Why I Buy

Self, Taste, and Consumer Society in America

Rami Gabriel

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781841507774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Power Resources
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Balancing psychological, conceptual and historical analyses with examples drawn from popular culture and mass media, Rami Gabriel traces the ways in which beliefs about the self – including dualism, individualism, and expressivism – influence consumer behaviour. These understandings of the self, Gabriel argues, structure the values that Americans seek and find in consumer society; they therefore have structural consequences for our cultural, political and economic lives. For example, Gabriel describes how imbalances in the institutions of participatory politics have directly resulted from a consumer society centered on powerful nongovernmental institutions and a scattered body of disengaged citizens whose social and individual needs are not primarily satisfied through civic involvement. By exploring the relationship between our individual needs and our institutions, Gabriel ultimately points the way toward transformations that could lead to a more sustaining and sustainable society.

Chapter 1

Dualism: What I Really Am¹

Being a self does not require understanding what the self is. Being a self is automatic; it requires no effort, it is, so to speak, as natural as being your self. And what can be more effortless than that? It is for this reason that the description of the self in contemporary America delivered in this book will be obvious and at the same time, surprising. The characteristics to be described in Part One (the first three chapters) are apparent in our daily activities and are understood, if ever, as the unquestioned way it is. What I will argue is that the way it is, or as it will be referred to, the “default” model of the self, can be described philosophically and traced historically, even as it manifests itself in our practical day-to-day behavior. The self as we know it is very much a product of cultural, social, historical, and psychological factors. Although we observe these factors in daily life as perfectly natural, their roots are deeply enmeshed in the exigencies of the historical past and in the evolved nature of the mind. Part One presents robust explanations of three characteristics of the “default” model of the self in contemporary American society. They comprise the psychological roots of consumer society in the self: a significant reason why we buy.

To be clear, I do not think the self is fully a social construction, rather I believe the form of the self to be a collection of mental processes that are themselves products of evolution.² Nevertheless, I believe that the way the self is manifested in individuals depends upon sociocultural conditions. In a nutshell, my view is that it is human nature to have a self (as described in empirical psychology and evolutionary biology). However, within the limits of biology, the particulars of each self depend upon social conditions. This book describes those very conditions in contemporary America.

A proper description of the dualist aspect of the “default” model of the self necessitates not only philosophical historiography, but also a historical contextualization of the shifts of power and influence that led to the dominance of this particular fundamental system of belief about the nature of reality. This chapter highlights two sets of reasons why our “default” model of the self is metaphysically dualist; the first is philosophical and historical, and the second is psychological research on the innate belief processes of the evolved mind.

The characteristic of the self, described in this chapter, is the most taken for granted because it has been, and continues to be, steeped in the language of an esoteric philosophical analysis about the nature of reality, it is the spiritual dimension of the “default” model of the self. Metaphysical dualism is the claim that reality is constituted of two things (i.e. substances), and that everything in the universe, including us, consists of an admixture of these two things. Metaphysical dualism may be contrasted with metaphysical monism (i.e., the view that the universe consists of one substance), which itself can be broken down into what that substance is. In the case that the one substance is physical, we have metaphysical materialism; in the case that the one substance is nonphysical, we have metaphysical idealism. Although these options do not exhaust the possibilities as to the nature of reality, they have served as dominant approaches in the western philosophical tradition. With respect to the self, metaphysical dualism means the self is a combination of mind (or soul) and body.³ An important tension broached in this chapter is that of the scientific metaphysical materialist approach to the nature of reality (an approach taken by most scientists), and the metaphysical dualism espoused, at least implicitly, by the majority of Americans. This spiritual dimension of the “default” model of the self mediates our deeper metaphysical belief structures, which are important in structuring what we think we really are and what the purpose of our existence is.

Metaphysical dualism is an essential part of western cultural heritage. It has roots in philosophical, religious, sociocultural, and, as will be argued, psychological, sources. It is because of these sources that despite the success of metaphysical materialism, as it is represented through science in so many aspects of modern life (for example, any technology generated through scientific research), metaphysical dualism remains the basis for the American’s ultimate beliefs concerning the nature of reality, including what each of us is at the most fundamental level.

I. The Philosophical and Religious Roots of Dualism

The folk foundations of metaphysical dualism may reside in two consistent features in the lives of Homo sapiens since the origin of the species: dreams and observation of other people’s deaths (Martin & Barresi, 2006). Both dreams and death suggest the possibility of other spheres of existence. More formally, metaphysical dualism also has a specific western philosophical lineage that we shall stroll through presently, originating in the Greek philosopher Pythagoras’ interpretation of the tenets of the ancient Orphic cults and reaching right up to contemporary times.

