Spring 2008

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Shrunken Sovereign: Consumerism, Globalization, and American Emptiness

Benjamin R. Barber

Two narratives bound our era and, by degrees but unmistakably, our predicament: the story of consumerism and the story of globalization. In recent years, the two have combined to produce a single and singularly corrosive narrative. Consumerism has meant the transformation of citizens into shoppers, eroding America’s sovereignty from within; globalization has meant the transformation of nation-states into secondary players on the world stage, eroding America’s sovereignty ...

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My first reaction is that Barber is unfair to the US. Everything bad in the world is not the US’s fault. Nor is it possible for americans to foresee what any one action, would at the time may seem the correct choice, will give rise to in the future or how everyone in the world will react to it. No one can. I am an African immigrant. Where I come from people are passionately attached to their own ethnic group. They are not consumers, which Barber despises. But neither are they in any sense liberal or tolerant. It is the consumers that are the liberal ones, the ones that can stand someone being different without wanting to kill or enslave that person. Africans have the community that Barber speaks of. And they have the disadvantages that come with that. You are devoted to your own group (it is not possible to be devoted to everyone) above all, your are not what Barber calls a consumer, within the group you have the same values, you want your group to do well, does this lead to peace and prosperity? No. Does everyone want democracy? No. They really don’t. A person living among those who are just like him, who believes devoutly in his religion and the rightness of his culture and way of life, and who is not a member of an oppressed group within that culture does not need democracy to be fulfilled. That person is not concerned about human rights or equality. Even the oppressed ones identify with the ideology of the majority. They are not about to revolt or rebel, or if there is the slightest hint of that, they will just be shot. End of story, no marching, no civil rights demonstrations. Among such peoples, anything wrong and something will always be wrong is blamed on outsiders. Nothing is wrong with us. The “emptiness” Barber speaks of can be cured one way, by more religion and more self confidence and less questioning of oneself, by an acceptance of the sadness of life as the will of God. But does Barber really want the US and other western nations to go that way? Barber comes from a typical western mindset which I like. That is why I am here. It saved my life. But of course that mindset has its limitations. He thinks there are solutions. Usually there are not solutions. Everything, no matter how good it seems, has something really bad attached to it. How to arrange for the world to have a higher standard of living and still have “community” and not have people become consumers, assuming it is true that that is all american are, it cannot be done.

Posted by Danai | June 20, 2008 9:41:03 AM EDT

Danai, I thought your answer was beautiful. There are not always solutions to problems. The fact we identify something as a problem almost always suggests there isn't a current solution. Otherwise, we would call it a task. This isn't bad. It is just what is. One can't paint a room and have it be perfect. You can't prepare for, and have help with, a dinner party for eight, and have everything absolutely perfect. A fork might be forgotten, the sauce might be a bit thick. It is the nature of life to be not perfect. The solution is not to pick holes in what is good, but to recognize the flaw does not condemn the jewel. The diamond somewhere has a slight flaw, and it is still beautiful. The beautiful woman whose hips are a bit wide, or whose nose is slightly overly large is still a beautiful woman. And, the most important thing, she would not be any more beautiful with a smaller nose. Barber is an academic, and unfortunately he reflects the nonsense that passes for intellectual discourse in the academy. It is a shame.

Posted by Steven Cox | June 20, 2008 2:04:09 PM EDT

The problem with this article is that it sets democracy up as something "good in itself" when it is merely the least offensive way to run a government. Decrying the fall of democracy to capitalism and consumerism sounds to me like decrying an increase in freedom. Other people are having less and less control over your actions, the state has less and less sovereign power.

Posted by Sirry | June 20, 2008 4:25:10 PM EDT

After reading the comments I've concluded that I must have read a different article by Mr. Barber. All he indicated in the article that I read is that the United States is perhaps the only country in the world which is exporting jobs and importing people simultaneously. (Welcome Danai!) The U.S. has troops in over 100 countries and despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars can't subdue insurgents in two relatively small countries much less rebuild their infrastuctures. At the same time we have an administration that is incapable of obeying it's own laws but also can't adhere to the international treaties that it has signed. And even though the majority of Americans oppose this administration the behavior of the people's representatives have proven that the citizens have lost control of the governent that is supposed to represent them. And if it's democracy that you object to then there's plenty of other countries where you won't be bothered with taking on the responsibilities of citizenship.

