Was America Always Materialistic?

In My Humble Opinion
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Status has been reflected by material goods for thousands of years. Problems with the supply chain are much in the news, especially with approaching holidays and more frequent Black Fridays and the like. Said less often; Consumption is also at an all-time high, buoyed further by the echoes of Covid and displays on social media. An article in The Atlantic (excerpt below) claims that over time, the virtues of being a citizen has been replaced by that of being a consumer. It implies America has been materialistic for perhaps a century, presumably due to advertising, movies and media. But this seems to me an underestimate.

Were America (and other countries) always largely materialistic? Is this a problem, apart from environmental concerns? If so, what is to be done?

Specifically, The Atlantic states:

“Somewhere along the line, powerful people in both business and government decided that the weaknesses that have caused the near-collapse of the supply chain are things Americans should just live with. For example, even before the pandemic, many truckers looked for work elsewhere instead of hauling goods out of container ports, because port trucking is particularly brutal and poorly compensated.work.

Instead of directly addressing this type of obvious problem in how goods are moved, America’s government and media so often have simply pleaded with Americans to spend more money—to create jobs to revitalize the economy, to save the country.

It’s no surprise we’ve obliged. Shopping has been marketed as a civic responsibility in America for more than a century. According to Tim Kasser, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Knox College who has spent decades studying materialism, the word citizen has slowly come to be replaced by the word consumer in newspapers and books. “It’s become more and more a sort of a default, to think of people as consumers instead of the myriad other roles that they play,” he told me. That’s also how people are socialized to think of themselves. For Americans, shopping isn’t just an activity about collecting the resources necessary for safe, happy lives. Over time, it’s become an expression of personal identity, a form of entertainment, and a way in which some believe they can effectively participate in politics—people rush to buy from or boycott companies on the basis of their public stances on social issues, and brands have begun to run extensive get-out-the-vote campaigns among their customers.

Kasser points out that a person’s propensity toward materialism—which his research defines as “a set of values and goals focused on wealth, possessions, image, and status”—tends to increase when they’re feeling threatened, insecure, or unsure of themselves. Research has shown that society-level threats can reproduce that effect at population scale. The pandemic threw people out of their normal routines; it severed people from the habits, settings, and relationships that undergird their self-conceptions; it made people fear for their lives. Of course those with resources responded by getting back to shopping for things they don’t need as quickly and voraciously as they could.”

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(This is not meant to be a thread that assumes materialism is always a bad thing, or that it only exists in a few countries. Neither of these is true.)

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Yeah, they were. Jamestown - founded in 1607 - at the start had a continual problem with people not wanting to do nitty-gritty work of actually running a colony/society and looking for get-rich-quick schemes. Which is why 2/3 of the initial group died off in a year or so.

A very, very few people came over for genuine religious freedom (as they defined it, not necessarily as we would see it). A bunch came over against their will (slaves and some of the indentured servants). But a lot of people showed up hoping for wealth of some sort - gold, land, whatever.

I actually think there might be a biological/evolutionary factor there. Gathering resources is a survival necessity on a basic level - if you don’t have food, water, clothing, and shelter you don’t survive. So when stressed or threatened securing resources becomes a more pressing need.

Of course, even an impulse that is survival-focused and beneficial can become harmful if overdone - I mean, you need to eat to survive but overdoing it results in obesity and all its attendant ills. Also, I think “comfort eating” is another example of an impulse that used to have high survival value - making sure you have sufficient calories during bad times - becoming detrimental outside of the context it originated in. That impulse emerged when getting food was much more difficult than it is now, our distant ancestors could not have imagined a world where over-abundance was killing people.

Likewise, acquiring material objects - land, tokens of wealth, other useful material goods - can also be overdone. And the more stressed you are the more likely you are to do something like “shopping therapy”, which is the equivalent of over-eating and can lead to a situation similar to obesity where too much of a good thing becomes toxic and harmful.

So yes, America was always materialistic because people have always been materialistic.

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As an oversimplification, Harari, at least in the graphic novel version his book Sapiens implies our biggest weakness is “always wanting more”. Strengths and weaknesses tend to have more in common than many might suppose.