The father of metaphysical dualism in this western philosophical tradition is Plato (428/427 BC–348/347 BC). In his Phaedo—a dialogue between Socrates and his students in the hours before his death—Plato presents the argument that the soul is not the same thing as the body because the wisdom of the soul is significantly different from knowledge gained through the senses. Plato claims the soul can be separated from the body; this separability makes it possible for the soul to be eternal, a quality that the body, alas, lacks. For Plato, the reasons for positing this separation—this metaphysical dualism—between the soul and the body were as follows: (a) all learning seemed to be a type of recollection such that knowledge must have existed before the body was fully formed, (b) that if everything dies then nothing would live, but things are alive and therefore something, that is, the soul, must be eternal, (c) things that are pure and made of only one material will not break up into parts, for example the soul is one thing and therefore cannot be disintegrated, whereas the body is a complicated amalgam of materials and thus breaks apart at death, (d) the soul is invisible whereas the body is visible, and (e) the soul has access to the unchanging truths of the universe like mathematics, whereas the body only grasps ephemeral sensory knowledge.

The theologian St. Augustine of Hippo (354 CE–430 CE) assimilated Plato’s metaphysical dualism into official church doctrine, giving the separable portion of the human being—the soul—the further function of transcending death by surviving the body in an afterlife. In effect, St. Augustine gave official church doctrine a philosophical grounding for the notion of the soul that was further elaborated by the church fathers in the Middle Ages and now serves as the groundwork for Christianity’s position on the soul (Foley, 2007).

Plato’s student, Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC), the next major metaphysician in the western philosophical tradition, when exploring the nature of reality in De Anima, differentiated between matter, form, and the composite of both. He separated thought from perception and conceptualized the former to reside in eternity rather than in the natural world. While Plato’s separable soul served as a vehicle for the transcendence of death, Aristotle’s conception of the separable element of a human being, namely the ability to think and reflect (what he called nous), does not survive death in an individualized form. For Aristotle it is not a specific thinking being that lives on after death but rather an anonymous ability to think and reflect. This claim, along with his metaphysical monist approach to form and substance, is the reason Aristotle is not considered a metaphysical dualist. Nevertheless, the theologian Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) and the Scholastics took Aristotle’s distinction to mean that the nous is nonphysical and sufficiently different from the body that the former can exist without the latter. This metaphysical dualist position fulfills Aquinas’ project of “faith-seeking understanding” by combining Aristotle’s framework with his own need to explain how the individual soul lives on in eternity with God.⁴

Hundreds of years later, with one foot in the church and the other in the laboratory, the philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Rene Descartes (1596–1650) elaborated a clever and catchy metaphysical dualism that has since captured the imagination of many western thinkers. In the wake of the rise of empirical science, Descartes, using the painstaking method of doubt, adjusted science, religion, and folk intuition into the modern philosophical formulation of metaphysical dualism. Descartes postulated two realms of existence: res extensa, where the laws of the new empirical science of physics applied, and res cogitans, the soul’s abode where the laws of science did not apply.⁵ This metaphysical dualist theory posits two substances: physical and nonphysical, with only the nonphysical being a foundation for truth as demonstrated in his famous adage: I think, therefore I am. Descartes offers an interesting take on Plato’s metaphysical dualist claim that the pure soul, made of only one material, is the eternal home of true unchanging knowledge. According to Descartes, the crucial issue of how two different substances, the mind and the body, interact is easily understood without the need for philosophy or deep meditations! This simple and somewhat flippant explanation has proven the most contentious and unsatisfactory aspect of Descartes’ metaphysical dualism.⁶ A few modern philosophers have attempted to update metaphysical dualism by arguing that res cogitans is not essentially nonphysical but may have a physical dimension (see philosophers Honderich (2004), Lowe (1993), and Popper & Eccles (1977)). In contemporary times, buoyed by the many successes of the scientific empirical approach, metaphysical materialism has become the dominant approach to viewing nature for scientists. The dominance of metaphysical materialism has banished metaphysical dualism from the desks of the majority of professional philosophers. As will be discussed, this strong philosophical rebuttal has not stopped a large proportion of the world’s population from adopting metaphysical dualism. What follows is a possible explanation of why this is the case.

