Materialist Values

Environmental Threat

The human worth placed on objects and the pursuit of owning more things—the more central role of materialist values in urban life, in particular—is often considered one of the key threats to sustainability. Materialist values are associated with over-consumption, given both the amount of withdrawals from the ecosystem and additions in the form of waste and pollution and the massive material resources involved in highly consumptive lifestyles. The growing number of goods and services consumed tends to offset the efficiency gains achieved through, for example, improved production technologies and processes.

Housing, food, drink, and mobility have the greatest environmental impact over their lifecycle in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases, acidifying and ozone-depleting substances, as well as resource use. Thus, both environmentalists and, increasingly, religious groups concerned about environmental problems question materialist values as a core element of modern civilization, believing that materialist values must be kept in a more-modest place among a suite of other cultural values (such as environmental, community, or social justice) that shape the development of human society.

Negative Popular Conceptions

There are many media accounts and folk legends about how characters who have strong materialist values became greedy and obsessed with accumulated wealth, status, and possessing high-status goods. Consequently, these characters' relentless pursuit, as driven by materialist values, is associated with losing sight of one's interdependent place in collective life—one's responsibilities to, and benefits from, family, community, nation, nature, and a full self that honors many kinds of values (for example, caring for the home). These commonplace stories—reproduced in fairy tales and Hollywood movies, where someone “had it all” and lost it to greed, corruption, or careless mismanagement of savings—celebrate cultural skepticism and the moral stance against strong materialist values in society.

Materialist values are also associated with those who will pursue material goods at the expense of other people and other moral actions. For example, materialist values are often associated with the abuse of power of large organizations—be it government or industry—that have placed the pursuit of revenue or profit over human safety and environmental protection and stewardship. Thus, many social justice issues are tied to a critique of materialist values as a distal cause, rather than a proximate cause, that at the core of the issue distorts human decision making to narrowly focus on the accumulation of wealth. For example, while the proximate cause for an oil rig blowout may be a failed technology, the distal cause may be attributed to materialist values held by the company or companies involved. In other words, the pursuit of profit overruled the oil company's investment in wisely assessing the risks, safely constructing the technology, and being prepared to assure safety to all citizens if a technological accident occured.

...