Thanks to reading Marx in a lot of my English classes, I’m comfortable with supposing that a capitalist system turns everything into a product. Things like shoes, bags, beauty, and even time I’m okay with. I’d buy that shit, and often do. But if there’s one thing I refuse to give up, it’s my general skepticism, my overarching caution in assuming sincerity, essentially my intrinsic sense of empathy.
It is under threat here, the threat streaming in heavy from every news source, any scrap of feigned media, anything masquerading as “news” or, more absurdly, “truth.” Our most fundamental facet of the human condition, our natural ability and willingness to empathize with another life, is at stake in this great race for commodification. Everywhere you turn something is being manufactured, labeled, and ultimately, sold. It’s done with activism, at a time when our sincerity is needed the most. They say shopping at Amvets and singing in a folk band will make you more of an anti-war protester. They slap fatigues on a kid and wrap him up in a shroud of patriotism. The labels stick solid, the image sells, and any space for deviation is condensing into a scene more confining than a jail cell: the comforts of your own living room.
It is imperative for the average citizen to engage in a little contrariness, if only to see the blood vessels throb a bit. Just try asking some questions when it comes to the new national commodity: global warming. Dig a bit deeper on allegedly catastrophic rising sea levels, and you’ll find studies that are inconclusive at best, generally clueless in an ocean of data. It helps to pick out the theory from otherwise fact-heavy studies, piece through who runs them, who funds them, how many possible causes for a warmer earth match up with how many different effects it could produce. Dare to utter the ideas of Bjørn Lomborg, the “inconvenient truth,” if you will (or the unpopular version of it), in his book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. And, for God’s sake, find out how much money is being funneled into this cause-du-jour from all angles and walks of life, playing off our collective sense of guilt, allowing for no grey room in a practice that is rarely black and white. Someone’s telling you your car will cause the end of the world, someone else tells you how many squares of toilet paper to use on your ass, and still someone else is saying it’s the cow farts, it’s all in the cow farts.
More disturbing is the use of children and bloody bodies as images in some kind of campaign. One wonders where the money is actually going if you proudly contribute to a notable and well-advertised charity, or in support of the latest cause, whether it be turmoil in Africa or another disease that can kill us. I often wonder how much it costs to make me feel empathetic enough to sign a check, what kind of price-tag they throw on spreading democracy, or shocking genuine good-natured folks into fear or prejudice.
I’m not saying global warming doesn’t exist. There’s enough evidence to support some sort of climate change. But possible causes, potential effects, threats and compromises are still up in the air, still the stuff of theories and hypotheses. If we are to ration our resources and place ourselves in the larger framework of the ecological system, it will not be out of coercion or guilt-tripping, flashing our green like newly minted bills. It will be of an informed, conscientious turn of the heart, more ingrained than any surface commodity.
To that end, it’s worth going out there and buying any book on an alternate point of view, even if it seems morally reprehensible to you. You might find more questions than answers, but at least your money is going to a good cause: the unconquerable and insatiable human appetite for “truth.”