The success and influence of Rene Descartes’ metaphysical dualism (also known as Cartesian dualism) must be understood as both a response to the historical situation of modernity, in particular the clash between science and religion, as well as an explicit formulation of our intuitive grasp of the experience of consciousness. There are two main reasons for the tenacity of Cartesian dualism, despite its disavowal by the majority of professional philosophers. The first is historical: the dominance of Christianity in western society, which holds in its belly Plato’s metaphysical dualism as adapted by St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (among others). This philosophical foundation has made Cartesian dualism compatible with Catholic and Protestant doctrines over the course of western culture, while simultaneously serving as a spiritual response to the nascent metaphysical materialist, scientific account of the universe. As the Catholic and Protestant Churches have been a dominant cultural institution in the western hemisphere, metaphysical dualism has been deemed the orthodox metaphysical position on the nature of the self and soul. The second reason for the tenacity of Cartesian dualism in western thought, I shall argue, is psychological. Recent evidence from experimental psychology reveals that we may innately and intuitively view the world through the lens of metaphysical dualism. Before focusing on these psychological factors (section iii), let us turn to the cultural/historical reasons metaphysical dualism makes up a part of the “default” model of the self in contemporary American society.

II. The Historical and Sociocultural Roots of Metaphysical Dualism

The dominance of Christianity in western culture over the last two millennia ensured the inculcation of metaphysical dualism. The belief that the mind, or soul, and the body are separate substances was a cornerstone of Catholic, and subsequently Protestant, doctrine because it explained how an individual could survive death (Martin & Barresi, 2006). In response to the rise of science in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church turned to metaphysical dualism, such as that articulated by Descartes, to preserve a space for the soul in the face of the encroachment of science’s metaphysical materialist natural world of cause-and-effect laws.

While the church was, and continues to be, hugely influential to modern conceptions of the self, other social and cultural factors have also contributed to the sustained hold of metaphysical dualism. The British historian Roy Porter notes shifts in social power dynamics when alternative forms of discourse sprung up during the early secularization of society in eighteenth-century England. He suggests this led to a specific set of values in regard to metaphysical dualism. Specifically, Porter describes how a secularized British society substituted the concept of mind for the concept of soul as a secular means of maintaining metaphysical dualism. According to Porter (2003), the rise of popular print media led to a transformative period in modern identity. For example, when rags (i.e. early magazines) like The Tatler (the original literary and society journal founded in 1709) promoted the idea of the spectatorial man (i.e. the virtues of critically evaluating other people from the sidelines) as a progressive social presence heavily invested in self-presentation and appearance, the reading populace adopted this position in social interactions in their daily lives. The importance of the soul and the rejection of the body was one of Christianity’s methods of maintaining spiritual eminence, but when the secular bourgeoisie rose in power and influence so too did the discourse of the superiority of mind (a secular concept that replaces the concept of the soul). The mind over matter/flesh debate was created and self-refinement, self-fashioning, and self-control (the virtues of the spectatorial man) became bywords for progress that replaced Christian notions of salvation. Porter recounts how this transformation occurred through the rags, the authority of medical associations, the proliferation of autobiographical writings, satire in theater productions as a play on identity, and the discourse of science in relation to the human body and the nature of the universe. That is to say, metaphysical dualism remained a widespread belief but this time in a secular context, where the mind replaced the soul.

In another elaboration of metaphysical dualism within secular society, the cultural historian Dror Wahrman’s (2004) study of modern identity at the end of the eighteenth century locates a shift from identity as collective grouping, to identity as quintessential uniqueness. According to Wahrman (2004), a similar pattern of transformation was seen across England, France, and America during this time period. Wahrman claims that the collective uncertainty about identity caused by the cultural shocks of the French and American revolutionary wars, not to mention industrialization, triggered the demise of one way of understanding identity—namely, the ancien regime malleable masquerade of identities—and the beginning of a new, more essentialized, and interiorized regime of identity. A related element of this historical shift was the rise of the Romantic Movement, which characterized the self as psychologically deep and uniquely individual.⁷ These shifts in cultural notions of the self reveal metaphysical dualism in that they demonstrate a belief in a separation between the interior mind (or soul) and the outer body. As Europe is America’s sociocultural progenitor, this metaphysical dualism has consequences for the form the self subsequently took in America.⁸

So far, the historical and philosophical sources of metaphysical dualism have been discussed. But might there be something over and above society and culture—something about the way the human mind works—that makes metaphysical dualism part of the “default” model of the self ? Recent empirical work in experimental psychology reveals that we may have an innate (i.e. inborn) tendency to intuitively see ourselves, others and the world through the lens of metaphysical dualism. It is this exciting evidence we turn to now.

III. The Psychological Bases of Metaphysical Dualism

Descartes’ metaphysical dualism has been all but disproved by several philosophers.⁹ The oldest and most devastating critique is that metaphysical dualists offer no convincing explanation for how the two distinct substances that constitute reality actually interact. And yet, metaphysical dualism remains the dominant belief concerning the nature of the self in contemporary American culture. This leads us to the following question: if metaphysical dualism is largely discredited in contemporary philosophy, why is it...