Posted by Awestruck | June 20, 2008 8:48:43 PM EDT

This is little more than windy paternalism. Typical elitist leftism. The consumer is an infant who must be shepherded, according to Barber. There are plenty of threats to democracy and the nation-state. Plenty of threats to freedom. But consumerism is the least of our worries. It only rankles tedious marxists like Mr. Barber for the well known reasons. What we should do is get a lot of guys like Barber into powerful places in order to guide us, the sheep, for we are empty. Please Benjamin will you lead us and make us whole, because you know best. After all, you probably went to a special college and have a degree in this stuff.

Posted by David K | June 20, 2008 10:42:59 PM EDT

Consumerism is a strange choice of culprit for the erosion of a democracy. Assuming, of course, that "democracy" isn't merely an afterthought tagged on to the end of "sovereign nation-state." But, given that democracy really is a concern here, why get so worked up about consumerism? Democracy has always existed in the space vacated by feudalism. Its sine qua non is a large middle class: a definitive change in the socio-economic order. Globalization threatens to return us to a feudalistic division of wealth: lord and peasant, highest and lowest, with a sliver a frightened middle class professionals shivering in between, too dependent on their wealthy patrons to rock the boat and demand their rights. To highlight consumerism -- a mere attitude -- as a core threat to democracy, particularly when very real ones abound, is a grave mistake. A distraction. Frankly, I don't feel too threatened by the replacement of "citizens" by "consumers." They'll remember that they're citizens as soon as they wake up and realize that their position is threatened. Things have been easy for a while. Naturally, people have let their guard down. Consumerism was the available vice. It has no special significance. As Dania noted above, attitudes can be changed. The distraction of "consumerism" -- and the crisis of meaning it highlights -- leads to yet more focus on ideals while the material conditions of democracy dissolve before our eyes. Focusing on consumerism mobilizes our (America's, that is) otherwise-benign preoccupation with ideals, encouraging people to look away from real things that are really happening. The true concern of this article announces itself in the first paragraph. It is all about national sovereignty. So much concern with the status of nation-states and the monopoly on the use of force! One almost feels sorry for nation-states -- the poor dears! -- by the end of this article. [In what Golden Age, by the way, have Americans ever given a tick about the American government having a monopoly on the use of force? National power is necessary – the way a lion’s teeth are necessary -- but it is not central.] By contrast, an underlying indifference to human freedom and the fundamental achievement of the West is palpable.

Posted by Jon | June 21, 2008 2:30:14 AM EDT

Danai, great response. But I loved this article. Uncertainty, doubt and questions are inherent in the human experience. The seeds of weakness are usually present in the harvest of great strength. Those things which deliver the most benefits to us also hold the capacity to deliver the most egregious results - the tyranny of majority comes to mind. By intensely questioning our deepest presuppositions and beliefs we may be able to discover the seeds of weakness before they sprout their fruit. Barber is right that privatizing public goods subverts them. You cannot indeed provide private security in the midst of general insecurity. Finally, who said there were 'solutions' or answers? Politics is the process of managing tensions arising from our differences about who should have what and when. There are no 'answers'. But we can develop means to manage these tensions and the only way to do that is to engage in the kind of questioning Barber does here.

Posted by Gyude | June 21, 2008 1:56:02 PM EDT

There is not a single sentence in this ignorant piece of paternalistic cant that I could agree with. People have sovereign rights over who they are, and what they want to be, and if they want to be fat, or lazy, or dumb, or all three, that is their right, and I can't fathom why this should represent a cause of concern or indeed interest for any other sovereign individual, who has, by virtue of the existence of our prosperous, consumerist, globalised economies, every right and every opportunity to be slim, energetic and well-informed themselves, if that is what they want to be. I have never ever been co-erced in my life by any seller of any product or service to do a single thing I didn't want to do, yet governments co-erce me every day in ways that number in the thousands. Yet somehow Barber seems to think that the threats to our freedom come from consumerism and globalisation, not governments. I really would love him to tell us, his unwilling readers, how he manages himself to exist without succumbing to the forces of "consumerism": does he never buy books, or artworks, or go to the theatre or the opera, or listen to CDs that he has bought, or watch DVDs, or visit galleries, or take vacations, or buy himself a new pair of jeans when he wants to, or visit a restaurant when there is no food at home...? How hard social engineers work to cast out the motes in their neighbours's eyes. If the sovereignty of states and state power everywhere is being undermined by the Web, by international companies and by the provision of consumer choice, it would be most welcome development. Regrettably, Barber is even wrong in this regard, because it isn't, and more's the pity. It is the hallmark of totalitarians everywhere that what pre-occupies them most is not the obligation to work on their own perfectibility, but to worry just in case someone else some where is not working on theirs.

