In recent years, a range of voices from science, philosophy,
political activism and the arts have begun to suggest exactly that,
coalescing into a movement that can ground us ever more mindfully in the
material world. The ‘new materialism’, as it was dubbed in a report by
the New Economics Foundation in 2012, challenges us to love our
possessions not less but more – to cherish them enough to care about
where they came from, who made them, what will happen to them in the
future.
Environmental campaigners are, in a similar spirit, slowly redefining
themselves less by what they’re against (global warming, fossil-fuel
extraction, runaway consumerism) than what they’re for: a healthy and
balanced relationship with the material world that sustains us in all
its delicate, interconnected beauty. But it’s a philosophical, even
spiritual position, too. If we could truly cherish the things in our
lives, ‘retain the pulse of their making’, as the British ceramicist
Edmund de Waal puts it, wouldn’t we be the opposite of consumers?
In its clear-eyed manifesto The New Materialism (2012), the New
Economics Foundation explains that creating a society in which things
last longer and are endlessly re-used will necessarily entail a major
shift to the services that keep things going, thereby creating
employment to replace lost manufacturing/retail output. Here, Herman
Daly, editor of the journal Ecological Economics, calls for the
‘subtle and complex economics of maintenance, qualitative improvements,
sharing, frugality, and adaptation to natural limits. It is an
economics of better, not bigger.’
The New Economics Foundation predicts that the new materialism will lead
to more emphasis in spending on ‘experiences rather than disposable
goods’, which means less shopping and more music, film, live
performance, sport and socialising: more lasting satisfaction and less
of the transitory hit of ownership. This in turn might lead to a
proliferation of festivals, sporting competitions and cultural events
celebrating the talents we share and occluding the endless proliferation
of retail stuff.
Read more at the Source: http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/why-we-should-love-material-things-more/
