INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN PERSON

2ND QUARTER

TOPIC: The Human Person and Society

LESSON TITLE: The Consumer Society

Introduction
One of the most visible and salient aspect of contemporary society is the ways is
which human manage to consume products which he/she uses in daily living. This
includes selling, buying, using and disposing of products and service. This essential
activity of human has significantly transformed the structural and cultural make-up in
comparison to earlier society. The culture of consumption has spread to other social
spheres, affecting social relationship and changing our understanding of the nature of
human beings and praxis.

The Beginning of Consumer Society

Although consumption and production as an activity of humans took place long before
the onset of agrarian society, cultural historians pointed out that consumerism
made its transformation during the early period of 20th century. Today the transformative
impact of consumerism is globally felt in modern society which cultural historians called
postmodern society. To trace the development of consumer society, Miller et al. (1998:1–7)
identify three stages of the development of consumer society. The first stage started in the
1960s and ended in the late 1970s with the decline of industrial jobs and traditional
working-class culture in Western societies. The second stage of consumption, w h i c h
lasted from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. During t h i s st a ge , c o n s u m p t i o n became
u n d e r s t o o d a s a way individual constructed their identities and was acknowledged as a
key component of industrialization, not simply a consequence of it (Slater 1997). This neglect
of production started to be rectified in the early 1990s and continues today during the
third stage of consumption studies, which connects the actions of consumers to the
treatment of workers and the effects of production and consumption on the environment.
Ethical and moral considerations are now being addressed more frequently, including the
idea that consumers are citizens who can engage in political and social activism through
the marketplace.

Creating the Culture of Consumption

The consumer did not, of course, appear full blown in some industrialized countries
during the early twentieth century. Merchants in United States, Great Britain, France and
elsewhere were concerned that more goods were being produced than could be sold. But
merchants generally paid little attention to how goods were marketed or presented,
assuming that when people needed their products, they would buy them. It was this
attitude in the United States of a century ago that was to undergo a profound change.
The change did not occur naturally. In fact, the culture of nineteenth-century America
e m p h a s i z e d not unlimited consumption but moderation and self-denial.

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People, workers in particular, were expected to be frugal and save their money;
spending, particularly on luxuries, was seen as “wasteful.” People purchased only necessities
– basic foodstuffs, clothing, household utensils, and appliances – or shared basic items
when they could.

According to anthropologists, the accumulation of goods is not a natural behavior of

human in society. For them, there are societies in which such accumulation is discouraged.
Human beings do not have the innate drive to accumulate commodities; again, there
are plenty of societies in which such accumulation is discouraged. People are not driven
to work; in fact, contrary to popular notions, members of capitalist culture work far
more than, say, people who live by gathering and hunting. But it is interesting to ask,
how does culture, as anthropologist use the term, encourage people to behave in some
ways and not in the others? Specifically, how does the culture of capitalism
encourage the accumulation of profit, wages, and commodities? How does it, in effect,
encourage perpetual growth and what counts to perpetual change?

As we mentioned earlier that consumption on the scale evident in capitalist culture is

unprecedented and is not natural. That is, there is no innate desire in human beings
to acquire an ever-greater quantity of stuff.

The early 20th century had created a new type of person and a new culture: the
consumer and the consumer culture respectively. As a result of the efficiency of production
brought about by the technological advancement in the industrial age, the supply of
goods far exceeds the existing demands of early industrial societies. Thus, a culture
that promotes consumption was eventually established.

The Character of Consumer Society

The culture of capitalism is devoted to encouraging the production and sale of
commodities. For capitalists, the culture encourages the accumulation of profit; for laborers,
it encourages the accumulation of wages; for consumers, it encourages the accumulation of
goods. In other words, capitalism defines sets of people who, behaving according to
a set of learned rules, act as they must act. What are the factors that brought to
the affluent behaviors of people to desire to consume beyond they need? What are the
major transformations brought by this new culture to the aspiration of individuals, the
institutions, spiritual and intellectual values? These questions will be answered in the
following.

Factors that Brought the Behavior of Consumerism

1. Marketing Strategy.
Marketing and advertising were the revolutionary developments that influenced the
creation of the consumer. In marketing, the emergence of the department store as a major
retail establishment meant that retailers began to pay attention to how products were
presented to the public. According to Miller, the displays of commodities helped define

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bourgeoisie culture, converting the culture, values, attitudes, and aspirations of the
bourgeoisie into goods, thus shaping and transforming them (Miller 1994).

Another addition to the marketing strategy was service, which included not only
consumer credit (charge accounts and installment buying) but also to fawn over
consumers. Customer became guest. William Leach suggested that service may have been
one of the most important features of the new consumer society. It helped, he said, mask
inequality, poverty, and labor conflicts that were very much a part of the United States at
this point of history. If one wanted to understand how consumer society developed, Leach
said, one could look at the rise of service.

2. Advertising
The goal of the advertisers was to aggressively shape consumer desires and create
value in commodities by imbuing them with power to transform the consumer into more
desirable person. Today, advertising plays such a ubiquitous part in our lives that we
scarcely notice it, even when it is engraved or embroidered on our clothing. Another
boom to merchandising is the idea of fashion: the stirring up of anxiety and restlessness
over the possession of things that were not “new” or “up-to- date”. Fashion pressured people
to buy not out of need but for style – from a desire to conform to what others defined as
“fashionable.”

