Metro Pulse/Minority Report/Enough Is Too Much

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Martin Luther King Jr. outlined the ills of consumption

by Sean Sheehan

This week we celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. It's a week that would have seen the civil rights hero celebrate his 75th birthday. It's also one of the few holiday weekends that Madison Avenue has yet to brazenly co-opt. Now while I can't say I'd be too surprised to see an ad for a "King Day Blowout sale: white Hummers, black Hummers, same low price," I do find it appropriate that ad shills seem to be steering clear of one of the 20th century's great opponents of extreme materialism.

"Now hold on," you might be saying. "I thought Dr. King stood up to racial inequality and military aggression." You'd be right, of course, but Dr. King actually spoke of three intertwined problems—racism, militarism and materialism—that needed to be overcome if his beloved United States was to fulfill the promise of the American Dream. The promise of the original American Dream was rooted in core American values such as freedom, security, justice and opportunity. It held that everyone should have access to pursue a good life. Unfortunately, in the second half of the 20th century these central values began to be corrupted and replaced by more materialistic priorities. Dr. King saw this corruption, recognized the disconnect between "enough for all" and "excess for some," and spoke out. In his 1967 "Beyond Vietnam" speech, King attested: "We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

This speech was not unique. Other speeches referred to "the triple evils of racism, extreme materialism and militarism." Interestingly, he also sometimes spoke of "poverty, racism and militarism" in the same way. King's interchangeable use of "materialism" and "poverty" is telling; he clearly understood that we live in a world of finite natural resources, and he obviously supported Gandhi's principle that there is "enough for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed." If King were alive to celebrate his 75th birthday, one can imagine that he might tout the findings of researchers at the University of British Columbia who discovered that we would need the resources of four additional planets for everyone on earth to live the lifestyle of the average North American. King recognized that the materialistic version of the American Dream was growing incompatible with the core values of the original dream. The conflict was particularly pronounced when citizens in developing countries aspired toward these American values, only to have U.S. political and corporate leaders thwart their aspirations out of fear that it would raise the cost of consumer imports. King saw this as a betrayal of the values upon which our nation was founded. He once lamented, "It is a sad fact that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries."

Unfortunately, the change King observed in the 1960s has only become more entrenched in subsequent decades. At the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the first President Bush staunchly defended and defined America by its "more is better" obsession when he declared to the world, "The American way of life is not negotiable."

When Madison Avenue tells us we're too small to make a difference, King reminds us that individual Americans together, even financially poor black Americans, have a tremendous amount of consumer power. In his "I've been to the mountaintop..." speech, King says, "[Let us] always anchor our external direct action with the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we are poor people, individually, we are poor when you compare us with white society in America. We are poor. Never stop and forget that collectively, that means all of us together, collectively we are richer than all the nations in the world, with the exception of nine."

It goes without saying that Dr. King's messages are entirely relevant four decades later. Many world leaders are seizing upon his teachings and working to make a difference. President Lula of Brazil reiterated King's connections in a speech to the United Nations this past September, stating: "Peace, security, development, and social justice are indivisible."

The president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, echoes an understanding of King when he states, "We have a situation where 20 percent of the world's population have 80 percent of the wealth, and the other 80 percent has just 20 percent. If that's a situation that leads to instability, then we are saying that that instability will convey itself through migration, through wars within countries and through crime and terrorism."

Leaders are recognizing the conflict between core values and a "more is better" way of life, and they're asking which is more important and what really matters. Some leaders are realizing that "more is better" does not provide happiness or security, its not sustainable and, for most of the world, it will never be attainable. We need a new dream. We need a return to our core values.

Sean Sheehan serves on the staff of the Center for a new American Dream, a non-profit Maryland-based organization dedicated to building a movement of individuals and organizations committed to sustainable consumption. The center's online at www.newdream.org.