To be fair, the article sometimes referring to a duty to consume for the general good. This patriotic impetus is reflected in, say, buying war bonds. In earlier societies, wealthy people helped fund and raise armies. Is this any different from marketing?

If one limits things to America urging people to consume as a social obligation, well, when did this begin?

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I checked Google ngrams.

In the 19th century, consumer was mostly used as a technical term. The consumer was the party to a contract, the opposite to the producer.

A 1907 poem shows the plight of the trampled on consumer:

CHEER FOR THE CONSUMER BY NIXON WATERMAN
I’m only a consumer , and it really doesn’t matter
If you crowd me in the street cars till I couldn’t well be flatter ; …

The grocer sells me addled eggs; the tailor sells me shoddy,
I’m only a consumer and I am not anybody.

By the 1930s, you start seeing courses on “consumer education” and “consumer protection” comes along in the 1960s.

You definitely see calls for consumer spending to help the economy during the Depression, along with the understanding that consumers didn’t have enough money to do so.

I also remember that after 9/11 people, especially in New York, were urged to resume spending and bring the economy back.

War bonds are different from consumption. They are technically loans, so, loosely speaking, the buyer is the producer and the government the consumer. They go back to the Civil War, when Jay Cooke’s bank pioneered national sales campaigns to get ordinary people instead of the few wealthy to buy the bonds. People in wartime had hundreds of duties, to save, to economize, to not use up war goods, to contribute to the war effort, to use blackout curtains, to spy on suspicious people. Consumption itself was not a thing pushed by the government; quite the opposite.

Saying that we’re not fixing the supply chain but simply telling people to shop more seems to me a ridiculous oversimplification, but I’m hoping that he’s saying it as part of a more nuanced argument. Or maybe not. The Atlantic likes printing contrarian articles that I often vehemently disagree with or find lacking. I haven’t gotten my new issue yet, so I’ll get to it,

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“As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much money will it bring in?”
   – Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831

Nothing can exceed their activity and perseverance in all kinds of speculation, handicraft, and enterprise, which promises a profitable pecuniary result. I heard an Englishman, who had been long resident in America, declare that … he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them.

Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else, except, perhaps, in an ants’ nest. The result is exactly what might be anticipated. This sordid object, for ever before their eyes, must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind, and, worse still, it produces a seared and blunted conscience on all questions of probity.

   – Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832

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As our more spiritually inclined brethren in Europe and Canada remind us, overweening materialism lurks everywhere in America, sometimes in the most surprising places.

I was made aware of this recently while reading Hardy Perennials, by British garden writer Graham Rice. In his section on hostas, he notes that the American Hosta Society gives out a ‘Big Bucks’ award to the person whose contributions to the auction at the AHS annual convention raise the most “dosh”.

“…I suppose that this combination of meritocracy and sales revenue in the hosta world is but the country in microcosm.”

Now, I would have supposed that the money raised at the auction, as with other plant societies, funds yearly plant shows, buys refreshments for board meetings, pays for publications and maybe a scholarship or two for grad student research. But no, apparently the American Hosta Society hierarchy is using the money to buy expensive baubles and lavish orgies. Thanks, Graham, for setting us straight!

I feel badly for the OP, subsisting on reindeer jerky in an ill-heated hut on the pittance he’s paid by Canadian Medicare, gazing disconsolately on the lumps of coal in his Xmas stocking. Maybe American Dopers can arrange to send him a few gifts for the holidays?

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Guess you missed the second post. That’s okay. I, too, often have trouble reading despite the illumination provided from my sense of smugness and self-satisfaction.

You can understand my distress during the long months of Covid at being unable to go to the States to buy cheap gas and exotic grocery items sadly unavailable in Canada. Bubble gum flavoured doggie chews. Scrapple. Donut hamburgers. How can one live?

But enough of this. Back to praying to those great Canadian deities: Gretzky, Gitchi Manitou and Gordon Lightfoot, gathered on Mt. Logan to eat smoked meat and screech as per our holiday lore.

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And that’s awful close
But that’s not why
I’m so hard done by.

I am a gentleman
in a dust coat;
Your ears are soft and small,
And listen to an old man not at all.

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You’re babbling incoherently! Do you have the omicron?

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No. Just “screeched in”.