-George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
We are
developing new types of destitutes—the automobileless, the yachtless, the
Newportcottageless. The subtlest luxuries of today reaches very high in the social
scale… The end of it all is vexation of spirit.
-Walter Weyl (1874-1917), The New Democracy, 1912
The
poor tread lightest on the earth. The higher our income, the more resources we control and
the more havoc we wreak.
-Paul Harrison quoted in the London Guardian, May 1, 1992
No one
who had once learned to identify happiness with wealth ever felt that he had wealth
enough.
-Joy Davidman (1915-1960), Smoke on the Mountain, 1953
Our
inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower
class.
-Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
We
are a material-mad race of people. Build, increase, expand, pile up, hoard! More and more
and more. “If we can just make enough money to—to— !” Jesus said: “Sell what ye have, and
give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that
faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth.”
-Eugenia
Price (1916-1996), Discoveries, 1953
Do not
accumulate wealth while millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of you life fame,
profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material
resources with those who are in need.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Modern
man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He
has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an
investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under
existing market conditions.
-
Erich Fromm (1900–1980), The Art of Loving, 1957
…the
tragedy of consumerism: one acquires more and more things without taking
the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys
them. One has without truly
having. The consumer is
right—there is pleasure to be had in good things, a sacred and almost
unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds
this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of possessing
them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this
tragedy.
-Brian
D. McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 2004
Water
and petrol both come from the earth, and though they seem to be alike
and even the same, they are in nature and purpose exact opposites, for
the one extinguishes fire and the other adds fuel to it. So also the
world and its treasures, the heart and its thirst for God are alike His
creation. Now the result of the attempt to satisfy the heart with the
wealth and pride and honours of this world is the same as if one tried
to put out a fire with petrol, for the heart can only find ease and
satisfaction in Him who created both it and the longing desire of which
it is conscious.
-Sadhu
Sundar Singh (1889-1929), At the Master’s Feet, 1922
If
we do not bear the cross of the Master, we will have to bear the cross
of the world, with all its earthly goods. Which cross have you taken up?
Pause and consider.
-Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889-1929)
But
prosperity without a soul is like a corpse whose heart has stopped beating. There is no
life, only consumption.
-Cal Thomas, Who Lost America speech in Oklahoma City, 11 March 1999
Theirs
is an endless road, a hopeless maze, who seeks for goods before they seek God.
-Bernard of Clairvaux, (1091-1153) On the Love of God
The
whole attempt to advance the kind of consumer society that depends for its growth on the
ceaseless stimulation of unlimited covetousness among the rich, while the poor majority
rot in their poverty—this is surely something against which a Christian should be a
nonconformist.
-Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), Journey Into Joy, 1972
They
want production to be limited to useful things, but they forget that the
production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.
-Karl
Marx (1818-1883), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844
Give the public the 'image' of what it thinks it ought to
be, or what television commercials or glossy magazine ads have convinced
us we ought to be, and we will buy more of the product, become closer to
the image, and further from reality.
Madeline L'Engle (1918-2007), A Circle of Quiet, 1972
McWorld
is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American,
its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a
product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are
Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they
once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafés like
Harley-Davidson's and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle. You don't drive
them, you feel their vibes and rock to the images they conjure up from old movies and new
celebrities, whose personal appearances are the key to the wildly popular international
café chain Planet Hollywood. Music, video, theater, books, and theme parks—the new
churches of a commercial civilization in which malls are the public squares and suburbs
the neighborless neighborhoods—are all constructed as image exports creating a common
world taste around common logos, advertising slogans, stars, songs, brand names, jingles,
and trademarks. Hard power yields to soft, while ideology is transmuted into a kind of
videology that works through sound bites and film clips.
-Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995
These
temple destroyers, devotees of raging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for
Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the
Almighty dollar.
-John Muir (1838-1914) commenting on the proposal to dam Hetch Hetchy, 1908
quoted in Wild Earth, Summer 2000
The
horseman serves the horse,
The neat-herd serves the neat,
The merchant serves the purse,
The eater serves his meat;
'Tis the day of the chattel,
Web to weave, and corn to grind,
Things are in the saddle,
And ride mankind.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
from "Ode, Inscribed to W.H. Channing," Poems, 1847
When
I lost my faith in people
I put my trust in things
To avoid the disappointment
Trusting people brings…
I tried to do it all myself then
Surrounded by my stuff
All I found were limitations
I could not rise above
There are gadgets and contraptions
Immaculate machines
There’s a program you can download now
That will even dream your dreams
It’ll even dream you dreams
For a monthly fee
Clear up your complexion
You get a hundred hours free
Possessions cannot save you
The way some body can
When I learned to care for others
Then the boy became a man
-John
Gorka, When I Lost My Faith ©2001
Men
have looked away from themselves and at things so long that they have
come to esteem what they call the soul’s progress, namely, the
religious, learned and civil institutions as guards of property, and
they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults
on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has,
and not by what each is.
-Ralph
Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), "Self Reliance," Essays 1841
When
humans act like animals, they become the most dangerous of animals to themselves and other
humans, and this is because of another critical difference between humans and animals:
Whereas animals are usually restrained by the limits of physical appetites, humans have
mental appetites that can be far more gross and capacious than physical ones. Only humans
squander and hoard, murder and pillage because of notions.
-Wendell Berry, "Getting Along With Nature," Home Economics,
1982
Too
much of the world’s happiness depends on taking from one to satisfy
another. To increase my
standard of living, someone in another part of the world must lower
his. The worldwide crisis
of hunger that we face today is a result of that method of pursuing
happiness. Industrialized
nations acquire appetites for more and more luxuries and higher and
higher standards of living, and increasing numbers of people are made
poor and hungry. It
doesn’t have to be that way… But we have a greed problem: if I
don’t grab mine while I can, I might not be happy.
The hunger problem is not going to be solved by government or
by industry, but in church, among Christians who learn a different way
to pursue happiness.
-Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction,
1980
It would
appear that the traditional parliamentary democracies can offer no fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and the
industrial-consumer society, for they too are being dragged helplessly along by it. People are manipulated in ways that
are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in post-totalitarian societies. But this
static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen
from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and these complex foci of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the
omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture and all that flood of information; all of it , so often
analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as humanity’s rediscovery of itself.
-Václav Havel (b. 1936), The Power of the Powerless:
Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe, ed. John Keane, 1985
All
left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because
they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to
destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a
standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic
coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be
set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the
robbery shall continue.
-George Orwell (1903-1950), essay on Rudyard Kipling, 1942
quoted in Berry's What Are People For?
Until recent years, British and American resource corporations,
with the full backing of their home governments, roamed the
world…plundering the raw materials of the people of Africa, Asia,
and America. Raw
materials were extracted with little or no compensation to the people
or governments in those areas. To
secure control of these raw materials, a series of institutions were
imposed on the people to foster dependency on the transnational
corporations and their home governments. The raw materials became particularly important to the
exploiting corporations and governments because of the high profits
earned due to cheap labor and minimal royalties and taxes. In a sense, these resources fueled the industrial growth of the
United States and Western Europe.
-Richard Nafziger,
“Transnational Energy Corporations and
American Indian Development,”
American Indian Energy Resources
and Development,
University of New Mexico, 1980
The
religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a
sham, because they make it their business to fight against something that they do not
really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands
that the robbery shall continue. We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to
live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and for
each other. It is either that or continue merely to think and talk about changes that we
are inviting catastrophe to make. The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that
we cannot change because we are dependant on what is wrong. But that is the addict's
excuse, and we know that it will not do.
-Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,"
What Are People For?, 1989
I
want a change, and a radical change.
I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional
society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers.
-Peter
Maurin (1877-1949), “A Radical Change,” Easy Essays
You
shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his
manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
-Exodus 20:17 from the New International Version of the Bible
Who is
the covetous man? One for whom plenty is not enough.
-Basil the Great (329-380)
Yes,
we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will
they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material
abundance without character is the path of destruction.
-Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) 3rd U.S. President
The
world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what
do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and
self-destruction! For the world says: "You have desires and so
satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and
powerful. Don't be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your
desires." That is the modern doctrine of the world. In that they
see freedom. And what follows from this right of multiplication of
desires? In the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy
and murder; for they have been given rights, but have not been shown the
means of satisfying their wants.
