I don’t want to slice the personal off from the economic or argue that the former is inconsequential while the latter is “real.” Integrating these two realms is what all my work (including this project) is about. Yet I wonder whether cutting back my personal consumption will do any more than make me feel better. Is not-buying part of the solution—to anything?
APRIL 30
I’ve come to the journalism department of New York University, to talk with my friend, editor, and comrade in arms, the cultural critic Ellen Willis. Ellen is one of the country’s smartest cartographers of the terrain where the personal meets the political, and for decades she has been writing about the parallels between religious-right and political-left conservatism. Both of these condemn what they see as the excesses of the Sixties and Seventies sexual liberation and cultural freedom movements; each blames these movements for what ails America. Neither has any use for “hedonism,” and both preach sacrifice and moderation—chastity on the right, anticonsumerism on the left.
I hope Ellen can help me sort through my own misgivings about the moral agenda of Voluntary Simplicity without entirely undermining my effort to reduce personal consumption. But I know she’s not going to reassure me. Ellen has expressed her skepticism about my buy-nothing project. “There are certain ways in which you can regulate consumption. You can take things off the market, like SUVs, for instance,” she has told me on the phone. “I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any laws. But reducing consumption as a principle is not a basis for political change.”
Today, Ellen begins by outlining three historic periods of postwar consumption. In the Fifties, an era of new prosperity following the traumas of the Depression and World War II, “consumption was about security and solidity—houses, appliances, cars, all tied up with an ethos that the most important thing was to have a secure life.”
For the Sixties generation, who grew up taking security for granted, “consumption started to be more fun.” Rent was cheap, you could work part time and live off the fat, spending your disposable income on motorcycles and records, drugs and travel. Consumption was not antithetical to rebellion. Desiring consumer goods did not preclude desiring other, less tangible, good things—community, freedom, transcendence, orgasms; in a politically optimistic time, both kinds of goods felt near at hand. “The pleasures of consumption could be expanded beyond consuming,” says Ellen. For instance, some feminists who criticized the misogyny in advertising and commercial pornography also saw that the sexuality in these media could adumbrate the sexual liberation of women as well as men. “Consumption opened out to help stimulate subversive thoughts,” and vice versa, says Ellen.
Ellen’s third, current, period began with the rise of the moral Right in the 1980s. Since then, she identifies two contradictory trends. Consumption has been hollowed out of any liberatory content (unless you count Jimi Hendrix as the soundtrack for Pepsi commercials). Getting and spending is everything—more than everything. “There is a feeling that this has gotten out of control,” Ellen laments. “Everybody is trying to sell me something at every moment. We better think about buying and selling because if we stop for a minute and think about anything else, we will have a meltdown.” At the same time, we are pinched by what she calls a “culture of scarcity,” the idea—made real by government and corporate policies favoring the rich and stockholders over everyone else—that there is no money for health care or pensions, no time for leisure, no affordable living space, no room to think about the possibilities beyond private bourgeois comfort. “Utopianism is out of the conversation entirely,” notes Ellen.
I agree. “The only utopian movements left are these ecstatic embraces of discipline,” I say. “Like chastity pledges.”
Or Voluntary Simplicity, she answers, and repeats that VS is not a path toward liberating ourselves from the grip of overconsumption. It is, rather, one more symptom of a culture in the tightening grip of repression: “Anticonsumerism is the Puritanism of the Left.”
When I get home, I take out Ellen’s 1992 collection,No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays. “Transcendence through discipline—as in meditation, or macrobiotics, or voluntary poverty, or living off the land—was always the antithesis of the ’60s dialectic,” she writes in “Coming Down Again,” a piece that is as fresh today as it was when it was written in 1990.
[I]n context it added another flavor to the rich stew of choices and made for some interesting, to say the least, syntheses. But its contemporary variants are the only game in town, emblems of scarcity. Another metaphor: runners by the thousands urging on their bodies until the endorphins kick in. The runners’ high, an extra reward for the work-well-done of tuning up one’s cardiovascular system. What’s scarce in the current scheme of things is not (for the shrinking middle class, anyway) rewards but grace, the unearned, the serendipitous. The space to lie down or wander off the map.
Bill McKibben also wants the space to lie down or wander off the map (though I can’t quite imagine him advising anyone to lie down and ingest a chemical that induces wandering temporarily off the planet). He stops short of telling people what they should want, but like other VS proponents suggests that environmentalists break the news gently that what people want is not going to make them happy. “Our task is to demonstrate that to live simply is…more satisfying and more pleasurable than consumer society,” he told Walljasper. “It doesn’t work to just tell people to get out of their cars to save the upper atmosphere. Instead we need to encourage them to ride a bike. It’s elegant. It’s fun. It makes you feel better. It’s important not to say that TV will rot your brain, but that it’s satisfying to take a walk in the moonlight instead.”