Posted by Colin | June 23, 2008 5:07:59 AM EDT

Mr Barber fails to see the irony of decrying "libertarians and privatizers" as "crucial allies" of the dominion of consumers when the aforementioned are basically trying to return the world closer to the conditions of limited national government power that allowed the triumph of self-reliant, strong work-ethic groups in the first place. His misunderstanding is further illustrated when he speaks (10th para) of retreating to "gated communities, where we deploy private resources to turn what were once public goods, such as garbage collection, police protection, and schooling, into private commodities". There is a vital clue that Mr Barber seems to have missed in the very term he used: "gated communities". Insofar as community/state provision of any goods may (arguably) be preferable to private provision, such a situation will always be better within groups of greater cultural homogeneity. For this reason, it is invariably better that such goods be provided in a smaller community. The nation state is not generally a good vehicle for such provision (as the history of the 20th century shows) unless it is reasonably culturally homogenous, and both globalisation and the poisonous policies of multi-culturalism actively work to destroy any basis upon which the provision of public services by national government can be successful in the long run. Contrary to Mr Barber's implication, the choice is not simply between the nation state and private - a gated community is still a community, and public provision within that community is still public provision. Whether it's better to provide particular services publicly or not remains an issue for debate, but certainly the costs (not just financial) of providing them will be less in a smaller, more homogenous community. What Mr Barber seems to want is a continuation of the policies of mass coerced charity which naturally tend to result from democracy, and which have dominated western culture for the last century or two. Ironically, such policies, as I have pointed out above, are fatally undermined by the multiculturalist agenda that seems to be espoused by many of the same people. The fallacy is inherent to democracy - the underlying assumption that a majority is entitled to dispose of the life and property of every member of the community as it sees fit.

Posted by Randal Cousins | June 25, 2008 5:32:42 AM EDT

To be far, I don't believe that any attack on privatization or globalization is automatically paternalistic or leftist. Moreover, the idea that privatization automatically leads to "self-reliant, strong work-ethic groups" is ridiculous. You can be just as dependent upon Blackwell as you can on the State of California to provide a necessary service. The only difference is that Blackwell is answerable to its shareholders, not to you. The articles larger point, that people are witless consumers who are going to be fine if the world goes to Hell in a hand basket so long as they all keep their iPods is ludicrous. The litmus test of any government is not the form, whether Oligarchy masking itself as a Democracy or a benign dictatorship. Rather, it is its ability to meet the needs of the people that is the key. If a private corporation can meet those needs more effectively than the government it will remain, if not, then it will be gone. That being said, this is not a unique period in history with regards to our uncertainty over the limits of public and private power. The East India Company (for example) was a multinational force long before Blackwell or McDonalds and some would argue a good deal more pervasive than either is likely to ever become. Yet the pendulum swung back and that corporation no longer exists. We will either go back to a period of nationalism trumping the multinational corporation, or we will move on to a different period, where the City-State solves the local problems and another form of government solves the global ones.

Posted by Raymond Hodgson | June 27, 2008 2:57:05 PM EDT

I own businesses in both upper and lower income cities, and have worked closely for decades with an extremely diverse clientele. Americans are not remotely "empty." Mr. Barber needs to get out more and speak with people outside his narrow little monkeysphere.

Posted by Bruce Dearborn Walker | June 29, 2008 2:33:03 PM EDT

While not a central point of the article, but made clear from the comments is just how broken our concepts of democracy and free speech are today. This small group is a great example of what is playing out on a larger stage and any future we have I believe starts with fixing our problem solving capability. Over many decades, our collective intolerance to explore ideas, as a group and then find points of agreement and disagreement in a dispassionate way has become the anchor preventing real progress. Our future as a people depends upon our ability to work together to find solutions. If the current US political situation has taught us anything is that we are broken because we can not find compromises to big problems. This articles comments provides a mirror of the real problem.

Posted by Randall | October 28, 2008 10:19:57 AM EDT

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