For
the past month or so, my wife and I have been working to get our
house in a condition to sell. In the process, we’ve recited
the usual cliché a dozen times over, shaking our heads and
waving our arms in the requisite display of disbelief: “How
the hell did we wind up with so much stuff?” (Actually, we
know full well how we wound up with so much stuff; the credit card
bills tell an epic tale.) Now that approximately 25 percent of our
belongings are either in storage or a Washtenaw County landfill,
another cliché has moved to the fore: “Less is more.”
As my wife remarked, “The house feels lighter,” and
it’s true—we may not be ready for the cover of Real
Simple magazine, but the feeling that we’ve sloughed off a
burden is unmistakable.
It would be nice to carry this free and easy feeling into our new
house. But we are Americans, and as such we will soon be cluttering
the new place with new toys, books, clothes and other detritus to
replace what we’ve sent away. It’s a process we don’t
even think about any more. When birthdays roll around, we buy each
other stuff. When we have a rare afternoon free of other obligations,
we often go shopping. When we met over a decade ago, my wife and
I had long serious discussions about our mutual disdain for consumerism.
Yet while it would still be fair to say that neither of us has a
jot of interest in, say, owning a Lexus SUV or a big screen television,
we’ve found that, in the age of heavy metal credit cards and
big box retailers, things have a way of insinuating themselves into
your life.
I suspect we buy things we don’t really need for the same
reasons most Americans do: because it’s easy, because we can,
and because the small thrill of walking out of a store with a bag
full of goodies that are all ours never gets old. The President
has lately touted the idea of creating an “ownership society”
as if it’s some sort of new and exciting concept, as if we
weren’t already living in a society that gives us every opportunity
and every encouragement to own as much as we can. At several points
during the past four-plus years (most notably after the 9/11 attacks),
the President has been quick to conflate patriotism, moral purpose
and shopping; for him, as for other cheerleaders of consumer capitalism,
making a purchase constitutes an act of moral good. But for most
people, shopping is a habit, not a mission. Moral considerations
don’t enter the picture at all. Thus, when Pope Benedict XVI
takes the opportunity, with a billion people watching, to single
out “rampant consumerism” and the culture of “self-gratification”
as direct threats to civilization, we smile and nod politely and
keep on gratifying ourselves, because as far as we’re concerned,
rampant consumerism is civilization.
All of which makes me wonder: What would I have done had I lived
in a slaveholding state in pre-Civil War America? This question
comes to mind because I’ve been reading Fergus M. Bordewich’s
gripping new book, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad
and the War for the Soul of America. Bordewich traces the history
of the Underground Railroad from its earliest vestiges in post-Revolutionary
America to the eve of the Civil War, and he brings to light a host
of heroic figures, from Levi Coffin to David Ruggles to George DeBaptiste,
who have been forgotten in the shadow of giants like Frederick Douglass
and Abraham Lincoln. It is no accident that the earliest abolitionists
and protectors of fugitive slaves were Quakers, for whom moral decisions
formed the fabric of daily existence. For most people, then as now,
moral decisions were few and far between and best avoided or rationalized
away; even amongst the Quakers, there were many slaveholders, and
many more who were not slaveholders but not active abolitionists
either. Only with the advent of the Second Great Awakening—the
fire-and-brimstone evangelicalism that scorched the North during
the first half of the 19th century—did the notion of everyday
moral living become more widespread, and with it (not coincidentally)
the spread of abolitionist fervor and the growth of the Underground
Railroad.
Yet throughout most of the early history of the country, most Americans
treated slavery as part of the landscape. We’re familiar with
the stereotypes of the cruel whip-wielding slave-driver and the
kindly-but-condescending master (both of whom make prominent appearances
in Bordewich’s book). But the story white America tells itself
about the antebellum South conveniently leaves out the fact that
most of us Anglos, born into that place and that time, would have
been either slave owners, slave owner wannabes or slave traders.
Why? Because owning slaves would have been a habit. Because owning
slaves would have been easy.
We do not want to see anything of ourselves in such people, and
most of us, myself included, would take all sorts of serious offense
to the implication that there is some sort of moral comparison to
be made between buying a slave and buying a big-screen television.
But at its most fundamental level, America has been shaped by its
consumer culture for over 300 years, and in that time the value
of ownership, whether of a car, a house or a slave, has nearly always
trumped all other considerations, to some reprehensible consequences.
If, as both the President and the Pope seem to believe, there are
serious moral implications to our consumer lifestyle, whether for
good (as a beacon of freedom to the world) or ill (as a corrosive
influence on culture), we might do well to consider how the things
we take for granted now may have ripple effects for decades or even
centuries to come—and how today’s moral extremists,
on either the left or the right, may well become tomorrow’s
visionaries.
Email deepbackground@annarborpaper.com |
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