Too Much for Our Own Good,
Harrison Sheppard & Alex Aris
Aristotle & Alexander Press, 2006

Review by Paul Addison

Consumer society as we know it today is largely an American invention.  It was the United States which pioneered the mass production of consumer goods and the techniques of mass marketing that gave rise to the age of the automobile.  These great transformations lifted the average American family from the hardship and poverty of the early nineteenth century to the affluence of the late twentieth.  They popularised capitalism and reconciled it with democracy.  The pattern of social change they established has been followed, to a greater or a lesser degree, by all the economically advanced nations.  In the ideological struggles of the Cold War, consumerism was a form of soft power of enormous value to the West in undermining the communist system.

Even then consumer society had its critics.  In The Affluent Society (1958) J.K. Galbraith argued that private affluence in the United States was achieved at the cost of ‘public squalor’.  Vance Packard condemned the psychological tricks of the advertising industry in The Hidden Persuaders (1957) and the planned obsolescence of consumer goods in The Waste-Makers (1960), a book which he dedicated to his parents – ‘who have never confused the possession of goods with the good life.’  The dissenters, however, were few and far between.  In the 1950s the growth of mass consumption was almost universally perceived as social progress.  With memories of the Great Depression still fresh it seemed perverse to carp at rising standards of living and the ending of scarcity. If it was the ambition of every couple to own their own home, their own fridge and their own car, what possible objection could there be to the possession of goods which answered to practical, everyday requirements? 

Although interrupted from time to time by brief periods of recession, standards of living have continued to rise ever since the 1950s.  Two-car families are commonplace and many families have a second home. Where a teenager used to be the proud owner of a record player and a dozen long-playing albums, he or she can download thousands of tracks on to a computer and burn any selection of them on to a compact disk.  Once upon a time people used to save up to buy expensive items. Now they buy them on credit, spending future income months or even years in advance. The age of innocence, in which consumerism gave people the basics of a secure existence, has given way to a scenario of apparently infinite demand on an ever-rising escalator of economic growth. 

Some see in all this a triumphant vindication of market forces, but others think consumerism has gone too far. In Too Much For Our Own Good: Consumeritis and Good Movies, Harrison Sheppard and Alex Aris argue that over the past twenty years or so it has mutated into ‘consumeritis’, which the authors define as ‘a species of excessive materialism, now a pathological condition of epidemic proportions…It is characterized by personal addiction to the purchase of consumer goods and services beyond what is needed to satisfy personal needs broadly understood, and often beyond the victim’s financial means…’   As they freely admit, there are still millions of people in the United States whose basic material needs have not yet been met.  Indeed they recognise the need to raise them above the poverty line.  But it is the malaise of affluent America with which they are mainly concerned.  The American constitution sets out the right of every citizen to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, but affluent America, they believe, has made the mistake of equating happiness with material possessions. 

It is interesting to reflect on this from the other side of the Atlantic.  The British, though not as wealthy as the Americans, have also seen a revolution in their standards of living.
They are certainly more entrepreneurial than they used to be before the days of Mrs Thatcher, and far more fluent in the language of management and public relations. 
Universities used to offer degree courses: now they market them. British trains no longer carry passengers: we are all customers now.  For all that it is hard to conceive of the British in general as materialists of the kind described by Sheppard and Aris.  Security and stability are more important to most people in Britain than the competition for wealth, which they are content to leave to media folk, sports stars, and corporate high-flyers. Hence the attachment of the British to the welfare state.  Can American attitudes be so different?  The answer, perhaps, is that the possession of a common language makes it very difficult for people in Britain to comprehend that the United States is truly a foreign country, less deeply rooted in long settled communities, and more Darwinian in its commitment to economic individualism and the survival of the fittest.  The authors interpret ‘consumeritis’ as the source of contemporary materialism.  I wonder if it is possible to separate the materialism born in earlier centuries of the struggle to survive, and the materialism of today. Materialism, I would have thought, has been hard-wired into American history from the start, and always had as much to do with fear and insecurity, as with expectations of heaven on earth. To a much greater extent than the British, Americans have learned to think of life as, at bottom, a ruthless struggle in which money and possessions are crucial. If so, consumeritis is not so much the source of materialism as its most recent manifestation.

Whatever the explanation, materialism is rampant. Too Much For Our Own Good is a secular sermon against it and in favour of the higher values of love, friendship, community and active citizenship.  It breathes the humane and scientific spirit of the Enlightenment and in spite of its temperate language exhibits an underlying anger and frustration with the direction in which American society has been moving.  Lucid, learned, and elegantly written, it is laid out schematically like a social science or business studies monograph, which in many respects it resembles. The analysis of consumerism draws on a wide range of academic studies in the fields of economics, politics and social psychology, supported by a wealth of graphs and tables.  The end-notes, which include much rewarding material for readers who wish to go into topics in greater detail, are almost a book in themselves. If all this sounds demanding, it is intended to be, but the arguments are clearly presented and punctuated by entertaining and instructive analogies with the plots of Hollywood feature films - the ‘good movies’ of the title - and the moral or sociological insights they provide into American life. (I was prompted at once to buy a DVD of The Maltese Falcon, a masterpiece it is still a joy to watch. I plead not guilty, in this instance, to ‘consumeritis’: in spite of all the junk and waste, many consumer-goods are life-enhancing).

