Talk to Centre for Public Christianity supporters’ lunch, Sydney
I’m pleased to be here to talk to your supporters’ lunch today. Speaking as a fellow-traveller rather than a Christian, I think the centre does a valuable job in making public a much-need Christian perspective on contemporary developments, and one not limited to issues of sexual morality.
I want to talk to you about materialism, an issue that’s been of growing interest to me the longer I’ve stayed as an economic journalist. Of course, we’re all concerned with the material to a greater or lesser extent - and for good reason. The material dimension of our lives is important, indeed, inescapable. Even the monk who takes a vow of poverty must devote a part of each day to begging.
But I believe we live in an era of heightened materialism, one where a lot more of us give material concerns a much higher priority in our lives, to the point where it can be said many of us - perhaps even society in general - have made materialism our god. This is true not just of Australia, but throughout the developed world and much of developing world.
I believe I can see this trend developing throughout my own working life in the attitudes and values of the businesses I’ve work for - and with - and in the way things have changed at the Herald over my 40 years there. Business life has become more intensely competitive and, as has, become more overtly focused on money-making over other values.
But if you want more objective evidence of heightened materialism, it can be found, first, in the American Freshman Survey, which has polled the attitudes of students entering tertiary education throughout the United States since 1967. In that year, 42 per cent of freshers said it was very important to be ‘very well off financially’. By 2012, the proportion believing this reached a record high of 81 per cent. Over the same period, the proportion saying it was very important for them to ‘develop a meaningful philosophy of life’ fell from 86 per cent to 46 per cent.
I think we can find evidence of our growing materialism in the way we’ve chosen take the ever-rising productivity of our labour in the form of higher real wages - more money - rather than fewer working hours, thereby confounding the predictions of the futurologists who foresaw an ever-shorter working week. Part of the problem is that, increasingly, leisure activity has become professionalised and commercialised - something you buy, including ‘retail therapy’.
I think we can find evidence of growing materialism in our changed attitude towards bearing our fair share of the tax burden and being too proud to claim welfare benefits we’re too well off to need. These days a mini industry exists to help the comfortably retired hold their wealth in ways that don’t diminish their eligibility for the age pension.
I’m not sure what factor or factors initiated this heightening in materialism, but I am sure the rise of economic rationalism - micro-economic reform, neo-liberalism - in the early 80s has been both a cause and an effect of our growing materialism since then. Economists have been offering governments pretty much the same advice for decades, but perhaps the politicians became more receptive to that advice as a response to the electorate’s increased material aspirations. Economists specialise in the material, in studying the ways the community can advance its material aspirations. Generally speaking, the economists’ advice works - and, certainly, over the past 30 years our material standard of living (measured as real income per person) has risen quite strongly and our position on the developed-country league table of income per person has improved a lot.
But the trouble with economic rationalism is that it’s missionary and imperialistic. It provides a rationalisation for selfishness and tends to promote the material aspect of life as though it’s the only thing that matters, unconsciously cannibalising other aspects such as the social, cultural and spiritual.
The trouble with materialism - and with money in particular - is that it’s more powerful than other motivations, tending to crowd out those less ‘salient’ influences. A psychology experiment found that when you offer people a choice between a $80,000 a year job that’s boring and a $70,000 job that’s interesting, they opt predominantly for the higher-paid job. The experimenters say this is not because of simple materialism, but because our brains find it much easier to compare the two numbers than to imagine how much worse a boring job would be than an interesting one.
We tend to invest material, money-making activities with a greater sense of urgency than non-material activities. Almost everyone would say their family was the most important part of their lives, but usually there’s nothing urgent about our relationships. So if I see little of the family while I work this weekend, we can always make it up later. We don’t really believe it, but we end up acting as though working long hours to allow us to send our kids to a good school is more important than actually being available to our kids.
Reading the work of the CPX’s fellows makes me think the decline in Christian observance and values may offer much of the explanation for our era of heightened materialism and for its great success as a rival god. Dr Justine Toh’s fascinating interpretation of the Harry Potter books reminds me of the power of advertising and its false promise that buying stuff can give our lives the meaning and identity we feel they lack. There was a time when religious belief filled these needs.
Dr Gordon Menzies’ essay on the sexual revolution reminds me in passing that the standard economists’ model is built on an unstated assumption that to be well-functioning, the market system needs a set of social norms that guide and constrain the behaviour of agents in the market. When you deregulate the financial markets, the absence of those social norms - and maybe even deregulation’s destruction of them - means self-seeking triumphs over prudence and restraint, and you end up with the GFC.
But where do social norms of honesty, self-restraint and consideration for others come from? Well, for openers, try religious belief. My reading tells me that, predominantly, people get their notion of what’s acceptable, ethical behaviour from the attitudes and behaviour of those around them - much more so than from any inner, moral compass. You’d expect that, the weaker were Christian observance and values, the less likely it is that people’s moral compass keeps them - and all of us - out of trouble.
One of the strongest conclusions I’ve come to as an economic commentator is that the dominance of economists and economic values in the advice going to governments and in the public debate needs to be balanced by the voices of people with other, non-materialist perspectives on what’s important to our lives. This is why I think the work of the Centre for Public Christianity is so important and I’d like to see it become more influential.
