All Consuming
Neal Lawson
Penguin
256pp
£10.99
In 2005, Neal Lawson tells us in this strange polemic, he ‘woke from a political slumber’, realised that we were a fallen people, and that shopping was the reason for our fall.
The ‘we’ – constantly invoked in this book – seems to be the British and American people, since Lawson is very specific about the nature of the devil. It is the hellish ‘turbo-consumerism’ that replaced merely bad consumerism as a result of the efforts of a dynasty of anti-society neoliberals, beginning with the economist Ludwig von Mises and ending with Margaret Thatcher.
Turbo-consumerism has alienated us from ourselves and each other, rendering us animalistic emptors of anything that clever capitalists wish to sell us. The result of this fiendishness and stupidity is climate change, global poverty and commercialised Christmases.
Lawson doesn’t think much of us at all. ‘We bought the stuff. We wanted it. We defined ourselves by it. We allowed ourselves to drift into the comatose life of the turbo-consumer. We needed something to worship and something to believe in and had long since swapped God for Gucci.’
Up to this point, I’m wondering who Lawson has been mixing with, since no one I know remotely fits this description. Materialism is one thing, but are there really whole strata of ‘comatose’ people who, uncaring of their children or lovers, cannot discuss anything but their shoes and enjoy no other activity than shopping?
There are, and worse, it seems. Consider how ‘consumer hedonism determines the quality of our social relations and behaviour so we increasingly lie, cheat, rage and vomit at will’. I would love to see the stats on national lying trends, but ‘increasingly’ vomiting at will? Then, ‘if we’re not raging or bingeing, we’re cheating. It’s become a national past-time.’ This beyond-even-the-Daily Mail rant is given a more familiar moral twist by Lawson’s view that parents (though not women, natch, but men too, as if) should be spending more time at home with the kids and have more kids earlier. ‘A decision to start a family’, he pronounces censoriously, ‘is just that – a decision rather than, as it once was, a natural consequence of living with or marrying someone.’ You mean, as it was before birth control, Neal.
I am unscared, too, by Lawson’s nightmare vision that ‘our fridges will soon talk directly to the supermarket via mobile technology to reorder food when stocks are low’. Good. I hate shopping. Nor do I accept that piercing makes our bodies ‘a temple to physical consumption’.
My unpierced Marxist father, an autodidact from a genuinely poverty-stricken background, would have been bemused by this: ‘I have a large book collection’, the author confesses like a priest admitting to lustful thoughts, ‘the books hang like intellectual trophies on the wall. As the moose head displays the hunter’s skills, so the bookshelves display my shopping skills and through them the inner me.’ My father thought his books indicated an interest in reading them. He loved them.
But all, all is gloom. Mistaken gloom, too. For example, Lawson is so concerned to have life conform to his miserable thesis that everything is rubbish and has been getting worse that he’ll allude to the erosion of public space, without noticing that our canals, parks, national trails, museums and galleries have all been getting better over the last 30 years.
His history is just as bad. ‘Country folk,’ he tells us, ‘had to be forcefully shifted off the land and transformed into worker bees. The mechanism by which this was achieved was harsh … primarily through enclosure, first introduced in Tudor times.’ This absurd over-deliberation is a bit like saying that the Highland Clearances was part of a plot to populate America. As for his Chestertonian invocation of the merry Middle Ages full of down-shifted peasants on holiday and fulfilled artisans, all ruined by Protestantism, the work ethic and individualism, I really think he ought to buy a few proper histories of the Reformation to sit alongside his mooses’ heads.
Even so, this deeply silly book is not entirely wrong. We do waste too much, we do consume too much of some things, we ought to have a fairer society, we will have to change some of the patterns of our consumption. But Lawson’s approach is more or less the worst way to convince people of the need and possibility of change. Take this on food waste: ‘We throw away £20bn worth (of food) in Britain every year – enough to lift 150 million people out of starvation.’ Question: how? Airlifts?
Ordinary people, I think, well understand that hierarchies of preferences such as Lawson’s are not, as he seems to imagine, the product of deep thought, but of shallow prejudice and snobbery. When he seeks to argue that books (borrowed from a public library) are best, but radio is better than television which is better than computer games and the iPod, they can see that both the book and the iPod are equally solitary.
And so we come to it. What Lawson, in contrition for his own earlier life of commercial lobbying, is recommending is that we should all become artisanal hippies, growing our own potatoes on our allotments, cycling everywhere, disdaining possessions, taking our holidays camping in Britain (which Lawson, beyond irony, describes as now being ‘cool’), and making like an apeman.