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OPINION

A moral argument for Christmas commercialism

By Richard E. Sincere Jr.

At the most recent Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville, filmmaker and political activist Alexandria Searls presented her new video about “Buy Nothing Day,” an annual “celebration” of austerity and asceticism. A grainy, colorless documentary, the film records the street theatre that takes place on the day after Thanksgiving, whose purpose is to discourage Americans from purchasing goods on what purports to be the busiest shopping day of the year. (It isn’t, but the myth lives on.)

“Buy Nothing Day” is another manifestation of the many complaints we hear each year about the “excessive commercialism” of Christmas. People complain about the barrage of product advertising, the crowded malls, and the rush of retailers to have the earliest holiday displays.

Such complaints are not new, of course. They have been voiced for generations. Forty-five years ago, adman Stan Freberg skewered his colleagues on Madison Avenue with the devastating musical satire, “Green Chri$tma$,” which still holds up as poignantly funny.

Perhaps the most trenchant criticism of Christmas commercialism suggests that immoderate eating and drinking, buying and selling — what Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” — divert us from the needs of those less fortunate and indeed (put most starkly) steal food from the mouths of the poor.

These criticisms often accompany the appeals we receive each December, solicitations to give our time or money to voluntary organizations that house the homeless, clothe the naked, teach the ignorant, cure the ill, or feed the hungry. Such organizations are the backbone of a free and compassionate society, for they perform the corporal works of mercy that many of us in our busy daily lives are unable to perform individually. They deserve our support.

Sometimes the message of guilt is explicit. At one Advent service, I heard a sermon that specifically condemned our consumerism as an assault on the poor. Conspicuous consumption becomes, in a word, a sin.

Let’s consider this for a moment, because I want to make the case stated so succinctly by the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides: “Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.”

Simply remember that every time you buy a Christmas gift — a new DVD, a dollhouse, a camp stove, a toolbox, a scented candle — you are helping to pay someone’s wages. Millions of such purchases, made every day in the Christmas-shopping season keep factories open, workers employed, and families fed.

Think about who depends on Christmas to make a living: Santa and his elves, of course, but also all of their “helpers” around the world. There are the printers of gift catalogues; postal workers and UPS (United Parcel Service) drivers who deliver packages; loggers who cut the trees to make the paper for holiday cards and wrapping paper; turkey farmers and cranberry growers … the list is not only endless; it is growing.

Imagine, for a moment, who benefits from your purchase of a woolen sweater. The wool came from sheep raised by a shepherd in the mountains of Nevada or New Zealand. The raw wool was processed into yarn at a textile mill in North Carolina or Nigeria. Dyes came from a chemical plant in Michigan or India. The yarn was woven into a sweater at a factory in Ohio or China. A trucker from Idaho drove the finished product to a distribution center in Colorado. There it was packaged and sent to stores around the country, where stock boys and sales clerks bring it to the ultimate purchasers. How many individuals earn a living from that single sweater? How many communities avert poverty because you, the individual shopper, choose to buy it?

Asked at the Virginia Film Festival what would happen if her vision of “buy nothing” were taken to its logical conclusion, throwing people out of work and causing poverty among those who make the things we buy, filmmaker Searls was preternaturally sanguine. That was not her concern, she said; rather, her concern was the “vacant faces” of those in the shopping malls, who were clearly “not enjoying themselves.” Such churlish condescension is typical of those who fail to understand what keeps people fed.

This argument is not meant merely to assuage our guilt about “conspicuous consumption.” It states the case that commerce, by creating wealth and eliminating poverty, has a substantial moral — even spiritual — component. Creating wealth makes charity — those corporal works of mercy — possible. As Margaret Thatcher once noted, “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions. He had money as well.”

Charity to those who cannot care for themselves is good. Giving them the means to care for themselves is better. Best of all is to engage in commerce: buying goods and services for a mutually agreeable price. This prevents poverty and trims the lists of the needy at Christmas and always.

Richard Sincere covered the Virginia Film Festival as entertainment editor for The Metro Herald, a weekly African American newspaper in Alexandria, Va.