Shopaholics Unite

SWAGATO GANGULY The Times of India DEVIL'S ADVOCATE: Friday, March 17, 2006

Consumerism gets a bad rap, yet human beings across history and culture have yearned to possess things. We are not disembodied selves but have an intimate relationship with the material world around us. And this world includes, emphatically, the products of human ingenuity. Modern industrial civilisation has only made such artefacts more appealing and enticing than ever before, and made them accessible to larger numbers of people. V S Naipaul found beauty in supermarket shelves, Salman Rushdie wrote an essay on the pleasures of bread, and Andy Warhol painted commercial soup cans.

Consumerism doesn't have to mean lusting after a Maruti Swift — it can include purchasing ethnic handicrafts or Che Guevera T-shirts, catching an art film by Rituparno Ghosh, vacationing in Orissa, or snapping up the latest offerings of Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein. By obscuring this connection, fashionable writers are simply doing a good job of marketing themselves. The point is, contrary to the idea that consuming objects confer on us a soulless conformity, it is precisely through the act of exercising choice that the consumer asserts her individuality.

We are, in a profound sense, the objects we consume. In non-market cultures, whether feudal or socialist, there is no means of exercising choice, and consequently no individuality. Consider the havoc that would be wrought if instead of going shopping, we spent our time on non-consumerist activities like visiting friends or appreciating nature. Industry sales would plummet, corporations would go bankrupt, and there would be massive retrenchment of workers. Without a job or the ability to feed our children, we would rapidly lose the capacity to enjoy friends or nature.

Anti-consumerism is bad not only in economics but also philosophically. It depends on the infantilising idea that we don't know what's good for us. It's puritanism reinvented, and presided over by a neo-Brahminical elite who will lay us on the couch, interpret our desires for us and inform us that we've been duped. It's the same as when the witch doctor told us we've been possessed by the devil. Sure, one can get addicted to objects, and that can have negative consequences. But the same applies to relationships with people, or any of the other good things of life. Shouldn't we, as mature adults, be allowed to judge for ourselves?