3. Major Institutions

The second way in which individuals buying habits were changed was through a
transformation of the major institutions in industrial society, each redefining its function to
include the promotion of consumption. Educational and cultural institutions, government
agencies, financial institutions, and even the family itself changed their meaning and
function to promote the consumption of commodities.

a. Education: In the twentieth century, American schools and universities began to

introduce design or arts-in-industry and began to prepare students to work in emerging
sales and design industries and in the large department stores. The University of
Pennsylvania’s Wharton School for Business and the Harvard School for Business
introduced programs in accounting (virtually nonexistent before then), marketing, and sales.
In 1919, New York School of Retailing opened; in the mid-1920s, Harvard and
Stanford University established graduate business schools as did such schools as
Northwestern, Michigan, California, and Wisconsin soon after. Today, there are virtually no
two-year or four-year colleges that do not offer some sort of business curriculum.

b. Museums also redefined their mission to accommodate the growth of the consumer
culture. The American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
Manhattan, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Newark Museum, all heavily endowed by
wealthy patrons such as J.P. Morgan, began to make alliances with business.

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 c. Government. The second set of institutions to aid in the development of
consumer culture were agencies of the governments. The state, as an entity, had long taken
a lively interest in commerce within its borders. But prior to the twentieth century, the
state’s concern focused largely on the manufacture of commodities, the organization of
business, the control of labor, and the movement of goods. It wasn’t until the twentieth
century that state agency began to concern themselves with the consumption end of the
business cycle. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that the government did more
to create the consumer than did any other institution.

d. Labor. Another step in creating a consumer was to give the worker more
buying power. The advantage of this from the economic perspective is not easy to see.
From the point of view of an industrialist or an employer, the ideal situation would be to
pay as low a wage possible to keep production cost down and increase profits. However,
each producer of goods would prefer other producers to pay high wages, which would
allow other producers’ workers to buy more products.

In addition to the money coming from higher wages, buying power was increased
by the expansion of credit. Credit, of course, is essential for economic growth and
consumerism because it means that people, corporations, and governments can
purchase goods and services with only a promise to pay for them at some future date.
Furthermore, whenever credit is extended – whether it be a store, a bank, a corporation, a
person, or a government – in effect, money has been created, and more buying power has
been introduced into the economy.

4. Spiritual and Intellectual Values

In addition to changing marketing techniques and modified societal

institutions that stimulated consumption, there had to be a change in spiritual and
intellectual values from an emphasis on such values as thrift, modesty, and moderation
toward a value system that encouraged spending and ostentatious display. In the United
States, T.J. Jackson Lears argued that, from 1880 to 1930, it underwent a transformation
of values from those that emphasized frugality and self- denial to those that sanctioned
periodic leisure, compulsive spending, and individual fulfillment (Lears 1983).

This shifts from values, said Lears, was facilitated in American life by a new therapeutic
ethos, an emphasis on physical and psychological health. This shift was promoted in part
by the growth of health professions and the popularity of psychology, along with the
increasing autonomy and alienation felt by individuals as America ceased being a land of
small towns and became increasingly urban. Advertisers capitalized on these changes
by altering the way products were advertised; rather than emphasizing the nature of
the product itself, they began to emphasize the alleged effects of the products and its promise
of richer, fuller life. Instead of simply being good soap, shoes, or deodorant, a product

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would contribute to the buyer’s psychological, physical, or social well-being (Lears
1983:19).

Clothing, perfumes, deodorant, and so on would provide the means of achieving love;
alcoholic beverages would provide the route to friendship; the proper automobile tires or
insurance policy would provide the means of meeting family responsibilities. Commodities
would be the source of satisfaction and a vital means of self-expression.

In the late nineteenth century, a series of religious movements emerged that became
known as mind cure religions. William James, in his classic 1902 book, Varieties of
Religious Experience, drew attention to the mind cure movements, although he was
not the first to use the term. Those movements – New Thought, Unity, Christian
Science, and Theosophy, among others – maintained that people could simply, by an
act of will and conviction, cure their own illness and create a heaven on earth. These
movements were, as Leach (1993:225) phrased it, “wish- oriented, optimistic, sunny, the
epitome of cheer and self-confidence, and completely lacking in anything resembling a tragic
view of life.” There was no sin, no evil, no darkness, only, as one mind curer said, “the
sunlight of health.”

These movements held that salvation would occur in this life and not in the afterlife.
Mind cure dismissed the ideas of sin and guilt. God became a divine force, a healing
power. These new religions made fashionable the idea that, in the world of goods, men and
women could find a paradise free from pain and suffering; they could find, as one historian
of religion put it, the “good” through “goods.”

References
Martinez, Alejandro Nestor Garcia. ed. BeingHuman in a Consumer Society. Surrey, England:
Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2015, pp. xv -

Robins, Richard H. Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism. New York: Pearson
Education, Inc., 2005. (p. 13)

Widenhoft, Wendy Muphy. Consumer Culture a n d Society. London: Sage

Publications, 2017.

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