Progress summer reading

David Aaronovitch reviews Neal Lawson’s ‘All Consuming’

All Consuming
Neal Lawson
Penguin
256pp
£10.99

In man’s evolution he has created the cities and the motor traffic rumble,
but give me half a chance and I’d be taking off my clothes and living in the jungle.
Cos the only time that I feel at ease
is swinging up and down in a coconut tree.
Oh what a life of luxury
to be like an ape man
    - The Kinks

In 2005, Neal Lawson tells us in this strange polemic, he ‘woke from a political slumber’ (while reading Zygmaunt Bauman I believe), realised that we were a fallen people, and that shopping was the reason for our fall.

The ‘we’ – constantly invoked in this book – seems to be the British and American people, since Lawson is very specific about the nature of the devil. It is the hellish ‘turbo-consumerism’ that replaced merely bad consumerism as a result of the efforts of a dynasty of anti-society neoliberals beginning with the economist Ludwig Van Mises and ending with Margaret Thatcher. Turbo-consumerism has alienated us from ourselves and each other, rendering us animalistic emptors of anything that clever capitalists wish to sell us. They have been abetted by psychologists such as Edward Bernays who, according to Lawson, ‘identified cigarettes as a symbol of the penis...’ presumably long before anybody else (including Iron Age man) recognised what longish cylindrical objects might represent. Anyway, the result of this fiendishness and stupidity is climate change, global poverty and commercialised Christmases.

Lawson doesn’t think much of us at all. ‘We bought the stuff. We wanted it. We defined ourselves by it. We allowed ourselves to drift into the comatose life of the turbo-consumer. We needed to something to worship and something to believe in and had long since swapped God for Gucci’ (this last is one of two jokes in 200 pages that, cumulatively, feel like being hit round the head repeatedly with a polystyrene mallet), or ‘We have been convinced that unless we keep up with the latest trends our lives are a failure.’

Up to this point I’m wondering who Lawson has been mixing with, since no one I know remotely fits this description. Materialism is one thing, but are there really whole strata of ‘comatose’ people who, uncaring of their children or lovers, cannot discuss anything but their shoes and enjoy no other activity than shopping?

There are, and worse, it seems. Consider how ‘consumer hedonism determines the quality of our social relations and behaviour so we increasingly lie, cheat, rage and vomit at will.’ I would love to see the stats on national lying trends, but ‘increasingly’ vomiting at will? Then, ‘if we’re not raging or bingeing, we’re cheating. It’s become a national past-time.’ This beyond-even-the-Daily Mail rant is given a more familiar moral twist by Lawson’s view that parents (though not women, natch, but men too, as if) should be spending more time at home with the kids and have more kids earlier. ‘A decision to start a family’, he pronounces censoriously, ‘is just that – a decision rather than, as it once was, a natural consequence of living with or marrying someone.’ You mean, as it was before birth control, Neal.

Neal’s own family is not spared his strictures. His sister and her housemate, he tells us, are victims of turbo-consumerism because, every weekend, they spend five hours shopping. ‘They are lovely, thoughtful, progressive women,’ writes Lawson carefully, ‘But what they did was shop.’ ‘But’, Neal, if they are lovely, thoughtful and progressive, who cares if they shop for five hours or 50? My father-in-law watches sport for well over five hours a week. I know people who spend more time on doing jigsaws or making matchstick ships. Chacun à son goût, as the otherwise unturbo French would have had it.

I am unscared too by Lawson’s nightmare vision that ‘our fridges will soon talk directly to the supermarket via mobile technology to reorder food when stocks are low.’ Good. I hate shopping. Nor do I accept that piercing makes our bodies ‘a temple to physical consumption’.

My unpierced Marxist father, an auto-didact from a genuinely poverty-stricken background, would have been bemused by this: ‘I have a large book collection’, the author confesses like a priest admitting to lustful thoughts, ‘the books hang like intellectual trophies on the wall. As the moose head displays the hunter’s skills, so the bookshelves display my shopping skills and through them the inner me...’. My father thought his books indicated an interest in reading them. He loved them.

But all, all is gloom. Mistaken gloom too. For example Lawson is so concerned to have life conform to his miserable thesis that everything is rubbish and has been getting worse, that he’ll allude to the erosion of public space, without noticing that our canals, parks, national trails, museums and galleries have all been getting better over the last 30 years.

