Let's assume that the critique I have articulated (it is hardly original to me) is largely correct. Let's assume that consumerist hyper-capitalism -- the kind with massive chain stores, media consolidation, rampant commodification, and so on; we know what I’m talking about -- let us assume this system undermines values and bonds such as those of family, spirit, and community. In place of the town where people know who you are and where you spend quality time with them, let us assume that we have created a faceless suburb with no town center, no interaction with others, and no values other than selfish ones.
Is this a bad thing?
Until the Balkan War, people used to like to quip that no two nations with McDonald’s had ever gone to war against each other. Once you were under the umbrella of Western civilization, the subtext was, you were basically on our team. We may hate the French and laugh at the Canadians, but they are essentially like us. We share the same ostensible values and the same real, economic ones.
Or maybe the subtext was that nations with McDonald’s have fewer things that they’d really start a war over. Places like Pakistan or Rwanda -- these people don’t have our material comforts and attendant laziness. They care passionately about traditional values like tribe and religion, and they will fight to the death for them. It’s harder to care so much when you’re eating Big Macs every day and getting fat.
The fact is, lazy consumers are anesthetized. They just don’t feel as strongly about anything, because it’s always Miller Time, the house and family is fine, and they have already turned inward so much that ignoring problems is easy. Value-people like me rail against this complacency. Stop being vegetables! Care about racism, human rights, ecology! Don’t get so comfortable that you forget what matters most!
And yet, wouldn’t we now want to anesthetize the ideologues of Radical Islam? Don’t we all fervently wish that their millions (perhaps billions) of followers would just get nice jobs, give up worrying about McDonalds, and let the plush easy chair of Western capitalism cradle them into relaxed submission?
A large part of the issue here is basic economics, not ideology. If people are starving, they will resent those who are fat. It’s not so much a matter of having one set of beliefs or another; it’s about not being starved.
True, as far as it goes, but Bin Laden is a millionaire; several of the hijackers were middle class; and there are comfortable intellectuals in all the fundamentalist-terrorist camps.
Me too, of course; I’m not railing against consumerism because I’m poor. (On the contrary, I’m not as rich as I could be because of my dislike for consumerism and the jobs you have to take to succeed at it.) I rail against it because it undermines values. And so do the Islamic fundamentalists. We have very different values that are being undermined, and obviously we have very different responses to the problem. But we are similar in that we both see Western corporate capitalism as eroding our values, whatever they are.
Would it be better for people to not really care so much?
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