Book reviews

• Eric Clark, The Real Toy Story. Inside the Ruthless Battle for Britain’s Youngest Consumers (332 pp., Black Swan, 2007)
• Benjamin R Barber, Consumed. How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (406 pp., W. W. Norton & Co, 2007)
• Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (160 pp., Polity, 2007)
• Gerhard Schulze, Die Sünde. Das Schöne Leben under seine Feinde ("Sin. The Good Life and its Enemies") (288 pp., Hanser, 2006)

In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) the American sociologist Daniel Bell framed a conservative critique of modern consumer capitalism. As producers we still have to live according to the Protestant ethic and be prepared for hard work, thrift and delayed gratification. As consumers we are expected to put our own needs first, to give in to impulses and constantly live beyond our means, what is often called infantilisation. Sooner or later, believed Bell, the consumer would seduce the producer with his corrupted values, which would create major problems for the economy and society.

What does this prophecy look like now, some thirty years later? Many of the trends that Bell has indicated have become even more all-pervasive – look, for example, at the indebtedness of American households! But even if the Protestant in us has become more attenuated, we nevertheless function as producers, although the demands of instant gratification also make themselves felt in business. Things have gone in a slightly different direction than Bell imagined, but a number of new books at the same time show the lasting value of his critique of consumer culture. It shows a minor foray through international publishing in 2007.

In The Real Toy Story. Inside the Ruthless Battle for Britain’s Youngest Consumers (332 pp., Black Swan) the British journalist Eric Clark, among other things a contributor to The Guardian, gives an interesting insight mainly into the American toy industry, where there is a distinct lack of playfulness. 80% of those toys sold in the USA are manufactured in China in very tough conditions, which the scandals around Mattel have brought to the fore. This is a nervous business as it is difficult to predict what is going to be a hit among children, and even major toy producers can end up in crisis by investing wrongly.

Today’s youngsters have grown up with MTV and demand rapid changes of image in all contexts. Trends are getting even more short-lived. Their parents are weighed down by guilt because they devote so little time to their children, and they try to compensate for this materially. If one adds to this the fact that many children, because of divorces, have several parents with bad consciences, one soon realises what a large-spending group children have become. The companies engage behavioural scientists and psychologists in order to find the right buttons to press. Some want to present as empowerment the fact that children have become consumers and in this way grow up earlier than they used to. This applies not least to sexuality. One can see this in the development of dolls. The Barbie competitor, Bratz, which is sold to the so-called tweens, 8-12 years of age, would very well be able to earn a living standing at the kerbside.

So it is a dual process: the child becomes more adult and the adult more childish. Or to use a phrase from that the famous American writer Benjamin R Barber, children become consumers. Barber’s book Consumed. How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (406 pp., W. W. Norton & Co) is a fire-and-brimstone sermon against consumerism. It is, however, not a matter of questioning capitalism as such, but of asking where the limits to market thinking should be drawn, both as regards the nursery and the public sphere. Are there alternatives to the capitalism that presupposes that new needs are constantly being created in order to keep the economy afloat? Barber pleads for a productivist capitalism, which aims to satisfy needs instead of creating them. This does not need to involve economic stagnation; you simply have to render the poor capable of becoming consumers. The limits between satisfying and creating needs need to be fairly vague if you look closely, but nevertheless the division suffices to capture the dynamics of dissatisfaction which have completely taken over today, and which produce an experience-driven character with no capacity for maturity. We are only ostensibly materialist, because we do not respect material things at all – they have become short-lived consumer goods. It is no coincidence that “consume” also means “demolish” or “destroy”.

But, what is more, Barber adds a political dimension to his critique of the consumer culture. Our role as consumers increasingly undermines our position as citizens. Politics has become a market, in which the electors seek the “package” which best satisfies their own needs, and the politicians have taken over many of the working methods of commercial culture. But the most serious thing is that through applying market thinking, we have lost the concept of the community, of what is public and cannot be privatised unless society ceases to be society. A culture of this kind probably does not have great prerequisites for mobilising its citizens to sacrifice in the face of affliction and threat.