Feodor
Dostoyevsky (1821–1881), The Brothers Karamazov, 1880 ch 41
We
are stripped bare by the curse of plenty
-Winston Churchill (1874-1965), Lecture, Cleveland, Ohio, 3 Feb 1932
from Winston Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963,
ed.
Robert Rhodes James
A
strange species we are. We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only
plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on
its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.
-John Steinbeck (1902-1968), Letter in The Washington Post,
28 Jan 60
He who
knows that enough is enough will have enough.
-Lao-tzu (fl. B.C. 600)
We are
the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
-T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Hollow Men, 1925
Can we
reasonably expect happiness from an insatiable appetite which, no matter how it stuffs its
belly, is still psychologically like Oliver Twist in the poorhouse, holding up an empty
bowl and begging, "I want some more"? Isn't it possible that our dream of the
good society contained, from the beginning, a hidden violation of the Tenth
Commandment—"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods"?
-Joy Davidman (1915-1960), Smoke on the Mountain, 1953
Consume more than you need
This
is the dream
Make you pauper
Or make you queen
I won’t die lonely
I’ll
have it all prearranged
A
grave that’s deep and wide enough
For
me and all my mountains o’ things
-Tracy
Chapman, Mountains of Things
©1987 SBK April Music/Purple Rabbit Music
He who
seeks more than he needs hinders himself from enjoying what he has.
-Hebrew Proverb
What
we're talking about is the endless, gullible elevation of necessary levels of comfort and
status and everything else at the complete expense of all around us. It's going to take us
a long time to learn how to climb down a little bit from the heights on which we have put
ourselves.
- Bill McKibben, The Comforting Whirlwind: God
and the Environmental Crisis,
sermon at Carlisle, Massachusetts 18 March 2001
When I
walk into a grocery store and look at all the products you can choose, I say, “My
God!” No king ever had anything like I have in my grocery store today.
-Bill Gates quoted in Parade Magazine, 14 Jul 02
they
showed it to you and
you laid your money down
well it looked like what you
wanted but it laid you in the ground
-Peter Himmelmann, You Bought It from Gematria 1987
Materialism,
among all nations, is a dangerous disease of the human mind; but it is more especially to
be dreaded among a democratic people because it readily amalgamates with that vice which
is the most familiar to the heart under such circumstances. Democracy encourages a taste
for physical gratification; this taste, if it becomes excessive, soon disposes men to
believe that all is matter only; and materialism, in its turn, hurries them on with mad
impatience to these same delights; such is the fatal circle within which democratic
nations are driven round. It were well that they should see the danger and hold back.
-Alex de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Democracy in America, tr. Henry Reeve
1945
I
think of the old slavery, and of the way The Economy has now improved upon it. The new
slavery has improved upon the old by giving the new slaves the illusion that they are
free. The Economy does not take people's freedom by force, which would be against its
principles, for it is very humane. It buys their freedom, pays for it, and then persuades
its money back again with shoddy goods and the promise of freedom. "Buy a car,"
it says, "and be free. Buy a boat and be free." Is this not the raw material of
bad dreams? Or is it maybe the very nightmare itself?
-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow, 2000
Day by day night after night
Blinded by the neon lights
Hurry here hustlin' there
No one's got the time to spare
Money's tight, nothin' free
Won't somebody come and rescue me?
I am stranded, caught in the crossfire
Stranded, caught in the crossfire!
Tooth for tooth, eye for an eye
Sell your soul just to buy, buy, buy
Beggin' a dollar stealin' a dime
Come on can't you see that I
I am stranded, caught in the crossfire…
-Stevie Ray Vaughn (1954-1990), Crossfire
with Tommy Shannon, Chris Layton, Reese Wynans, B. Carter, Ruth Ellsworth
We are
slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire
agro-industrial empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend
and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an
exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees.
-Edward Abbey (1927-1989)
In the
last twenty-five years alone, new inventions and improvements have utterly transformed the
way we live. Personal computers and fax machines, cordless phones and wireless speakers,
e-mail and other hi-tech labor-saving conveniences have revolutionized our work and home
life. Yet have they brought us the peace and freedom they seemed to promise? Without
realizing it, we have become dulled, if not brainwashed, in our eagerness to embrace
technology. We have become slaves to a system that presses us to spend money on new
gadgets, and we have accepted without question the argument that, by working harder, we
will have more time to do more important things. It is a perverse logic.
-Johann Christoph Arnold, Seeking Peace, 1998
What
does a person need – really need? A few pounds of food each day,
heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working
activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all – in
the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our
economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time
payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our
attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade. The years thunder by.
The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves
of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed. Where, then, lies
the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or
bankruptcy of life?
-Sterling Hayden, Wanderer, 1963
We
did not choose to believe that personal choice is the highest human
virtue. Rather, we were
taught, formed, forced to believe nothing is important in life other
than that which we have personally chosen. The irony is that the belief that nothing is important in life
other than that which we have personally chosen is a belief that we have
not personally chosen! The
supermarket and shopping mall have been our school.
-William H. Willimon & Stanley Hauerwas, Lord Teach Us, 1996
[The]
illusion that mechanical progress means human improvement . . .
alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely
because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a
better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn
and destroy our own reality and the reality of our natural resources.
Technology was made for man, not man for technology. In losing touch
with being and thus with God, we have fallen into a senseless idolatry
of production and consumption for their own sakes. We have renounced the
act of being and plunged ourself into process
for its own sake.
-Thomas
Merton (1915-1968) Mystics and Zen Masters, 1967
The
bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal,
patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that
bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between man
and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned
out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of
philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved
personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered
freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.
-Karl Marx (1818-1883) & Frederick Engels (1820-1895),
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
Under
private property ...Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby
to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is
therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is
subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and
mutual plundering.
-Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Human Requirements and Division of Labour, 1844
There
are two ways to be rich - one in the abundance of your possessions and the other in the
fewness of your wants.
-E. Stanley Jones (1884-1973) In Christ, 1961
Everything
in excess is opposed to nature.
-Hippocrates (B.C. 460-370)
True
happiness flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue and not from the possession of
external goods.
-Aristotle (B.C. 384-322), Politics
No man
can tell whether he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is the heart that makes a
man rich. He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.
-Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)
He who
multiplies riches multiplies cares.
-Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Often
people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money,
in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works
is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in
order to have what you want.
-Margaret Young from The OmniRead Treasuries
compiled and edited by Peter Stafford Sumner
With
respect to physical existence, one needs little, and to the degree that one needs less,
the more perfect one is.
-Sřren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 1990
Lives
based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being.
-William James (1842-1910)
More,
more, is the cry of a mistaken soul.
Less than all will not satisfy man.
-William Blake (1757–1827)
It is
preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living
freely and nobly.
-Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
When
I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination
I can't get no, oh no, no, no
Hey, hey, hey, that's what I say
I
can't get no satisfaction
I can't get no satisfaction
'Cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can't get no, I can't get no
When
I'm watchin' my TV
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me
I
can't get no, oh no, no, no
Hey, hey, hey, that's what I say
-Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Satisfaction, Rolling Stones, 1965
Before our eyes we have the results of ideologies such as
Marxism, Nazism and fascism, and also of myths like racial superiority, nationalism and
ethnic exclusivism. No less pernicious, though not always as obvious, are the effects of
materialistic consumerism, in which the exaltation of the individual and the selfish
satisfaction of personal aspirations become the ultimate goal of life. In this outlook,
the negative effects on others are considered completely irrelevant. Instead it must be
said again that no affront to human dignity can be ignored, whatever its source, whatever
actual form it takes and wherever it occurs.
-Pope John Paul II, "Respect for Human
Rights," 1 Jan 1999
There
is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living
within your means.
-Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) 30th U.S. President
American
culture is no longer created by the people… A free, authentic life is
no longer possible in AmericaTM today. We are being
manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from
media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very
fabric of our existence. Most
North Americans now live designer lives—sleep, eat, sit in car, work,
shop, watch TV, sleep again. I
doubt there’s more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes
anywhere in that cycle. We
ourselves have been branded.
-Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of AmericaTM,
1999
What worries some people about consumption (and I confess at
the outset to be one of these ambivalent creatures, fat but troubled in
paradise) is that the affluent, technologically advanced West seems more
and more focused not on consuming to live but living to consume.
