To Michael Matheson Miller and his blogpost on how to combat consumerism. This appeared in the Acton blog.
We need to face the fact that consumerism is a product of Capitalism. That doesn't meant that consumerism needs Capitalism to exist, but the converse is true. Markets must always expand if Capitalism is to survive. Thus, people need to buy more and more and what is it that they are buying but goods and services that are designed to feed our pleasures and ensure our comfort.
Thus, Capitalism promotes a consumerism that is not only bad for us as people, it is harmful to the environment and contributes to climate change. The drive to maximize profits is incentivized by an increased ability to consume. And thus either curbing or replacing Capitalism could help reduce consumerism, but then again it might not. For we should note what Martin Luther King Jr. observed in that both Marxism and Capitalism promoted their own unique kinds of materialism.
Now the rules for combating consumerism listed in the above article might give temporary help to some, but it was what Martin Luther King Jr. said that provides the stake in the heart of consumerism. In speaking against the Vietnam War, King said the following:
We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
Unless we learn to count people, remember those creatures each of whom is made in the image of God, as being more important than our possession and wealth, we will never defeat the 3-headed monster that included materialism. And unless we become a person-oriented society, the rules listed above will provide no permanent relief from consumerism.
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To Rev. Ben Johnson and his blogpost that talks about how St. Nikolas thinks Christians should view technology. This appeared in the Acton blog.
While Johnson states that technology is morally neutral, that has not been regarded as being always true by scientists. The creation of the atom bomb, for example, was seen as being wrong once it was completed even by some who participated in its development. In fact, the development of the atom bomb caused Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein to write a manifesto that declared that because of that bomb, people must choose between either relying on fighting wars or survival.
We should also consider that just because something is morally neutral doesn't mean that it a wise choice. When I taught my introduction ot Information Technology class, the first term I would teach my students is the word 'trade off.' The term means that when choosing a particular option, there are benefits and detriments that come with that choice. And that the mature adult way of deciding between options is to compare the trade offs for each choice. Unfortunately, too many of us want to fall in love at first sight with each new piece of technology than to measure its trade offs.
Then there come something that a fellow activist and very important friend of mine, Rita Corriel, said to me. She said that we often measure progress by how far we can distance ourselves from nature. This perspective helps point to the trade offs that we should look for in each new technological product. For when our reliance on technology separates us too far from nature, we will pay a severe price both physically and personally.
Thus, there are other concerns besides the morality of using a new piece of technology that determines whether we should use it.
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