Le Matérialisme, C’est les Autres

Ho-hum. It’s that time of year again. The time when all the good folks on the Net who have been bragging all year about all their nice stuff start sermonizing about the evils of materialism.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m unsympathetic to such sermons. The older I get, the more obvious it becomes that there should be a lot more to one’s life than just having nice stuff. After all, the last time I was in the hospital, I wasn’t comforted all that much by all the books I owned or my VCR or even my PC. But a simple visit from a friend or relative would mean a lot to me. And despite the fact that I often like to fancy myself a loner, there’s a part of me that deeply craves the comfort of human company. Thus a simple home-made breakfast with my former bride-to-be meant more to me than any dinner I could order on my own at the fanciest restaurant in town. And I had more respect for the single mom I knew who had no desire to spend her money on a DVD player when her old VCR would entertain her kids just as well than I did for all those people who owned the latest techno-gadget.

So why am I so cynical about the anti-materialism crowd? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that most anti-materialism sermons don’t really concern materialism per se. They only concern other people’s materialism. To paraphrase French writer Jean-Paul Sartre, le matérialisme, c’est les autres (materialism is other people). Thus we get endless lectures about how awful it is that so many people own big houses and big cars -- from the same people who brag about their new Blu-ray recorder or their new high-definition TV or their new iPod and so on and so forth. Not once do such people rarely acknowledge the fact that not everyone can afford the items they possess. Nor do they show any respect for the traditional notion that it’s in bad taste to brag about all the nice stuff you got. Indeed, it seems as if it’s become more and more popular to brag about being what is called an early adopter (a person who buys an item before it is generally popular). The idea apparently being that the ability to afford the latest such gadget is akin to godliness, and that any acknowledgment of the economic factors that might keep others from purchasing such items -- and that might make bragging about the ownership of such items seem gauche -- should be ignored at all costs.

I don’t pretend that there was ever a Golden Age in which such hypocrisy did not exist. Contrary to popular belief, twentieth-century Americans did not invent materialism nor do we have a monopoly on it. But when you grow up around people who used to be poor and grow up hearing constant lectures on the need to save one’s money and to not buy the latest item, one can’t help but be amused by those anti-materialists who seem to want to have it both ways: to brag about all the nice stuff they have and to attack those other people who have the bad taste to own more nice stuff than they do.

Perhaps that is the reason why I wasn’t so quick to join the crowds of Internet posters who have praised the heck out of anti-materialist movies like American Beauty and Fight Club. Because deep down, I sensed that the makers of those movies -- and all too many of the people who praised them -- weren’t really that sincere about their anti-materialism messages. I wish they were. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to prove that they are.