American gadget lovers are already lining up for the tech event of the year: the release of Apple’s much-ballyhooed iPhone. By all accounts, it’s a spectacularly cool gizmo – a single, sleek device that, at the poke of a finger, lets you surf the Web, watch a movie, take a picture, listen to a song or even gab on the phone. It’s easy enough to get seduced by the next next thing, as the phrase goes. But amid all the hype, the real question that a savvy shopper should be asking is: Can it make me happy?
In avid consumer societies such as ours, connecting a gadget, brand or product with happiness – a true, lasting sense of well-being – has become the stock in trade of modern advertising. No doubt Apple will be trying to forge that link again in the coming media and advertising blitz. (Just look at its hipster ad campaign for the shrewdly marketed iPod: all those Technicolour swingers jiving ecstatically away. The underlying message (Consume and Be Content) is perfectly clear.
What is less clear is the effect that such products, and our helpless lust for them, have on our personal happiness and our societal well-being. (After all, it was Adam and Eve’s longing for another apple product that first consigned humanity to misery.) Should we be worried that the iPhone, and the countless other material indulgences on offer in today’s hypercapitalist economies, might have similarly nasty effects?
Benjamin R. Barber, a professor at the University of Maryland, argues in his recent “Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilise Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole” that modern capitalism drives grown-ups “to retrieve the childish things the Bible told us to put away, and to enter the new world of electronic toys, games, and gadgets that constitute a modern digital playground for adults.”
The anxiety that prosperity and commerce would rot our moral fibre only worsened with the onset of commercial society as we know it. In 18th-century Britain and France (with the United States close behind), the world’s first consumer cultures consumed as never before: fine silverware to stir the sugar; chocolate, coffee and tea to give life savour, courtesy of life-wrecking slave colonies in the New World and Asia; Waterford crystal and Wedgwood porcelain to carry the delights of increasingly productive farms; ornate pipes and snuff boxes to hold Virginia tobacco; and clothes, clothes, clothes – especially in Paris, which hasn’t looked back since the first women’s fashion magazine, the Journal des Dames, was founded in 1759.
Needless to say, such early consumer items were a far cry from the iPhone. But their novelty and popularity were enough to alarm the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who warned that human “needs” were being trampled by fleeting fashions and tastes. Far from making us happier, he scolded, the new abundance was fostering false needs, envy and self-love – alienating us from one another and from ourselves. Rousseau’s insights were picked up by the philosopher Georg Hegel and then Karl Marx. The rise of modern economies, Marx argued, relied on convincing consumers that they needed gadget after gadget, luxury after luxury. Capitalism led people to regard objects newly available for purchase as magical and strange, investing them with a value they didn’t inherently have. This argument, from the first chapter of “Das Kapital,” is famously known as the “fetishism of commodities.” You’ll witness it firsthand with that first blissed-out friend raving on and on about his new iPhone. The pleasure we get from such objects is invariably short-lived. After an initial rush of excitement, the joy fades. And then you're on to the next gizmo, and then the next, in hot pursuit of happiness.
Researchers in the growing field of happiness studies have long appreciated this phenomenon. So did Freud, who likened it to the “cheap enjoyment” one gets from “putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again.” Repeat the action as often as you like: The feeling of satisfaction always wears off.
Where does that leave homo economicus? Are we really just like children at a birthday party rushing from one toy to the next? Do people like Barber have a point when they warn that an “ethos of infantilisation” has infected our society? Perhaps. But remember, homo economicus is also homo ludens, a creature of play. Is it really so wrong to amuse ourselves with our toys?
So pursue away. Of course, the iPhone won't make you truly happy--at least not for long. But don’t let that keep you from enjoying it. People were meant to play, and there is tremendous power in such pursuits. Smith probably would have chuckled indulgently at the iPhone lineups at AT&T. He may even have picked one up for himself.
The Washington Post
