{"id":16668,"date":"2018-02-22T13:27:26","date_gmt":"2018-02-22T21:27:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=16668"},"modified":"2018-02-23T20:13:54","modified_gmt":"2018-02-24T04:13:54","slug":"a-fools-errand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/a-fools-errand\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fool’s Errand"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was a teenager, having grown up in the Roman Catholic tradition, I had no concept of a Christian culture, no awareness that there was such a thing as a Christian sub-culture, and certainly no concept of a Christian youth sub-culture. That is, not until my friend Eric brought me out of a life experience that was centered on gangs and drugs at the time, and into an Evangelical community whose subculture was nearly as thick as the gang I was in. This was the mid to late 90\u2019s, where alternative Evangelical youth culture was spreading like wildfire across the nation. My youth pastor was part of a Christian ska\/punk band called \u201cthe OC Supertones\u201d (the trumpet player on the far left of the picture).\"Image\u00a0We would go to their shows, and the shows of all the other Christian rock, punk and even rap groups who came to town: Plankeye, MXPX, the Gospel Gangstas, and Jars of Clay (who are now friends of mine). Some of my peers in the youth group started one of these Christian punk bands, and they called themselves \u201cthe Tasty Snax,\u201d with a Bible verse about food as their slogan (the bassist is now Phoenix from Linkin Park, the guy in the red shirt of the picture on the left).\"Image\u00a0One of their songs was dedicated to the band\u2019s awareness that it had become popular for young Christians to imagine themselves as a counter-culture. One of the song\u2019s lines was: \u201cI want to be different just like everybody else.\u201d We spent a lot of money on clothes, music, concerts and products that we believed would help us both conform and not conform\u2014conform to Christ and one another, and not to \u201cthe ways of the world,\u201d such as consumerism (Romans 12:2).<\/p>\n

The irony of that line in the Tasty Snax song is the same irony that Potter and Heath are seeking to expose comprehensively in their critique of anti-consumerism, \u201cThe Rebel Sell.\u201d The authors claim that consumerism is not about conformity, it\u2019s about distinction and competitive consumption. Rebelling against the system is the way we show our distinction and superiority in society. And yet, according to the authors, it is this rebellion against mass society that is driving consumerism. While I can hardly imagine this claim being news to anyone in 2018, in 2004 it was quite an awakening. It seems to me that the \u201cmessage\u201d of the book, if there is one, is: \u201cDon\u2019t be fooled by thinking you\u2019re a non-conformist when you purchase rebellious cultural artifacts. In fact, you\u2019re just contributing to the system.\u201d As the authors would claim, the market does an excellent job responding to consumer demand for anti-consumerist products.<\/p>\n

The authors address \u201cthe Critique of Mass Society\u201d as the basis for rebellion against consumerism, and yet it\u2019s just another way of selling goods. There was a time, perhaps, when capitalism sought to supply the demands that consumers already had. Now, manufacturers need to create demand through emotional and psychological exploitation and social conformity. Herein lies the problem with our system\u2014we\u2019re happy with the wealth it creates, but we don\u2019t want to submit to its rules of discipline. As such, according to Heath and Potter, an anti-consumer \/ anti-conformist demand is created and nurtured by the market, thus playing a critical role in the system it is trying to jam.<\/p>\n

Where the book is lacking is in its analysis of power differentials in today’s society, and how marginalization fuels “rebellious” spending and branding more than anti-consumerism.\u00a0The struggle is not really about consumerism versus anti-consumerism. Rather, it’s about societal power and felt marginalization. Let me attempt to explain.<\/p>\n

It may appear to Heath and Potter that, for instance, the hip-hop community was trying to create an \u201calternative\u201d anti-consumer culture, when in reality it was the system of segregation that created their alternative culture\u2014a marginalized and ignored community in society with their own cultural artifacts and symbols.<\/p>\n

While the claim within the hip-hop community in the 90\u2019s, \u201cDon\u2019t be a sell out,\u201d was aimed to keep people from conforming to mainstream society, it wasn\u2019t because they wanted to create a new \u201calternative\u201d system (they already had one), or to “jam” the current mainstream system, but to reform the system of power in order to allow for another particular way of life to be understood and accepted. This is why Dr. Dre is praised and held with the highest esteem in the hip hop community\u2014because he was able to get the untold \u201calternative\u201d story of reality in Compton told to the world and received by mainstream society, while still embodying Compton culture. Nobody<\/p>\n