The authors call on psychological research to demonstrate that materialism tends to be insatiable and hence a source of perpetual dissatisfaction.  As they stress, it also interferes with the more basic needs we all have for stable and loving relationships: the acquisitive individual becomes self-absorbed and self-defeating.  But materialism has been stimulated by the colossal growth of advertising, bombarding the public with messages intended to multiply the wants – as distinct from the needs - of consumers. The United States has, of course, a higher proportion of regular church-goers than most countries in western Europe, which might suggest a greater attachment to spiritual values than Sheppard and Aris allow for. But as they observe, 70% more Americans visit shopping malls each week than attend a church or synagogue.  And even if they do go to church on Sundays, the faith in which they are indoctrinated every other day of the week is materialism pure and simple: the belief that the acquisition of more goods will increase their happiness or make a dream come true. ‘By the time he is 20’, we learn, ‘the average American has been exposed to as many as one million commercials from all advertising media.’ As the authors concede, adults can and usually do acquire some capacity to resist the black magic of the advertisers, but children are more suggestible. It is hard to think of any justification at all for advertising campaigns that encourage them to consume large quantities of junk food which increase the risks of diabetes and obesity.

American consumers run up large debts and the nation as a whole lives with massive  deficits in its public finances and its external trade. We are a long way from the era of thrift and balanced budgets, but whether the deficits foreshadow a major recession is difficult to say: economists are divided on the subject. Less in doubt are the political costs of ‘consumeritis’.  Even in the best regulated nations parliamentary democracy is a rough old game, but the power of money in American political campaigns, the blatant links between campaign contributions and corporate lobbying, and the dumbing down of political debate, have reached shameless proportions. As Sheppard and Aris write: ‘American political rhetoric, thoroughly schooled by commercial advertising, is overwhelmingly dominated by hollow, manipulative appeals to public passions and prejudices. Its “sound bite” technique allows little room for the kind of discourse that logic, reason, practical wisdom political principle require.’  There is, perhaps, a touch of nostalgia here for an age of rational debate that never was: Citizen Kane, discussed elsewhere in the book, reminds us that issues could be manipulated as unscrupulously in print a hundred years ago as they are today on television. Nevertheless the power of money in American elections is incompatible with good government, and an embarrassing advertisement for a nation that preaches the virtues of freedom and democracy.  One wonders whether American politicians and officials begin to grasp the extent of the credibility gap, which the outside world sees between the rhetoric and practice of democracy in the United States.

It was Abraham Lincoln who described the United States as ‘the last, best hope of mankind.’  Many of us in Britain still subscribe to this belief, but the Bush administration, and the readiness of so many Americans to support it, have tested our faith to the limits. The growing hostility of the Moslem world to the United States,  and the alienation of huge swathes of popular opinion in western Europe, have been mainly due to the war in Iraq and its aftermath – a subject at a tangent to the main theme of the book. But they certainly owe something to the apparent indifference of the Bush administration to the environmental costs and global consequences of the reckless exploitation of gas and oil supplies, its reluctance to accept the mounting scientific evidence for global warning, and its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Treaty. ‘In sum’, write Sheppard and Aris, ‘much of the world now perceives Americans as gluttonous over-consumers.’  By the end of the book, however, the authors’ thesis, with its recurrent emphasis on the evils of mass consumption and commercial advertising, begins to raise a larger question.  Are the authors skirting around a more fundamental problem, the power of corporate America and its political allies?

What is to be done? In a crucial passage the authors write: ‘The greatest choice available to adults in opposition to materialist conformity is chiefly a matter of inner, not outer revolution. It is not the superstructure of American materialism that is in need of destruction: it is our own bondage to its seductions and dictates.’  They are right, of course.  They do propose various federal regulations to restrict advertising and campaign funding, tax consumer goods and gasoline, and finance public transport. They also urge the administration to sign up for Kyoto and rejoin the world community.  But whereas European social democrats put their faith in social engineering, American progressives continue to stress the importance of self-knowledge and self-help. The only lasting cure for materialism is a widespread change of heart over time by millions of individuals. As tactfully as possible the authors argue that they should pull their socks up, switch off the television, and engage in some kind of social, cultural or sporting activity.  Of course there may be no change of heart, but the United States is a land of immense diversity with a remarkable capacity for renewing and reinventing itself. Too Much For Our Own Good is a testimony to the resilience of humane and optimistic ideals in American life.  There have been many struggles for the American soul in the past and in the end the cause of enlightenment has usually prevailed. Slavery was abolished, prohibition abandoned, isolationism overcome, McCarthyism defeated, racial segregation outlawed. The United States will never turn into Utopia but it remains a free society with enormous potential for good both at home and abroad.