COMMODIFICATION GONE CUCKOO

Dara Molloy, June 1994
Published in The Aisling Magazine, Issue 14

Twenty years ago, who would have thought that someone would get money for a bottle of drinking water? Now, in Belgium, a glass of drinking water in a pub is more expensive than a glass of beer! The trend towards the commodification of almost everything has been most exemplified in Ireland with the commodification of drinking water.

Sixty years ago, people living in the Irish countryside would have been shocked to see cabbages and turnips for sale in their local shop. These vegetables were grown at home and if some people did not have them, the neighbours were able to provide. Cabbages and turnips were not yet commodified.

Before the onset of commodification, all the necessities of life were produced locally without the need for money or shops. In that society, the people who had to go looking for paid employment to feed themselves were regarded as the poorest of the poor.

But in these modern times, turning an item of nature into a commodity, an article of trade, is something to be encouraged. It is performed by those who have ‘enterprise’. People the world over search for a way to make a few pence. Literally nothing on earth is now safe from the ‘enterprising spirit’. Mountains are for mining, rivers for damming, trees for cutting, cows for milking, chickens for laying, sea for fishing and oil for burning.

The trend has been to give more weight to the commercial value of any object than to any other value the object might have. Fields that were once surrounded with ditches and hedges are now levelled into large flat areas that stretch for hundreds of acres across western Europe. Cattle that once were let roam freely in these fields are now enclosed in sheds from the beginning to the end of their lives – because this makes more commercial sense. While fish are being vacuumed from the seas, so much so that fish populations are seriously depleted and many species threatened with extinction, fishfarms spring up all over to produce commercially viable fish in artificial conditions.

In this process, nature is not only harnessed for commercial purposes, but it is also both reduced and distorted. The original diversity of nature is shrinking to include only those species of plant and animal which are commercially exploitable. No room is left for what is not commodifiable (Nota: The Irish Genetic Resources Conservation Trust has been set up in Ireland (1994) to counter act this destruction. Its object is to promote the conservation of Ireland’s biodiversity. Contactable through: Charlie Spillane, Secretary, 52 Crampton Square, Temple Bar, Dublin 2). Nature is distorted through genetic manipulation and genetic engineering so that many plants and animals now seen in fields are not the result of natural selection but of human interference and manipulation.

Commodities for Tourism

But the trend of commodification has yet further to go. In recent years in Ireland there has been an upsurge in tourism that has no parallel in previous times. This upsurge in tourism has led to a greater focus on the economic value of scenery, wilderness, heritage sites and historical areas. As this focus prevails with increasing intensity, more and more of these places will be commodified. In being commodified, they will come to be valued more for the possibilities they offer for making money than for any other reason.

Take Inis Mór for example, one of the Aran Islands, where this writer lives. Inis Mór has had a long tradition, stretching back at least 1500 years, of welcoming people to its shores. In earlier times, the island was a monastic island and attracted pilgrims from far and near. In more recent times, people who visited came for holidays, staying at least for a week or two and many for longer periods. They lived in the homes of islanders and most of them made many friends among the locals. Quite a number of marriages have resulted from such visits.

But now people come neither as pilgrims nor as sojourners. They come as ‘tourists’. A tourist is a specific product of modern society unlike any previous type of traveller in history. The tourist operates out of a market economy that advertises where one can go for holidays. The choice is usually an economic one – value for money. One place can be in fashion this year, another place next year. The tourist economy is not interested in the pilgrim who wants to walk barefoot to Croagh Patrick and then sleep overnight on its summit. It is interested in the consumption of products for which money is paid. Transport, bed-nights, meals, gifts and souvenirs, postcards, photos, guides – and the very latest … heritage centres … all of these are tourist commodities.

The Aran Islands have now been commodified. In trans-world advertising by the state body for tourism, Bord Fáilte, the Aran Islands are portrayed as a place not to be missed. Winter and summer, strangers pour in from afar – Japan, Australia, America – as well as from Europe and from mainland Ireland. They come with their cameras and their videos … and of course their money. It is because they come as consumers that they are welcome.

Tourism is the fruit of wealth. This year, Aran is unlikely to see many tourists from Eastern Europe, from Africa, from South America or from China. Only the wealthy will be represented. They come as voyeurs. The island prostitutes itself. There is an intense pressure on the island community to commodify everything that the tourists want – the thatched houses, the currachs, the donkeys, the traditional singing, the céilí dancing, the Irish language, the heritage sites and even the people themselves. The real danger is that islanders will in the future continue to speak the Irish language, wear the Aran sweater and dance the Aran Set primarily for the sake of the tourists.

In this way, Aran is slowly becoming a museum, a museum of living people whose patterns of lifestyle and behaviour are determined by the demands of commercial tourism.

