Materialism and the Consumer

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2000

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg examines materialism and the consumer. Does consumerism - as a cult, a fact, a need, a religion - threaten culture as we have known it, individuality as we desire it, life as we aspire to its best condition? Is the march of Mammon an army of jack-booted businessmen, using the propaganda of advertising and the seduction of the supermarket to trample us into submission, and into the worshipping of the great god - Buy? Or is the consumer the new source of power? A truer, more democratic individual freedom? Wordsworth prophesied much current criticism of consumerism when he wrote “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours:/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”. How has ‘getting and spending’ come to enjoy the place of importance it holds in our lives, and why have we so often seen shopping as in opposition to some notion of our ‘true natures’?With Rachel Bowlby, Professor of English, University of York and author of Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping; William Gibson, science fiction writer and author of Neuromancer and All Tomorrow’s Parties.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.uk.
0:09.0	I hope you enjoy the program.
0:11.0	Hello, are we in the thrall of consumer culture, hopelessly manipulated by
0:16.2	materialism, or has the market developed to better the condition, liberate even the
0:20.6	situation of man and woman? Wordsworth could be said to prophesied much current criticism of consumerism 200 years ago
0:27.0	when he wrote,
0:28.0	The world is too much with us.
0:30.0	Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
0:33.5	Little we see in nature that is ours.
0:35.5	We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.
0:39.3	How has getting and spending come to enjoy the place of importance
0:42.3	it holds in our lives, and why have we so often seen shopping as in opposition to some
0:46.8	notion of our truer natures. With me to discuss the development and future
0:51.0	of material culture is the influential science fiction
0:53.5	author William Gibson whose books include Neuromancer and All-Tomorrow's Parties.
0:57.8	He's in London to give talk on science and the creative mind at the ICA.
1:01.7	I'm also joined by Professor Rachel
1:04.0	Bulby, author of a forthcoming book, Carried Away, the invention of modern shopping. Rachel Bulby, the turn of last century, Thorstein-Viblen wrote the theory of the leisure class.
1:15.7	He first coined the phrase conspicuous consumption.
1:19.0	It seems rather modern phrase.
1:20.8	Has the idea of conspicuous consumption? Did he establish it and has it changed not much from the time he introduced the phrase?
1:29.0	Well, Vableen's idea of conspicuous consumption was based on the idea that the consumer is a man
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