Consumer Monoculture: The Destruction of Tradition

Helena Norberg-Hodge is director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, which promotes ecological regeneration and community renewal while raising awareness of the impact of economic globalisation. She is also the author of Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (London: Rider Books, 1992), which has been translated into thirty languages.

 

 

For the people of the “Third World”‚ the pressure to conform to the expectations of the spreading Western consumer monoculture is destroying traditional societies, eliminating local economies and erasing regional differences. But this monoculture is also leading to divisions, uncertainty and collapse, where previously there had been unity, security and stability.

 

For many, the rise of the global economy marks the final fulfilment of the great dream of a “Global Village”. Almost everywhere you go in today’s version of that dream you will find multilane highways, concrete cities and a cultural landscape featuring grey business suits, fast‑food chains, Hollywood films and cellular phones. In the remotest corners of the planet, Barbie, Madonna and the Marlboro Man are familiar icons. From Cleveland to Cairo to Caracas, Baywatch is entertainment and CNN news.

 

The world, we are told, is being brought together by virtue of the fact that everyone will soon be able to indulge their innate human desire for a Westernised, urbanised, consumer lifestyle. West is best, and joining the bandwagon brings closer a harmonious union of peaceable, rational, democratic consumers “like us”.

 

This worldview assumes that it was the wide diversity of cultures, values and beliefs that lay behind the chaos and conflicts of the past: that as these differences are removed, so the differences between us will be resolved.

 

As a result, all around the world, villages, rural communities and their cultural traditions are being destroyed on an unprecedented scale by the impact of globalising market forces. Communities that have sustained themselves for hundreds of years are simply disintegrating. The pressure to modernise is everywhere seemingly becoming unstoppable. 

Consumers R Us 

Historically, the erosion of cultural integrity was a conscious goal of colonial developers. As the applied anthropologist D. E. Goodenough explained in 1910: “The problem is one of creating in another a sufficient dissatisfaction with his present condition of self so that he wants to change it. This calls for some kind of experience that leads him to reappraise his self-image and re-evaluate his self-esteem.”¹

 

Towards this end, colonial officers were advised that they should:

 

1. Involve traditional leaders in their programmes.

2. Work through bilingual, acculturated individuals who have some knowledge of both the dominant and the target culture. 

3. Modify circumstances or deliberately tamper with the equilibrium of the traditional culture so that change will become imperative.

4. Attempt to change underlying core values before attacking superficial customs.²

 

It is instructive to consider the actual effect of these strategies on the wellbeing of individual peoples in the South. For example, the Toradja tribes of the Poso district in central Celebes (now Sulawesi, Indonesia) were initially deemed completely incapable of “development‚ without drastic intervention”. Writing in 1929, colonial agent A. C. Kruyt reported that the happiness and stability of Toradja society were such that “development and progress were impossible” and that the tribes were “bound to remain at the same level”.³

 

Toradja society was cashless and there was a desire neither for money nor for the extra goods that might be purchased with it. In the face of such contentment, missionary work proved an abject failure as the Toradjas had no interest in converting to a new religion, sending their children to school or growing cash crops. So, in 1905 the Dutch East Indies government decided to bring the Poso region under firm control, using armed force to crush all resistance. As a result of relocation and continual government harassment, mortality rates soared among the Toradjas. Turning to the missionaries for help, they were “converted” and began sending their children to school. Eventually they began cultivating coconut and coffee plantations and began to acquire new needs for oil lamps, sewing machines, and “better” clothes. The self-sufficient tribal economy had been superseded as a result of deliberate government action.