His history is just as bad. ‘Country folk,’ he tells us, ‘had to be forcefully shifted off the land and transformed into worker bees. The mechanism by which this was achieved was harsh...primarily through enclosure, first introduced in Tudor times...’. This absurd over-deliberation is a bit like saying that the Highland Clearances was part of a plot to populate America. As for his Chestertonian invocation of the merry Middle Ages full of down-shifted peasants on holiday and fulfilled artisans, all ruined by Protestantism, the work ethic and individualism, I really think he ought to buy a few proper histories of the Reformation to sit alongside his mooses’ heads.

Even so, this deeply silly book is not entirely wrong. We do waste too much, we do consume too much of some things, we ought to have a fairer society, we will have to change some of the patterns of our consumption. But Lawson’s approach is more or less the worst way to convince people of the need and possibility of change. Take this on food waste: ‘We throw away £20bn worth (of food) in Britain every year – enough to lift 150 million people out of starvation’. Question: how? Airlifts?

Ordinary people, I think, well understand that hierarchies of preferences such as Lawson’s are not, as he seems to imagine, the product of deep thought, but of shallow prejudice and snobbery. When he seeks to argue that books (borrowed from a public library) are best, but radio is better than television which is better than computer games and the i-pod (his other joke is about the 'I' in iPod) they can see that both the book and the i-pod are equally solitary.

And so we come to it. What Lawson, in contrition for his own earlier life of commercial lobbying, is recommending is that we should all become artisanal hippies, growing our own potatoes on our allotments, cycling everywhere, disdaining possessions, taking our holidays camping in Britain (which Lawson, beyond irony, describes as now being ‘cool’), and making like an apeman.

David Aaronovitch is a columnist for the Times

13 Aug 2009 16:56

 

