Commercials Made me Do It!

Reader el shared the following comment from one of online discussions about the bad, mean and scary advertisement industry:

I like how the ad messages evolved from WW2, “Be beautiful while you work in the factories and marry a sailor!” to post WW2 get-back-in-the-kitchen and marry a veteran. The social engineering is really remarkable–it went well beyond creating needs and selling products to shaping behavior in all walks of life.  Advertisements still work that way, but I think they’ve gotten much more clever at being subtle. Insidious.

I can just imagine those subtle and insidious ad executives getting together and creating a world-wide conspiracy to shape people's behavior. Of course, it would make a lot more sense - and be a whole lot easier - simply to discover what people's basic needs and drives are and try to tap into those needs and drives. Is it possible that the old fogy Ockham was right and the simplest explanation is, indeed, the correct one?

I, for one, am sick to death of hearing how advertisement influences people to do things they don't want and buy stuff they don't need. As somebody who speaks to people for a living, I know very well that people have a tendency only to hear what they want to. You can repeat something a hundred times over, write it on a board, sing and dance it, put it in flashing lights and bright colors, and still people will hear the exact opposite of what you are saying because that's what they want to do. 

A while ago, there was this theory that advertisers put subliminal messages into TV commercials to provoke people to want to buy things on a subconscious level. I don't know about other people, but I can't even say with certainty what company my favorite commercials represent. People of the TV generations have learned to tune out of commercials to the point where they couldn't tell you what was being advertised two seconds after the commercials aired. I do, however, watch attentively the advertisement for products that I want to buy.

People criticize advertisement for talking us into buying stuff we don't need and getting into massive debt as we keep consuming like crazy. I could buy into this argument had I not read Benito Perez Galdos's 1884 novel La de Bringas, whose protagonist, Rosalia Bringas, gets into debt through an unbridled consumption of useless objects. Her crazy spending gets so bad that she has to resort to prostitution to repay her debts. One could, of course, find much earlier examples of out-of-control purchases that left people destitute. So somehow people managed to overspend without watching TV commercials.

Advertisement promotes an impossible standard of beauty, people claim. In order to believe this you need to forget that for millenia people did all kinds of crazy, bizarre and dangerous things to their bodies to pursue an impossible standard of beauty. Foot binding, neck elongation, drinking of vinegar - all these practices existed long before anybody heard of advertisement.

In my opinion, all that advertisement does is give us exactly what we want anyways. The impossible standards of beauty and loads of useless junk are things that human beings always have and always will pursue. Beauty, by its nature, has to be impossible to attain, or it would be no beauty at all. If everybody is special, then nobody is. It is very easy and attractive to find some outside agency that we can happily blame for everything that goes wrong in our lives. It isn't my fault that I bought objects I couldn't afford. The bad, nasty commercials made me do it. I'm not to blame for eating junk and then torturing myself with stupid diets to lose weight. The greedy ad execs are at fault. I'm not a responsible individual. I'm just a weak, powerless object at the mercy of forces beyond my control.

Or am I?

Zygmunt Bauman's Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?: A Review, Part I

Zygmunt Bauman is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers. His interest in the mechanisms of identity construction is enough to make me follow his work with great dedication.

Bauman's recent Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? (Institute for Human Sciences Vienna Lecture Series) made a dubious impression on me. Everything Bauman has to say about identity is really good. Everything he has to say on other topics, however, is really not. This is unusual, since normally philosophers are provoked by the topic of identity into uttering strings of annoying platitudes. Bauman avoids this danger and talks about identity in a thought-provoking and profound way. The other subjects he addresses in Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? , though, are analyzed in a much weaker way. Unfortunately, a moment comes in everybody's life when our brain cannot process change as effectively as it used to when we were younger. As a result, we see any change in our world as at worst terrifying and at best negative. This is, sadly, what happens to Bauman. His fear of today's reality taints his analysis and robs it of any intellectual value. As I already explained, I have no patience with anybody whose sexism and racism do not allow them to recognize that life today is without a shadow of a doubt better than at any other point in history. Bauman's lamentations about some unspecified past when everything was better, fresher, and sweeter are a testimony to his nostalgia for his lost youth. This nostalgia is so strong that it overruns the obvious ethical considerations that should have helped Bauman remember that the current historical period he dislikes so much is characterized by an incredible progress in the rights of women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities.

In this review, I will first address the parts of Bauman's argument that I really liked. Then, I will proceed to discuss the much weaker second half of this book.

Bauman starts his discussion of identity formation by observing how much the task of creating an identity is linked to fear, anxiety, and constant insecurity:

Identities exist today solely in the process of continuous renegotiation. Identity formation, or more correctly their re-formation, turns into a lifelong task, never complete; at no moment of life is the identity "final" There always remains an outstanding task of readjustment, since neither conditions of life nor the sets of opportunities and threats ever stop changing. That built-in "nonfinality," the incurable inconclusiveness of the task of self-identification, causes a lot of tension and anxiety.

The idea that identity today is negotiable, fluid, and non-static has, of course, turned into something of a favorite platitude among the theorists of identity. What is different in Bauman's analysis is that his thinking does not stop there. He realizes that the qualities of fluidity and variability of contemporary identities do not in any way rob them of their potential to do harm. It is a given that everybody today moves seamlessly between identities. This mere fact, however, does nothing to alleviate the dreadful burden of identity.

By its very nature, collective identity requires a common enemy. The ever-growing complexity of today's world makes the need for this enemy stronger, instead of weaker:

The act of selecting a group as one's site of belonging in fact constitutes some other groups as alien and, potentially, hostile territory: "I am P" always means (at least implicitly, but often explicitly) that "most certainly, I am not Q, R, S, and so on." "Belonging" is one side of the coin, and the other side is separation and opposition-which all too often evolve into resentment, antagonism, and open conflict. Identification of an adversary is an indispensable element of identification with an "entity of belonging"-and, through the latter, also a crucial element of self-identification. Identification of an enemy construed as an incarnation of the evil against which the community "integrates," gives clarity to life purposes and to the world in which life is lived.

Consequently, when the world becomes less clear and more complex, a group needs to construct an enemy who is more and more evil with every passing day. Thus, those who believe that we live in a post-identity world are completely wrong. I have no idea whether these people even follow the news or turn on the television. There are no structures in place today that would dilute the strength of collective identifications. Just the opposite.

After this impressive discussion of identity, Bauman proceeds to talk about the actual subject of his book, which is the relationship between ethics and consumerism. And here, unfortunately, his argument begins to fall apart. In order to introduce the topic of ethics, the philosopher comes out with the following bizarre statement:

In order to have self-love, we need to be loved or to have hope of being loved. Refusal of love-a snub, a rejection, denial of the status of a love-worthy object-breeds self-hatred. Self-love is built of the love offered to us by others. Others must love us first, so that we can begin to love ourselves.

It honestly took me a while to realize that the author was completely serious in this statement. When I finally saw that no punch line was coming and this is exactly what he meant to say, I felt pretty embarrassed for Bauman. You cannot proceed to theorize on the basis of your psychological insecurities and neuroses. Of course, we can never escape them, but the least we could do is avoid projecting them onto the entire world. The kind of self-love that is so dependent on the aceptance and approval of others is beyond unhealthy. A theory constructed on the basis of this vision cannot convince anybody.