 

In many countries, schooling was the prime coercive instrument for changing “underlying core values” and proved to be a highly effective means of destroying self-esteem, fostering new “needs”, creating dissatisfactions and generally disrupting traditional cultures. An excerpt from a French reader designed in 1919 for use by French West African school-children gives a flavour of the kinds of pressure that were imposed on children:

 

It is … an advantage for a native to work for a White man, because the Whites are better educated, more advanced in civilisation than the natives … You who are intelligent and industrious, my children, always help the Whites in their task. That is a duty.⁴

 

Today, as wealth is transferred away from nation states into the rootless casino of the money markets, the destruction of cultural integrity is far subtler than before. Corporate and government executives no longer consciously plan the destruction they wreak (indeed they are often unaware of the consequences of their decisions for real people on the other side of the world). This lack of awareness is fostered by the cult of specialisation that pervades our society. (The job of a public relations executive is confined to producing business-friendly soundbites: it is part of the job not to question the consequences of his or her corporation’s activities.) The tendency to undermine cultural diversity proceeds, as it were, on “automatic pilot” as an inevitable consequence of the spreading global economy.

 

But although the methods employed by the masters of the “Global Village” are less brutal than in colonial times, the scale and effects are often even more devastating. The computer and telecommunications revolutions have helped to speed up and strengthen the forces behind the march of a global monoculture, which is now able to disrupt traditional cultures with a shocking speed and finality that surpass anything the world has witnessed before. 

Mass Media, Mass Culture 

A crucial component of the drive to globalisation has been the mass media dissemination of the cultural values associated with Western-style consumerism. It would be a mistake to imagine that this consumer culture was simply an agglomeration of the thoughts and values of Western people. Rather, Western culture is to a large extent a product of the views, values and priorities of the organisations that control it, namely, corporate and state institutions.

 

Modern mass media corporations have a virtual monopoly on the communication of mass media culture. They are powerful businesses that attract investment and other financial support from other large businesses. Time-Warner, the world’s largest media corporation, is currently estimated to be worth $25 billion. Disney, in second place, is worth $24 billion. Between 1969 and 1986, nine multinational conglomerates bought over two hundred British newspapers with total circulation in excess of forty-six million.

 

In the age of globalisation, global mergers ensure that ever fewer transnational corporations own ever more of the media cake. This means that transnational interests are exercising ever tighter control on what we are able to see, hear, read and know. It would be a surprise, after all, if these corporate media giants were critical of corporate activity in the Third World, or of its effects on the environment, or of the corporate system as a whole.

 

The implications for democracy of this natural bias are as obvious as they are disturbing. The corporate press is not only made up of corporations, but these corporations are owned by a small number of large, and increasingly transnational, parent corporations, which in turn are owned by quite wealthy individuals. Parent corporations hire the managers that run media corporations. These managers understand that media criticism of their “parents” is extremely unwelcome. In a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, about a third of editors admitted that they “would not feel free to run a news story that was damaging to their parent firm”.⁵

 

A further constraint on reporting is the reality of how the media make their money. Most newspapers and magazines do not survive by virtue of their cover price, but on the strength of their ability to attract advertising revenue. The prestigious New York Times, for example, is generally made up of around 60 per cent advertising, and could not exist without it. Of this 60 per cent, a sizeable proportion is contributed by the car industry. It comes as little surprise to learn, then, that Times publisher and CEO Arthur Sulzberger admitted that he leaned on his editors to present the auto industry’s position because otherwise it “would affect advertising”.⁶ Editors and journalists must step carefully around the toes of advertiser interests to avoid losing advertising revenue to competitors. As advertisers are often transnational corporations wreaking havoc in the Third World and on the environment, we tend not to read too much about these disasters and the Western responsibility for them.

 

The state effectively subsidises the media by providing cheap, readily available news. Number 10 Downing Street, the White House and the Pentagon provide limitless supplies of free news releases. Reporters or editors who are overly critical of government policy find that these cheap news sources dry up, as does their access to the latest news, which is the life-blood of all current affairs media. There is therefore a real incentive to take a “moderate”, uncontroversial approach when reporting on issues important to the state. One result is that reporting produces a general effect of “depoliticisation or, more precisely, disenchantment with politics”.⁷

 

The end result of these pressures, according to the host of one of PBS’s shows, is that: “You cannot get a TV or a radio show on the air in America these days unless it targets an audience that corporations are interested in targeting and unless it carries a message that is acceptable to corporations.”⁸

 

This claim was supported by the Economist when it noted that (media) “projects unsuitable for corporate sponsorship tend to die on the vine”, adding that stations have learned to be sympathetic to the most delicate sympathies of corporations.⁹ 

Preying on the Young 

Today, the cult of Western consumer conformity is descending on the less industrialised parts of the world like an avalanche. Development brings tourism, Western films and products and, more recently, satellite television to the remotest corners of the Earth. All provide overwhelming impressions of luxury and power. Adverts and action films give the impression that everyone in the West is rich, beautiful and brave, and leads a life filled with excitement and glamour.

