Mastering materialism

The deceptions and delusions of materialism stem from its inevitable superficiality. Materialism traps us, unawares, in a world of possessions hag-ridden by irrational fears of likely loss and lurking dangers. Finally, it degrades creativity to consumption. The spiritual option, say SWAMI AGNIVESH and Rev. VALSON THAMPU, is not to renounce modernity and demonise development, but to transcend the spirit of materialism.

THE global village is not partial to any religion. The civilisational conflict, contrary to Samuel Huntington's hypothesis, will not be between Christianity and Islam. It will be, if at all, between religions and materialism, which is the rising religion of our globalising world. The conflictual model of inter-faith relationships that kept religions fighting one another has enabled materialism - their common enemy - to steal a march upon them unawares.

Materialism is much more than affluence and lavish life-styles. No religion preaches against material success gained the right way. Hindus worship Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. The Sikh gurus encouraged hard work, paving the way for the prosperity of Punjab. The Semitic religions see prosperity as a gift from God. At the same time, all religions recognise that our attitude to wealth is crucial to our personality. When affluence is idolised, it enslaves the individual and lures him away from the meaning and purpose of life. Materialism, unlike material prosperity, is a quasi-religion, complete with its own ritual, its own creed, and its counterpart of the supernatural. Wealth, pursued for its own sake, is the god of materialism. Consumerism is its ritual and technology is its "supernatural". Worldly success is its dogma. Escalating and interminable pleasure is the highway to its secular nirvana.

But materialism is a pseudo-religion. Insisting that "matter alone matters", it brings about the subservience of the human to the non-human. The industrial culture degraded human beings into cogs in the machine. In the globalising world, profit has already superseded people. The generation of wealth is a goal higher than the promotion of human welfare. The pathos of the dwindling stature of man, his growing insignificance and bewilderment, is a recurrent lament in modern literature. The secular-materialistic dream of a new heaven and a new earth, on all available evidence, threatens to turn into a nightmare. Decades ago, the French philosopher Bergson warned that we would be crushed, not by our failures but by our successes; and our souls could be smothered under the weight of our achievements. Studies now prove that materialism breeds despair, anger and irrational outbursts of violence, of which the infamous "road-rage" is a startling instance. Already in India nearly a hundred thousand people commit suicide annually. The advent of prosperity has not translated itself into happiness.

"While there is growing concern over the environmental effects of materialism and global consumerism," says Shaun Saunders of the University of Newcastle, Australia, "little attention has been paid to its psychological effects." Why is the materialistic culture out of sync with the stature and wellbeing of our species?

The anatomy of materialism

Materialism is, by definition, a worldview based on superficiality. The reason for this is not far to seek. Matter, in a philosophical sense, is all surface and no depth. We cannot get into the depth of a material object. A stone, for example, has no inside, strictly speaking. Break a stone, and we get several stones; we do not reach the "inside" of a stone. Nor can we access the depth of a stone by drilling into it. Drilling creates, at best, only an illusion of depth. The deceptions and delusions of materialism stem from its inevitable superficiality.

The surface is a sphere of vulnerability, insecurity and unfulfillment. That is so because the surface is governed by the inexorable law of change. Change, for the sake of change, breeds restlessness. It unsettles. Whatever is on the surface keeps poorly. It has no stable or settled value. It is for this reason that material possessions tend to lose their value soon after they are acquired. As long as it was being struggled for, it was an idea. Attainment turns this idea into an object; and an object exists no longer in the depth but on the surface, where the magic evaporates. This inevitable dissatisfaction with what is attained keeps the mill of acquisitiveness grinding. It also makes fulfillment elude our grasp.

Superficiality is inhospitable to human stature. Personality is a depth-phenomenon, which also means that it has a spiritual core: a core of mystery. It is only from a superficial perspective that a person's worth can be equated with his possessions. Such an approach perforce brings about an imbalance between "being" and "having". The more obsessed one gets with "having", the less capable or keen he gets of "being". This leads to a situation in which material riches are secured to the neglect of, even at the expense of, one's inner wealth. In that event, the wealthier a person gets materially, the poorer he gets humanly. It is a glaring fact of history that the culture of materialism and its coordinate of liberal individualism have failed to produce, as Paul Tournier laments, individuals of stature. When personality is reduced to a materialistic concept, we get stuffed shirts where we expect great men and women.

