Imtiyaz

Imtiyaz and the Rebel Sell

By John Taylor; 13 June, 2007

We are all familiar with the main historical thesis in this Faith, the one that pretty much defines "Baha'i," the idea that we are going through the collective equivalent of the stage of adolescence. This, the Guardian wrote, is "embedded in the teachings, and enshrined in the prophesies, of Baha'u'llah." This age is the body politic coming-of-age story, a perspective that allows us to understand the negativity and folly growing right along with the spectacular expansion of knowledge, science and technology. Shoghi Effendi wrote, in the same passage as that cited above,

"The tumult of this age of transition is characteristic of the impetuosity and irrational instincts of youth, its follies, its prodigality, its pride, its self-assurance, its rebelliousness, and contempt of discipline." (Shoghi Effendi, The Promised Day is Come, 117)

Last night I came across a brilliantly original address by a pair of University of Toronto philosophy professors in tvo.org's Big Ideas' lecture archives describing how this rebelliousness works, and why the whole idea of a counterculture is a false myth. This is one of those theories that you have always felt in your bones but could never articulate. These two fellows, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, lay out with admirable incisiveness the deceptive quality of the whole idea of a conformist majority versus a counterculture.

Their idea, very briefly, is that rebelliousness, rejecting the system, is, far from opposing free enterprise and the machine of materialism, actually an inherent part of how the cogs in the treadmill turn. Vidal Sassoon, Starbucks, all started off as small, cool, hard-to-get brands, save by an anointed few, until success propelled them into the mainstream and made them the new elite. I especially liked one of their ironic asides. They note that when the rock singer was knighted and became "Sir Mick Jagger," band member Kieth Richards, himself a multimillionaire member of the elite, accused his colleague of "selling out." This expression, "selling out," is invoked by reflex by those undergoing the transition from counterculture to mainstream. No matter how mainstream they become, some still think of themselves as rebels.

If you prefer to read rather than listen, these authors wrote an article covering the same ground called "The Rebel Sell; If we all hate consumerism, how come we cannot stop shopping?" is available on the Web at:

<http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2002/11/rebelsell.php>

Here they say that we are undergoing a massive, society-wide bipolar disorder, and that "the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for more than 40 years." In other words, how do you stick it to the man if sticking it to the man is what the man is all about? They note that a theory grew up in the 1950's that capitalism is all about conformity, workers are trained to work, students to learn, consumers to buy, all according to the same standard, cookie cutter existences, and that the way to counteract that is to opt out. Rebel.

Heath and Potter beg to differ, literally. Most people, they says, most of the time are not fighting to conform to those around them, they are struggling to be different. They will do anything to stand out from the crowd. Most to the point, they will buy anything in order to show how they stand out from the crowd. The authors point to the film American Beauty as typical of this theory. It is the story of a fellow who stages a mini-consumer "rebellion" by, in essence, buying different products from different sellers. Instead of a high priced couch made by a big corporation, he buys high-priced dope from a local teen. In what he sees as rebellion, the protagonist continues to define his existence by what he buys.

The dominant theory offers the reverse idea: capitalism is all about conformism rather than distinction. This has became so orthodox since the Sixties that few on the left see it as a theory anymore, they see it as bare fact. They have no idea what is really going on,

"What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, its about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (BMW's)."

Consumption is rarely about conformity, or even naked greed. It is about head-to-head competition with your peers. I buy a certain car in order to make a point about how different I am from everybody else. Hmm. Do you mean that if I bought the free trade coffee in our doctor's office it would not be a blow for freedom for Third World workers, it would rather be yet another show of how much more worthy I am than your average Hoi Poloi consumer buying ordinary coffee?

The value of the authors' philosophical training becomes evident as they explain the inherent logical contradiction of crowding together in order to become distinct. It just cannot be done. It is like walking, a form of controlled falling, except that this is walking on a treadmill that generates the energy that powers consumerism.

Consumerism holds so-called positional goods as its holy grail. Their best example is the real estate market. Here longing to stand out from the crowd drives us all on a plunge outward, a process of uglification called urban sprawl. Location is everything in housing because everybody wants to be able to say that they come from the most desirable place. This drives prices up wherever the most people consider it most desirable to be from, at least until so many ordinary persons live there for it to be exclusive any more. Everybody cannot possibly be from the best neighborhoods, because as soon as too many people move there, it stops being rare and desirable. No matter how good a thing may be, intrinsically, if it is common it ceases to be a mark of distinction.

Thus downtown real estate in the hottest cities becomes the most expensive in the world. Then everybody rushes for the suburbs, where the edges of the city become the big distinction. Thus sprawl starts not in greed or conformity but a desire to be the first to live on the edge. But the edge constantly expands outwards, and ultimately nobody gets what they want. This peculiarity of crowd behavior is the outward effect of many spiritual lives smothered and stifled by neglect of our real distinction, a distinction that has nothing to do with outer reality. The true non-conformity, the true distinctiveness is not material at all. The Master said that,

"the distinction of the world of humanity is due to its relationship to the world of the spirit." (Mahmud, 192)

Abdu'l-Baha mentioned one hundred and thirteen times the word "distinction" in His addresses in North America, far and away the most often in the entire Baha'i Opus. There was evidently something about America that, in His judgment, needed desperately to understand this word "distinction" better. In fact it was almost precisely ninety-five years ago from the time I write (June 13, 1912, according Mahmud, June 15, 1912, according to Promulgation) that the Master gave his famous "distinction speech" at the home of the MacNutt family. He began,

"I have made you wait awhile, but as I was tired, I slept. While I was sleeping, I was conversing with you as though speaking at the top of my voice. Then through the effect of my own voice I awoke. As I awoke, one word was upon my lips -- the word imtiyaz (`distinction'). So I will speak to you upon that subject this morning..." (Promulgation, 188)

This entire speech we should listen to every time we enter a store, a car lot or turn onto the overcrowded QEW to Toronto.

The Master had a longstanding aversion to our ubiquitous instinct for hoity-toitiness. Once, when Abdu'l-Baha's train was leaving Pittsburgh, Mahmud described those giving Him farewell as so full of adulation that they were "like the bowing and bending of the cypress trees;" but after lunch, Abdu'l-Baha refused a sleeping compartment, saying,

"`I make certain expenditures only to help people and to serve the Cause of God; and since my childhood I have never liked distinctions.' He spoke for some time on this subject and warned us against making such personal distinctions."

In other words, if everybody had learned His lesson and followed the example of the Master and we all disliked outer distinctions, and instead chose one of the many virtues and perfections of God to make them stand out, we would never feel a need to take that contradictory leap of crowding around what makes you stand out from the crowd. We would not have the pride that makes us buy into what we think we are buying out of. Heath and Potter write,

"Most people who consider themselves anti-consumerist are extremely brand-conscious. They are able to fool themselves into believing that they don't care because their preferences are primarily negative. They would never be caught dead driving a Chrysler or listening to Celine Dion. It is precisely by not buying these uncool items that they establish their social superiority. (It is also why, when they do consume mass society products, they must do so ironically -- so as to preserve their distinction.)"

Heath and Potter rightly point at the jugular of the consumer society: advertising. I will get into that next time.