The problem with consumption, and the consumer capitalism that
has pushed it to feverish historical extremes, is that it has become so
all-consuming.
-Rodney Clapp, “The Theology of Consumption & the
Consumption of Theology,”
The Consuming Passion, ed. Rodney
Clapp, 1998
Consumer
sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer
markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the
multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for
Coke sales. Long-lunch traditions obstruct the development of fast-food franchises and
successful fast-food franchises inevitably undermine Mediterranean home-at-noon-for-dinner
rituals—whether intentionally or not hardly matters. Highly developed public
transportation systems lessen the opportunity for automobile sales and depress steel,
rubber, and petroleum production. Agricultural lifestyles (rise at daylight, work all day,
to bed at dusk) are inhospitable to television watching. People uninterested in sports buy
fewer athletic shoes. Health campaigns hurt tobacco sales. The moral logic of austerity
contradicts the economic logic of consumption. Can responsible corporate managers then
afford to be anything other than immoral advocates of sybaritism?
-Benjamin R. Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld, 1995
The
goals of development are always and everywhere stated in terms of
consumer value packages standardized around the North Atlantic--and
therefore always and everywhere imply more privileges for a few... Underdevelopment is the result of a state of mind common to both
socialist and capitalist countries. Present development goals are
neither desirable nor reasonable. Unfortunately antiimperialism is no
antidote. Although exploitation of poor countries is an undeniable
reality, current nationalism is merely the affirmation of the right of
colonial elites to repeat history and follow the road traveled by the
rich toward the universal consumption of internationally marketed
packages, a road which can ultimately lead only to universal pollution
and universal frustration.
-Ivan
Illich (1926-2002), Celebrations of Awareness, 1971
Thanksgiving
is a typically American holiday...The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant
consumption is the result and reward of production.
-Ayn Rand (1905-1982)
Civilization
has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give
thanks.
-G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Daily News, 2/21/02
However
destructive may be the policies of the government and the methods and products of the
corporations, the root of the problem is always found to be found in private life. We must
learn to see that every problem that concerns us as conservationists always leads straight
to the question of how we live. The world is being destroyed, no doubt about it, by the
greed of the rich and powerful. It is also being destroyed by popular demand.
-Wendell Berry, "Conservation Is Good Work,"
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1991
It is
not necessity but abundance which produces greed.
-Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592)
First,
…our culture invites us to locate the sum total of human happiness here and now and
in the consumption of the fruits of the technological economy; and second, …we have
not been tricked into this, but that we actually chose this path several hundred years ago
and continue to choose it on a more-or-less daily basis.
-Craig M. Gay, "Sensualists without Heart,"
The Consuming Passion, ed. Rodney Clapp 1998
The
environmental problems of the 21st century involve us, not them—individuals, not
corporations. This time there aren't any bad guys to hold responsible. This time, we
ourselves have to be responsible.
-Karen Studders, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Commissioner,
quoted in "Ventura: Pollution control starts with individuals,"
St. Paul Pioneer Press 24 April 2001
The
test of our progress is not whether we add more abundance to those who have much; it is
whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd U.S. President
We eat
when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty. We buy what we don't need and throw
away everything that's useful. Why sell a man what he wants? Sell him what he doesn't
need! Pretend he's got eight legs and two stomachs and money to burn. It's wrong! Wrong.
Wrong. Wrong.
-Allie Fox, father in the movie The Mosquito Coast
from screenplay based on Paul Theroux's 1982 novel by the same name
There
is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste
for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and
their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and
lose all self-restraint at the sight of new possessions they are about to obtain. In their
intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection
that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all.
-Alex de Tocqueville (1805-1859), Democracy in America, tr. Henry Reeve
1945
Our
present culture, however, specializes in inflaming endless lust for possessions with
advertisements that constantly convince us that we need more (particularly to create the
ease we have never found). The marketers don't tell us much about their products, but they
spend a great deal of energy (and enormous amounts of money) appealing to our fears and
dreams. Thus, the idolatry of possessions plays to the deeper idolatry of our
selves—and in an endlessly consuming society, persons are always remaking themselves
with new belongings.
-Marva J. Dawn, A Royal "Waste" of Time, 1999
Advertisers
regularly con us into believing that we genuinely need one luxury after another. We are
convinced that we must keep up with or even go one better than our neighbors. So we buy
another dress, sports jacket or sports car and thereby force up the standard of living.
The ever more affluent standard of living is the god of twentieth century North America
and the adman is its prophet.
-Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, 1977
It is
really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for
more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), The New Jerusalem 1920
So
many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to
deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so
compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are
all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of
advertising men (woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires, the
satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.
-Dorothy Day (1897-1980), The Catholic Worker, Apr 1953
The
answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to
the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is
to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers.
-Wendell Berry, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,"
What Are People For?, 1989
The
illusion that consumption -- and its correlative, income -- is desirable probably stems
from too great preoccupation with what Knight calls "one-use goods," such as
food and fuel, where the utilization and consumption of the good are tightly bound
together in a single act or event. ... any economy in the consumption of fuel that enables
us to maintain warmth or to generate power with lessened consumption again leaves us
better off. ... there is no great value in consumption itself. ... Consumption is the
death of capital, and the only valid arguments in favor of consumption are arguments in
favor of death itself.
-Kenneth E. Boulding (1910-1993), "Income or Welfare,"
Review of Economic Studies, 1949-50
Materialism
sees national well-being hitched to the rising star of the Gross National Product. You may
say, "At least we are concerned with human well-being." But we are talking about
human dignity, not human well-being. How, for instance, do we go about "improving the
well-being of people?" We do so at the expense of their dignity. We subject them to
media manipulation so they will buy what we want them to buy, wear what we want them to
wear, eat what we want them to eat. Whatever we may profess about believing in human
dignity, our actions betray us. We base our commercials on theories that assume people are
either laboratory rats or computers. We then proceed to strip them of dignity in order to
load them with things.
-John White, The Golden Cow, 1979
What
is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948)
Non-Violence in Peace and War, 1949
We
must surely appear to the world as exactly what we are: a nation that
organizes its economy around consuming twice as much oil as it produces,
and around the profligate wastefulness of the wars and campaigns
required to defend such consumption. In recent years we have defined our national interest largely in
terms of the oil fields and pipelines we need to procure fuel.
-Barbara
Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002
The
writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation
illiterate in the language of the wall.
The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually
bring down the charming, infuriating naďveté of Americans that allows
us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness
that bring us whatever we want.
-Barbara
Kingsolver, Small Wonder, 2002
Advertising
signs: they con you into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on all around you
-Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma, 1965
The
gospel preached during every television show is 'You only go around once in life, so get
all the gusto you can.' It is a statement about theology; it is a statement about beer.
It's lousy beer and even worse theology.
-John Silber, president of Boston University quoted in Time, 25 May 1987
The
need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the
entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market,
given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the
great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national
ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or
are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction
becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer
work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones;
industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the
globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new
wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
-Karl Marx (1818-1883) & Frederick Engels (1820-1895),
The Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
Work.
Consume. Be silent. And die.
-graffito
It is
important to recognize that behind the razzmatazz of consumerism, we all remain dependent
on basic natural resources - land, air, water and biodiversity - for every product and
service. There can be no free lunch on the environment.
-Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program,
"Asia's Dry Lands
Crisis too Critical to Ignore,"
Environment News Service 10 Nov 2000
The
danger, then, is that materialism is not only shaping how we live but the way we think as
well. It influences our consumer tastes and our preference for high-paying jobs, but it
also alters our capacity to pray, the nature of our prayers, and the ways in which
religious tutelage instructs our values. It becomes harder for us to hear messages about
the suffering of the poor, the need for economic justice, and the desirability of seeing
God's handiwork in simple things or in nature. Materialism draws us into its logic not so
much by convincing us that material goods are preferable to helping the poor, but by
persuading us that we can help them best by buying luxury goods for ourselves (thereby
creating jobs). It permits advertisers to sell us more goods, not less, by emphasizing the
virtue of high-quality goods that will last, biodegradable goods that will not pollute the
environment, and expensive vacations that will give us opportunities to get away and
reflect on our values. In fact, materialism becomes so much a way of life that we no
longer recognize it as an option, as one value among others that we can decide to choose
or to reject. It ceases to raise questions but is taken for granted as an inevitable
feature of our society. Without realizing it, Ronald Reagan perhaps said it best when he
commented on our obsession with the getting and keeping of wealth: "That is not
materialism," he asserted; "that is Americanism."
