Conscience Consumers
Interesting post at WorldChanging on Fair Trade becoming trendy. Even more interesting are the cynical comments to the effect of “So what, Fashion will swing back to conspicuous consumption”.
All of the most subjective social phenomena are naturally fickle, and this isn’t a flaw. Cultures have to be able to experiment and rapidly protoype to find new things that are worth keeping (or merely deemed worthy; as a mass expression of the human psyche, culture is just as vulnerable to pathology, pathogenesis, and maladaptation). The output of most means of cultural production, such as art and fashion, is largely disposable, but that doesn’t make them entirely superficial. Deep memes, long-term unconscious majority behaviour and ultimately even traditions can emerge.
Trends are conduits that provide fairly rapid means for all sectors of society to propagate signals and project influence to large numbers of cultural actors. Sometimes they’re purely aesthetic, but in the case of fair trade goods the trend is deep on concept and motives, at all levels of the supply chain. Farmers coops didn’t get into fair trade to look cool, and they won’t give it up on that basis either. Even if it later dies as a fad at the consumer end of the interaction, the fashionable upswing in ethical commerce is an opportunity to project the memes further than ever. The potential is for fair trade markets to be emplaced more securely in widespread cultural values.
I understand the cynicism, but art and fashion aren’t just a pernicious fever dream. Culture has been demonstrated to occur in other primates. As a social force, it is older than our species and forms the basis for many editable constructs. Some such human constructs may currently be engines for consumerism, but all parts of the system can influence the rest.