The degradation of human worth into "having" and the corresponding erosion of human dignity together constitute the perverse logic of corruption. The perpetrators of mega corruption are not driven by the need to meet their basic needs. They are possessed and driven by the spirit of covetousness, having equated their worth with their material possessions. Their richness is a matter of being seen for what they have, of which the craving to hog the social limelight is an irresistible corollary. Sadly, they realise only too late that they are poorer for their ill-gotten wealth. The more they have, the poorer they are. And that is so, even if they manage to evade detection and public infamy. Can a man's affluence avail him, if it has already cost him his self-respect? The irony is that public respect is purchased at the cost of self-respect. That is too great a price to pay.

Relationships suffer in a culture of superficiality. The logic of change operates with equal effectiveness on relationships as on fashions. Both remain vulnerable to change and are driven by convenience. Since this is an intuited reality all through, relationships bristle with anxiety and mistrust from the beginning. Mutual trust can exist only in personal depth, the depth of total mutual acceptance in love. Mistrust activates control-orientation, which breeds cruelty. All the values that we cherish - such as love, truth, compassion and justice - have their roots in the human depth; and they evaporate in a culture of superficiality. "Is your heart made of muscle or mud?" shot the Principal Sessions Judge in Chennai at the police officer who handled the arrest of Mr. M. Karunanidhi. The judge knows that police officers act less according to deep, personal convictions and more in consonance with the prevailing political ambience. According to the outlook that now prevails, a man is a cherished treasure as long as he is ensconced in the seat of power, but is wholly worthless when out of it. This is the quintessential logic of materialism. The problem with the police officer is not that his heart is made of mud; but that he too is animated by the mindset of materialism. "Heart of mud", incidentally, is an evocative metaphor of the human predicament in a materialistic culture.

Superficiality is, besides, a domain of compromised freedom. According to Swami Vivekananda, man is free only in the sphere of the spirit. He can have the illusion of freedom in the domains of matter and mind. Freedom is at the root of our humanity. The thirst for freedom cannot be assuaged by the glitter or comfort of the prison to which we are confined. This is why mansions of affluence often hold oceans of misery. Downy pillows and plush mattresses are, somehow, incomplete without sleeping pills. Materialism traps us, unawares, in a world of possessions hagridden by irrational fears of likely loss and lurking dangers. It reduces human freedom to the logic of taking and receiving, and erodes the freedom to give. The freedom only to receive is, at best, only an illusion of freedom. It degenerates sooner of later into the compulsion to extort, which makes thieves of those who can thrive at the expense of others. Significantly, in the Indian tradition, as well as in all other spiritually informed schools of thought, the basic ingredients of human freedom are self-control, generosity and compassion.

Finally, materialism degrades creativity to consumption. Creativity, like personality, to which it is organically related, is a depth phenomenon, as is proved by the mystery that inheres in it. On the surface there could be suspense, but not mystery. Creativity is an outward flow. Consumption is a pull in the opposite direction.

Consumption is not merely a dental activity. It is a larger and comprehensive metaphor of a personality-orientation. Consumption affords pleasure. But it is only creativity that engenders enduring joy. Pleasure, in comparison, is superficial and transitory. It breeds a craving to consume ever-increasing doses in the futile chase after elusive fulfillment.

Consumerism has powerful psychosocial and pseudo-religious overtones in materialism. It is the ritual of materialism. In materialistic cultures a person's social worth is measured wholly by the consumables he can afford. This includes not only exotic cuisine, expensive wardrobe, and other catalysts of "social envy", but also pointers like expensive medical treatment, exclusive education, elite residential locality, and so on. One familiar pointer to the psychological implications of consumerism is what has come to be known as "retail therapy". This refers to the false sense of wellbeing that people derive merely from shopping for the sake of shopping. When peace returns after a domestic quarrel, for example, the husband and wife celebrate the occasion by going on a shopping spree that may include the ritual of 'eating out'.

In the process these familial gladiators side-step the duty to understand each other, which would help avert the periodic outbreak of domestic dogfights. This creates a seemingly autonomous cycle comprising tensions, conflict-resolutions, shopping sprees and further tensions.

The spread of materialism

A way of life does not become materialistic simply on account of the increase in its affluence. It does so only when the criteria for judging realities and options are derived from the materialistic worldview. In materialistic cultures, even religion is shaped and driven by the logic of materialism. A pointer in this direction is the fact that people practise religion - never mind which religion - only with materialistic intentions and calculations. In general terms, these "religious" motives are either to persuade God to be partisan to one's own interests or to ward off the dreaded displeasure of God, lest it proves too costly. If this does not strike us as "religious corruption" it is because discernment of this kind is alien to the materialistic mindset. That being the case, one should expect "religious materialism", if you like, of this sort to abound in routine self-contradictions. It is not rarely that one comes across, for instance, gurus and dharmacharyas who pride themselves on their ascetic credentials chuckling gleefully, nonetheless, over the affluence and clout of their devotees!