-Robert Wuthnow, Rethinking Materialism, 1995
The
open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural
resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to
produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on
money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.
-Barbara Tuchman (1912-1989), "On Our Birthday—America as Idea,"
Newsweek 12 July 1976
I wish
we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things (especially selling) seems to
have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
-C S Lewis (1898-1963), Letters to an American Lady, ed. Clyde S. Kilby,
1967
And he
said to them, "Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one's life
does not consist in the abundance of possessions."
-Jesus quoted in Luke 12:15 from New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
If the
Christ we follow sent out his disciples with no extra possessions (Luke 9:1-6 and 10:1-12)
and warned would-be devotees that he had nowhere to lay his head (see Luke 9:57-62), then
we must recognize that it is extremely difficult to live in a Christian way in a consumer
culture.
-Marva J. Dawn, A Royal "Waste" of Time, 1999
For
why, my brothers and sisters, would you rejoice in silver? Either your silver will perish,
or you will, and no one knows which will perish first. For neither can you remain here
always, nor can silver remain here always; so also with gold, wardrobes, houses, money,
real estate – and in the end, even the light by which we enjoy all these things. So
do not be willing then to rejoice in such things as these. Rejoice instead in the light
that has no setting; rejoice in the dawn which no yesterday precedes, and no tomorrow
follows.
-Augustine (354-430), Exposition on Psalm 85:6
The
organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is
such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges
us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more
intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be
only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of
liberation.
- Raoul Vaneigem, “Basic Banalities II,” no. 8,
Internationale Situationiste Paris, Jan 1963
To
make continuous expansion of material resources the primary aim of social organization is
the inevitable consequence of making humanity absolute. Material consumption is thus
endowed with a false infinity. The transformation of humanity from a subordinate, created
entity into an absolute, self-existing, self-evolving entity makes the exploitation of
human power the highest good. From this it is but a step to the identification of the good
life with increasing material consumption; which is exactly the step that has been taken
by Western civilization, both in its capitalist and socialist phases.
-D. R. Davies, The Sin of Our Age, 1947
[Capitalism
is] that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which
everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants.
-G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), "How to Write a Detective Story"
The Spice of Life
Only
after the last tree has been cut down,
Only after the last river has been poisoned,
Only after the last fish has been caught,
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.
-Cree Indian prophecy
It is
preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living
freely and nobly.
-Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
There
are not enough rich and powerful people to consume the whole world; for that, the rich and
powerful need the help of countless ordinary people.
-Wendell Berry, "Conservation Is Good Work,"
Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1991
The
average American already consumes so much that the U.S. has a worldwide environmental
impact amounting to 4 billion people. The U.S., with only 5 percent of the world's
population, consumes 32 percent of the world's petroleum and plastics and produces 25
percent of the world's greenhouse gases. Its 265 million people produce more waste than
the 2 billion people in China and India. Indeed, the cause of environmental destruction is
conspicuous consumption - a lifestyle that is unfortunately "migrating" from the
U.S. to the Third World.
-"The Nation" (independent), Bangkok, April 16, 1998
quoted in World Press Review, September '98
Overpopulation is the problem of the third and
fourth World; over-consumption is the problem of the West. The average American child this year will consume as much of the
world’s resources as twenty children born in India. Deliberate and calculated
waste is the central aspect of the American economy. We over-eat, over-buy, and over-built, spewing out our toxic
wastes upon the earth and into the air.
-Richard Foster, Freedom of Simplicity, 1981
Overconsumption is a “cancer eating away at our
spiritual vitals.” It cuts
the heart right out of our compassion. It distances us from the great masses of broken bleeding
humanity. It converts us
into materialists. We become
less able to ask moral questions. For
example, just because we have the economic muscle to buy up vast amounts
of the world’s oil, does that give us the right to do so? When the poor farmer of India
is unable to buy a gallon of gasoline to run his simple water pump
because the world’s demand has priced him out of the market, who is to
blame?
-Richard Foster, Freedom of Simplicity, 1981
The
measure of those excesses [demand for material things] is seen in the forests and in the
natural parts of the Earth. And the people who live there, as we do, are the ones who live
with the consequence of supplying the raw material for those excesses.
-Guujaaw, leader of the Haida Nation,
quoted by DeNeen L. Brown in
"In
Canadian Court, a Native Nation Claims Offshore Rights,"
Washington Post, 26 Mar 2002
Remember
how many closets you have. They are for storing things you aren't using. In my house, we
have six closets, and we'd like to add a coat closet. In addition to our six closets, we
also have a basement. And a shed. And a pantry. All pretty full. What is your attitude
toward possessions if your closets are bursting with things you don't use while kids
starve by the thousands?
-John Alexander, Your Money or Your Life 1986
The
crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational
system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the
student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future
career.
-Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Monthly Review, 1949
We’re prone to judge success by the index of our
salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of
our service and relationship to humanity—thus capitalism can lead to a
practical materialism that is as pernicious as the materialism taught by
communism.
-Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), Stride Toward Freedom, 1958
We are
being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as
well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated
industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our
material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly.
-T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Christianity and Culture, 1939 *
To the
primitive man, the hunt for food embodied the will to live, to survive. To the modern man,
the pursuit of material wealth…embodies the will to self-affirmation, to excess, to
glory, as well as the will to survive. This vast distinction between primitive man and his
modern descendant transforms the contemporary obsession with things from a physical
necessity into a moral affirmation, It is this transformation which bedevils our entire
economic activity.
-D. R. Davies, The Sin of Our Age, 1947
Our
world has enough for each person's need, but not for his greed.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
The
good life has become inseparable from the maximum possible consumption of things…The
dogma of the new religion is the dogma of increasing wants.
-D.R. Davies (1889-1958), The Sin of Our Age, 1947
High
thinking is inconsistent with a complicated material life based on high speed and imposed
on us by mammon worship.
-Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
How
far, O rich, do you extend your senseless avarice? Do you intend to be the sole
inhabitants of the earth? Why do you drive out the fellow sharers of nature, and claim it
all for yourselves? The earth was made for all, rich and poor, in common. Why do you rich
claim it as your exclusive right?
-Ambrose (339-397) Bishop of Milan
Ours
is a self-centered world which follows the philosophy that human beings are the most
significant entity in the universe. And if we believe that, then we look for more for
ourselves; more of the material baubles of our age: from cellular phones to laptop
computers to prestigious cars, street addresses, clothing labels and so on to give us
gratification. More is better. More is beautiful. More is contrary to the Creator's
design. The environment is endangered by our "more" mentality. There is enough
of everything to go around for those who see themselves as guardians entrusted with
preserving what God has made.
-Susan Perlman, "Whose Earth Are We Ruining"
Issues:
A Messianic Jewish Perspective
Civilization
is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
-Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910)
He has
much who needs least. Do not create necessities for yourself.
–Jose Escrivá (1902-1975)
It is
not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.
-Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892)
Think
not on what you lack as much as on what you have.
-Greek proverb
I have
also learned why people work so hard to succeed: it is because they envy the things their
neighbors have. But it is useless. It is like chasing the wind. They say that a man would
be a fool to fold his hands and let himself starve to death. Maybe so, but it is better to
have only a little, with peace of mind, than be busy all the time with both hands, trying
to catch the wind.
-Ecclesiastes 4:4-6, Today's English Version Bible
It is
more blessed to give than to receive, but then it is also more blessed to be able to do
without than to have to have.
-Sřren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), Journals and Papers
Both
abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always
our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend ... when we choose not to focus on
what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present - love,
health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us
pleasure - the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience Heaven on earth.
-Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance, 1995
The
sense that materialism has gotten out of hand is magnified by the pressures facing
middle-class American families. Home entertainment centers and camcorders can perhaps be
passed by, albeit not without the nagging suspicion that one is needlessly denying oneself
(and one's children) the small perks that everyone else in the neighborhood is enjoying
already. But other material temptations are much more difficult to withstand. High
mortgage payments and property taxes may strap the family budget but seem inescapable, not
because the amenities of suburban living are so marvelous, but because the public schools
anywhere else are in disarray (if not downright dangerous). A new car that costs fifteen
times what a new car cost a generation ago is likely to seem equally essential, not so
much for the luxurious pleasure of cruising along exotic coastal highways, but because an
older, inexpensive car turns out to be an even worse bargain, given the fact that the
local repair-service franchise not only charges ten times the minimum wage for semiskilled
labor but also cheats on repair bills and replaces parts unnecessarily. By the same token,
frozen dinners, a microwave oven, a dishwasher, and an illegal immigrant hired to clean
the house and take one's cat to the vet would have seemed like the epitome of materialism
in another time, but now provide the only means available for two-career couples to work
hard enough at their jobs to earn the salaries they need to pay for those labor-saving
amenities.
-Robert Wuthnow, Rethinking Materialism, 1995
I
believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a
life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a
lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet
related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only
allows to make and unmake, produce and consume - a style of life which
is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of
the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions
which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and
technologies.
-Ivan
Illich (1926-2002), Deschooling Society, 1973
The
cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call 'life' which is required to be exchanged
for it, immediately or in the long run.
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
You
have found that you were more secure before you accumulated so much. See what greed has
imposed on you: You have filled your house and now you fear burglars. You have hoarded
money and lost sleep. See what greed has commanded you: "Do this!" And you did
it.
-Augustine (354-430), Tenth Homily on the First Letter of St. John
Not
what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.
-John Petit-Senn (1792-1870)
I
understand that it's the music that keeps me alive…That's my lifeblood. And to give
that up for, like, the TV, the cars, the houses – that's not the American dream.
That's the booby prize, in the end. Those are the booby prizes. And if you fall for them
– if, when you achieve them, you believe that this is the end in and of itself –
then you've been suckered in. Because those are the consolation prizes, if you're not
careful, for selling yourself out, or letting the best of yourself slip away. So you gotta
be vigilant. You gotta carry the idea you began with further. And you gotta hope that
you're headed for higher ground.
-Bruce Springsteen quoted by Barry Schwartz in The Costs of Living, 1994
When
advertisers fill our consciousness with images of beautiful, happy, one-dimensional
people, they feed the illusion that our innate dissatisfaction can be relieved by material
acquisition. By stuff. A cool camel smokes a cigarette; a couple in chinos sit on a
sun-reddened mesa; buff teens run around on a beach knocking back soft drinks. These ads
work on our unconscious by showing us a model of completion: "lack"-less people
whose lives are not ruled or even touched by anxiety or desire.
-Richard Wainwright, "Our Empty Desires," Adbusters, June/July
00
New
pressures are causing ever more people to find their main satisfaction in their
consumptive role rather than in their productive role. And these pressures are bringing
forward such traits as pleasure-mindedness, self-indulgence, materialism, and passivity as
conspicuous elements of the American character.
-Vance Packard (1914-1996), The Waste Makers 1959
Modern
man is drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping,
which is the same thing.
-Ernest Becker (1924-1974)
In the
last seven years, a borderless youth culture has emerged. The uniform is Levi's. The drink
is Coke. And they are all hard-wired to the same pop media. Outside the United States this
phenomena is seen not only as a product of globalization, but as a new form of American
colonization. The world is beginning to look like an American strip mall, complete with
KFC, Pizza Hut, and the Golden Arches…The destination of McWorld's economic
engineering is a global shopping mall where our identity, our common humanity, and even
our spirituality are derived from our consumerism… We are not simply dealing with the
issues of consumerism that we contended with in the '70s and '80s. In the 21st century,
global marketers have taken an entirely new focus that is much more seductive than
anything we have seen before.
-Tom Sine, "Branded
for Life," Sojourners Sep/Oct 2000
Pampered
children are the product of pampered parents – parents who insist on
getting their own way, and whose lives are structured around the
illusion that instant gratification brings happiness. Children are
spoiled not only by an overabundance of food, toys, clothing, and other
material things. Many parents spoil them simply by giving in to their
whims. While they are still in the playpen, this is bad enough, but as
they grow older, the problem gets much worse. How many harried mothers
spend all of their energy simply trying to keep up with their
children’s demands? And how many more give in to their children just
to keep them quiet?
-Johann
Christoph Arnold, Endangered, 2000
Cupidity…takes
created things for ends in themselves, which they are not. The will that seeks rest in
creatures for their own sake stops on the way to its true end, terminates in a value which
does not exist, and thus frustrates all its deepest capacities for happiness and peace.
-Thomas Merton (1915-1968)
A
large percentage of those living in developed societies are told what brand of soda they
should drink, what cigarettes they should smoke, what clothes and shoes they should wear,
what they should eat and what brand of food they should buy. Their political ideas are
supplied in the same way. Every year a trillion dollars is spent on advertising. This rain
pours on the helpless masses that are totally deprived of the necessary elements of
judgment to formulate an opinion and the knowledge required for mediating and discerning.
This has never happened before in the history of humanity. Primitive humans enjoyed
greater freedom of thought.
-Fidel Castro from an interview with Federico Mayor Zaragoza,
former director of UNESCO, Jan 2000
Can it
be seriously denied that, to the mass mind of today, the good life has become inseparable
from the maximum possible consumption of things! Poverty has been promoted to be the chief
evil of human existence…Men can no longer be judged to be poor by what they consume,
but by what they think they should consume and do not…Even though their bellies be
bursting with chicken, the vast majority of people would still be poor if a minority of
bellies were bursting with turkey.
-D.R. Davies (1889-1958), The Sin of Our Age, 1947
The
idea is the least labor and capital and resources you put together and the more you
accumulate the better capitalist you are. So the suggestion I will make to you is that the
idea of constant accumulation, which is what America is about, what consumerism, NAFTA are
about, means that you always take more than you need and you don't leave the rest. So I
suggest that it is possible from an indigenous world view that capitalism is inherently
out of order with natural law.
-Winona LaDuke, speech on "Social Justice & Racism," UC Boulder 28
Sep 1993
For
they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental
falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of
their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things
on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply
without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who
sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.
-G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), As I Was Saying 1936
Most
persons think that a state in order to be happy ought to be large; but even if they are
right, they have no idea of what is a large and what a small state....
To the size of states there is a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals,
implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too
small, but they either wholly lose their nature, or are spoiled.
-Aristotle (B.C. 384-322)
Our
enormously productive economy...demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we
convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction,
our ego satisfaction, in consumption...We need things consumed, burned up, worn out,
replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate.
-Victor Lebow, retailing analyst
quoted by Vance Packard in The Waste Makers, 1960
As
businessmen caught a glimpse of the potentialities inherent in endlessly expanding the
wants of people under consumerism, forced draft or otherwise, many began to see blue
skies… What was needed was strategies that would make Americans in large numbers into
voracious, wasteful, compulsive consumers—and strategies that would provide products
assuring such wastefulness. Even where wastefulness was not involved, additional
strategies were needed that would induce the public to consume at ever-higher levels.
-Vance Packard (1914-1996), The Waste Makers 1959
The
philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that
the improvement of man's condition was the highest requirement of morality. But in what
did the improvement consist? The answer seemed so obvious to them that they did not bother
to justify it: the expansion and fulfillment of the material wants of man, and the spread
of these benefits, from the few who had once preempted them, to the many who had so long
lived on the scraps Dives had thrown into the gutter. The great dogma of this religion is
the dogma of increasing wants. To multiply the powers of production one must likewise
multiply the capacities of consumption. What, then, was man's true life? The utilitarian
had a ready answer: it consisted in having more wants than could be supplied by the
machine, and inventing more ways in which these wants could be varied and expanded.
Whereas the traditional religions had sought to curb appetite, this new religion had
openly stimulated it.
-Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), The Condition of Man, 1944
Many
Christians, though keenly sensitive to the dangers of greed and discontent that come with
an economy of continually increasing consumption, nevertheless feel that it is worth
risking if only it can end man's physical miseries. The trouble is that it can't. In a
finite world, continually increasing consumption is just not possible.
-Joy Davidman (1915-1960), Smoke on the Mountain, 1953
We
Americans think we are pretty good! We want to build a house, we cut down some trees. We
want to build a fire, we dig a little coal. But when we run out of all these things, then
we will find out just how good we really are.
