Round Up: December 22 - Paying Attention to Our Stuff

Advent is the good moment to think about the things we invite into our lives and our homes

This Advent season is quite odd. With inflation everywhere and the perspective of a long, cold winter for the Europeans, there are still plenty of opportunities to stuff our houses with objects produced in slave-like conditions and feed our stomachs with industrial poison, including meat produced from confined animals.

More than ever, this season should be an opportunity to think twice about the things we invite into our homes. Here are a few suggestions of essays and books giving plenty of food for thought.

Michael Pakaluk, Piety for Things, The Catholic Thing, Dec. 7, 2022

Michael Pakaluk authored a little gem of an essay, exploring our relationship to objects by exploring the opposition between greed and detachment. Pakaluk defines detachment as “any ordered use of material goods,” and greed as “disordered, disproportionate use.” However, disproportion, or mismeasure, has not always been seen as now, as a profligate use of energy. In older times disproportion referred to hubis or pride, meaning that less can mean different things depending on whether we situate ouselves in a Greek or Christian cosmogony or a modern, rationalist one. Sometimes, the modern and the older conceptions of lack of measure can overlap, but at other times, they can mean radically opposed evaluations of reality.

Pakaluk gives a good example about gluttony, exploring the paradox that contemporary dietocrats, to paraphrase Sally Fallon Morell, with their obsession with low-calorie food may actually lead to gluttony. If the opposite of greed is “detachment from things” and if “part of this detachment from things is attachment to the persons who made them, then eating industrially plant-based products from land which has been abused amounts to gluttony while eating high-fat animal products made from farm animals raised with human care may in fact mean less.

In a Berryesque fashion, Michael Pakaluk therefore proposes wonderful advice for Advent.

Reflections such as these seem salutary at the start of the Christmas shopping and gift-giving seasons.  Advent conversion for us might include prayerful reflection on where all these manufactured things came from.  The two great failings of our countrymen today, I believe, are division and distraction, which feed each other.

How much of our polarization comes from not appreciating how many people from former generations sacrificed their “chance” in life, to build up this economy and culture for us?

Or take the smartphone that you may be using to read this essay.  Most likely, it was made in a mega factory in China, where upwards of 300,000 people live, eat, and sleep, working overtime up to 12 hours a day, each doing the same repetitive task, say, screwing in just one screw, for a couple of thousand phones each day, with one day off per week to see spouse, children, or grandparents.

The mega factory (as an Apple executive once told me) has analogies with a college campus; it offers good work in that poor province of China; the workers wish to work there for a year or two; and smartphones are great works of brilliant design.

Still, it’s difficult to work in such conditions. And piety for things, which implies solidarity with others, will lead me to ask: As a “faithful administrator” am I getting the best possible use of this machine?  Or am I distractedly grasping for “more” in all the wrong places?

And there’s a good place to start.

Walter Kirn, O Holy Crap, The Free Press, Dec. 21, 2022

Walter Kirn’s last essay in Bari Weiss’ Free Press Substack also writes about the piety for things that our mass manufacturers of consumer goods have completely lost.

Kirn marvels at a 70-year-old — and still functioning — citrus juicer he acquired at a local thrift stores, and goes on a delightful rant about his graveyard of coffee grinders and pretty much all consumer goods that have entered his home and his life for a long time.

I can’t say the same about my coffee grinders. I use the plural because I’ve owned a lot of them, all bought in their original packaging and dead within a year. They’re good ones, supposedly, with burrs not blades, but they stop performing before long, ending their long journeys from overseas factories in unmarked graves in my local Montana landfill. 

