MATERIAL CULTURE

Material culture may be defined as the human significance of the totality of tangible artifacts that humans have produced. These artifacts range from the mundane and perishable to the monumental and enduring, and have been linked together in distinctive ways across place and time. Scholarly attention to material culture beyond technical analyses is divided among mainstream disciplines such as history and anthropology and specializations such as art history, archaeology, history of technology, cultural geography, and philosophy of technology. In all instances, questions of the ethical implications of material culture call for reflective consideration.

Basic Transformations

Despite the manifold plurality of material cultures across places and times, the Industrial Revolution of late-eighteenth-century England introduced a watershed into human history that began a radical transformation in the general character of material culture across all of its permutations. The steam engine for the first time in human history provided a tireless, ubiquitous, and powerful prime mover. Coal became a seemingly limitless energy source, and iron and steel constituted a material for structures that were both large and finely articulated.

Already in the nineteenth century, this transformation exhibited creative and destructive aspects, both noted by Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) in The Communist Manifesto (1848). About the creative side they said: "The need of a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere" (Marx and Engels 1955 [1848], p. 13). This creative process has continued over the past century and a half and is much discussed in the early 2000s under the term globalization.

The destructive side Marx and Engels described as follows: "All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind" (Marx and Engels 1955 [1848], p. 13). They described the dissolution more specifically in their description of how the labor power of workers was being torn out of its traditional context of personal relations, social bonds, and ownership of stores and tools and converted into a commodity whose price was being more and more depressed. Marx's Capital (1867) extended this analysis to all those things that used to be rooted in the production and consumption of the household and were pulled into the market by industry and commerce. This process too is still being discussed vigorously, and Anglo-American scholars have coined the term commodification as a covering concept.

Both creation and destruction are pervaded by a third process, a dematerialization and refinement of production and consumption. John Kenneth Galbraith (1967) noted how the basis of economic power had shifted since the eighteenth century from land via capital to expertise. Daniel Bell (1973) described a similar shift from extraction via fabrication to processing. Remarkably, Thomas J. Schlereth (1982) observed a broadly analogous process of sophistication in the scholarly concern with material culture. He distinguished the "The Age of Collecting (1876–1948)" from the "The Age of Description (1948–1965)" and the "The Age of Analysis (1965–)." The current end phase of this development is also much considered and contested in the early twenty-first century under such headings as the computer era or the information age.

Modern technology began as a widespread activity of inspired tinkering and ingenious inventing in the last third of the eighteenth century. It was well underway before the natural sciences in the nineteenth century caught up with technology and, through the explanation of heat, pressure, electricity, and materials, became an engine of innovation. Technological devices, in turn, began to open up deeper dimensions of familiar phenomena and entirely new areas of investigation. Research and development have to this day been the major sources of productivity growth and thus of an exploding material culture. By now technology and science have so fulsomely embraced one another that it has become fashionable to see them as one creature—technoscience (Ihde and Selinger 2003). It is an undeniable fact, to be sure, that much of science is undertaken for technological gain and that technology has stimulated science and made it more effective; yet technology and science remain distinguishable and, from the moral point of view, need to be distinguished.

Ethical Assessment

When it comes to its ethical examination, Marx may again be considered a founding figure in his ambivalence about the moral quality of the newly emerging material culture. Under the surface, Marx regretted the loss of traditional things and relations. Overtly, however, he considered the world of the past as one of oppression, exploitation, and even idiocy, and he embraced the Industrial Revolution and its fruits. What he emphatically found objectionable and doomed was not the quality of the new material culture, but maldistribution in the power over production and in the blessings of consumption.

Because it does not examine or question the internal moral structure and properties of the artifacts modern technology has produced, Marx's moral judgment of the material culture is an extrinsic one. It has in fact become the received wisdom of social theory that there are no morally significant internal structures or properties and that tangible technology is thus morally neutral. Accordingly, when considering how standard ethical theories and more popular moral positions bear on contemporary material culture, all those bearings turn out to be extrinsic.

This does not mean they are unimportant. Consider the two leading contemporary ethical theories. The first is the ethics of equality and liberty, masterfully represented by John Rawls (1999) and technically known as deontology. It contends that inequalities in power and prosperity are warranted only if everyone has an opportunity to become powerful and prosperous, and if inequalities are to the benefit of the poor and powerless. This implies a significant and well-warranted critique of how prosperity and the material objects of which it consists are distributed nationally and globally. At the same time Rawls makes the debatable claim that prosperity and opportunity in themselves can be defined in a morally thin or neutral sense.

