The Dower Power Hour

Okay, so this blog isn’t completely dead. I no longer hold any public office, so in theory I should be more willing to weigh in on societal issues. However, I also still hope to run for an elected office someday, and thus there’s always the concern about having my words come back to haunt me. Actually there was an interesting article in The New York Times about this today, which I highly recommend.

However, since I spent an hour today responding to Reverend Chuck Freeman’s blog post entitled “A Consumer is a Subject, A Citizen is a Verb,” I thought I would upload my response here. Basically, Reverend Freeman argues that Americans today are in danger of becoming Subjects, not Citizens, because we have become “buying machines.” He says, “The American corporate media culture challenges our freedom in a much more sophisticated and seductive fashion. We are saturated with images and rhetoric by which we willingly morph our identity… A Consumer is a Subject, a pawn to be manipulated. A Citizen is a Verb with dignity and purpose.”

The following is my response:

Chuck,

While I agree with much of the spirit of your message, I wouldn’t be a good democratic “Citizen” if I didn’t express my opinion as to what I perceive as a weakness in your exposition, or at least a contradiction want to clarify. I have two points I would like to make and I’d be interested in hearing your response.

First, at one point you say, “we have reverted back to being Subject.” Later, you tell the reader, “You are now a Consumer. You have deformed into a buying machine.” But at the end, you conclude by asking, “Will you be a Consumer or a Citizen?” So my question is, do we have a choice or not? Are you trying to say that the American people have become Consumers, not Citizens, due to the effects of advertising and the importance our society places on economic wealth as the sole determination of value or are you merely alleging that it is easy to become a Consumer in that environment and we should resist the temptation?

I don’t think you are arguing the former, because if you are asking us to become Citizens, not Consumers, then clearly you believe such a choice is possible. So while it might be easy to slide into complacent consumerism, it’s not necessarily inevitable. If this is true, than I think you might overstate your case at the beginning of the composition for the sake of grabbing the audience’s attention. It might be more accurate to say, “An increasing number of Americans have become Consumers rather than Citizens” than to assert to the reader that they, individually, have made that transition.

My second point, which is less focused on the manner in which you present your idea and more on the content, is that I disagree on your equating Subject status with Consumer status.

The whole point of being a Subject was that you did not have a choice. You were compelled by the social and political hierarchy into doing something. You were not an actor in society because you lacked the power to change your status. A Citizen, as you say, is an active role.

However, I disagree that recent trends have forced us to become “Subjects” once more. Yes, Americans today are subjected to an increasing amount of advertising, bias in the media, and constant efforts to direct our personal behavior (at least to the extent it effects our voting and buying decisions). Yet by equating Subject and Consumer, you ignore (or at least, downplay) the liberty that we have to make choices that fly in the face of that manipulation. I might see an advertisement on TV, but no one is forcing me to buy a product at the point of a gun. Likewise, I can watch Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann but my voting behavior may be influenced, not determined, by those pundits. In essence, despite constant efforts to control our behavior, we still have the ability to choose, which is the hallmark of the Citizen status.

It is impossible to sever the link between Citizen and Consumer, because the central characteristic of both is the same: the ability to choose. Merely because other people are trying to direct our behavior does not mean we are Subjects, because we still have the liberty to act according to our preferences.

In fact, if anything, I think we have the opposite problem today. Far from becoming Subjects again, without the ability to choose, we instead have become over-saturated by the abundance of choice. Which cereal should I eat for breakfast? What car should I drive? Where should I live? Who should I vote for? Americans have so many options that we become exhausted by constantly making decisions. With so much choice, the temptation is to become lazy. It is so difficult to remain informed about everything. Much easier to surrender to popular opinion, or advertisements, and just follow the group. This, in my opinion, is the real risk in society today.

The important distinction is not between Citizen and Consumer, but rather through being a passive Citizen-Consumer and an active one.

An active Citizen-Consumer is still under the pressures that are inevitable in a free society, but attempts to find out the truth. A passive Citizen-Consumer responds to that pressure by blindly complying with it. However, equating passive Citizen-Consumers with Subjects ignores the central issue. What is at stake is not the liberty to choose, which distinguishes Citizens from Subjects. What is at stake is our willingness to actively seek the truth in the face of an exhausting amount of personal liberty.