I have a whole ghost kitchen in this landfill, and soon I will need to reserve a bigger plot. For the nifty under-the-counter fridge that has stopped getting cold after three years and no one in the area can fix. For the cool, bagless vacuum cleaner that clogs and chokes when I run it over a rug. For the set of glass measuring cups whose numbers and hash marks are swiftly fading and becoming illegible, much like those on the dials of the washer my wife bought just three years ago. For the remains of the Pyrex casserole that shattered when I removed it from the oven, strewing the floor with blade-like shards, some so tiny I probably won’t find them for another couple of months, and only when they lodge in my bare feet[…]

Like the cute yellow mittens my wife picked up at Target which unraveled the second time she wore them. Or the new suitcase which won’t stand upright when it’s full. The laptop computers that have turned to bricks within months of their warranties expiring. And the hybrid sedan with 50,000 miles on it that also turned into a brick while going eighty down the freeway, losing its power steering, its power brakes, its power everything. I survived, by some miracle, issued legal threats, and the car’s manufacturer repaired it, free. Then it bricked again a few weeks later.

Kirn wrote this essay after asking his followers on Twitter to provide examples of the loss of quality of consumer goods and services. Some offered reasons for this steep decline. Since Kirn’s followers are mostly Americans, it is not surprising that the first reason given was to blame the government, particularly environmental regulations. Though this reason missed the much bigger picture, which Kirn covers later, they had a point here, illustrated by Kirn’s hilarious description of the death of his hybrid car:

When my suddenly de-electrified hybrid car became a hurtling giant stone inside which my wife and I were helplessly strapped—all for the crime of trying to save fuel and, ultimately, earth—it was hard not to feel tricked. 

But then, Kirn really got on the track with a quote from William Morris, another powerful guide to observe a piety for things:

“Have nothing in your home,” wrote Morris, the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, which aimed to elevate the lives of the working and middle classes, “that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” This would be a tall order nowadays. 

After a remark about how the digitalization of our lives brings even more starkly in plain sight the categorical imperative that we conduct our lives as obsolete beings, Kirn then concludes his essay asking the important question: what if being surrounded with goods planned to be obsolete was a way to discipline us to accept our obsolescence.

The psychic toll of goods that don’t endure is that one loses faith the future will even come, and then one loses interest in it coming, for little that we own or use or cherish seems likely to be there with us to meet it. 

One wonders whose obsolescence is being planned—our products’, our belongings’, or our own?

Günther Anders gave an unequivocal affirmative answer to Kirn’s question in the second volume of The Obsolescence of Man.

Günther Anders, The Obsolescence of Man, Volume II: On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution, 1980

In the second volume of his magnum opus, The Obsolescence of Man, Günther Anders examined how the obsolescence of the products we consume is meant to condition us to think of ourselves as obsolete men.

Here’s how Anders starts his chapter entitled Obsolescence of Products.

The principle of reproduction in modern industry means not only that the products produced by assembly line technology are ephemeral and perishable; not only that, like the parts of previous generations of products, they will unfortunately fail some day because they will wear out, but also that they suffer from a mortality of a particularly special degree, whose characteristic sounds plainly theological, that is: that they must die, that they are destined to an ephemeral existence. And not only is their temporary functionality planned, but also (at least approximately) their lifespan and, furthermore, a lifespan that is as short as possible. In the words of a Nazi song, whose purpose was not only to inculcate in the youth the fact that they are replaceable, but even to make them embrace their expendability with enthusiasm: mass produced commodities were born to die.

Pay close attention to this expression.

A death for which one has been “born” (thus, a death that, instead of merely being the conclusion of an existence, is established in advance as the goal of that existence) is only nominally a “death”. For the young people who were forced to sing this song, the latter did not prepare them for their deaths, but rather prepared them for being killed. And the same thing is true of the “death” of mass produced products: they are born not to die, but to be killed.

In the planned obsolescence of our products, Anders saw a paradigm shift about the objective pursued by production after the third industrial revolution. Producing goods planned to be obsolete was meant to produce a new anthropological type, a fundamentally dependent and narcissistic one. In order for our growth economy to grow forever and limitlessly, we must acquire the consciousness that we are ourselves obsolete. As revealed by phenomena such as the hoarders in the United States and in Europe, or the commodification of Marie Kondo by Netflix, planned obsolescence is at the heart of our dominant economics, which can only prosper if the products it mass-manufactures are economically planned to be obsolete. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature. The productive apparatus organizes the premeditated murder of the objects it produces in order to maintain the illusion that the human world will collapse if it ceases to grow like a wild fire, like a Baal demanding ever more offerings. By positing that objects “are born to die,” the industrial system asserts its own immortality, premised on the principle that nothing — and more importantly no human — “is allowed to be a definite article, a the.”

