Alternative hedonism might just lead us to fulfilment

From Buzzle :

A new campaign by those disaffected with our shopping culture could be a cure for anxiety and low self-esteem, says Jackie Ashley.

Easter? It's about chocolate, obviously, but it is about so much else too. This is an appropriate time of year to reflect on our monotheism. We shall have one god, a jealous god, and no other gods shall we worship. Luckily, except for a few weirdos on the edges of society, we all do worship the one god, yea, the source of all happiness - shopping. It has just been predicted that we will spend £10.5bn over the four-day Easter break. Never have the British been so soaked in consumerism.

But perhaps there is evidence of a backlash against this glossy and omnipresent deity. Next week a conference at London Metropolitan University takes place with the title Countering Consumerism: Religious and Secular Responses. This may very well get them a fatwa from Tesco. Perhaps the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, which has seen sales improve so strongly in the past six months, will be standing outside with a placard declaring "Down with the blasphemers!", and a pile of organic air-freighted fruit with which to pelt the academics.

Interestingly, the conference does not start with the traditional leftwing case against consumerism, the austere hatred of waste that British people once felt, remembered by millions as simply: "Finish your dinner, what about the children in Africa?" There is nothing wrong with that, of course, except that the notion that we should all feel guilty about enjoying material plenty was so comprehensively defeated by the consumer booms of recent decades. It feels like a lost argument from another age.

Instead, the conference promises to focus on a backlash against the shopping culture for producing too much stress and pollution, and too little real satisfaction - the dark side of the consumer culture as experienced by those who are already sated. It talks of "alternative hedonism" - what Kate Soper, one of the organisers, calls "self-interested disaffection with consumerism" on the part of consumers themselves.

This is coming at a time when many organisations, from the television watchdog Ofcom to the National Consumer Council, have been looking at the effect of the shopping culture and its ubiquitous advertising, particularly on children. Polls show that an overwhelming majority of parents are worried. Across Europe there are moves to restrict junk-food advertisements from children's television.

With good reason; work by Juliet Schor of Boston College has tried to track how children are drawn into the shopping culture. Unsurprisingly, she finds that the more children are exposed to the media, mainly television, the more avidly they become consumers. More controversially, she goes on to argue that this produces "higher rates of depression, anxiety and psychosomatic complaints such as headache, stomach ache and boredom, as well as lower self-esteem". Consumerism, says Schor, is "ailing America's children."

The point of anti-consumerism, however, is not to ban one kind of advert any more than it is to produce better labelling about the fat and salt content of food. These things are useful in themselves, but if anything they could be called pro-consumerism: by reassuring consciences, they allow us to return to the shopping frenzy with renewed energy. The point of "alternative hedonism" is to confront the frenzy itself.

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