I try not to participate in activities that I find reprehensible or that don't please me. But sometimes, either from stupidity or advertising or coercion, I do the wrong thing.
I am, you see, a consumer side ethicist. I thought that the cars with 'Boycott Exxon' after the Valdez oil spill were absurd. Ships have wrecked for years. If one wants to avoid ship wrecks leaving oil spills, one shouldn't buy oil. It could have just as easily been a Shell spill.
There was a day in late 1966 that I still remember vividly, when the young woman who was to be my wife and a very naive version of myself were standing on the corner of Michigan and Van Buren in Chicago and a new Caddillac Eldorado nearly ran us over. I said at the time that I thought cars were a very poor method of daily transporation, and that I never wanted to own one. I was about to make the worst moral decision of my life, and marry the poor girl. It was a decision based on ignorance and advertising: I would ask her to marry me, and when she said yes, to do the deed. I was a gay man who didn't begin to understand what that meant, and everyone among whom I had grown up had advertised that marriage was a Very Good Thing. Shortly after that, we were about to make a long journey and wanted to take all our loot--marriage does come with good loot--and my mother offered to buy us a car. It seemed like something I might use occasionally, not as daily transportation, and it would make hauling all that stuff 3,500 miles easy. So, I became a married car owner. I would remain married for more than 20 years and buy more cars than I can remember. Indeed, I would try to find a sort of satisfaction in automobile ownership that I did not find in marriage. (See Marshall McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride.)
Please consider this introduction a kind of confession, a revelation that I am often not very successful in avoiding situations that I find reprehensible or displeasing. Indeed, after finally getting out of marriage, I would continue to buy cars from time to time for another fifteen years or so, although I was much better about not using them for my daily transportation. I made a lot of trips to the east, west, and south coasts.
On September 11, 2001, however, I thought that oil had probably been a major contribution to the events surrounding the collapse of the World Trade Center, and I got rid of my car. More research quickly convinced me that oil was mostly a side show to that event, but I found that not having a car was something I enjoyed, so I haven't had one since. But I would not condemn anyone else who drives. Ethics is a really strange human creation, ranging from genital mutilation to forbidding theft and demanding bombings. My position is simple: if you think something is wrong, don't do it. If you think it's a good thing, do it. But don't impose your choices on others by force. Circumcise yourself, but don't make it a legal requirement.
Soon after September 11, I found the reaction of the United States more reprehensible that the attack on the towers, so I decided to try to limit my support of the activities of the US government. I simply limited my income to just below the minimal taxable amount. Interestingly enough, despite what the advertisements might claim, I continued to have a very enjoyable life. (And, I had a lot more leisure time.)
There was a time when I thought that Apple were an evil corporation, and despite their alluring advertising, I did not buy their products. More research convinced me that they were not so bad as I had assumed, and I now have an iPhone. But when I think some corporation or person really is evil, I try not to contribute to their success. For instance, I think the local food co-op with its claims about being local and organic is just selling bullshit, and I almost never buy anything there. But even then I am not pure. They sell some short bread cookies that I buy about once a month. And I don't hate the people who do buy there.
I am quick to recognize that I have the luxury to make these sorts of decisions because I live in a rich modern society which allows a lot of individual freedom. I might complain about the coercion exercised by the United States government, but in the history of governments, it's pretty kind and gentle. Still, it has the power to coerce, and there are many who would have that power as their own.
It is the quagmire of the current US presidential campaign season that brings these thoughts to my mind and makes me think there might be some value in sharing them. I find that nearly everyone 'participating in the debate', either as candidates or as voters, is happy to blame someone else for one's own actions, and to punish the system that allows us choices for our own poor decisions.
As Plato reminded us long ago, Democracies can easily become the worst sort of tyrannies. Ford can target me with advertisements to buy a new Mustang, but they don't send a mercenary to my door to force me to make a purchase. Apple can spend millions telling me that my life would be much richer with a new iMac, but they can't keep me from choosing Samsung or even, god forbid, digital isolation. But the government has the power to coerce.
The genius of the American system was that the the framers of the Constitution recognized the dangers and tried to put in place restraints to that power, to protect the rights of minorities. Now those would would use the American system only recognize minorities as voting blocs who are expected to be indebted to the candidate who promises them the biggest benefits at the expense of someone else. Minority thoughts are to be banned from public discourse.
I thought long about whether to say 'the genius of the American system was' rather than 'has been'. I hope I have made the wrong choice, and that there might be a return to a society supporting individual responsibility for one's own choices. I certainly have made some very poor choices over the years, and I could easily try to blame 'the system'. But the truth is that when i have made poor choices, it was because I did not make the effort to think through what I was really doing and who would benefit. It's easy to yield to stupidity, popular to yield to advertising, and sometimes it seems necessary to yield to coercion. But I'm a perhaps foolishly optimistic old man who thinks that resistance is not futile. So, if you want a new Cadillac, go for it. Just don't try to make me buy one, too.
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