Signs of transition: From accumulation to edifying experience

Hiking along a beautiful gorge in the Groendal area outside of Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape with a young friend yesterday, our conversation ranged from complexity theory to cuisine (he happens to be an accomplished chef), what South Africa has to offer the world except minerals and tourist-attracting natural beauty, and, eventually, the emerging signs, especially among a growing number of young people, that “material(-ist) accumulation” has peaked, and people are rediscovering the joys of “being”, rather than “having”.

This is certainly the case among my young friend, who is 28, and his group of friends, all of whom have adopted an attitude of relative indifference to the [still] mainstream fascination with the temptations of Mammon, the god of money. Not that they don’t realise that, living as we do in a [still] largely capitalist economy, they have to earn at least enough lucre to be able to survive, or even that, if they wish to pursue a lifestyle where they indulge their love of good food, making music, creating interesting artworks, pursuing intellectual trajectories of their own choice, and so on, they cannot spurn opportunities to earn good salaries.

But a crucial difference on their part soon emerged in our conversation: neither he, nor any of his good friends (men as well as women) are in any way committed to a materialist worldview, where the accumulation of money and material wealth is the sole driving force behind their choice of career. On the contrary, as my friend (who is also a Rhodes Mandela Scholar, and therefore no intellectual lightweight) put it: “I have come to the realization that I am not primarily interested, like so many people of my age, in becoming filthy rich, owning property and cars, and so on; what interests me is experience — having many interesting experiences and learning from them. Experience is something that no one can take away from you”.

Unwittingly he had articulated the rediscovery, on his part, of a cultural motif that has played a major role — affirmatively as well as negatively — in Western culture for centuries, to wit, the ideal of “Bildung”, or the cultivation, moulding, of one’s character through education and experience. Nor is “Bildung” associated with “good” or pleasant experience only; as Gadamer points out in his book, Truth and Method, the most valuable experiences are often the “negative” ones, that is, the ones where one has to pay the price of a certain degree of pain and suffering, such as when one has to sacrifice a number of years of relatively “easy” living to be able to complete a doctoral degree, which does not happen without strain and effort (95% perspiration, and 5% inspiration, as the saying goes), or when one has to look after a family member who is terminally ill, until his or her death. Such experiences are many and varied, but invariably, if one can resist the tendency, to allow the most difficult of these to cause bitterness on one’s part, you emerge a more experienced and wiser person, provided you reflect on your experiences and gain insight in this way. Hence the realisation that, in this age of the valorization of “information” (for the sake of profit), an old-fashioned notion — that of “wisdom” — can still gain a purchase on one’s life.

From this point of view, the literary genre of the “Bildingsroman” — the kind of novel in which the protagonist learns wisdom through trials and tribulations — captures more than just a literary form. It serves as a reminder that there is more than one sense in which human beings can be enriched — experience, more than wealth, is potentially enriching, as my young friend had discovered for himself. Probably the best known “Bildungsroman” in English is Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, where the principal character, Pip, gains experience and wisdom in the course of a chequered life, where enjoyment and hardship, success and failure alternate, affording him the opportunity to learn from the unpredictability of life what humans can and cannot do.

There have been challenges to the principle of edifying experience underlying the Bildungsroman, which could hardly be avoided in a changing world which has witnessed two world wars, one no longer committed to the Enlightenment belief in an improvement of human life through reflection on experience. One particularly striking instance is Wim Wenders’s film, Falsche Bewegung (1975), the very title of which (Wrong Move, False Movement) indicates Wenders’s rejection, at the time, of the ideal of Bildung as something that necessarily brings clarity about life’s vicissitudes. This is all the more striking, considering that Falsche Bewegung was freely based on Goethe’s Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Instead of learning through experience, however, the protagonist in Falsche Bewegung becomes increasingly confused, however, despite wanting to be a writer.

But perhaps things had to become worse before they could get better. What makes my hiker-friend’s stated preference for edifying experience above a materialist pursuit of “accumulation” all the more remarkable, is that it runs counter to the mainstream preoccupation of global societies today, namely conspicuous material(-ist) consumption. As such, it is a welcome sign that we may indeed be in a time of transition, from mindless consumer culture to one where stock will be taken, once again, of what it means to be human. Even if one does not see in this a return of an ethos of “Bildung” — you can’t turn back the clock of history, after all — it does reflect two important things. First, a dissatisfaction, even a disgust, in a way of life that only values things and people as means to making more money, and second, a search for something more genuine, which my friend called “experience(s)”.

If one thinks of cinema, by analogy with Freud’s famous dictum, that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, as the “dreams” of society, one can decipher in their manifest content the signs of a latent content which is an indication of fears, wishes and desires ordinarily repressed by mainstream discourses. Thought of in this way, films such as Mendes’s American Beauty (1999) and Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) testify to a deep dissatisfaction with an aimless life of consumption and accumulation. Significantly, both are films noir, probably the genre best suited for diagnosing a dehumanising malady at the very core of our society, in this case the valorization of money and consumer values, and in both the films in question these values are relentlessly questioned. In American Beauty the [dead] protagonist rediscovers, in retrospect, all those experiences that had made him happy with his wife and daughter, before the rot of materialist ambition set in, and in Fight Club the fact that men find in raw fist-fighting an attractive alternative to their daily lives of working in a system blindly bent on economic growth, is representative of a deep longing for something ‘real’ that one can relate to, even if it is the deliberate experience of pain.

These are just some of the signs that the era of conspicuous consumption may be drawing to a close. There is no guarantee that this is the case, of course (capitalism always fights like a cornered rat to overcome a crisis), and I know that many readers who believe (erroneously) that consumerism is the only way to live, will come down on me like a ton of bricks for even suggesting its possible demise. Their outrage will be an unmistakable sign that they adhere to the values of consumerism. I would like to recommend to these people that they take out the DVD of Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead (2004; a remake of Romero’s 1978 zombie film by the same name), a cinematic diagnosis of consumerism as ‘zombie-ism’ — if one takes the film seriously, as one should, then we are at crossroads in human history (significantly, most of the action in the film is set at a shopping mall called the ‘Crossroads Shopping Mall’), where we can either surrender completely to the “consumption” of everything around us, people included, like living-dead zombies, or we could look for a cure (something not developed in the film). Perhaps signs of the ‘cure’ are becoming visible in young people’s rejection of a money-centred life in favour of one where experience is reflected upon for its edifying value.