-Will Rogers (1879-1935),
quoted in Francesca Lyman, The Greeenhouse Trap, 1990 *
The
problem of our highly technical civilization, with its greatly increased power over
Nature, is not how to guarantee the satisfaction of simple needs, but how to guarantee the
satisfaction of wants which persist in increasing number, intensity and complexity. This
is the ultimate reality behind that seemingly innocent and laudable phrase
""social security." Material needs have been endowed, as they have never
been before, with a false infinity, by the values which our society considers to be the
supreme values.
-D. R. Davies (1889-1958), The Sin of Our Age, 1947
The
concept of work that is valued because it benefits people is all but lost in the
modern marketplace. Work nowadays is largely seen as a commodity we exchange for the
fruits of consumption.
-Stacy & Paula Rinehart, Living For What Really Matters, 1986
We had
learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things
receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born
in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the
principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise,
standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of
technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as
children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that is to say, as markets.
–Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,
1992
Overconsumption
is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of
capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.
-Kalle Lasn, founder of the Media Foundation
quoted in Time, April 14, 1997
Let
us be bold enough to ask ourselves as Christians whether the Church of the Lord Jesus in
the United States has anything to say to our nation and its ideologies of materialism,
possessiveness, and the worship of financial security. Are we courageous enough to be a
sign of contradiction to consumerism through our living faith in Jesus Christ? Are we
committed enough to his gospel to become a countercurrent to the drift? Or have we so
accommodated the faith of our fathers to consumption that the question of simplicity of
life, sharing of resources, and radical dependence on God's providence no longer seems
relevant? How do we build the Kingdom of God on earth if what we incarnate in our lives is
the dogma of our culture rather than the revelation of Jesus?
-Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus, 1988
Distance
does not decide who is your brother and who is not. The church is going to have to become
the conscience of the free market if it's to have any meaning in this world--and stop
being its apologist.
-Bono of U2, quoted in an interview
with Anthony DeCurtis, 20 Feb 2001
Two
opposing gospels are fighting one another for the soul of our nation and, increasingly,
the world: the gospel of consumption and the gospel of peace.
-Leonard Sweet, SoulTsunami, 1999
In the
name of economy a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of
efficiency new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained
speed through the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant
futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end—that
of freeing mankind for higher functions—if the standard of living remained stable.
The dogma of increasing wants nullified every real economy and set the community in a
collective squirrel-cage…The mechanical expansion of human appetites, the appetite
for goods, the appetite for power, the appetite for sensation, has no relation whatever to
the ordering of the means of existence for the satisfaction of human needs.
-Lewis Mumford (1895-1990), The Condition of Man, 1944
It is
partly to avoid consciousness of greed that we prefer to associate with those who are at
least as greedy as we ourselves. Those who consume much less are a reproach.
-Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929), U.S. sociologist
You
can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
-Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), U.S. social philosopher
Never
buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.
-Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd U.S. President
We
always pay dearly for chasing after what is cheap.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
I
have discovered that many of the things I thought were priceless are as
cheap as costume jewelry, and much of what I labeled worthless was, all
the time, filled with the kind of beauty that directly nourishes my
soul… Now I think that the vast majority of us “normal” people
spend our lives trashing our treasures and treasuring our trash. We
bustle around trying to create the impression that we are hip,
imperturbable, omniscient, in perfect control, when in fact we are
awkward and scared and bewildered.
-Martha Beck, Expecting Adam, 1999
Any
so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but
because it will content your spirit for the moment.
-Mark Twain (1835–1910), Old Man in What Is Man?, 1906
Great
wealth and content seldom live together.
-Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), 1906
Western
man at present drifts through life obsessed with the desire to obtain an ever higher
'standard of living,' greater status -- and this applies equally to so-called 'capitalist'
as to 'communist' countries. It can offer nothing more inspiring as a guide to living than
a sterile form of materialism which promotes at every turn the natural conceit, fear, and
acquisitiveness of the ego.
-Philip M. Eden
What I
mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now on...those who buy something, as if it
were not theirs to keep; those who use the things of the world, as if not engrossed in
them. For this world in its present form is passing away.
-Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:29,31
from the New International Version of the Bible
To the
extent that we consume, in our present circumstances, we are guilty. To the extent that we
guilty consumers are conservationists, we are absurd. But what can we do? Must we go on
writing letters to politicians and donating to conservation organizations until the
majority of our fellow citizens agree with us? Or can we do something directly to solve
our share of the problem? I am a conservationist. I believe wholeheartedly in putting
pressure on the politicians and in maintaining the conservation organizations… That I
live every hour of every day in an environmental crisis I know from all my senses. Why
then is not my first duty to reduce, so far as I can, my own consumption?
-Wendell Berry, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer"
What Are People For?,1990
Comforts
that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out
wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space,
quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at
least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.
-G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Commonwealth, 1933
In
North America, we like to believe we have transcended the false idols of ideology. But the
Market is our god. Data surveillance and techniques that classify, segment, and isolate
the population are already here. Soon each consumer will be segmented into a specific
"target" audience; each of us will become increasingly isolated in our separate
technological enclosure or cell.
The result is the Virtual Panopticon - a new instrument of social
control. Computerized corporate "wardens" can observe every detail of every life
from the central tower. Their precisely calibrated interactive feedback can induce
consumers to willingly follow patterns generated by psycho-demographic profiles. More
efficient than naked military power, this arrangement offers a better way of extracting
money from consumers through the tactics of computer-targeted micro (rather than mass)
marketing.
-Rick Crawford, researcher in computer security
at the University of California at Davis, nvisible Crises, 1994
Our
institutions and values are in jeopardy as the mores of the market pervade all social life
in this country. Loyalty, honesty, courage, discipline, patriotism, and commitment to
family are being crowded out by the goals and rules of economic rationality -- do whatever
makes the most money.
-Barry Schwartz
Consumption
is presented as our right, even as a patriotic act. We celebrate stores
filled with goods. But once the novelty of my purchases wears off, I
often feel more burdened and dissatisfied. In my heart I know that most
of the things I buy will end up in the trash or a Salvation Army sales
rack - adding to the huge surplus that is the inevitable, although
hidden, part of our society's unprecedented wealth.
-Paul Boyer, “My quest: to live with less,” Christian Science
Monitor, 30 Oct 03
Love
the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
-Wendell Berry, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, 1973
Nothing
is cheap which is superfluous, for what one does not need, is dear at a penny.
-Plutarch (46-120 A.D.)
And
other seed fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked it, and it yielded no
crop...these are the ones who have heard the word, and the worries of the world, and the
deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and
it becomes unfruitful.
-Jesus quoted in Mark 4:7,18b-19
from the New American Standard version of the Bible
Superfluous
wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden, 1854
The
contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has
vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper
classes until they gag with superfluity. If democracy is to have breadth of meaning, it is
necessary to adjust this inequity. It is not only moral, but it is also intelligent. We
are wasting and degrading human life by clinging to archaic thinking.
-Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
This
world has nothing for me
This world has everything
All that I could want
And nothing that I need
-Aaron Tate, Not Enough, Caedmon's Call, 1994 Cumbee Road Music
You, O
money, are the cause of a restless life! Because of you we journey toward a premature
death; you provide cruel nourishment for the evils of men; the seed of our cares sprouts
from your head.
Sextus Propertius (c. 15 B.C.), Latin elegiac poet from Elegies
The
conversation of most middle-class Americans, we are told, revolves around consumption:
what to buy, what was just bought, where to eat, the price of the neighbor's house, what's
on sale this week, our clothes or someone else's, the best car on the market this year,
where to spend a vacation. Apparently we can't stop eating, shopping, or consuming.
Success is measured not in terms of love, wisdom, and maturity but by the size of one's
pile of possessions.
-Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus, 1988
The
truly affluent are those who do not want more than they have.
-Erich Fromm (1900-1980)
The
effect of the post-Enlightenment project for human society is that all human activity is
absorbed into labor. It becomes an unending cycle of production for the sake of
consumption. The modern concept of "built-in obsolescence" makes this clear. The
cycle of production and consumption has to be kept going, and the work of the artist or
craftsman who aims to create something enduring becomes marginal to the economic order.
Likewise, the world of action, of politics, is reduced to a conflict of views about how to
keep the cycle of production and consumption going. Questions of ultimate purpose are
excluded from the public world.
-Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), Foolishness to the Greeks, 1986
The
lust of avarice has so totally seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to
possess them than they possess their wealth.
-Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.)
Their
property held them in chains...chains which shackled their courage and choked their faith
and hampered their judgment and throttled their soul...If they stored up their treasure in
heaven, they would not now have an enemy and a thief within their own household...They
think of themselves as owners, whereas it is they rather who are owned: enslaved as they
are to their own property, they are not the masters of their money but its slaves.
-Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (c. AD 200-258) from the Lapsed, 11-12
quoted in Walsh and Langan, "Parasitic Social Consciousness"
It is
not earthly riches which make us or our sons happy; for they must either be lost by us in
our lifetime, or be possessed when we are dead, by whom we know not, or perhaps by whom we
would not.
-Augustine of Hippo (354-430), The City of God
The
devil was piqu'd such sainthood to behold,
And longed to tempt him like good Job of old;
But Satan now is wiser than of yore
And tempts by making rich, not making poor.
-Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Moral Essays
The
modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward
spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual
response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption.
All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child
becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like
some character he has seen on television. His head is filled with inane slogans, songs,
noises, explosions, statistics, brand names, menaces, ribaldries, and cliches. Then, when
the child gets to school, he learns to verbalize, rationalize, to pace, to make faces like
an advertisement, to need a car and in short, to go through life with an empty head
conforming to others, like himself, in togetherness.
-Thomas Merton (1915-1968), The Hidden Ground of Love, 1985
Consumption
is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to
be attended to, only in so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
The maxim is so perfectly self-evident, that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it.
-Adam Smith (1723-1790), The Wealth of Nations, 1776 *
The
people who have more money and goods than any people in the history of the world spend
most of their time worrying about not having enough.
-Jim Wallis, The Call to Conversion, 1981
The
cultural propaganda embodied in two liquor advertisements, "Living well is the best
revenge" and "Sip it with arrogance," have a curious, perhaps demonic
appeal. Consumerism indeed has its own spirituality.
-Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus, 1988
Our
presidents still take oaths upon bibles; our astronauts read us scripture from outer
space. But the mark of the beast is upon the appetites and aspirations that most govern
our collective conduct: demonic imbalance—endless distraction by unholy infinities of
desire: to produce and devour without limit, to build big, kill big, control big. Anything
goes—but where anything goes, nothing counts. No natural standard gives discipline.
Mephisto's strategy with Faust: to make absence of restraint matter more than presence of
purpose; to make liberation nihilism's bait.
-Theodore Roszak, "The Human Whole and Justly Proportioned," Sources,
1972
What
is the chief end of man?–to get rich. In what way?--dishonestly if we can; honestly
if we must. Who is God, the one and only true? Money is God. Gold and Greenbacks and
Stock--father, son, and ghosts of same, three persons in one; these are the true and only
God, mighty and supreme.
-Mark Twain a.k.a. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910),
"The Revised Catechism"
As
riches grow, care follows, and a thirst
For more and more.
-Horace (65 BC - 8 BC), Latin poet and satirist, from Odes (19 BC)
Our
body has this defect that, the more it is provided care and comforts, the more needs and
desires it finds.
-Teresa of Avila (1515-1582)
All
plenty which is not my God is poverty to me.
-Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
Therefore
I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or
about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than
clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,
and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?
-Jesus quoted in the Gospel according to Matthew
Matthew 6:25-26 from the New Revised Standard version of the Bible
That
happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every
religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American
television set.
-Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant, 1975
The
persistent appeal to covetousness is fundamentally opposed to the unselfishness which was
taught by Jesus Christ and by the New Testament as a whole.
-William Temple (1881-1944), Archbishop of Canterbury
All
the wants which disturb human life, which make us uneasy to ourselves, quarrelsome with
others, and unthankful to God, which weary us in vain labors and foolish anxieties, which
carry us from project to project, from place to place in a poor pursuit of we don't know
what, are the wants which neither God, nor nature, nor reason hath subjected us to, but
are solely infused into us by pride, envy, ambition, and covetousness.
-William Law (1686-1761), A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
To be
satisfied with a little, is the greatest wisdom; and he that increaseth his riches,
increaseth his cares; but a contented mind is a hidden treasure, and trouble findeth it
not.
-Akhenaton? (c. B.C. 1375), Egyptian king of the 18th dynasty
Come
now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches
have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and
their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have
laid up treasure for the last days. Listen! The wages of the laborers who mowed your
fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out, and the cries of the harvesters have
reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in
pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned
and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.
-James (d. c. AD 62) in the epistle of James 5:1-6 c. 48 A.D.
from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
We'll
hold the distinction of being the only Nation in the history of the world that ever went
to the poor house in an automobile.
-Will Rogers (1879-1935)
It is
wrong to assume that men of immense wealth are always happy.
-John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937), quoted in The Age of the Moguls
Side
by side with the miseries of underdevelopment...we find ourselves up against a form of
superdevelopment, equally inadmissable. This superdevelopment consists in an excessive
availability of material goods for the benefit of certain social groups and makes people
slaves of "possession" and immediate gratification, with no other horizon than
the multiplication or continual replacement of the things already owned with others still
better. This is the civilization of consumption, or "consumerism," which
involves so much throwing away and waste.
-Pope John Paul II excerpts from public statements
compiled by the Christian Society of the Green Cross, 1996
A
faithful man will be richly blessed, but one eager to get rich will not go unpunished.
-Proverbs 28:20 from New International Version of the Bible
Christmas
is a school for consumerism - in it we learn to equate delight with materialism. We
celebrate the birth of One who told us to give everything to the poor by giving each other
motorized tie racks.
-Bill McKibben, Christianity Today, 12/96
All of
us experience the sad effects of blind submission to consumerism. In the first place it
represents crass materialism. At the same time it represents a radical dissatisfaction
because one quickly learns that the more one possesses, the more one wants, while deeper
aspirations remain unsatisfied and perhaps even stifled.
-Pope John Paul II excerpts from public statements
compiled by the Christian Society of the Green Cross, 1996
Too
many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress
people they don't like.
-Will Rogers (1879-1935)
Heaven help a timid child in a trendy tide
He really doesn't know
That his heart's being taken for a ride
Doing what the world lays down
As a steadfast rule
And changing when the world says to change
Like a steadfast fool
Heaven heaven help me
I'm one of the dominoes
Chain reaction coming
Blow by blow
-Mark Heard (1952-1992), One Of The Dominoes 1981
Why do
we, in fact, almost all of us, desire to increase our incomes? It may seem, at first
sight, as though material goods were what we desire. But, in fact, we desire these mainly
in order to impress our neighbors. When a man moves into a larger house in a more genteel
quarter, he reflects that "better" people will call on his wife, and some
unprosperous cronies of former days can be dropped. When he sends his son to a good school
or an expensive university, he consoles himself for the heavy fees by thoughts of the
social kudos to be gained. In every big city, whether of Europe or of America, houses in
some districts are more expensive than equally good houses in other districts, merely
because they are more fashionable. One of the most powerful of all our passions is the
desire to be admired and respected. As things stand, admirations and respect are given to
the man who seems to be rich. This is the chief reason why people wish to be rich. The
actual goods purchased by their money play quite a secondary role.
-John Russell (1792-1878), Sceptical Essays
quoted in Wisdom, Multnomah Press
You do
not consider, money never stays with me: it would burn me if it did. I throw it out of my
hands as soon as possible, lest it should find a way into my heart.
-John Wesley (1703-1791), Letters, Letter to Mrs. Hall, 6 Oct 1768
The
possessions God allows us to have are intended for our use, not our enjoyment. Trying to
squeeze something out of them that was never in them in the first place is a futile
endeavor. A cow's udders, gently pressed, will yield sweet milk, nourishing and
refreshing. Applying more and more pressure will not produce greater quantities of milk.
We lose the good of material things by expecting too much from them. Those who try hardest
to please themselves with earthly goods find the least satisfaction in them.