Comments

• Posted by Steve on 13 August 2009, 11:39:21 AM No less than Neal's inflated ego deserves! Many of us spend ten minutes each week having a giggle over his latest Compass rant. A rather neat and enjoyable demolition.
• Posted by Neal Lawson on 13 August 2009, 1:22:42 PM Ill resist the temptation to dig back at David. He is far better than me at attack. Ill just pick up one bit of the review where he says: “Even so, this deeply silly book is not entirely wrong. We do waste too much, we do consume too much of some things, we ought to have a fairer society, we will have to change some of the patterns of our consumption.”; Ok so we agree about what but not about how. It’s not David job as a reviewer to suggest answers but id be interested to know how he wants to do these things. The central argument of this ‘silly’ book is that left to its own devises the market creates more and more spaces to make a profit. Children’s lives become more commercialised, as does the private sector and an endless stream of new wants are turned into needs. Just think about the six blade razor. Furthermore we are just at the frontiers of the shopping revolution as online databases track our every cyber move and scientists learn how to manipulate neurons to get us to buy more. As David seems to agree – the planet burns, the poor get left behind and I would argue democracy is diminished under the welter of a consumer mono culture. The answer is not to stop shopping but strike a balance. To find ways of being citizens and not just consumers. When the market doesn’t do morality that balance has to be truck by us personally and collectively. We can decide to shop better and shop less and we can work together and through government to say there area places that consumerism should reach. The book ends with a series of policies and ideas to strike a better balance. I think it’s called we could call progress. I’ve written more about socialism and shopping here: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/news/item.asp?n=5248.
• Posted by Anna on 13 August 2009, 1:58:34 PM What's wrong with guys having a 6 blade razor if they want one? I assume it gives a pretty good shave. Baffled.
• Posted by chris on 13 August 2009, 3:17:07 PM Havent't time to read this silly book. I'm off to the shops
• Posted by Tim Nichols on 13 August 2009, 3:18:22 PM I do not know if the error is Aaronovitch's or Lawson's, but Edward Bernays was not a psychologist. He graduated in agriculture and became a journalist. He soon became a pioneer of the public relations industry, applying the ideas his uncle had published about the subconscius. 'Uncle Siggy' as Bernays called him, was not a pyschologist either, but a psychoanalyst called Sigmund Freud. Lawson and Aaronovtich are both squabbling leftrightists who are new to the notion of consumerism, which was being elegantly critiqued from behind the iron curtain by Vaclav Havel some 30 years ago. Unlike Aaronovitch though, Lawson is to be created for his recent interest in consumerism. He has realised that our economistic approach to politics and its traditional epistemic framings are failing us. The economistic mainstream fails to understand the complexity of culture, the psychological complexity of human beings and the extent to which how people think and behaviour is governed by socialising forces outside of ourselves, but located within a culture - in particular its most powerful institutions. Yes we are all consumers. It is not just advertising that persuades us to desire and consume things we don't need by employing psycghologists and pyschoanalysts to help the achieve this. Our entire culture is consumerist. Even the government talks about us as consumers when we use essential public services. Bernays understood this. For him the control of the masses through socialising institutions was essential to democracy. The first sentence of his book 'Propaganda' reads: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society." He was employed as a consultant by several US Presidents and corporations to help create modern consumerist America. What holds Lawson back is his failure to acknowledge that left and right, or socialism and capitalism, are just competing version of consumerism. Hopefully another epiphany awaits. I doubt 'All Consuming' will be the best book on consumerism that arrives in the next decade, but for now it is welcome with all imperfections. What Aaronovitch has to say about it all is neither here nor there. It says a lot about the Times that they could not have put up someone to do a review that actually has the social science understanding to do a decent critique of the book.
• Posted by Tim Nichols on 13 August 2009, 3:23:56 PM correction: Lawson is to be CREDITED, not CREATED. His parents already did that!
• Posted by burma toad on 13 August 2009, 5:25:18 PM "the poor get left behind and I would argue democracy is diminished under the welter of a consumer mono culture" This is hardly what has happened. Hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty in China through our "consumerism". The place is massively more democratic - in terms of the ability to choose identities, places to live, how to behave - than at any time in its future. Brazil has likewise been transformed by the consumption boom. Lula's social-democratic Government has been able to introduce a basic welfare state thanks to the rest of the world's demand for soya, iron ore etc. The ecological ramifications are troubling, of course. But then Neal should make clear that is his main priority - and go off and join the Green Party.
• Posted by M&M on 14 August 2009, 8:52:42 PM Seems tearing NL a new one has become a national past-time: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-logo-lite/
• Posted by M&M on 14 August 2009, 11:14:29 PM Seems tearing NL a new one has become a national past-time: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-logo-lite/
• Posted by William on 18 August 2009, 1:30:15 PM I alwayd find a good term to describe Mr Aaronvitch is a 'snider'. But I suppose thats how he makes his living. But a detached and perhaps even 'comatose' snider might be better applied to his job title here .. 'Up to this point I’m wondering who Lawson has been mixing with, since no one I know remotely fits this description. Materialism is one thing, but are there really whole strata of ‘comatose’ people who, uncaring of their children or lovers, cannot discuss anything but their shoes and enjoy no other activity than shopping?' wonder who Aaronvitch has been mixing with in his pseuds bubble Well of course its Aaronvitchs Parody but it works quite well as he would know if he got out of this bubble that its not that people dont care for their children on their lovers but that they think that expression of caring means buying them lots of stuff and spending lots of time making money to be able to do it . Its not that the fundamentals of human instinct have changed only that they have been subverted in the the interests of selling product. Thats whats so worrying about it
• Posted by edmonton green on 19 August 2009, 11:40:07 AM

  Yes William, there really whole strata of ‘comatose’ people who, uncaring of their children or lovers, cannot discuss anything but their shoes and enjoy no other activity than shopping'. No one you know remotely fits the above description because, like the majority of the progressive left, you are probably very middle or upper middle class (although you probably wouldn't accept that) and have never lived with or known people like that. Whatever's right or wrong with Neal's book, this incredulous 'who are these people' stuff illustrates something deeply depressing - or at least deflating - about progressive left politics and politics in general; it is that the political class on the so called left has no clue about how the people it purports to support think or live and that it doesn't seem to matter anyway. Depite the fact that I'm not employed by Murdoch to generate puff and bluster in place of substance when required, I can tell you with authority that the above descrption is accuarte.

• Posted by Missing the point on 21 August 2009, 2:36:30 PM 6 blade razors don't give a good shave. The best shaves are done the old fashioned way with very sharp, dangerous looking razors and the kind of shaving creme which needs to be applied with a brush.
• Posted by Des McConaghy on 23 August 2009, 8:41:30 PM It cannot be easy to say we've got it so badly wrong or, in effect, that economies based on ever increasing consumption must be fatal for this planet. Indeed I should think it takes courage for people like Lawson who are trying to mix it with our so-called political leadership. So well done Neal Lawson - and let's not waste more time with Aaronovitch!