\"Imagethinks Dre is a \u201csell-out\u201d for making it big.\u00a0Dre’s success in mainstream American culture makes him a hero of hope to others with similar stories.<\/p>\n

So, when a kid wears \u201cchucks and khakis\u201d, he can feel a little bit better about himself because the world has now received Dr. Dre as a genius. This doesn\u2019t make him into a fool, believing he\u2019s not conforming when he actually is. It just makes him a little more free to express himself–not as a unique individual–but as part of a sub-cultural community that gives him a sense of belonging and empowerment where there is none for him in society. The claim that the authors make that we buy things to express our individuality seems to ignore the social location out of which the claim is made. This is the imagination of the white Westerner at work, not the Asian American, the Latino or African-American. White adults may want to be non-conformists by trying not to conform to anything other than the individual self, whereas the black struggle is to not conform to \u201cwhiteness.\u201d They have a much deeper communal identity to begin with.<\/p>\n

The authors suggest that when we\u2019re kids we want to conform in order to fit in, whereas when we are adults, we want to express distinctiveness and superiority (all of which is a myth anyway, which is beside the point). But again, that seems to be mostly true for white, middle-upper class men, like me. The claim\u00a0does not take into account the power differential between the teenage community and adult society. It\u2019s not that we grow out of our desire to conform. It\u2019s that we feel the need to both conform and not conform when we are part of a marginalized community. Teenagers don\u2019t have equal rights in society as adults. So, they conform to one another (an act of cultural empowerment), and together they try to be non-conformists toward mainstream society. The intention is not to jam the system, but to be accepted by it as they are.<\/p>\n

This is precisely where I find the book to be not only overstated, but void of the demographic complexities inherent to consumerism in North America today. I\u2019m not convinced that the counter-culture \u201crebels\u201d were ever attempting to create an alternative to a system, or even a counter-culture to consumerism, or to be \u201cnon-conformist\u201d in some general sense. Surely, there was at least a small pocket of these kinds of intentional \u201crebels,\u201d like the \u201cAd-Busters\u201d group from fifteen years ago. But at it\u2019s deepest level, the rebellion against mainstream consumerism is more reflective of a struggle against power abuse and discrimination, not consumerism.<\/p>\n

I will also say that the privileged community often wants to identify with the marginalized communities in our society, without having to become marginalized or suffer as they do. Even Kurt Cobain\u00a0\"Imagewas part of a privileged community, though he suffered depression. It was the crash between his suffering and his privilege that became the crisis. His \u201calternative\u201d way, in my understanding, was more about giving voice to those who suffer depression and other emotional\/mental illnesses, because the mainstream system looks down on the suffering. In this way, he was a type of hero like Dr. Dre. But once you\u2019re no longer marginalized, it\u2019s hard to have a voice within the marginalized community. The fear in these communities is that their cultural leaders, like Cobain and Dre, will forget the voices they represent, and the pain of their experiences. When in reality, they were actually changing the system and giving voice in the mainstream to these marginalized communities.<\/p>\n

While the authors identified the problem of consumerism well: we\u2019re so busy producing and yet there\u2019s no evidence of increased satisfaction, they\u2019ve only identified another possible problem as their answer: those who think they\u2019re rebelling from the system are actually driving it. Though the claim is backed up with thorough research, and though it is replete with interpretations of cultural phenomenon examples, the book seems somewhat irrelevant, in that the number of those who believe they are \u201cjamming the system,\u201d is likely unsubstantial in 2018. Nobody watches Michael Moore films anymore.<\/p>\n

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When I was a teenager, having grown up in the Roman Catholic tradition, I had no concept of a Christian culture, no awareness that there was such a thing as a Christian sub-culture, and certainly no concept of a Christian youth sub-culture. That is, not until my friend Eric brought me out of a life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","cohort-lgp8"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16668"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16744,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16668\/revisions\/16744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}