But what can really legitimately be the objection to people following their inclinations? We still find ourselves with a hangover after the sermons of the Left about people not wanting what they think they want at all; this meant that the avant-garde came to decide. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to enter this minefield, on the one hand because the opportunities of influencing people’s choices are so great that one can question whether elections are free, on the other because many opportunities are not experienced as freedom at all, but as a different form of compulsion. In Freud’s time psychological suffering primarily resulted because strict norms repressed the expression of feelings; today we are primarily tormented by the abundance of choice and suffer from melancholy when we understand that we can only realise a fraction.

This is something asserted by the famous sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in Consuming Life (160 pp., Polity). The book summarises and varies his thoughts on consumption in that condition of society that he has for a long time characterised as liquid. Everything is dominated by demands for constant and rapid change. Social life is not in the same way organised in the group with rules, hierarchies and exclusions. We live in swarms which move so quickly that structures have no time to solidify. We are no longer excluded, but we are left behind. And the worst form of being left behind is to be a failed consumer, not to have buying power. Those who have buying power can never be satisfied, because this is a different form of being a failed consumer. Bauman attempts with some success to uncover what control mechanisms actually look like in this liquid state. Because, we did not enter into a state of chaos when the rules and regulations of the Protestant ethic became attenuated; the exercise of power is subtle and is based more on seduction and enticement than on compulsion.

Part of this critique of capitalism can of course be put down in the column with the rubric “whining critique of civilisation”, and in these books it is difficult to see any realistic alternatives to the present order. But the formulation of the problem cannot be brushed aside: how do you create counterweights and limits to consumerism?

The critique of modern society has been remarkably similar down the centuries. Ever since industrialisation took hold in the 19th century, people have mourned the loss of authenticity and complained that social ties have been replaced by market relationships. They have also warned repeatedly of the stress resulting from the rapid rate of change. The fact that there is a stock catalogue of complaints about modernity may lead us to suspect that this is in large part a question of hypochondria, imaginings rather than real problems. One of the great challenges faced by a new critique of consumption is to show that it is not merely an updating of this canon of grumbles, but can show empirically that something tangible has occurred during the latest phase in the development of capitalism.

How much of this syndrome has its roots in Christianity’s rejection of the world and the flesh? We do not talk of sin, of course, but of hedonism; perhaps in essence they mean the same thing. And how many visions of doom do not have as a sounding board Christianity's Apocalypse? The German sociologist Gerhard Schulze tackles this question laterally in his new book Die Sünde. Das Schöne Leben under seine Feinde. (288 pp., Hanser, 2006, “Sin. The Good Life and its Enemies”). His ambition is to study what has happened to the seven deadly sins – lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Is there a life without sin, and in that case what does it look like?

This is not a book propounding a thesis, but rather a wandering mental activity that sometimes results in our opening new doors. The deadly sins are principally about our relationships with ourselves, unlike the commandments, which regulate our relationship with other people, and some of them live on in the form of demands for self-control. This applies for example to gluttony, which has become a health issue. Those commandments dealing with the control of sexuality have, however, loosened their grip on us; today we are worried more by whether we have chosen the correct alternative form of those pleasures which are on offer rather than by any notion of sinning. Greed has more or less become a civic duty, as increases in demand are a prerequisite for economic growth.

Of the seven deadly sins Schulze finds that it is really only wrath and envy that are still central, in particular the latter, which has grown in importance while the others have declined. When no other demands can allay the claims of the ego, it becomes difficult to moderate envy. No humility can cause us to be satisfied with our lot in the traditional way. As a result of this, what Schulze calls envy paranoia has developed; we fear envy in other people and in ourselves because it is such a powerful force, and develop strategies for controlling it.

The most provocative and stimulating aspect of Schulze’s book is that he refuses to complete the catalogue of symptoms as regards complaints about modernity. He rejects notions that we have become less moral and more selfish. Moral unambiguity and the metaphysical base have vanished, but the private sphere has strictly speaking been re-moralised. We constantly examine ourselves as to what we are making of our opportunities, and whether we are making the right choices. We also reflect more on how we act vis-à-vis other people, and have to do this as we have so few rules. In actual fact this uncertainty is one of the fundamental trials we face today. Our consciences may still be bad, but they are just as much exhausted.