Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of HappinessRoger Rosenblatt Consider this paradox: Ecologists estimate that it would take three planets Earth to provide an American standard of living to the entire world. Yet it is that standard of living to which the whole world aspires.In Consuming Desires, award-winning writer and social commentator Roger Rosenblatt brings together a brilliant collection of thinkers and writers to shed light on the triumphs and tragedies of that disturbing paradox. The book represents a captivating salon, offering a rich and varied dialogue on the underlying roots of consumer culture and its pervasive impact on ourselves and the world around us. Each author offers a unique perspective, their layers of thoughts and insights building together to create a striking, multifaceted picture of our society and culture.Jane Smiley probes the roots of consumerism in the emancipation of women from household drudgery afforded by labor-saving devices and technological innovation; Alex Kotlowitz describes the mutual reinforcement of fashion trends as poor inner-city kids and rich suburban kids strive to imitate each other; Bill McKibben discusses the significance, and the irony, of defining yourself not by what you buy, but by what you don't buy.The essays range widely, but two ideas are central to nearly all of them: that consumption is driven by yearning and desire -- often unspoken, seemingly insatiable -- and that what prevents us from keeping our consumptive impulse in check is the western concept of self, the solitary and restless self, entitled to all it can pay for.As Rosenblatt explains in his insightful introduction: "Individualism and desire are what makes us great and what makes us small. Freedom is our dream and our enemy. The essays touch on these paradoxes, and while all are too nuanced and graceful to preach easy reform, they give an idea of what reform means, where it is possible, and, in some cases, where it may not be as desirable as it appears." |
Contents
| 1 | |
One World of Consumers | 23 |
Whats Wrong with Consumer Society? Competitive | 37 |
Consuming for Love | 51 |
False Connections | 65 |
Consuming Nature | 87 |
A News Consumers Bill of Rights | 97 |
When We Devoured Books | 111 |
Movies and the Selling of Desire | 123 |
The Ecology of Giving and Consuming | 137 |
It All Begins with Housework | 155 |
Equipoise | 173 |
Cant Get That Extinction Crisis | 193 |
NOTES | 207 |
ABOUT THE AUTHORS | 217 |
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Consuming Desires: Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of Happiness Roger Rosenblatt No preview available - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
advertising Aldo Leopold Alex Kotlowitz American André Schiffrin aspire audience automobile become Beecher Bharati Mukherjee blackflies Blackfly season called capitalism cars century choice citizens clothing consumer society consumerism consumption create culture desire earth ecological design economic ethic food court forests Gatsby global human Hush Puppies ideas immigrants income Indian individual industrial Jane Smiley Johnsburg journalists Juliet Schor kids labor land less lifestyle live luxury mall mass material means ment middle class million Molly Haskell moral natural North once patterns political poor Press problem publishing Random House religion rich Roger Rosenblatt savings Schor sell shirts social South Asian spending status Stephanie Mills story Stuart sumers sumption television things Thorstein Veblen tion Tommy Hilfiger United urban waste women yearning York
Popular passages
Page 19 - WITH fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread, — • Stitch— stitch— stitch ! In poverty, hunger, and dirt; And still with a voice of dolorous pitch She sang the "Song of the Shirt!
Page 180 - It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our , dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.
Page 194 - A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
Page 1 - He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in manycolored disarray.
Page 147 - We must draw our standards from the natural world, heedless of ridicule, and reaffirm its denied validity. We must honor with the humility of the wise, the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence...
Page 194 - Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land.
Page 191 - ... because of the ability of those who control the world's resources to manipulate things to their own perceived advantage. The greed and delusion which are fundamental to the workings and values of the global marketplace have destructively affected the way in which we see ourselves and relate to others. With the breakdown of community at all levels, human beings have become more like what the traditional model of Homo economicus described. Shopping has become the great national pastime ... On the...
Page 144 - To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.
Page 39 - To the socially recognized hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers. This predisposes tastes to function as markers of 'class'.