no wonder you see the connections. Your observation of consumer values penetrating the sphere of work is astute–I hadn’t quite put that together. I think you’re right, although we also have to keep in mind that we’re talking about middle class values here. Anthropologist Claudia Strauss points out that many working class Americans continue to hold what she calls “breadwinner values”–taking pride in providing for your family. Your final question is a good book topic (which is a way of saying I don’t know the answer). For example, could one argue that the current financial crisis is associated with seeing work simply as a source of personal benefits?
Thanks for your thoughtful and well-informed comment.