 

In the commercial mass culture which fuels this illusion, advertisers make it clear that Westernised fashion accessories equal sophistication and “cool”. In diverse “developing” nations around the world, people are induced to meet their needs not through their community or local economy, but by trying to “buy in” to the global market. People are made to believe that, in the words of one advertising executive in China, “imported equals good, local equals crap”.

 

Even more damagingly, people are encouraged to reject their own ethnic and racial characteristics—to feel shame at being who they are. Around the world, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Barbie dolls and thin-as-a-rake cover girls set the standard for women. It is not unusual now to find East Asian women with eyes surgically altered to look more European, dark-haired southern European women dying their hair blonde, and Africans with blue- or green-coloured contact lenses intended to “correct” dark eyes.

 

The one-dimensional, fantasy view of modern life promoted by the Western media, television and business becomes a slap in the face for young people in the “Third World”. Teenagers in particular are made to feel stupid and ashamed of their traditions and their origins. The people they learn to admire and respect on television are all “sophisticated” city-dwellers with fast cars, designer clothes, spotlessly clean hands and shiny white teeth. Yet they find their parents asking them to choose a way of life that involves working in the fields and getting their hands dirty for little or no money, and certainly no glamour. It is hardly surprising, then, that many choose to abandon the old ways of their parents for the siren song of a Western material paradise.

 

For millions of young people in rural areas of the world, modern Western culture appears vastly superior to their own. Every day, they see incoming tourists spending as much as a hundred dollars, the equivalent of a visitor to the United States spending about fifty thousand dollars a day. Besides promoting the illusion that all Westerners are multi-millionaires, tourism and media images also give the impression that we never work—and for many people in “developing” countries, to sit at a desk or behind the wheel of a car does not constitute work.

 

The young, of course, are not shown the negative social or psychological aspects of Western life so familiar to us: the stress, the loneliness and isolation, the fear of growing old alone, the rise in clinical depression and other “industrial” diseases, such as cancer, stroke, diabetes and heart problems. Nor do they see the environmental decay, rising crime, poverty, homelessness and unemployment. While they know their own culture inside out, including all of its limitations and imperfections, they only ever see a glossy, exaggerated side of life in the West which most of us who live here never achieve, if we even want to. 

Ladakh: A Case-Study in Cultural Erosion 

My own experience among the people of Ladakh, or “Little Tibet”, in the trans-Himalayan region of Kashmir, is a good, if painful, example of this destruction of traditional cultures by a faceless, Americanised consumer monoculture. When I first arrived in the area twenty-three years ago, the vast majority of Ladakhis were self-supporting farmers, living in small, scattered settlements in the high desert. Although natural resources were scarce and hard to obtain, the Ladakhis had a remarkably high standard of living, with beautiful art, architecture and jewellery. They worked at a gentle pace and enjoyed a degree of leisure unknown to most people in the West. Most Ladakhis only really worked for four months of the year, and poverty was an alien concept. In 1975, I remember being shown around the remote village of Hemis Shukpachan by a young Ladakhi called Tsewang. It seemed to me, a newcomer, that all the houses I saw were especially large and beautiful, and I asked Tsewang to show me the houses where the poor lived. He looked perplexed for a moment, then replied, “we don’t have any poor people here.”

 

In recent years, though, external forces have caused massive and rapid disruption in Ladakh. Contact with the modern world has debilitated and demoralised a once proud and self-sufficient people, who today are suffering from what can best be described as a cultural inferiority complex. When tourism descended on Ladakh some years ago, I began to realise how, looked at from a Ladakhi perspective, our modern, Western culture looks much more successful, fulfilled and sophisticated than we find it to be from the inside.