Thus, do not call production a cruel mother! If it executes a horrible demographic policy, it does so exclusively in the interest of its subsequent and continuous fertility. And from its very beginning, it has demonstrated its ingenuity by producing not only mortal offspring, but the mortality of its offspring. That is why we can admit with equanimity that it should not only make its offspring expressly mortal, but that it should cause them to begin to wear out from the first moments of their existence. None of them is allowed to be a definite article, a the. Every one of them is allowed to lead its life only as an a. And none of them is allowed to
enjoy the consolation of being identical with itself. Indeed, it has to be identical, it even must be identical, but only with its model: in reality, it performs its functions like any other specimen of its model and therefore does so together with the innumerable specimens that, like itself, have been sold to the world like any other specimens of the same model. That is why anyone who believes he can describe the present situation with the following words, ‘What is created today, will tomorrow be thrown in the trashcan’, falls far short of the truth. The truth is instead that production creates products as tomorrow’s trash, that production is the creation of trash; and of trash whose essence is constituted by the temporary preservation
of the status of being used.

The categorical imperative of obsolescence is there to remind us, at every moment, that, like the products we consume, we are one individual among many, and interchangeable with our fellow human beings. Our lives are valued by our acceptance — which better be enthusiastic — of our ephemeral, dispensable, expendable condition, or more exactly to the idea that we are born for the sole purpose of dying. A humanity, writes Anders, “which treats the world as a world to use and then throw
in the trash, also treats its own kind as humanity to use and then throw in the trash.”

In such a world, death is not understood as the conclusion of life, but as the goal toward which life must thrive, explaining our contemporary obsession with frantically postponing it, whatever the cost. Paradoxically, the transhumanist quest for immortality, prepared for a long time by an economy conditioning us mentally to accept our fundamental obsolescence, transforms death into a life project, potentially an eternal project.

Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things, Harper & Collins, 2016

Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things — subtitled How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Eighteenth Century to the Twenty-First — is a much more academic encouragement to adopt a piety for things. An encyclopedic work, Trentmann’s 700 page book, with close to 200 pages of notes, is a tremendous history book to understand how bourgeois modernity led to a world of people buried alive in obsolete possessions.

Walking in the footsteps of Fernand Braudel, Trentmann’s book is also a refreshing read because he restrained from moralization, without ever falling in the tepid descriptive flatness of most current academic work. In fact, you have to wait until the very last page to see Trentmann venture into a few common sense policy recommendations, simply stating that “our lifestyles, and their social and environmental consequences should be the subject of serious public debate and policy, not left as a matter simply of individual taste and purchasing power.”

The central thread, in Trentmann’s book, is that the way we consume, and all the frame around consumption of things and goods, decides what kind of citizens we are. It almost sounds like a platitude, but it is completely absent from the Net Zero global decision-making circles, from where common sense is banished.

Trentmann’s book is so rich that it’s difficult to select a quote, and I have no intention in this post to write a full review. I picked a quote from his developments on the department stores, simply because I think Trentmann managed to stimulate my historical imagination enough to have a nostalgia for something I got to know in the weakened version of stores like The Galeries Lafayette, Harrod’s or Le Bon Marché during my childhood. The current ghastly state of what were once temples of illusion reflects the ghastly state of our entire consumption experience, despite the grandiose propaganda claim that we have never had it so good as now.

The key to [department store’s] success was flow — flow of people and goods. Cheap prices demanded large, rapid turnover, and this fundamentally changed the atmosphere inside the store as well as its relationship to the urban environment outside. In comparison to early modern shops, the department store was an extrovert. Instead of creating an exclusive, semi-private space for elite customers, it reached out into the city to grab the masses and pull them in. In the 1890s, large shop-windows became a stage for a new profession of window-dressers to live out ever more ambitious fantasies. At Marshall Field’s in Chicago, Arthur Fraser turned the entire shopfront into a seventeenth-century manor house. Provincial stores tried their hands at wire battleships and models of St Paul’s made out of handkerchiefs. Selfridges lit its stores from 8 p.m. until midnight to attract nocturnal window-shoppers. Shops added covered arcades that extended their displays into the street. It was hard to tell where commercial space ended and public space began.