The other leading contemporary moral theory is utilitarianism, which is concerned with maximizing the happiness of a given population (Sidgwick 1981 [1907]). The animating principle of utilitarianism is as intuitively simple and attractive as it is technically difficult and forbidding. Finding a measure for happiness, establishing the maximizing procedure, and defining the relevant population have turned out to be endlessly complicated and controversial problems that at every turn threaten implementation with paralysis. Utilitarianism becomes a feasible program if one substitutes prosperity for happiness and agrees to measure prosperity with money. The resulting moral theory—what may be termed monetary utilitarianism—dominates public policy decision-making in the advanced industrial countries and retains some of the affirmative and forward-looking spirit of the original conception. Maximizing becomes equated with increasing the gross domestic product by all available means, a person's happiness is measured by income and prosperity, and the relevant population is the citizenry of a nation. All this is animated by a spirit of optimism and tolerance. But utilitarianism, monetary or not, remains neutral when it comes to the moral quality of the goods that, along with the services, compose prosperity or lead to happiness. This is how utilitarians understand tolerance.

Environmentalism and Religion

The two more popular moral positions that bear on the material culture are environmentalism and religion. Environmentalists, broadly speaking, regard contemporary material culture as hypertrophic (growing excessively) and ruinous. Hence they counsel a reduction of material possession and consumption. This too is a moral injunction on the material culture—and one that is important and would be beneficial if heeded. But as practiced, environmentalism would not require a deeper understanding and a transformation of the moral quality of material culture. One might continue to enjoy the same tangible and consumable objects, albeit in environmentally sustainable versions—sitting on natural-fiber couches, drinking beer brewed from organically grown barley and hops, eating chips made from genetically unmodified corn, staring at a television set that, at the end of its useful life, the producer has to take back and recycle in its entirety. All of this would make the material culture simpler in quality and reduced in quantity, but not essentially different in character.

The most pointed and the best-known critique of the material culture comes from religious ethics. It condemns materialism—the excessive concern with material goods. Pope John Paul II has been a vocal proponent of this criticism, and his voice may seem a lonely one because, at least in the United States, Christianity and materialism seem to be anything but antagonistic. When questioned, however, Americans profess to be worried about materialism (Wuthnow 1996, Schor 1998). These worries surface in movements that range from Luddism to voluntary simplicity (Elgin 1981).

Materialism is an ill-defined phenomenon. The concern with material objects covers such disparate things—television sets and sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) are material objects, but so are musical instruments and bicycles. Can't one at least say that, no matter the kinds of material objects, there are simply too many? Aren't humans consuming too much and thus running out of raw materials, food, timber, and energy? And in the process, aren't the industrialized countries of the northern hemisphere exploiting those of the globe's southern half? According to Mark Sagoff (1997), however, these apprehensions turn out to rest on misconceptions.

Two conclusions appear to follow. First, the religious objection to materialism stands no matter how materialism is defined. Excessive concern with any kind of material object is a distraction from spiritual matters or the afterlife. Second, secular worries about materialism are unfounded, and a secular outlook on life cannot have objections in principle to the current way of taking up with material culture. Both conclusions leave one uneasy, however. As to the first, excessive concern with tangible stuff is morally objectionable by definition. But what about appreciation and enjoyment of the visible world? Some religious traditions at least think of the tangible world as created by God and therefore as fundamentally good. Secular folks who worry about materialism have something specific in mind, namely, consumerism (Wuthnow 1996, Schor 1998). Materialism in this sense is a preoccupation with a particular kind of material object, consumable objects, presumably. There is a need, then, for an intrinsic analysis of material goods and for a determination of whether their internal structure is ethically potent.

Material Goods Themselves

One school of thought has it that material goods are used to mark and enforce class distinctions (Veblen 1992, Douglas and Isherwood 1979, Schor 1998). Though this is certainly true and morally troubling, it reveals little about the specific quality of goods produced by modern technology. Horses, servants, and mansions were used to signal high status prior to the Industrial Revolution, and sumptuary laws were used to enforce class distinctions more rigorously than even Ferraris do in the early 2000s. Here again a cue may be taken from Marx or at least from his progeny. Like Marx, more recent left-liberal theorists have examined the transformation things undergo when they are drawn into market. Commodification is the term used to name this phenomenon, and the term carries connotations of disapproval, unlike the coreferential term that conservatives prefer, namely, privatization, or the term of mixed connotations, namely, commercialization.