The commodification of Irish culture is well developed outside of Ireland. A second Irish pub has opened recently in Bremen, north Germany. This is typical of many cities and towns across Europe. Irish music blares out on radio stations and the Aran sweater can be bought in cities across the world.

Other cultures too of course have been commodified – the crafts of African tribes, the music of indigenous peoples in Central America, the medicines of native traditions. But this is not a way of preserving the culture, except by preserving it in a bottle. A commodified culture has become a product, it is no longer a way of life. Diverse cultures the world over face the stark choice of commodification or death, if they yield to the onslaught of modernisation and development.

The Commodification of Genes

We have not seen the end of the commodification process yet, nor will we for some time. Developments in genetics herald a whole new era of patenting and copyright. Already, in the area of plants especially, genetic strains have been bred that produce better yields, look more beautiful, last longer on the shelf or are cheaper to produce.

F1 hybrids are genetically manipulated plant seeds that will not themselves produce fertile seed for sowing but are good for other commercial purposes. These gene manipulations are copyright. Claiming to be inventions and therefore the property of the inventor, they cannot be used without paying a royalty to the copyright owner.

Where strains have been developed that are reproducible, reproduction will now also be copyright. This means that a farmer who wishes to collect and save his own seed may have to pay a royalty before he can plant it again next year, if the genetic make-up of the seed has been copyrighted.

Now take this case a stage further, a stage we are fast approaching. Take the case where a genetic formula is discovered, manipulated so that it becomes technically an invention, and is then copyrighted. The formula can be injected into a human being to change some genetic balance within the body, with the result, let us say, that it cures the tendency to baldness. The man who gets this treatment will have to pay, of course, for the treatment, including a royalty to the inventor.

But what if he has children and this genetic adaptation is passed on through his adjusted genes? For each of his children to whom he passes on this genetic adaptation, he will have to pay a royalty to the inventor – and so on through his grandchildren, great grandchildren and family tree forever. These are the implications. People will become commodified in the very immediate sense – their reproduction will be worth money to somebody directly.

The Cuckoo Religion

The commodification process which continues to swallow up more and more in modern society is part of a wider all-encompassing belief-system in which it is hard not to be immersed, no matter what part of the world one lives in. This belief system I call the ‘Cuckoo Religion’.

A cuckoo does not have a nest of its own. It lays its egg in some other bird’s nest. When the egg hatches, the young cuckoo pushes all the other hatched birds out of the nest, and then consumes all before it – everything that the unsuspecting foster-mother brings it, until it grows much bigger than the foster mother, leaves the nest and flies away to repeat the process on some other innocent bird. Meanwhile, the foster-mother has been left without any offspring except this all-consuming monster.

The ‘Cuckoo Religion’ operates in this way. In the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development’, the so-called ‘modern’ way of life finds its way into every nook and corner of the globe. Landing into traditional peoples and cultures, it pushes out all indigenous practices and beliefs, or converts them (commodifies them) to its own use. It is all-consuming of both people and nature, streamlining all into the production / consumption mode of being. Having pushed everything else out of the nest, it grows fat on the unsuspecting services of people and place until it decides to fly away, leaving the nest destitute.

Consumer Education

Human beings become valued on the basis of their ability to consume and produce. The Western education system is a prime agent in this conversion process. Wherever the Western concepts of progress and development have begun to take root, a Western style education system has been put in place. In this system, brother is pitted against sister and friend against neighbour in a cut-throat competition for points and certificates. The educational process, operating on a factory model, trains the young people to consume educational products and to produce results according to certain required grades, in rehearsal for later life.

Schools are socially engineered breeding grounds that create the productive / consumptive individual – the ultimate product of commodification. This process is well illustrated in Ireland in the new emphasis placed by the Irish government on producing the ‘enterprising individual’ from Irish schools (Nota: Green Paper on Education, produced by Irish Minister for Education, 1992. cf. pages 11-16). It is also illustrated in well used phrases of government representatives such as ‘Irish graduates are Ireland’s most valuable export’ (Nota: A phrase used by Ms Gemma Hussey, ex-minister for Education, in an article in Education Now some years ago).

The cuckoo religion of commodification is responsible for the cataclysmic reduction of diversity in the modern world. That reduction in diversity ranges from the disappearance of the corncrake to the death of a language. People the world over are drinking Coke and watching Dallas or its equivalent. The cuckoo religion is a pseudo religion offering a pseudo culture and a pseudo way of life that is soul-destroying and unsustainable. Yet it continues to envelope the world. In the end it turns human beings as well as everything else into commodities.

 

Dara Molloy lives as a Celtic monk and is co-editor of The AISLING Magazine.

 

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