Once inside, the pull continued. At Harrod’s, a ‘moving staircase’ started rolling in 1898, transporting up to 4,000 customers per hour. Conveyer belts transported merchandises. Messages flew through pneumatic tubes. Rapid turnover ruled. ‘Sales’ had existed for a century or more. The department store turned them into seasonal rituals. Muir and Mirrielees held sales on gloves in March, perfume in April and carpets in August. All stores had ‘white weeks’, mostly in January, as well as ‘special price’ or ‘95 pfennig’ weeks. During sales, customers could quadruple, to 70,000 a day in the Bon Marché. Stores turned over stock six times a year. Sales-mania excited cartoonists, moral reformers and shoppers alike. ‘Sale’ was, as the Prejudiced Guide to London Shops put it in 1906:

[the] magic word that stocks our wardrobes, deletes our purses, disorganizes our routine, fascinates us, repels us, delights us, disappoints us twice a year regularly in London… The ethics of sales are so disturbing, one time so morally and clearly good, the next minute so conspicuously disappointing and bad, that no woman, I believe, is quite settled in her mind regarding them.

It was the birth of total shopping. Department stores held concerts, installed pictures galleries and libraries, and provided tea and smoking rooms. Openings and promotional weeks turned shop floors into magical sets. No one captured the atmosphere more vividly than Emile Zola, who devoted a good twenty pages to trhe exhibition of white in his Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), published in 1883, after meticulous research in the real Bon Marché. ‘There was nothing but white, all the white goods from every department, an orgy of white, a white star whose radiance was blinding at first.’ In the gallery of haberdashery and hosiery, ‘white edifices were displayed made of pearl buttons, together with huge constructions of white socks, and a whole hall covered with white swansdown.’ In the central gallery, bright light illuminated white silks and ribbons. ‘The staircases were decked with white draperies… running the whole length of the banisters and encircling the halls right up to the ‘second floor’. The ‘ascending whiteness appeared to take wing, merging together and disappearing like a flight of swans. The whiteness then fell back again from the domes in the rain of eiderdown, a sheet of huge snowflakes.’ In the main hall, over the silk counter:

there was the miracle, the altar of this cult of white — a tent made of white curtains hanging down from the glass roof. Muslins, gauzes, and guipures [large-patterned decorative lace] flowed in light ripples, while richly embroudened tulles and length of oriental silk and silver lamé served as a background to this gigantic decoration, which was evocative both of the tabernacle and of the bedroom. It looked like a great white bed, its virginal whiteness waiting… for the white princess… who would one day come… in her white bridal veil. ‘Oh! It’s fantastic’ the ladies kept repeating. ‘Amazing!’ […]

Zola’s novel, the most successful of the emerging-genre of the department-store novel, mixed social observation with moral anxiety. In Zola’s store, a dream world of virginal innocence (the white bed, the shepherdess) collides with animalistic lust. he describes women ‘pale with desire’ and with an ‘irresistible desire to throw themselves’ into silks and velvets, ‘and be lost’. The department store replaced the satanic mill, a microcosm of social evil […] Zola describes the store as a ruthless ‘machine’ designed to seduce and conquer women. During sales, the ‘current’ of the store grew into an ‘ocean’ that took everyone and everything with it.

The Ladies’ Paradise is a brilliant catalogue of contemporary fears. One was that these ‘cathedrals of commerce’ were displacing the true Church, with the worship of goods leading away from the worship of Christ.

Advent is a time of preparation and prayers. A common thread in the texts selected in this post, is an acute attention to the things which enter our lives and our hearts. And an important part of the work we must do to prepare our hearts for the reception of Christ is to observe a piety for the things that surround us by reflecting on what kind of care or lack of care was involved in their production.

I wish you all a merry Christmas.