 

In traditional Ladakhi culture, all basic needs (food, clothing and shelter) were provided without money. All labour needed and given was free of charge, part of an intricate and long-established web of human relationships. Because Ladakhis had no need for money, they had little or none. So when they saw outsiders—tourists and visitors—coming in, spending what was to them vast amounts of cash on inessential luxuries, they suddenly felt poor. Not realising that money was essential in the West—that without it, people often go homeless or even starve—they didn’t realise its true value. They began to feel inadequate and backward. Eight years after Tsewang had told me that Ladakhis had no poverty, I overheard him talking to some tourists. “If you could only help us Ladakhis,” he was saying, “we’re so poor.”

 

Ladakh is now being integrated into the Indian, and hence the global, economy. Food is imported from the Indian plains, while local farmers who had previously grown a variety of crops and kept a few animals to provide for themselves have been encouraged to grow cash crops. In this way they have become dependent on forces beyond their control—huge transportation networks, oil prices and the fluctuations of international finance. Over the course of time, financial inflation obliges them to produce more and more, so as to secure the income that they now need in order to buy what they used to grow themselves. In political terms, each Ladakhi is now one individual in a national economy of eight hundred million, and, as part of a global economy, one of about six billion.

 

As a result, local economies are crumbling. For generation after generation Ladakhis grew up learning how to provide themselves with clothing and shelter; how to make shoes out of yak skin and robes from the wool of sheep; how to build houses out of mud and stone. As these building traditions give way to “modern” methods, the plentiful local materials are left unused, while competition for a narrow range of modern materials (concrete, steel and plastic) skyrockets. The same thing happens when people begin eating identical staple foods, wearing the same clothes and relying on the same finite energy sources. Making everyone dependent on the same resources creates efficiency for global corporations, but it also creates an artificial scarcity for consumers, which heightens competitive pressures.

 

As they lose the sense of security and identity that springs from deep, long-lasting connections to people and place, the Ladakhis are starting to develop doubts about who they are. The images they get from outside tell them to be different, to own more, to buy more and thus to be “better” than they are. The previously strong, outgoing women of Ladakh have been replaced by a new generation, unsure of themselves and desperately concerned with their appearance. And as their desire to be “modern” grows, Ladakhis are turning their backs on their traditional culture. I have seen Ladakhis wearing wristwatches they cannot read, and heard them apologising for the lack of electric lighting in their homes—electric lighting which in 1975, when it first appeared, most villagers laughed at as an unnecessary idiocy. Even traditional foods are no longer a source of pride; now, when I’m a guest in a Ladakhi village, people apologise if they serve the traditional roasted barley ngamphe instead of instant noodles.

 

Ironically, then, modernisation, so often associated with the triumph of individualism, has produced a loss of individuality and a growing sense of personal insecurity. As people become self-conscious and insecure, they feel pressured to conform and to live up to an idealised image. By contrast, in the traditional village, where everyone wore essentially the same clothes and looked the same to the casual observer, there was more freedom to relax. As part of a close-knit community, people felt secure enough to be themselves.

 

In Ladakh, as elsewhere, the breaking of local cultural, economic and political ties isolates people from their locality and from each other. At the same time, life speeds up and mobility increases, making even familiar relationships more superficial and brief. Competition for scarce jobs and political representation within the new centralised structures increasingly divides people. Ethnic and religious differences begin to take on a political dimension, causing bitterness and enmity on a scale hitherto unknown. With a desperate irony, the monoculture creates divisions that previously did not exist.

 

As the fabric of local interdependence fragments, so too do traditional levels of tolerance and co-operation. In villages near the capital Leh, disputes and acrimony within previously close-knit communities, and even within families, are increasing. I have seen heated arguments over the allocation of irrigation water, a procedure that had previously been managed smoothly within a co-operative framework. The rise in this kind of new rivalry is one of the most painful divisions I have seen in Ladakh. Within a few years, growing competition has actually culminated in violence—and this in a place where previously there had been no group conflict in living memory. 

Dangerous Divisions

 The rise of divisions, violence and civil disorder around the world is a sign of resistance to attempts to incorporate all cultures and peoples into the global monoculture. Often these divisions are deep enough to result in fundamentalist reaction and ethnic conflict. A few examples from around the world will serve to illustrate this point.