Commodification has a clean and crisp economic definition: the process of moving something into the market—from either the intimate sphere or the public sphere—so that it becomes available for sale and purchase. In the case of a good from the public sphere, a public good is converted into a commodity, and, speaking more precisely, privatization is commodification in this latter sense only. Some of the public goods, such as justice and elementary education, are not material, of course, but others, such as transportation or a healthy environment, clearly are. The same distinction applies to intimate goods. Friendship and freedom are not material goods, but food and clothing are.

Commodification of intangible goods is morally objectionable because in this case a good commodified becomes a good corrupted. Justice bought is no longer justice, and friendship paid for is not real friendship. But no such opprobrium seems to taint tangible goods. Railroads are managed as public goods by governments in some countries, whereas in others they are private enterprises run for profit. Food and clothing have left the intimate sphere of the household so long ago that people no longer notice their peculiarities as commodities. Accordingly, Michael Walzer (1983), who has thought deeply about commodification (though he does not use the word), has drawn up a list of never-to-be-commodified goods, all of which are intangible.

Is there a way of capturing the apprehensions about consumerism, the suspicion that commodification of material goods is a process whereby "all that is holy is profaned" or that at least some holy things are profaned? The sacredness of food is certainly lost when it is shelved in a supermarket. The sacredness of nature is gone when it becomes an engineered setting for the wilderness lodge in Disney World. The holiness of things, or, more prosaically, their power to engage people deeply, is lost when things are stripped of their spatial, temporal, and social contexts, when those contexts are reconstituted and concealed technological means, and when the resulting commodities are made available for sale.

Commodification, then, is a cultural as well as an economic process. These two processes largely overlap, but not entirely. The food in a supermarket is commodified both economically and culturally. A typical farmers' market is a scene of economic commodification. The food, after all, is for sale. But significant contexts are there to be experienced directly. The local market reflects its special context in the fruits and vegetables that the local soil and climate can produce. It reflects the season with the hardy stuff appearing early in the year and the more tender things not until summer. Sellers are known for their expertise in growing this or that, and they establish ties of expectations and pleasure with their customers.

Conversely, tourists whose only concern is to capture the sights and scenes with their cameras deracinate treasures, trees, and towers and make them available as videos that can be shown anywhere and any time. They commodify their travels culturally though rarely economically. The things on those videos are severed from their here and now, but few would pay to see those desiccated things.

What is driving commodification? In its economic aspect it is certainly propelled by the pursuit of prosperity. This is a creditable desire, and many are grateful beneficiaries of at least some important parts of this affluence. The less noticed kinetic force of commodification is the desire for liberty—less noticed because one tends to think of liberty exclusively as political, the freedom from the oppression by persons. But, prior to the Industrial Revolution, there were also burdens and claims of material reality: the need to shear, card, and spin wool, and knit it into sweaters; the need to plant, water, weed, harvest, clean, prepare, and cook beans; and so on. Commodification, taken culturally, disburdens people of these requirements, and consumption can be taken in a culturally corresponding sense as the unencumbered enjoyment of commodities. Dematerialization turns out to be a consistent tendency of commodification. The less materially heavy and imposing commodities are, the more variously and easily they will be available and consumable. Technologically perfect virtual realities are the endpoint of this process.

Disburdenment too has its undeniable moral benefits, certainly when it comes to such basic parts of the material culture as water, warmth, and light. But disburdenment can hypertrophy from liberation to disengagement and lead to the physical and mental shapelessness that plagues the most advanced industrial societies. There is then a need to save or selectively reintroduce those material things that rightfully claim people's engagement and exertion, things such as musical instruments, gourmet kitchens, running trails, urbane cities, and more.

Morally debilitating commodification is not a problem for most people on the globe, namely, those who suffer from hunger, disease, illiteracy, and confinement. Appropriate globalizing of commodification is morally desirable. But finding a measure for appropriate globalization and for the readjustment of the material culture requires understanding the cultural and moral aspects of commodification. It is hard, however, to meet this task when science and technology are conceptually fused or rather confused into technoscience. Consider genetics. There are things to be found out about how genes and proteins relate to one another and how genes cooperate with one another and with environmental conditions to help produce brains, dispositions, and behavior. To come to understand these things is progress, and once clearly understood, the resulting knowledge compels assent. But there is nothing obviously progressive or compelling in the application of such knowledge. The eradication of aging and a massive deferral of dying may not be progress at all, and nothing compels one to think of those goals as desirable. These are moral issues that call for wisdom and persuasion.

ALBERT BORGMANN

SEE ALSO Consumerism;Distance;Place.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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