Crass Consumerism
If you read my Egypt narrative, you may recall the scattered comments on Lame Deer. I’ve collected them together here.
I set out to learn something about crass consumerism as a feature of capitalism from Lame Deer, a Lakota Sioux who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century. A contemporary, therefore, of other critics like Herbert Marcuse, and of proto-hippie transgressives like Jack Kerouac. His book is titled Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions.
Lame Deer starts out prattling on about how Indians are so superior to white people. In Lame Deer’s case the casual racism is a way to promote Lakota medicine-man values, and I don’t mind that aspect of his theme, probably there’s something to learn from them. But. Must we first descend immediately to tribalism? It seems to me a better way is to think in terms of principle.
By “principle” I mean universal principles, applicable the same for everyone. These include virtues and vices like open-mindedness/closed-mindedness; love/hate. They are associated with logocentrism, rationality, objectivity, and the Genesis worldview. It’s no coincidence that cultures that depart from the principle paradigm descend to hatreds like antisemitism. That’s a form of tribalism. Another is race-hatred, like hatred of white people because they’re white. In the USSR tribalism excluded low-level property owners, the kulaks. In China it’s house church Christians and the Falun Gong. In Nazi Germany it was Jews and gypsies. Ideologues divide people as a necessary methodology on the road to totalitarianism. We’ve seen this movie dozens of times already and are living in the next installment.
I suppose the reason Lame Deer picks a fight with all of European civilization is because of how it crashed against the Indian civilizations in the latter half of the 1800s. But why does he need a foil at all, to address his philosophies? And especially a racial one? He could just say how great pantheist animism and hunter-gatherer intuition are. That would be an appeal to universal principle instead of tribalism.
Maybe I’ll yet learn something, from Lame Deer, but so far the only reason I keep going with him is that I heard a philosophy lecture in which he was talked about. From the lecture I took Lame Deer to espouse essentially off-brand zen Buddhism, but I had a particular interest because I nurse a theory that the great East/West clash really took place right here on the American continent, in our history books most clearly on the Plains. But for now I want to consider Lame Deer’s attitude toward the European capitalist/puritan tidal wave that changed irrevocably life for his people.
He wrote of “green frog skins” to sniff disapproval about money. He is critical Americans’ fascination with it, for example remarking that Custer’s soldiers had just gotten paid so the cash was swirling around in the air at Little Big Horn. I take this to be rather free poetic license, because he wasn’t there, but in any event what’s his point? In any society other than long-gone hunter-gatherers, there will be either barter or a standard unit of exchange. The most prosperous societies providing the most for even the poorest are those with currency made stable by enculturated rule of law. Certainly a society can be materially prosperous and spiritually impoverished. That’s what we live in now, in the US. But these two things do not have to inversely correlate. That is to say, indigence does not produce virtue, nor virtue indigence. Lame Deer as a practical matter is wishing further ill fortune on the most miserable among us materially. Still, he makes some interesting points. Did Custer’s troops die regretting they hadn’t spent their paycheck? Sounds dumb but probably a few did. That’s the spiritual impoverishment I allude to.
One point resonates with the thankfully short-lived defund police movement: “Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals.” Fact check. Before Americans arrived in the west, the Sioux—Lame Deer’s nation—had “soldiers,” i.e. policemen. They didn’t build jails, obviously, but they would banish wrongdoers from the tribe for a moon or a year or forever, to fend for themselves solo without the social benefit of the tribe and potentially exposed to the tribe’s enemies. Francis Parkman wrote of this contemporaneously (unlike Lame Deer) in The Oregon Trail in 1846 after riding for weeks with a band of Sioux. So Lame Deer is wrong factually, and as a matter of common sense: jails don’t create criminals. Police don’t make criminals. Racism doesn’t make criminals. Commission of crime makes one a criminal, something undertaken intentionally in the unavoidable exercise of individual human agency.
As I read, I became ever more convinced of Lame Deer’s hypocrisy concerning money and the material things it buys. In truth, it’s all about the money, in his world as in ours. Still, he’s completely right that we are better off if we live closer to the land, and be more attentive to relationships than material things. The criticism makes me think of Herbert Marcuse, who Lame Deer probably never read. Lame Deer like Marcuse thought we give over too much attention to what we consume, so that our self-identity is tied up with what we wear, eat, drink, and otherwise own. In turn our consumer choices inform our desires so that the whole system is a degrading desire-producing machine. The machine aspect is explicit, with Lame Deer. He even uses the word, as do postmodernists like Marcuse and Giles Deleuze and Theodor Adorno.
In Lame Deer’s case, the difference between native American thirst for stuff and “white” thirst for stuff is, in my interpretation and not his words, the absence of the bogus prestige element to acquisition of stuff. The seeking of prestige or social status shifts ordinary acquisitiveness (common to all of us) to desire-producing avarice. That’s unquestionably bad. But personally, if the alternative is socialism I’d rather live in freedom, even if it’s freedom precariously close to the Machine of crass consumerism, the cultural trawling net of consumption, prestige, and desire. I want to resist the Machine, but I want to do it exercising my God-given self-will, because even if the proffered socialist utopia could eliminate crass consumerism, it would eliminate self-will, too. That’s the design, not just my opinion. Just ask Hobbes, Rousseau, Walt Whitman, Dewey, Rorty, and anyone else who thinks democracy means more than a procedural principle of governance; who considers it rather a substantive vehicle to ultimate collectivism and abnegation of self.
I fear, however, that the Machine comes after me anyway. It comes after us by choking off the alternative of living simply so we can hear the eternal. Good luck with ordinary life without a cell phone, or computer, or credit cards, or even wearing well-worn clothes that are still serviceable. Or how about eschewing dependence on an automobile? Thanks to zoning laws, most of the housing in America is not within feasible walking distance to a grocery store, still less to a patch of dirt where you can grow some of your own, or to producers of food and clean water. It’s no wonder that the noise of life crowds out prayer or even just thinking.
So why am I not on board with Lame Deer? Because throwing off the prestige element of consumerism is not enough to fix the soul-draining mess prosperity puts us in.
Is prosperity a problem? Well it certainly isn’t a problem for the poor. Being poor is the problem for the poor, whether they’re in a prosperous society, or in a solidarity of perpetual need with their neighbors. Our material needs can be met in capitalism, but not Marxism. As for other human needs, capitalism doesn’t address them. Marxism attempts to, but poisons both body and soul.
We don’t fix our spiritual malaise from the top down. We fix it ourselves by appeal to God. I don’t want to re-make society so it will re-make me in the image of the collective consciousness. Through collectivism we attempt to avoid the accruing tarnish on our souls, but it leaves us with no more soul to be concerned with. God is the answer, not man-invented ideology.