by John de Graaf; David Wann; Thomas H Naylor; David Horsey; Vicki Robin
They’d forgotten the dirt, the strained muscles, the bite of the mosquitoes. But they remembered with deep fondness the camaraderie and the feeling they had that they were “building America,” creating work of true and lasting value that would be enjoyed by generations yet unborn. The sense of pride in their CCC accomplishments was still palpable sixty years later.1
THE MAN WHO PLANTED TREES
Twenty-five years ago, John Beal was working as an engineer with the Boeing Company when heart problems forced him to take some time off work. To improve his health, he walked frequently near his home. His strolls took him past a stream called Hamm Creek, a tiny rivulet that descends from the hills of southwest Seattle and joins the Duwamish River, an industrial waterway emptying into Puget Sound. Beal knew that in years past, schools of salmon came up the Duwamish to spawning grounds on Hamm Creek.
But in 1980 the creek was barren of fish. The evergreen forests that once lined its banks had all been stripped away. Industries dumped waste into the creek and garbage lined its banks. John Beal set out to change that. “If we could restore Hamm Creek, in the most polluted part of the city of Seattle,” he says he felt at the time, “we could demonstrate that it could be done anywhere.”2
He worked actively, and successfully, to stop companies from polluting the creek, and hauled out tons of garbage. Then, over the next decade and a half, he planted trees, thousands of them. He restored natural ponds and waterfalls and spawning beds. At first he worked alone, but in time other people began to help. Some newspaper articles and a couple of TV reports attracted more. Beal showed them how to restore the watershed.
The salmon came back, each year a few more until the run is now nearly healthy again. Beal has never been paid for his efforts, though public donations cover his expenses. But he has, he says, been richly compensated by the satisfaction he feels from having made a real difference for Hamm Creek and his community. “That’s my reward, that’s how I get paid,” Beal concludes.
What John Beal, the men of the CCC, and the countless other people who give to their communities have in common is the understanding that meaningful activity matters more than money and that, indeed, it is better to give than receive. They’ve learned that fulfillment comes from such efforts. But in our consumer society they are becoming exceptions.
The more Americans fill their lives with things, the more they tell psychiatrists, pastors, friends, and family members that they feel “empty” inside. The more toys our kids have to play with, the more they complain of boredom. Two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ predicted they would feel that way. What profit would it bring a person, he asked his followers (Matthew 16:26), were that person to gain the whole world, but lose his soul? In the Age of Affluenza, that question is seldom asked, at least not publicly. It should be.
POVERTY OF THE SOUL
When Mother Teresa came to the United States to receive an honorary degree, she said, “This is the poorest place I’ve ever been in my life,” recounts Robert Seiple, the former director of World Vision, a Christian charity organization. “She wasn’t talking about economics, mutual funds, Wall Street, the ability to consume,” he adds. “She was talking about poverty of the soul.”3
Shortly before he died of a brain tumor, Republican campaign strategist Lee Atwater made a confession. “The ’80s,” he said, “were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty.” He warned that there was “a spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, a tumor of the soul.”4
In all the great religious traditions, human beings are seen as having a purpose in life. Stripped to its essentials, it is to serve God by caring for God’s creations and our fellow human beings. Happy is the man or woman whose work and life energies serve those ends, who finds a “calling” or “right livelihood” that allows his or her talents to serve the common good. In none of those traditions is purpose to be found in simply accumulating things, or power, or pleasure—or in “looking out for number one.”
One seldom hears work described as a calling anymore. Work may be “interesting” and “creative” or dull and boring. It may bring status or indifference—and not in any sense in relation to its real value. Our lives are disrupted far more severely when garbage collectors stop working than when ball players do. Work may bring great monetary rewards or bare subsistence. But we almost never ask what it means and what it serves. For most, though certainly not all of us, if it makes money, that’s reason enough. Why do it? Simple. It pays.
Consider, for example, the handsomely compensated professionals who design the hyper-violent video game advertisements that so alarmed Caroline Sawe (described in chapter 7). Undoubtedly, most would describe their jobs as “fun” and certainly “creative,” allowing them to continually imagine new ideas for effective promotions (double meaning intended). Nothing rote about such work. Comfortable surroundings? No doubt. Flexible hours? Probably, if long ones. A certain smug self-satisfaction at being smart, effective manipulators, able to come up with oh-so-clever copy like “More fun than shooting your neighbor’s cat.” “I love my job,” they’d be likely to tell you if you asked them.
Then consider the designers of the games themselves. All the same satisfactions apply, plus even higher levels of financial remuneration—enough to purchase Ferraris, Porsches, and mansions. A few admit they would never let their own children use the products (or, in the case of purveyors of movie violence, see the films) that they make and market to other people’s children. But stop making them? Not when the rewards are what they are.
Gain the world, lose the soul.
