Saturday, December 25, 2004

Orgy of Consumption

Today’s Christmas is sometimes referred to as a consumerist orgy — an annual festival of unbridled commodity purchases aimed at expressing how much we care for others. But there are fundamental contradictions in the “tradition.”

Indeed, today’s Christmas (wouldn’t be what it is had it not been for the power of both the Church and, much more recently, corporations to tame and shape another, more traditional, kind of orgy.

[snip]

Alongside industrialization came the fragmentation of communities into individualized contract workers. And with urbanization and its displacement of millions from their villages and traditional extended families came a kind of social-psychological vacuum. Accompanying this growing culture of isolation and emptiness was a broad range of “inventions” primarily developed to serve the interests of corporations, including electricity, the telegraph, and the Department Store. Together, they facilitated further urbanization, more efficiency, and importantly, more potential sales. The Department Store, for example, became a central gathering place in most cities; people were free to browse and, for the first time, were not expected to buy anything. Through the magic of electrical illuminations, potential customers now could see all the goods and potential lifestyles available to those hard-working individuals with money.

For Department Stores and the capitalists behind the production, Christmas soon became an opportunity to sell more goods by (and here's the key!) associating these commodities with social-psychological needs emerging in people’s lives.
As urbanization and industrialization proceeded, corporations successfully associated Christmas with what we now take for granted; December 25th became a time for individuals and families to re-unite and, in the absence of truly intimate relationships, familial bonds were expressed through an exchange of purchased clothes, toys and innumerable other products.

Quite suddenly Christmas had become a family holiday – something quite different from what the Church originally intended when it labeled the day as Christ’s birth. Also, through the mystical re-manufacturing of Christmas by corporations as a day - and now a “season” - for buying and exchanging gifts, the emerging world of atomized relations and fragmented communities could them-selves be exploited – exploited as a social-psychological vacuum in which the selling of commodities could be perpetuated.

Today, through the twists, turns and power interests shaping history, Christmas again has become a time of debauchery. From its roots as an agrarian pagan orgy, followed by the attempt to transform it into a religious holiday for the community, it’s now become another kind of pagan orgy – this time a capitalist one.

In our economic system, this faith in Christmas as a celebration of love through consumption has become so deeply entrenched, it exists in the very marrow of our cultural existence. But more significantly, and paradoxically, its ascendancy has paralleled the near collapse of the bases of life and love itself – the environment in which we all live.

Over these past 150 yrs, humanity has consumed more of the earth’s resources and has caused more ecological damage than all the generations, living tens of thousands of years before the mid-19th century, combined. Now, the “developing” world is being told about the wonders of our consumerist religion, and Christmas is being used as a core means of promulgating the faith; a faith being promoted even in non-Christian cultures.

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