NOT BUYING IT

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

December 16, 2007

READINGS

Adapted from Walden by Henry David Thoreau

I know of no more encouraging fact about humankind than our unquestionable ability to elevate our lives by conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality or the day, that is the highest of arts.

From the Tao te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding

SERMON

For Judith Levine, the epiphany came on a slushy day in New York City, a week before Christmas. “My feet were wet,” she says. “My shopping bags were soggy. I’d maxed out my credit card. All around me, folks were in the holiday mood: getting and spending. But I wasn’t feeling remotely merry. I thought back to September 11, 2001, when the president and the mayor were telling us we could defeat the terrorists by going out and buying more stuff. Family, friendship, spirituality, national security – we would get all this from shopping? The idea depressed me.”

The more she thought about it, the more it troubled and angered her. “Overconsumption,” she said, “is already wreaking havoc on the earth and its people – from global warming to record numbers of personal bankruptcies to the crummy wages of the foreign workers who make the $29 DVDs on sale at Target. We can’t keep this up.”

So, she came up with an idea. What if she simply stopped shopping, not just for a day or two, or even a couple of months, but for a whole year? Could she do it? What would it be like?

She suggested the idea to her partner, Paul, and they agreed. For a full year they would purchase only the most basic necessities to sustain their health and livelihoods, but no books or CDs, no cute little shoes or that killer purse, no coffee shop lattes, fast food lunches, or even video rentals. Levine details her experience in her book – a consumer item that I did buy – “Not Buying it: My Year Without Shopping” (1) that I’ll come back to later. But whether any of you have undertaken such a radical experiment I’m guessing you can sympathize with the sentiment that gave rise to it. I know I can.

Around the time each year when I hear the first Christmas carol of the season – these days usually right around Halloween – I can feel my blood pressure start to rise, for I know that the race is on. Like many men, I am not much of a shopper, but I know that soon I will be out to the stores, fighting my way through the traffic and crowds. In recent years I have tried to reduce these grueling trips through telephone ordering or shopping on the Internet. But then my mailbox quickly fills with catalogs and my email inbox becomes cluttered with come-ons from retailers. Stuff, stuff! It’s in my face, and I can’t get away from it.

Added to this, of course, is the emotional overburden of all these purchases. Is it the right thing for this person or that person? Am I spending too much or too little? What will person X think when person Y opens it? And on and on and on.

Consumption in our society has become a proxy for so much more: for acceptance, for love, for esteem, for respect. So is it any wonder that, as one recent Visa commercial depicts it, so many of us are marching through stores, piling our arms with purchases and blithely swiping our credit cards.

Harvard professor Juliet Schor notes that even for those of us who try to keep the spending down during most of the year, Christmas is the time of year when our wallets open especially wide, since, she says, “it can be harder to hold the line on gift buying than on purchases for oneself.”

And it’s easy to get caught on the treadmill of increased expectations. As Schor puts it, “one partner begins by giving something really nice, and expensive, that he wouldn’t get for himself, but feels his partner deserves. That act creates the license for a return gift of equal or greater luxuriousness, and an upward spiral ensues.” (2)

We can even get in the habit of using gift giving to substitute or atone for the attention we have been unable to give. One of Schor’s students found in a study that the more time parents worked, and the less time they spent with their children, the more they bought in the way of gifts, such as toys, videos and books. Parents who were with their children more spent less.

And, of course, it doesn’t stop with our partners and our children. When we get used to associating consumer goods with love, respect and esteem, we reflect that we could really use a little more love, respect and esteem as well. So, as long as we’re swiping our card for a cashmere sweater for Aunt Betty perhaps we’ll toss on a couple for ourselves as well. And so it goes in the merry dance of the great American epidemic that has been dubbed “affluenza.”

John De Graaf, who originated the term, defines affluenza as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste, resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” It’s a helpful term, I think, because it points to the unhealthy compulsiveness that often drives our consumption. There is nothing wrong, after all, with cashmere sweaters or any other luxury product. What’s unhealthy is the anxiety and craving that we direct toward them, our heedless march into the sinkhole of debt to possess them, and the lack of fulfillment or joy, ultimately, that these possessions give us.

In the end, it is not so much the items themselves but what they represent that we value. While actually purchasing them may give us a moment’s pleasure, that pleasure fades and like an addict we need another fix. And so our consumption continues. The mall, after all, is an endless source fine goods, attractively displayed and expertly marketed. What we lose track of is that in addition to putting us deeply in hock our consumption does, in fact, consume things, like oil, ore, and soil, and also contribute to ill forces, like pollution, human oppression and global warming. Our purchases not only add to our own debt, they diminish living standards for others and deplete the world’s bank of natural resources.

All of this suggests a growing spiritual disconnect. We are missing a sense of who we are, what we value, and how we are connected to each other and all things. A life driven by consumption is ultimately a lonely, disconnected one. For it is centered fundamentally on serving ourselves: our whims, our pleasures, and, at a deeper level, our fear. Our “affluenza” has at its core an aching need, for affirmation, for security.

Our homes filled with fine things stand like fortresses, secluded and imposing. Yet the security we get from our stuff is deceptive. More than halfway through her year of “not buying it,” Judith Levine reflected that as her stockpiles dwindled and the buffers that protected her and her partner from extremity fell, she found herself feeling less, not more afraid. They had discovered how modest their needs really were, that with the extra time on their hands they were able even to make a few small improvements to their home, and experience with the kindness of friends had shown them that help was nearby.

