The dilemma of consuming

I took my new Jetta to the VW dealer today, to have them correct a couple chips of paint and a ding in the trunk lid. I half expected them to tell me to get lost, but perhaps part of the reward of being a conspicuous consumer (or at least the purchaser of a new car) is that you get good treatment.

I've been preparing for my second class session in Professional Ethics this evening, contemplating Anthony Weston's A Practical Compantion to Ethics and considering his take on what it means to value, and how little we tend to consider this in its depth. For instance:

I'm opposed to the current US military involvement in Iraq. I have suspected from before the beginning that it was for the sake of advancing a capitalist economic agenda, specifically the petroleum economy, and that the various pretexts presented by the Bush administration for invading Iraq (all of which have now been abandoned) were always nothing more than that - pretexts. My general reaction to news stories related to Iraq and the Bush administration's policies and statements about Iraq rests on the assumption that the war is really for nothing more noble than oil.

But of course, I'm implicated. I drive a car; I use electricity; I throw away plastic bags. I buy stuff - lately, in fact, I've bought a lot of stuff. My pretext for this behavior is that it improves my life in ways that are practical and worthwhile. The new car replaces a probably dangerous and probably (monetarily) worthless vehicle. The new laptop replaces a generally unreliable and frustrating machine - although I retain the old one, because it contains files I will likely need, and a PC hockey game I still may play from time to time. It all seems reasonable, and not at all objectionable, from the narrow standpoint of my own individual life and system of needs and desires.

Nonetheless, by choosing to consume, I'm choosing to contribute in my own way to the petroleum economy and the US and global capitalist policies that this entails. Now, my dropping out wouldn't make a noticeable difference, but my remaining within the worldwide economic hoohah means I don't have the legitimate right to pass moral judgments on IT. I am part of it. And I didn't buy the hybrid.

Is it a hand-wringing bit of hairshirt self-flagellation to say that there's no such thing as a conscientious consumer? Am I using guilt as an excuse for continuing to live the way I please? (Well, on that point, let me be frank: I gave up guilt about 18 months ago, by deciding that, right or wrong, I would make moral and life decisions of my own, stand by them, and deal with their repercussions.)

In a very practical sense, there are few options for a person in this society to act on the basis of objections to the way corporate capitalism dominates the world (regardless of whether such a person is a socialist, Marxist, anarchist, or just finds CEOs kinda stinky). In this society, YOU are GOING TO CONSUME. I think it doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference how you consume. Go ahead, buy nothing but organic fruits, veggies, and cotton fibers. But don't buy your own bullshit: they still use trucks to bring in the food, and they still use oil to make the plastic or the wax-covered cardboard cartons for your soy milk. Unless you're growing your own, or are running naked and eating nothing, you're part of IT too.

I don't mean that consuming is bad. Consuming is necessary and human. What I mean is that because we consume in the way we unavoidably do consume, in the current economic and social-political context, all of us are implicated. None of us has moral high ground on this. And that's very interesting, because it may be the one area of life where we can't stand on creed or culture like a soapbox and make pronouncements against one another.

Except against SUV drivers. We still get to loathe them, never fear.