Socializing Kids and Corporations
I was in Borders today and grabbed the most recent edition of Mother Jones magazine. I was intrigued by a number of the articles listed in the table of contents, but the opening line of Bill McKibben’s piece “Is Corporate Do-Goodery for Real?” was compelling enough to get me to throw down the six bucks necessary to take a copy home. As the father of a soon-to-be two-year-old and a soon-to-be five-year-old, I found the opening paragraph of McKibben’s article terribly alarming but also all too familiar. McKibben writes:
“Ten percent of a two-year-old’s nouns are brand names; by the time an American child heads to school, he or she can recognize hundreds of logos. Disney is now putting its cartoon characters on fresh fruit, arguing (perhaps correctly) that it’s the only way to get kids to eat it. If that’s the world we’re born into, is it any wonder we want corporations to solve our biggest problems as well? Isn’t it a parent’s job to protect us? And besides, who else has the capital and the power to do what needs to be done in the face of a crisis like global warming?”
The whole family thought it was cute the other night when we were driving next to a big mall and our youngest – who, incidentally, is still trying to master the names of everyone in his family – called out “Chuck E. Cheese!” as we drove past the sign that bears the name and likeness of every American kid’s favorite pizza making rat. Cute and terrifying.
But McKibben’s piece is not really about the process of forming children into fully devoted followers of consumer capitalism (for more on that, see Juliet Schor’s insightful and appalling Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture). McKibben’s article is about asking the question of whether or not we can have confidence in the recent rise of corporations with at least the appearance of a conscience.
At one point in the article McKibben takes a shot at the ultimate big-box juggernaut, Wal-Mart, who recently announced that they would start carrying organic produce:
“Often the difficulty is built right into a company’s business model. It makes scant difference whether Wal-Mart starts stocking organic food or not, because the real problem is the imperative to ship products all over the world, sell them in vast, downtown-destroying complexes, and push prices so low that neither workers nor responsible suppliers can prosper. (In fact, Wal-Mart’s decision to sell organic food will almost certainly mean the final consolidation of the industry into the hands of a few huge growers that ship their produce across thousands of miles—not to mention that the people ringing up the organic groceries will still make below-poverty wages and taxpayers will still be footing the bill for their health care. There’s something gross about buying a healthy carrot from a sick company.)”
Predictably, McKibben doesn’t hold out a lot of hope that the corporate powers-that-be, left to their own devices, will rescue us from our ills. He does offer some hope for us, but it’s a hope that requires us to muster up some political moxie:
“‘Will business save the world?’ turns out to be the wrong question. The right question is “How can we structure the world so that businesses play their part in saving it?” And the answer to that, inevitably, is politics…. The strange part is how little opposition the corporate agenda meets anymore—how many of us have accepted the ideological argument that as long as we leave commerce alone, it will somehow, magically, solve all our problems. We could compel Big Oil to take its windfall profits and build windmills; instead we stand quietly by, as if unfettered plunder were the obvious and necessary course…. In the childlike enchantment we’ve lived under since the Reagan era, we’ve wanted very much to believe that someone else, some wavy-haired ceo, would do the hard, adult work of problem-solving. In fact, corporations are the infants of our society—they know very little except how to grow (though they’re very good at that), and they howl when you set limits. Socializing them is the work of politics. It’s about time we took it up again.”
Happy Thanksgiving Barry and family!
And, great post. Very interesting. I recently bought a McKibben book because it was recommended, and I haven't read any yet, nor do I know a thing about him (until now)!
The book is The Comforting Whirlwind - God, Job, and the scale of creation. I'm very interested to start now.
I'm intrigued by this article.
I recently saw/heard the CEO of Timberland on the Colbert Report, talking about being a CEO, a large profitable company, and still being very responsible when it comes to the environment, etc.. It was the whole point of the interview, in fact. It was unique, but hopeful too!
I'd love to see where these ideas go.
-s.o
Posted by
s.o |
11:29 PM
Leanna and I were driving back from Georgia today and she stopped by a Starbucks. I couldn't figure out anything to drink so I just got a "water." Well, turns out the water I got was from a company which donated 5 cents of every sales to providing clean water solutions around the world.
http://www.ethoswater.com/
At the time, I though, "what a neat idea!", and I also thought, perhaps too cynically, that it really wasn't taking much off the bottom line when I paid 1.80 for the water in the first place and they donate 5 cents of that to some charitable cause.
Ah. At any rate, nice to see you posting. Hope the dissertation is going well.
Posted by
Nate |
11:27 PM
Barry, I find your post very interesting. I am struck with this thought: the very principles of democracy and a free economy is destructive to the very thing it endorses. America is the land where anyone can work hard, think of a good enough idea, work hard some more, and get rich. Right? But when there's nothing to stop him from getting richer and richer, he eventually gets greedy and puts down the little guy, which he used to be. So we start legislating against him (the big guy) in such a way that the gov then becomes the big guy, or "The Man."
It just seems like the idea that politics is the way to do away with monsters like Wal-Mart is odd. Maybe it's just necessary at this point-the only worthy adversary.
Don't you think that the best way to defeat The Man is to raise those two boys of yours so that they will not be duped by the corporate cut-throats?
And then to write more and talk more about this stuff? I like to think Shelley was right when he said, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World."
Looks like we're getting started.
Posted by
Richard Carpenter |
5:09 PM
Richard,
Wow. A visit from the third member of the thoseawake community. I’m honored.
Great thoughts. I think you are essentially right with your idea that the principles of democracy and a free economy are destructive to the very thing they endorse. Those virtues and social structures that sustain our culture are eroded by the economic principles that rule it.
I should have said that I have a far greater sense of optimism concerning the prospects of socializing kids than I do of our socializing corporations.
With respect to the rather odd suggestion that our hope lies in politics, I suppose it has a lot to do with how you parse that word. If by politics McKibben means primarily or exclusively participation in our American partisan political system (which, on my more cynical days, seems to me to be increasingly less like a democracy and increasingly more like an auction), then I think his hope is pretty fundamentally misplaced. If, however, you adopt the older, broader and richer concept of “politics” – viz., the way in which a people orders its common life – then I think that there is something to the thought that we can hope for a better future through politics.
The really important question would then become something like “Who is my polis?” Here’s where I think that American Christians need to recover the sense that our primary political identity (again, in the older, broader, richer sense of the term) is the church. Such a sense of church as polis (which, by implication, would mean church as “counter-polis” or “alternative polis”) would then involve the church structuring its common life in such a way that what you referred to as “The Man” doesn’t exercise absolute dominion.
This, in turn, also has profound implications for how I raise my two boys. I’m convinced that it really does take a polis to raise a child (an idea that did not originate with Hillary Clinton ;-)). The dominant polis is more than happy to help me raise my boys to become what my post referred to as “fully devoted followers of consumer capitalism.” Honestly, I feel a bit helpless at times trying to fight the powers that be in this regard. That’s precisely why my family and I need an alternative polis.
More needs to be said about why such an account of "church as polis" wouldn’t need to entail a sort of sectarian abandonment of the dominant culture and an abdication of the biblical responsibility to live “in but not of.” But I’ve already said too much for now. Bottom line… I just really need more friends that read Wendell Berry and grow gardens in their backyard. ;-)
Posted by
Kim |
8:57 PM
Barry,
Ah, I like this idea of the polis. And thanks for helping me understand what you mean by politics, this is much more hopeful.
Posted by
Richard Carpenter |
7:09 PM