Last week when, for the first time, I heard the phrase "Buy Nothing Day", I formed an instantaneous impression of what it was about, which turned out to be 90 per cent correct.
So perfectly did the idea fit in with a certain strand of thought - no, of emotion - in this society now, that I was able to comprehend the phrase by means of the much undervalued de Valeraesque strategy of looking into my own heart. It was, I instantly divined, about guilt, about a neurotic repugnance of consumerism, but also about buying back a little peace of mind.
I looked it up on the internet and found the following explanation: "Every November, for 24 hours, we remember that no one was born to shop. If you've never taken part in Buy Nothing Day, or if you've taken part in the past but haven't really committed to doing it again, consider this: 2006 will go down as the year in which mainstream dialogue about global warming finally reached its critical mass. What better way to bring the Year of Global Warming to a close than to point in the direction of real alternatives to the unbridled consumption that has created this quagmire?"
I hadn't quite intuited the green dimension, but otherwise had it pretty well sussed. In case you missed it, Saturday last, November 25th, was Buy Nothing Day, when you were challenged to refrain from shopping and "tune into life". It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, an American idea, based on the putative benefits of a day of asceticism in the aftermath of Thanksgiving excess.
The Buy Nothing Day movement began in the early 1990s with the objective of providing a period of respite from the rigours of the consumption economy and creating a pause for reflection before the coming Christmas splurge. My investigations on the internet informed me that the Buy Nothing movement is "a sprawling, disparate, diversified, 100 per cent anarchistic self-organising system", in which "nobody tells anyone else what to do".
I can't see it catching on here just yet, mainly because most of us can remember a time when every day was Buy Nothing Day, and right now the idea resonates a little too loudly with a strand of misanthropy in Irish society that delights in lecturing people about spending their own money. Isn't it odd that, while engaged in a full-on exploration of our newly-discovered materialist dimension, we are continually flagellating ourselves for having surrendered our "spiritual values"?
As I wrote a couple of weeks back, there is a minor industry now in platitudinising about the negative effects of prosperity, bemoaning our decline into material hedonism and lamenting the collapse of spiritual values, whatever they were. I believe that this duality about materialism and spirituality is one of the most destructive legacies we have been bequeathed by an over-simplified form of Christianity.
Much of the current pontificating about materialism originates in this skewed notion of the Christian message and is not merely unsuccessful in winning hearts and minds but may well be counter-productive in terms of its implicit objectives. The brief outbreaks of guilt it precipitates may provoke a degree of compensatory "altruism", but more profoundly the action of guilt on the individual is as likely to make him unhappy, and unhappy people tend to be less generous and more selfish.
Perhaps we need to come around to the idea that buying things is actually a relatively innocent expression of a desire for the transcendent. We buy things because we have a desire to be whole.
Clothes, for example, are less about what we sometimes think of as narcissism than about reinventing ourselves in accordance with a utopian fantasy of earthly potential. Advertising works because it taps into this desire and convinces us that the missing need can be filled by the right shirt, suit or handbag. It takes a lot of trial and error before we begin to comprehend that none of these things make the merest difference to the void.
But ask yourself this: how often have you bought something you thought would change your life, brought it home, stashed it guiltily at the bottom of the wardrobe and then, when you opened it a week or two later wondered what on earth you were thinking of? Strangely, then, our current obsession with retail therapy may be a signal not of a collapse in spirituality but of the strength of the underlying impulse. Shopping may well be, as the current cliché has it, "the new religion", but not necessarily in as pejorative sense as we tend to think.
I proposed some time ago that we scrap the word "spirituality" and talk instead about happiness. From that changed perspective, we might perceive that, for all our current concerns about the damaging effects of prosperity, we haven't lost anything but simply changed the focus of our searching. Buy Nothing Day seems like something we could all get something from. But not yet.
We have a lot of buying to do before it dawns on us that what we're looking for can't be bought.