That such professionals can “enjoy” their work without the slightest qualms about its ultimate value or consequences surely testifies to the effective repression of questions about meaning and purpose in our modern economy. These privileged workers do not ache—not outwardly, at least. Or perhaps the rewards they receive—money, stimulation, power, status—for their morally dubious products act like morphine to deaden any pangs of regret.
UNDER THE SMILE BUTTONS
But millions of other Americans do hunger for meaning. That’s what Dr. Michael Lerner, a rabbi and writer, found when he worked in a “stress clinic” for working families in Oakland, California. Along with his co-workers, Lerner originally “imagined that most Americans are motivated primarily by material self-interest. So we were surprised that these middle Americans often experience more stress from feeling that they are wasting their lives doing meaningless work than from feeling that they are not making enough money.”5
Lerner and his colleagues brought groups of working people from various occupations together to talk with each other about their lives. “At first, most of the people we talked to wanted to reassure us, as they assured their co-workers and friends, that everything was fine, that they were handling things well, that they never let stress get to them, and that their lives were good.” It was, he says, the kind of response that pollsters usually get when they ask people superficial questions about life satisfaction. But in time, as participants in the groups felt more comfortable being honest about their emotions, a different pattern of responses emerged.
“We found middle-income people deeply unhappy because they hunger to serve the common good and to contribute something with their talents and energies, yet find that their actual work gives them little opportunity to do so,” Lerner writes. “They often turn to demands for more money as a compensation for a life that otherwise feels frustrating and empty.”
“It is perhaps this fear of no longer being needed in a world of needless things that most clearly spells out the unnaturalness, the surreality, of much that is called work today,” wrote Studs Terkel in his best-seller Working. Perhaps feelings such as those described by Lerner and Terkel have led to one of the most disturbing of contemporary American statistics: The rate of clinical depression in the United States today is ten times what it
was before 1945. Over any given year, nearly half of American adults suffer from clinical depression, anxiety disorders, or other mental illnesses. By contrast, Old Order Amish, who avoid most of the amenities of our society, suffer from depression less than a fifth as often. Millions of Americans dull their psychic pain with Prozac and other drugs.6 The use of antidepressants tripled during the past decade.7 As Americans increasingly fall victim to affluenza, feelings of depression, anxiety, and lowered self-esteem are likely to become even more prevalent. Such a prediction finds scientific support in a series of recent studies carried out by two professors of psychology, Tim Kasser and Richard Ryan. They compared individuals whose primary aspirations were financial with others who were oriented toward lives of community service and strong relationships with other people.
Their conclusions were unequivocal: Those individuals for whom accumulating wealth was a primary aspiration “were associated with less self-actualization, less vitality, more depression and more anxiety.” Their studies, they wrote, “demonstrated the deleterious consequences of having money as an important guiding principle in life.”8
CHANGING STUDENT VALUES
Kasser and Ryan’s studies confirm the wisdom of religious traditions that warn about the dangers of preoccupation with wealth. But such wisdom has been falling on deaf ears for quite some time now. In 1962, when Tom Hayden penned the Port Huron Statement, the founding manifesto of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), he declared, “The main and transcending concern of the university must be the unfolding and refinement of the moral, aesthetic and logical capacities” to help students find “a moral meaning in life.”9
“Loneliness, estrangement and isolation describe the vast distance between man and man today,” Hayden wrote. “These dominant tendencies cannot be overcome by better personnel management, nor by improved gadgets, but only when a love of man overcomes the idolatrous worship of things by man.”
During the ’60s, calls such as Hayden’s for a meaningful life of service to the world—responding in part to John F Kennedy’s inaugural admonition to “ask not what your country can do for you; ask, rather, what you can do for your country”— inspired tens of thousands of students. Oral historian Studs Terkel, while acknowledging some of the youthful excesses of the ’60s (the drugs, the foul language, the casual sex), says that what he remembers most about that decade was symbolized by an episode during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, when police chased antiwar demonstrators through Grant and Lincoln parks, clubbing and gassing them.
Terkel was observing the demonstration with James Cameron, a British journalist, when all of a sudden the police sent a volley of tear gas their way. “We were scurrying away, the tears running down, and as I was stumbling, a canister of tear gas fell at my feet,” Terkel recalls. “And I’ll never forget this little goofy hippie kid with long blond locks. He kicks the tear gas away from Cameron and me and toward himself. Toward himself. He saves us from the gas! That kid’s gesture was really what the sixties was all about. They had causes outside themselves. Civil rights. Vietnam. That’s what the sixties was all about.” 10
The dreams of college students have changed markedly since then.
A little more than a decade ago, when Thomas taught at Duke University, he asked students to outline their goals. Above all, they wanted money, power, and things—very big things, including vacation homes, expensive foreign automobiles, yachts, and even airplanes. Their request of faculty members like himself:“Teach me to be a money-making, money-spending machine.” The most common thing he remembers Duke students saying to each other was, “I can’t believe how drunk I got last night.” Alcohol abuse—and particularly binge drinking—is an increasing problem on American campuses. Alcohol-related deaths, injuries, and poisoning are common. Students now spend nearly $6 billion a year on booze, more than they spend on all other beverages and their books combined.11
Apparently, it takes a lot of alcohol to fill an empty soul.