 

In Bhutan, different ethnic groups had lived peaceably together for hundreds of years. In the last few decades, however, pressures of modernisation have resulted in the widespread destruction of decentralised livelihoods and communities. Unemployment, once completely unknown, has reached crisis levels. Fuelled by the population growth that so often accompanies development, these pressures have created intense competition between individuals and groups for jobs, resources and places in schools.

 

As a result, tensions between Buddhists and Bhutanese Hindus of Nepalese origin have led to an eruption of violence and even a type of “ethnic cleansing”—one conveniently ignored by the West.

 

Elsewhere, when confronted with the horrors of ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia or Rwanda, for example, it is often taken for granted that the cause must lie in ingrained and ancient antagonisms. The reality, however, as Nicholas Hildyard notes, is different:

 

Scratch below the surface of inter-ethnic civil conflict, and the shallowness and deceptiveness of “blood” or “culture” explanations are soon revealed. “Tribal hatred” (though a real and genuine emotion for some) emerges as the product not of “nature” or of a primordial “culture”, but of a complex web of politics, economics, history, psychology and a struggle for identity.¹⁰

 

In a similar vein, Michel Chossudovsky, professor of economics at the University of Ottawa, argues that the current Kosovo crisis has its roots at least partly in the macro-economic reforms imposed by Belgrade’s external creditors, such as the International Monetary Fund. Multi-ethnic Yugoslavia was once a regional industrial power and economic success. But after a decade of Western economic ministrations and five years of disintegration, war, boycott and embargo, the economies of the former Yugoslavia are in ruins:

 

In Kosovo, the economic reforms were conducive to the concurrent impoverishment of both the Albanian and Serbian populations, contributing to fuelling ethnic tensions. The deliberate manipulation of market forces destroyed economic activity and people’s livelihood, creating a situation of despair.¹¹

 

It is sometimes assumed that ethnic and religious strife are increasing because modern democracy liberates people, allowing old, previously suppressed, prejudices and hatreds to be expressed. If there was peace earlier, it is thought it was the result of oppression. But after more than twenty years of first-hand experience on the Indian subcontinent, I am convinced that economic “development” not only exacerbates existing tensions, but in many cases actually creates them. By breaking down human-scale structures it destroys bonds of reciprocity and mutual dependence. Because in the Third World, all too often, to strive for the Western ideal is to reject one’s own culture and roots—in effect to deny one’s own identity.

 

Ultimately, while the myth-makers of the “Global Village” celebrate values of togetherness, the disparity in wealth between the world’s upper income brackets and the 90 per cent of people in the poor countries represents a polarisation far more extreme than any which existed in the nineteenth century. Use of the word “village”, intended to suggest relative equality, belonging and harmony, obscures a reality of high-tech islands of privilege and wealth towering above oceans of impoverished humanity struggling to survive. The Western global monoculture is a dealer in illusions: while it destroys traditions, local economies and sustainable ways of living, it does not even provide the poor with the glittering, wealthy lifestyle it promised them. It provides no replacement for that which it destroys but a fractured, isolated, competitive and unhappy society.

 

 

Endnotes

 

 

1. See John Bodley, Victims of Progress (Mountain View, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing, 1982), pp. 111–12.

 

2. Ibid., p. 112.

 

3. Ibid., p. 127.

 

4. Ibid., p. 114.

 

5. See Sharon Beder, Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism (Totnes, UK: Green Books, 1997), p. 15.

 

6. Ibid., p. 181.          

 

7. Pierre Bourdieu, On Television and Journalism (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p. 6.

 

8. Beder, Global Spin, p. 12.

 

9. Ibid., p. 182.

 

10. Nicholas Hildyard, “Blood and Culture: Ethnic Conflict and the Authoritarian Right”, Briefing 11, The Cornerhouse, 1999 [http://www.sociology.org/Cornerhouse/briefings/11.html].

 

11. Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Yugoslavia, Colonising Bosnia”, Covert Action Quarterly, no. 56 (spring 1996).