“The president’s first post-September 11 speech sought to persuade us that a united front of shoppers would buy the safety of our homes and homeland,” she wrote. “But in my year loitering on the margins of the agora – the market square where people go desiring products, not other people – I am coming to know the opposite is true. There is nothing wrong with painting my walls; in these fearful times we will all want and need the prettiest of homes. But security, or the hope thereof, can be found only in walking out the door into the roiling oikos – the forum of human conflict and human exchange, of deeds, not things, and of politics, not purchases.”

There are many creative strategies to help us get over our “affluenza.” Our used toy sale today is a good place to start, and you can find more ideas on the Internet. Our church is home to a group gathered to find ways to live with voluntary simplicity.” I recommend these to you. But today I would like focus a little deeper on some of the ways of thinking that contribute to this widespread infection and, to extend the metaphor a little further, how we might inoculate ourselves against it.

A place I want to begin is with desire. Desire of some kind is at the root of every purchase we make. We like to make the case for the rational basis for our decisions, but as every marketer knows it is the sizzle that sells the steak. Retailers, as the holiday season shows, will go to extraordinary lengths to trip the switch in our heads that turns on desire.

Desire, of course, has rather shady associations in our culture, rooted in traditional Christian doctrine, which regards it as evidence of our innate sinfulness. Even those of us who don’t accept that theology pick up the message that pleasure is something we should feel guilty about. The feeling of guilt, though, does nothing to lessen the desire. If anything it enhances it. Who doesn’t know the thrill of indulging a guilty pleasure? “Oh, I’m bad,” we say as the ice cream sundae arrives or as we swipe the credit card for some megapurchase. We feel guilty, perhaps, but also find absolution in giving our poor, put-upon selves some comfort. You deserve a break today, right?

Such is the logic of desire. The problem is that the more that we feed our desire, the more our desire demands. We not only want more, we want better, and our wanting dominates our lives. Juliet Schor cites a survey that found that 61 percent of adults always have something in mind that they are looking forward to buying, and 27 percent dream “very often” about things they don’t own but want to.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,” wrote the poet William Wordsworth 200 years ago. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

Sordid, indeed. When we place our hearts in our possessions, we have given them away to something that is unworthy of them. Our problem as Americans, says Judith Levine, is not that we desire too much, but that we desire too little. The objects of our desire, as glitzy and glamorous as they are made to appear, are really paltry things, inconsequential in the face of the greatness of which we human beings are capable.

The philosopher Albert Borgmann points out that one of the dubious achievements of our culture today is its success in turning so much that touches our lives into commodities, things whose value is determined by how they can be bought or sold. This way of thinking leaves us numb, he says, to any other deeper value as well as the consequences of consumption for the larger world. (3)

We are better served listening to the Buddhists, who warn us of the hazards of attachment. This clutching and grasping, they caution, is a drive that can never be satisfied, a drive, they say, that is centered in the belief that we are incomplete and that the objects of our desire will complete us.

But that belief is false, and on several levels. Our getting and spending will never complete us. The pleasures that our consumer society has to peddle are not ultimately what we are yearning for. What we are thirsty for is meaning and connection, and the inert objects we swipe our credit cards for cannot give them. We can only find them engaging with each other as persons who have inherent worth, unaffected by the market’s measure, and with a world of infinite depth and complexity within which we are intricately interwoven and whose value far exceeds the commodities it is capable of providing us.

Henry David Thoreau, who we heard from earlier, famously urged his readers in Walden to “simplify, simplify.” The more commodities we invent and consume, the more cluttered our lives become. In the end, though, it is not our stuff that is to blame, but the meaning we attach to it. With the Buddhists we could begin by reflecting on what’s behind this desire.

Judith Levine credits this kind of mindfulness as one of her most valuable lessons from a year of “Not Buying It.” As she says, “By not assuaging transient needs, say, with a pack of whole-wheat fig bars from the Korean deli, we’ve made ourselves available to a wider range of small experiences, including hunger and vulnerability.”

The point of “not buying it,” after all, was not some kind of exercise in ascetic self-denial. It was learning in a larger sense not to buy into an ethic that defines our lives in terms of consumption. As Levine puts it, “If I am a consumer first and last, all I can do to better the world is to consume more responsibly – buy green, invest in socially responsible businesses, and buy less. The other choice I have is to reject consumer as my sole role and reclaim my other public identity, citizen.”

Time away from the preoccupation with stuff, she said, turned her eyes to the diminished state of our public lives, those things that we share, such as schools, libraries, neighborhoods. There is a wider world, after all, outside the mall. Once our dreams are no longer haunted by wished for purchases, once our affluenza subsides and we are able to say at last, “enough,” we are freed to pursue a richer life, engaged in the wider world, serving our deeper values. We are able, in Thoreau’s words, “to elevate our lives by conscious endeavor. . . to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look . . . to affect the quality of the day.”

The Tao reminds us that the goods with which we clutter our lives are but fleeting images. What is truly real is ultimately unnamable. It embodies all we encounter and more, the unfathomable mystery in which we live and move. Letting go of desire, of the anxious clutching and grasping that haunts our days, we can finally be present to it, to each other and the beauty and wonder of everything that surrounds us.

But as for me, no, I have not stepped away entirely from the holiday madness. To reassure my family, yes, there will be presents under the tree on Christmas morning. But to be honest, whatever lies beneath those festive wrappings, the greatest joy I look forward to is just seeing your beautiful faces and the quiet company that we can keep together in that singular moment of time in this brief span that is our lives.

Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, Judith Levine, Free Press, NY, NY, 2006

The Overspent American; Why We Want What We Don’t Need, Juliet B. Schor, HarperCollins Basic Books, NY, NY, 1998

Real American Ethics, Albert Borgmann, University of Chicago Books, Chicago, 2007