The clinching proof that the spirit of materialism is ascendant in a particular religion is that it prefers to wall in its community, and wall out all others. Exclusion is the intrinsic logic of materialism. Hospitality is its counterpart in the culture of spirituality. Matter is neutral; whereas materialism is loaded with negativity. Matter in materialism serves as the medium of separation between individuals and communities. Between the rich and the poor, there is a wall thicker than the Great Wall of China. Matter, from a spiritual outlook, becomes the bridge that connects. The task of spirituality is to set free the captives of "exclusionist" mental prisons and to enable them to reach out in love and service to a world in need. It is like the mental revolution that preceded the circumnavigation of the globe. Ferdinand Magellan dared to embark on his adventure because, unlike his contemporaries, he saw the sea as something that "connected" the continents. Others assumed that the sea "separated" the continents! From a spiritual perspective materialism is a throw-back to the pre-Magellan era in the geography of the soul.

In the domain of politics, materialism excludes compassion from the culture of governance. When governance is informed by spiritual sensitivity, it makes eminent sense to address the needs of the underprivileged as a preferential option. That is because, such a culture, because it does not equate the worth of a human being with his material possessions, insists on the worth of the poor and the powerless. From a materialistic viewpoint, however, have-nots have nothing, including human worth. Ideological charades apart, therefore, the poor cease to be a matter of concern to the rulers. The "invisibility of the poor" is a natural and necessary outcome of it. It was because Gandhiji had a vibrant spiritual sensitivity that he insisted on the poorest of the poor being the term of reference for choosing between models and priorities for development. In the Indian context there is an unmistakable correlation between the denial of the poor and the rise of corruption in public life. One way or another, corruption is inevitable in a materialistic way of life.

Materialism has a devastating effect on the idea of work and the culture of the workplace itself. Work comes to be seen, primarily, as a crucible of covetousness. Money becomes the ultimate arbiter between people. This drains work of any social, psychological or spiritual significance. The worth of work then comes to be seen only in terms of how much it brings home to the worker, irrespective of the means employed. This makes workers blind to the prospect of creativity, innovativeness and their own personal dignity in the approach to work. Work becomes a soulless routine; and the workplace a barren territory of inevitable boredom, alienation and frustration. The alienation of the worker from the value and meaning of work is at the centre, we know, of Marx's concern for the working class. It is also a key issue in the sociology of work.

It could sound heretical at the present time to be skeptical of the blessings of materialism. A spiritually informed critique of materialism does not advocate the renunciation of the fruits of material development. Spirituality is not religious obscurantism! Nor is spirituality partial to any model of economic development. The business of spirituality is to remain vigilant against the assumptions and advocacies in every culture and every age that misconstrue life and human welfare. The key assumption in spirituality is the primacy of the human. All the wealth of the world put together does not surpass the worth of a human being. This is the core of the spiritual vision because nothing less can ward off the temptation to subordinate the human to the material accessories of the world. Materialism, as against material progress, is incompatible with our spiritual destiny because it makes life subservient to the amenities for living. The fundamental problem of the modern man, according to Einstein, is that he gets obsessed with the means to the neglect of the ends. This cripples the art of living. It makes us improvise solutions without understanding problems and evolve remedies without diagnosing the maladies.

The spiritual option is not to renounce modernity or demonise development. It is, instead, to transcend the spirit of materialism. It is to ensure that material development remains conducive to the blossoming of the human spirit. It is to remain vigilant against the danger of losing the needle of life in the haystack of the material circumstances for living.

Culturally, materialism leads to Philistinism which, according to Matthew Arnold, makes the heart subservient to the stomach, with all the problems that arise in its wake. Spiritually, materialism leads to religious fundamentalism which corrupts the fundamentals of a religion by degrading them into weapons for defending vested interests. Humanly, materialism effects an existential dis- equilibrium between matter and spirit, choking the human under the preponderance of the material. The inner being experiences this anomaly as depression, despair and life-weariness. The sickness of materialism is not that there is an over-abundance of material goods. The poverty of materialism is that in its keenness to fatten the body it leaves the spirit starved. It is reflected in the foolish assumption that the hypervitaminosis of the body would, somehow, spill over and become nourishment for the soul. The mounting agony of the world, however, roundly condemns the willful blindness of this secular dogma.

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