Culture is Not Your Friend: Part I

It seems to be an accepted fact today that culture and all its parts are to be cherished like a tender infant. Culture, and indeed, the delightful, yet cumbersome idea of multiculturalism is burned into our brains, and has become something of a philosophy. Culture is the way we talk. Culture is the turban on the head of a Hindu. Culture is the Latin music being played at a bar. Culture is the turkey with dressing we eat on Thanksgiving, and culture is part of the sense of justice and individual rights that we all share. Make any disparaging comments about culture, and brace yourself for attacks from all sides. The problem is that culture is not just these things, but a whole lot more. Culture is Levis 501’s. Culture is Hollywood action films. Culture is our obsession with gigantic SUVs. And culture is also our sense of entitlement that we should follow our dreams and be anything we want, even if it means living thousands of miles from our families and sacrificing meaningful relationships for the pursuit of money. To really be at peace with culture, you have to take the bad with the good. But, that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to change it.

Every culture has its virtues, and every culture has its more pathological elements. America is no exception. We do have a great country, but it’s interesting that we alone seem to have been taught from a very young age that each of us is a truly special and unique person, and that we live in the greatest country in the world. These very beliefs instill both passion and danger, good and bad. The catch is that if we, as a society, are going to grow and mature to be our own, truly unique individuals, we will have to break a bit from certain parts of our own culture. While the American way of life really does offer many advantages, it is easy to get consumed by the monetary elements. This age of information affords us more opportunities for communication than in any time in human history, but it also presents us with many new challenges. Our culture, or pop-culture at least, is constantly in our homes and in our ears. Every electronic gizmo, in addition to being great entertainment that we all enjoy, is in a darker sense another conduit for some anonymous person or company to compete with your loved ones for your valuable attention.

A great deal of the “culture” we’re exposed to comes from so far away and from so high up in the business hierarchy that it is not really culture at all in the sense that it is not created organically through the interactions of many people. In the original sense of the word, and how most people continue to think of it today, culture is something that emerges from a society of people thinking and acting together in certain ways that creates a character all its own. Culture in this context is something generated at the local level by people sharing and expressing themselves and making contributions to a community until the ideas and habits that are most valued spread outward to surrounding communities and grow “up” the social hierarchy. Anything from new recipes to new musical styles can come about from this pattern. This is very different however, from the “top-down” imposition of new styles and behaviors from designers, executives, editors, and pop icons to the general population. For instance, some bands are not started by guys jamming in a garage, trying to find some way to express themselves, but are hand-picked by a few people in the music industry and handed songs to fill the niche that those select few people think needs to be filled. With regard to food, the vast majority of the packaged food available to consumers on the shelves in supermarkets are produced by Nestle, Coca-Cola, and Kraft- which by the way, was acquired by Phillip Morris some years ago (which is now known as the Altria Group), which merged Kraft with General Foods and Nabisco, which were giants in their own right at the time. It is now the case that many new foods products and dishes don’t start in the kitchen, but start in the factory. Even a large amount of the produce people buy is genetically modified (even though these fruits and vegetables are not required to be labeled as such by law, and thus hardly ever are), and are thereby tailored not just to your needs, but to the companies’ needs of efficiency and volume.

On a specific level, we can do small things such as demand that our food be labeled if it is genetically modified. But, on a larger and even simpler level, we can resist feeding this beast and empower ourselves as consumers by actually buying as little as possible, with as little packaging as possible, with as little advertising as possible. If a product is very heavily advertised and packaged, where do you think much of the company’s money is going? It’s certainly not towards improving the quality of the product. Changing our buying habits can benefit not only our health and our checkbooks, but even our communities and our society if enough people get motivated enough to change their habits. One problem with the mass production of everything from TVs to food is that most of our money goes to companies in places that are so far away and so removed from our lives that they don’t mean anything personal to us. Of course, mass production brings prices down. So, shopping for quality will cost more, but it’s worth considering the benefits. It’s a simple decision that consumers make dozens of times a day. The idea of quantity over quality really has taken control of the American Psyche, and it can be hard for many people to resist. However, buying less stuff, and particularly less name-brand stuff allows people to buy higher quality products for the same amount of money. It should be noted that this isn’t meant to be a complete anti-corporate rant. It’s not that the corporations are evil because they’re rich and powerful; it’s that we compromise a great deal of our choice in which products we consume (and how much of them we consume) when we buy from someone or something that wouldn’t know if we died tomorrow.

Perhaps the biggest issue here (literally) though is the over-consumption that is so pervasive today. And, which has been pushed on the consumer from high up consistently for the past several decades at least. This is something that people have heard before, but it continues to get worse and worse. And, this really is something that is forced on the consumer. Just look at sizes of everything from cups in convenience stores and fast food chains, to dinner plates, to packages of cookies, to houses. It’s getting harder and harder to buy things in reasonable quantities, even if you try. Today’s “small” cup size in most fast food restaurants is as big as the largest cup size 25 years ago. And why do we buy more? -Because the companies tell us it’s a better deal, of course! -What a great marketing strategy!

Consider the mortgage crisis and the huge ramifications it is having on the stock market and the global economy. This is something that directly stems from American over-consumption. Every American wants their own home, which is perfectly understandable and fine of course. But the simple truth is that not every American can really afford one- unless, however, the banks convince them that they can. Over the past decade, lenders continued to lower the bar for the amount of credit and mortgage payments that were required to buy a new home. This brought millions of people with low incomes or shaky credit closer to fulfilling the American dream, at least for a little while. Unfortunately, lenders went too far and convinced people they could have more than they could afford, and a shocking number of people grabbed at the offer. The inability to pay off their houses and stick with their mortgages after the initial “teaser” rates were hiked up to realistic levels has left millions of people in deep financial trouble. Whole sections of Detroit and Cleveland and other cities across the country are filled with huge, brand-new, rotting houses that people couldn’t afford and now wouldn’t buy if they had the cash because their value is sinking so fast. And again, the recent troubles on Wall Street, with Bear Stearns collapsing and other big banks which are tied to the mortgage lending schemes facing huge losses, plus the turmoil this is causing throughout the world financial markets has indicated what a big mistake these lending practices were. Other examples of the depth of the over-consumption problem is that on average, Americans actually have negative savings- they owe several thousand dollars in credit card debt instead of saving for tough times ahead. On a larger level, America has a trade balance of negative 819 billion dollars over the past twelve months, according to The Economist. However, it seems that with every economic downturn, the United States Government, as well as the shopping malls and advertisers encourage us consumers to somehow buy our way out of the crisis by “stimulating the economy”. Unfortunately, this just digs the hole deeper.

This over-consumption is not just a little splotch on the surface of our society, it’s a blight. Countless other examples could be noted such as consuming more stuff and driving bigger cars destroys the environment, or eating too much makes you fat and unhealthy. But the biggest issue is to get back to what culture really is. It is something people invest in with their time more than their credit cards. It is something that people can contribute to and interact with personally, not just read from a label or watch on the TV. Culture includes the people around us, not just the products we buy. And, understanding our complex society requires time and effort, so it’s just not possible to have it all, watch it all, or absorb it all. Consuming less mass culture liberates us by giving us enough precious time and money to learn about what is most important to us personally. It is not in our own favor or in our national interest to support that American Dream. It is necessary to pursue our own American Dream.