-William Gurnall, Puritan author, The Christian in Complete Armour, 1655
'Tis a
gift to be simple
'Tis a gift to be free
'Tis a gift to come down where you ought to be
And when we find ourselves in the place just right
It will be in the valley of love and delight
When
the true simplicity is gained
To bow and to bend we shall not be ashamed
To turn, turn will be our delight
'Til by turning, turning we come round right
-Shaker hymn
Too
many commercials, too many lies
Too many celebrities I don't recognize
Too many brand names, too many magazines
I got so much sensation, I can't feel a thing
Simple living
Got to get to simple living
Simple living
Simple... simply living
Too many things we just throw away
If we put it in the garbage, we're gonna eat it someday
We turn on the lights and a river dies
We turn the TV on to see an eagle fly
-Fred Small, Simple Living, Everything Possible, 1993
Live
your life so that whenever you lose, you are ahead.
-Will Rogers (1879-1935)
It is
not because food, clothes and property are inherently evil that Christians today must
lower their standard of living. It is because others are starving. Creation is good. But
the one who gave us this gorgeous token of his affection has asked us to share it with our
sisters and brothers.
-Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger, 1977
Modern
society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at
its lifestyle. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and
consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these attitudes cause.
Simplicity, moderation and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become part
of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a
few.
-Pope John Paul II excerpts from public statements
compiled by the Christian Society of the Green Cross, 1996
The
one who dies with the most toys wins
-U.S. bumper sticker
To
have what we want is riches, but to be able to do without is power.
-George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scottish novelist
Not he
who has little, but he who wishes for more, is poor.
-Lucius Annaeus Seneca (5 BC – 65 AD)
The
individual is denuded of everything but appetites, desires, and tastes, wrenched from any
context of human obligation or commitment. It is a process of mutilation; and once this
has been achieved, we are offered the consolation of reconstituting the abbreviated
humanity out of the things and the goods around us, and the fantasies and vapors which
they emit. A sense of self has to be sought in the parade of images and products; and this
culture becomes the main determinant upon morality, beliefs, and purpose, usurping more
and more territory that formerly belonged to parents, teachers, community, priests, and
politics alike.
-Jeremy Seabrook, What Went Wrong?
Why Hasn't Having More Made People Happier?, 1978
It was
only in the late nineteenth century and then the twentieth century, with the maturation of
consumer capitalism, that a shift was made toward the cultivation of unbounded desire. We
must appreciate this to realize that late modern consumption, consumption as we now know
it, is not fundamentally about materialism or the consumption of physical goods. Affluence
and consumer-oriented capitalism have moved us well beyond the undeniable efficiencies and
benefits of refrigeration and indoor plumbing. Instead, in a fun-house world of
ever-proliferating wants and exquisitely unsatisfied desire, consumption entails most
profoundly the cultivation of pleasure, the pursuit of novelty, and the chasing after
illusory experiences associated with material goods.
-Rodney Clapp, "Why the Devil Takes Visa," Christianity Today,10/96
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume
and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,
where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For
where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
-Jesus quoted in the Gospel according to Matthew
Matthew 6:19-21 from the New Revised Standard version of the Bible
With
breathtaking rapidity, we are destroying all that was lovely to look at and turning
America into a prison house of the spirit. The affluent society, with relentless
single-minded energy, is turning our cities, most of suburbia and most of our roadways
into the most affluent slum on earth.
-Eric Sevareid, journalist (1912-1992)
We do
this ecological evil because we believe it to be spiritually good. We do this because,
looking at it from a carefully constructed social and economic perspective, we find
fundamental spiritual meaning and satisfaction in it; it is our symbol of being
"number one" and blessed by God.
-William H. Becker in "Ecological Sin," Theology Today, 1992
To me,
an economy that sees the life of a community or a place as expendable, and reckons its
value only in terms of money, is not acceptable because it is not realistic. I am
thinking as I believe we must think if we wish to discuss the best uses of people,
places, and things, and if we wish to give affection some standing in our thoughts.
-Wendell Berry, What Are People For?, 1990
A man
is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Walden, 1854
Death
and Destruction are never satisfied, and neither are the eyes of man.
-Proverb 27:20 from the New International Version of the Bible
The economy is still substantially that of the fur trade,
still based on the same general kinds of commercial items: technology,
weapons, ornaments, novelties, and drugs. The one great difference is that by now the revolution has
deprived the mass of consumers of any independent access to the staples
of life: clothing, shelter, food, even water. Air access remains the only necessity that the average user can
still get for himself, and the revolution has imposed a heavy tax on
that by way of pollution. Commercial
conquest is far more thorough and final than military defeat.
-Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America,” The
Unsettling of America 1977
Modern
capitalism has created a world totally different from anything known before. Previous ages
have assumed that resources are limited and that economics - housekeeping - is about how
to distribute them fairly, Since Adam Smith, we have learned to assume that exponential
growth is the basic law of economics and that no limits can be set to it. The result is
that increased production has become an end to itself; products are designed to become
rapidly obsolete so as to make room for more production; a minority is ceaselessly urged
to multiply its wants in order to keep the process going while the majority lacks the
basic necessities for existence; and the whole ecosystem upon which human life depends is
threatened with destruction. Growth is for the sake of growth and is not determined by any
overarching social purpose. And that, of course, is an exact account of the phenomenon
which, when it occurs in the human body, is called cancer.
-Lesslie Newbigin (1909-1998), Foolishness to the Greeks, 1986
If we
were built, what were we built for? ...Why do we have this amazing collection of sinews,
senses, and sensibilities? Were we really designed in order to recline on the couch,
extending our wrists perpendicular to the floor so we can flick through the television's
offerings? Were we really designed in order to shop some more so the economy can grow some
more? Or were we designed to experience the great epiphanies that come from contact with
each other and with the natural world? Were we designed to witness the goodness all around
us, and to protect and nourish it? Just as "the environment" is a context, not
an issue, so is "consumption." It defines at the moment who we are - and who we
aren't.
-Bill McKibben, Christianity Today, December '96
Irresponsible
spending is the scandal of Christian America, in the face of the world's need. The
American standard of living has risen to unprecedented heights, although a large portion
of the world exists on a sub-human level. Philanthropy, as we practice it, is not enough
--- although the word philanthropy actually means brotherhood. Our stewardship of God's
goods requires that we administer in God's name -- that is, with full awareness that the
world is His and that His love is directed toward us no more fully than toward every man.
- Rachel Henderlite, A Call to Faith
How
does God's love abide in anyone who has the world's goods and sees a brother or sister in
need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in
truth and action.
-the Apostle John (c. A.D. 100)
1 John 3:17-18 from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible
We can
be content with simplicity because the deepest most satisfying delights God gives us
through creation are free gifts from nature and from loving relationships with people.
After your basic needs are met, accumulated money begins to diminish your capacity for
these pleasures rather than increase them. Buying things contributes absolutely nothing to
the heart's capacity for joy.
-John Piper, Desiring God, 1989
Simplicity
in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an
ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs,
townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a
deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and
superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar.
-David E. Shi, The Simple Life, 1985
The
praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown literally afraid to be
poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner
life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we
deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what
the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material
attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we
are and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly
- the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape.
-William James (1842-1910), Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902
The
most outstanding characteristic of Eastern civilization is to know contentment, whereas
that of Western civilization is not to know contentment. Contented Easterners are
satisfied with their simple life and therefore do not seek to increase their material
enjoyment... They are satisfied with their present lot and environment and therefore do
not want to conquer nature but merely be at home with nature and at peace with their lot.
-Hu Shih (1891-1962) La Juenesse Nouvelle, April 1918
However
mean your life is, meet it and live it: do not shun it and call it hard names. Cultivate
poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things,
whether clothes or friends. Things do not change, we change. Sell your clothes and keep
your thoughts.
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Turn
my heart toward your statutes and not toward selfish gain.
Turn my eyes away from worthless things; preserve my life according to your word.
-Psalm 119:36-37 from the New International Version of the Bible
We,
all of us in the First World, have participated in something of a binge, a half century of
unbelievable prosperity and ease. We may have had some intuition that it was a
binge and the earth couldn't support it, but aside from the easy things (biodegradable
detergent, slightly smaller cars) we didn't do much. We didn't turn our lives around to
prevent it. Our sadness is almost an aesthetic response - appropriate because we have
marred a great, mad, profligate work of art, taken a hammer to the most perfectly
proportioned of sculptures.
-Bill McKibben, The End of Nature, 1989
I
am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the
circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I
have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or
hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me
strength.
-the Apostle Paul (c.A.D. 5-67)
Letter to the Philippians 4:11-13, the New International Version of the Bible
