Lapis Magazine

Consuming Desires: Culture, Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness edited by Roger Rosenblatt

Review by Ralph White, editor of Lapis magazine.

Consuming Desires: Culture, Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness. Edited by Roger Rosenblatt. Published by Island Books.

At a time when the power of consumerism drives not only the American but also the global economy, this is a timely and valuable book. Roger Rosenblatt, best known for his commentary for The Newshour on PBS, has compiled a stimulating and varied series of essays by mostly well-known writers like William Greider and Bill McKibben who ponder questions of serious contemporary relevance. From where does this rapacious appetite for more spring? And what is the predicament it leaves us in today when the environmental consequences of our unrelenting obsessions with buying and having are increasingly apparent?

The overwhelming picture that emerges is of an economic and psychological system that is increasingly running out of control — an express train without a driver — with few individuals awake or influential enough to throw the brakes. A report by Andre Schiffrin from inside the publishing industry, a place close to the heart of American culture, reveals the increasingly disturbing prevalence of market values as multi-nationals intent only on the bottom line reduce both the number of titles critical of prevailing assumptions and new translations of foreign authors. In the world of television, we see the disturbing development of news divisions at the major networks viewed increasingly by their owners as mere profit centers along with the soap operas and sitcoms, rather than matters of public responsibility.

Where is all this leading? Perhaps David Orr sums it all up with arguably the most comprehensive sentence yet constructed on our present economic plight. Examining a beautiful, hand-carved wooden letter opener that he has used with pleasure for twenty years he remarks that the friend who made it for him, had he operated in accordance with conventional economic laws of self-interest, would have “hurried to a discount office supply store to buy one of the cheap, chrome-plated metal letter openers stamped out by the tens of thousands in some “developing” country by underpaid and overworked laborers employed by a multinational corporation using materials carelessly ripped from the earth by another footloose conglomerate and shipped across the ocean in a freighter spewing Saudi crude every which way and sold by nameless employers to anonymous consumers in a shopping mall built on what was prime farmland and is now uglier than sin itself, making a few dollars for some organization that buys influence in Washington and seduces the public on television.”

Hardly a pleasing prospect, but difficult to dispute. Juliet Schorr compounds our causes for concern by pointing out that Americans now spend roughly forty per cent of our free time watching TV and base our consumer expectations on the lifestyles of the upper middle class and rich, disproportionately portrayed with their tennis courts, private planes, convertibles, car phones, maids and swimming pools. And Alex Kotlowitz, in a sharply observed essay, notes that inner city kids want clothes with status-conferring, upscale brands like Tommy Hilfiger while, ironically, suburban white youths cultivate the edgy, prison-derived look of low-slung, baggy pants. Everyone, it seems, wants desperately to appear other than they really are.

Why? Edward Luttwak’s answer is the loneliness and alienation of American society where, deprived of the warm cocoon of extended families and often barely familiar with our neighbors, we exist in an atomistic world in which we become increasingly vulnerable to the siren call of consumerism as solace for all our pangs of loneliness.

Is all this a vicious circle with no way out? William Greider suggests not, when he says that the next big breakthrough we need must be in changing economics itself. Every day the ubiquitous business reports thoughout the media with their constant triumphalist cheerleading perpetrate a dangerous illusion: that there are no real environmental costs of industrial development. And so we are led to fantasies of limitless growth while the planet’s finite resources are continually depleted. We need instead a new economics, one that pays attention to the real world of nature, “in which growth once again becomes synonymous with genuine progress.”

Of course for some like Bharati Mukherjee, an immigrant from India, shopping mall culture at its most crass is a welcome relief from the endless round of familial responsibilities, cooking and cleaning that characterize a woman’s lot in traditional Indian culture. But for most of us our obsession with consumerism has become a kind of pathology that we are eagerly exporting to the whole world rather than examining for its flaws. The publication of this penetrating and entertaining collection of essays is a hopeful sign that the overdue debate on globalized consumerism, its causes and cure, is at last underway in mainstream circles. And not a moment too soon. Rosenblatt concludes his thoughtful introduction with the growing suspicion that the impulse that underlies our increasingly manic behavior is in fact a yearning for less, not more. And we can only hope that he is right. This deeply relevant book implies that our most sensible priorities should be voluntary simplicity and ecological economics. Combined with a search for meaning that inclines us to the spiritual rather than the material, they have the potential to begin to haul us out of this self-created mess before we consume our own souls along with most of the planet’s resources.