WHEN LEFT AND RIGHT AGREED
These days, critics of the emptiness of the consumer lifestyle come most often from the political left. But that wasn’t always so. Before Reagan, many conservatives hadn’t yet hitched their star completely to libertarian, free-market worship. Prominent conservative philosophers and economists were often as critical of consumerism as were their leftist counterparts, suggesting that it led to lives without meaning.
Wilhelm Ropke was one of the giants of traditional conservative economic thought. “Homo sapiens consumens loses sight of everything that goes to make up human happiness apart from money income and its transformation into goods,” Ropke wrote in 1957. Those who fall into the “keeping up with the Joneses” lifestyle, he argued, “lack the genuine and essentially non-material conditions of simple human happiness. Their existence is empty, and they try to fill this emptiness somehow.”12
Long before Enron, WorldCom, and other scandals involving corporate greed, Ropke posed powerful questions about the moral direction of consumer society:
Are we not living in an economic world, or as R. H. Tawney says, in an “acquisitive society” which unleashes naked greed, fosters Machiavellian business methods and, indeed allows them to become the rule, drowns all higher motives in the “icy water of egotistical calculation”(to borrow from the Communist Manifesto), and lets people gain the world but lose their souls? Is there any more certain way of desiccating the soul of man than the habit of constantly thinking about money and what it can buy? Is there a more potent poison than our economic system’s all-pervasive commercialism?”13
In A Humane Economy, Ropke pointed out that in a capitalist society (which, as a conservative, he strongly supported), it is all the more important for each individual to ask questions about the moral value of his or her activities and not merely be carried along by market currents. Without such vigilance, he suggested, life would become hollow. “Life is not worth living,” he wrote, “if we exercise our profession only for the sake of material success and do not find in our calling an inner necessity and a meaning that transcends the mere earning of money, a meaning which gives our life dignity and strength.”14
STANDARDIZED PEOPLE
Perhaps the best explanation of how the pursuit of material aims leads to meaningless, perpetually bored lives was provided by another conservative, the philosopher Ernest van den Haag.
First, he pointed out, mass production, which makes the universal consumer lifestyle possible, drives large numbers of people out of more varied occupations as artisans and small farmers, and agglomerates them in factories, where the division of labor reduces the scope of their activities to a few repetitive motions. Their work offers neither variety nor control.
In time, their output is sufficient enough, and their organized demands effective enough, that they begin to share in the material fruits of their labor. But to provide the quantity of goods that makes that possible, they must accept mass-produced, and therefore standardized, products. “The benefits of mass production,” van den Haag wrote, “are reaped only by matching de-individualizing work with equally de-individualizing consumption.” Therefore, he argued, “Failure to repress individual personality in or after working hours is costly; in the end, the production of standardized things by persons also demands the production of standardized persons [emphasis ours].”15
De-individualization, the result of material progress itself, cannot help but strip life of both meaning and inherent interest. The worker-consumer is vaguely dissatisfied, restless, and bored, and these feelings are reinforced by advertising, which deliberately attempts to exploit them by offering new products as a way out. Consumer products and the mass media—itself made possible only by ads for consumer products—“drown the shriek of unused capacities, of repressed individuality,” leaving us either “listless or perpetually restless,” declared van den Haag. The products and the media distract us from the soul’s cry for truly meaningful activities.
The individual who finds no opportuni
ty for self-chosen, meaningful expression of inner resources and personality, said van den Haag, suffers “an insatiable longing for things to happen. The external world is to supply these events to fill the emptiness. The popular demand for ‘inside’ stories, for vicarious sharing of the private lives of ‘personalities’ rests on the craving for private life—even someone else’s— of those who are dimly aware of having none whatever, or at least no life that holds their interest.”16
What the bored person really craves is a meaningful, authentic life. The ads suggest that such a life comes in products or packaged commercial experiences. But religion and the science of psychology say it’s more likely to be found in such things as service to others, relationships with friends and family, connection with nature, and work of intrinsic moral value.
AFTER AFFLUENZA
Our technologically advanced culture offers opportunities for much more meaningful and creative lives than most of us lead. Our amazingly productive technologies could allow all of us to spend less time doing repetitive, standardized work, or work whose products bring us little pride, by allowing us to trade increased wages for reduced working hours.
Such choices would allow more time for freely chosen, voluntary, often unpaid work that enhances our relationships and communities and/or allows us to express more fully our talents and creativity (like the restoration work of John Beal). And such choices would allow us more time to find meaning and joy in the beauty and wonders of nature, in the delightful play of children, or in the restoration of our damaged environment. They would give us time to think about what really matters to us, and how we really want to use the remaining years of our lives.
CHAPTER 10
Social scars
Today’s unfettered celebration of wealth and the