Targeted Buyers in the Information Age
Having a sense of national identity is not the same as being a part of a target audience. I wonder if this point isn't lost on the generation of voters under the age of 25. They have grown up as targeted buyers, a sought-after market in the global sophistication of the information age. These are people who have learned to vote with a dollar, and who feel more powerful as consumers than as voting citizens. Perhaps they are not wrong.
Citizenship is an identity where the self is a part of a larger whole. However, the habit of viewing one's self in a larger, affliative context has been lost on the younger generation. They do not enjoy the same connections to family, religion, and place, at least not in the way their parents did.
Family as clan has deteriorated. According to the Census Bureau, nearly one third of kids under 18 are living with one parent, and an additional 6 percent are living with their grandparents. Even if a child's parents are still married, the ubiquity of broken homes sends the message that family ties are fragile at best.
The Erosion of Group Identity
Compared to 1957, church attendance is down 13%, but importantly, so are attitudes about religion. According to Gallup polls, in 1957 only 14% of people felt that religion was “losing its influence,” compared to four times that number in February of this year.
Further, Gen-X and younger age groups cannot rely on geographical paradigms the same way that their parents did. Residence in our highly mobile society is temporary and incidental. Main Street has been subsumed by malls and superstores. Even in affluent areas, many smaller downtowns are reduced to depressed, real-estate eye sores.
Finally, the absence of a war or any serious economic depression has also meant the absence of a national rallying point. National identity today is an abstract, emasculated concept, rather than a source of pride.
A case in point is the new television campaign for the army: “I am An Army of One.” These ads appeal to the individual's drive for self-actualization. But they fail to appeal to a young man's sense of national pride, or his identity with a larger whole. Contrast the message in the World War II recruiting poster: “United We Win.”
The guiding ethic of identity for past generations was the self as a part of a larger whole: clan, religion, and place. And yet, the message heard by younger generations today is: “If it feels good, go for it.”
The emergence of the new über-consumer is the result of the erosion of group identity washing on the shores of technology and prosperity. Today, the self is empowered individually through technology. The cell phone, the Internet, the personal webpage, Internet vote-swapping, social/geographical mobility, and prosperity have together enabled individuals, as soon as they achieve the age of majority, to function autonomously — socially and politically, yes, but also economically.
Real strength resides in purchasing power. Power accrues to an individual — not as a member of a family or a citizen of the state — but most significantly, as a buyer.
Squandered Humility and Spirituality
This is both burdensome and liberating. In the absence of group affiliation, the individual must create a meaningful, social self. The free market is at play here as well. When the burden of creating an identity is too overwhelming, an identity can be bought; Prada, Absolut or Range Rover will do the trick. The temporary, elastic identity of a brand is the ready-to-wear persona of today.
However, today's individual economic automaton is also freer than the consumer of the past. In the 1950s, women certainly bought brands — but mostly as agents on behalf of larger units: families. They were often accountable to their husbands for the family budget. Today, many women feel accountable only to themselves. Women's lib (now a much-maligned term) really was economic liberation for many women, and it set the stage for the free-wheeling, liberated consumerism of today.
However, something is lost in a nation of consumers. We have squandered the humility that comes from voluntary subjugation of self to a larger whole. Why does this matter? Because losing one's sense of community matters to spirituality. It seems quaint to even mention the “s”-word in polite company these days, whereas, again, writers of the 1950s wouldn't hesitate to mention it.
Ours is a forbidding-looking army of “ones,” to be sure. But do we remember what we're fighting for?
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)