What if I don’t fancy elegance and moonlight? What if I relish my nightly fix ofLaw and Order and have not noticed any neuronal deterioration for it? Actually, itdoes work to tell me to get out of my car to save the upper atmosphere. It works a lot better than telling me to get out of my car to save my soul.
So the Left argues (alongside Plato) that a good society is one that provides everyone with his essential bodily needs; spiritual satisfaction will naturally follow material satiation. The religious Right (alongside Descartes and the tree-living extremes of the environmentalist movement) sees spiritual salvation in the mortification of the flesh. But if neurologists teach us that there is no separation of the body from the mind, anthropologists show there is no sundering things from their meanings or from culture and the relationships inside culture. “Take [goods] out of human intercourse and you have dismantled the whole thing,” write Douglas and Isherwood. This is as true of Keynes’s “second-class wants” as it is of his essentials. “Goods that minister to physical needs—food or drink—are no less carriers of meaning than ballet or poetry,” the two continue.
We need bread and water. We also desire freedom and transcendence. Somewhere in between fall the lime-green stiletto-heeled shoes. They are a pleasure: where need meets desire. Listening again to the tape of my conversation with Ellen, it strikes me that freedom and transcendence are also needs, not just desires. And maybe the freedom to desire itself—the font of personal fulfillment, creativity, and democracy, to name just a few good things—is a necessity, too. Will Paul and I have to recognize third, fourth, and fifth categories floating between Necessity and Superfluity?
Unlike Ellen Willis, I’m sympathetic to Bill McKibben’s argument. Part of me is disgusted by Americans’ sense of entitlement to vast quantities of everything. At the same time, I am loath to ally myself with any movement, right or left, that starts by telling people not to desire. I don’t want to tell the girls in the store that it’s wrong to want those frivolous shoes, because I don’t want to risk suggesting they give up the sexy dream of dancing the night away. That dream is stitched into the soles (and souls) of the shoes.
*The names of the VSers in the group have been changed.
May
Scarcity
MAY 1
Things fall apart. The wheel of my shopping c
art wobbles off the axle and its pin is lost on the sidewalk. My favorite green-and-black striped shirt is thinning at the elbows, my heels are poking through my socks. The final shard of Body Time rosemary-mint aromatherapy soap slides down the drain. Now we’ll make do with Ivory.
Intellectually, as well, a feeling of scarcity is setting in. I skim the newspaper’s arts pages daily like a historian surveying the microfiche of an era she did not live through. But I turn my closer attention to the television schedules, scrutinizing them for anything that looks remotely engaging. I rush home by nine every Wednesday forWest Wing and pencil shows I want to watch into my calendar. On those rare evenings when there is noLaw and Order episode airing, I feel deprived of the satisfyingly predictable “surprise” endings and go to sleep unsettled. Tonight, Saturday, is such aLaw- less evening.
What should I do? I don’t have a date and Paul is in Vermont. I could take a bike ride, I could read, I could learn to knit or start on ancient Greek. But it’s too late to ride and there’s nothing I want to read. I’d be irritating company in my present mood, so it’s a good thing I haven’t any social plans. As for knitting or Greek, the idea of one more homemade, edifying pastime makes me yawn.
“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre,” declared Albert Camus. “Boredom is the threshold to great deeds,” wrote Walter Benjamin.
I sit on the couch, noticing how cute the cat is when he folds his little white paws over his little orange face. Sometimes, it seems, boredom is not even the threshold to deeds.
Yes, I am bored—a feeling that is more frequent this year than I’d like to admit. I feel lonely, antsy, and distracted by this prolonged suspension of distraction, like a yogi forced to meditate twenty-four hours a day. The one difference is that my knees don’t hurt.
Does this mean I am mediocre? Or am I confronting something I don’t usually have to confront?
Adam Phillips calls boredom “the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.” Phillips, a child psychologist, is talking about boredom in children, who, faced with nothing to do, are often powerless to do much about it besides wait around until they think of something. Boredom is “a precarious process,” he continues, “in which the child is both waiting for something and looking for something, in which hope is being secretly negotiated.” The state he describes is remarkably similar to Benjamin’s “threshold.”
If the child were an adult, she could skip over the threshold and go shopping.
Shopping defeats, or at least circumvents, boredom, but not only because it fills idle time. Consumption is an exercise in hope—hope for more happiness, more beauty, more status, more fun. This sort of hope requires little negotiation; its fulfillment is relatively simple, even if temporary. But more than this simple, immediate gratification, consumption provides the thing that precedes gratification, the complex something with which Phillips’s child is grappling: the marketplace provides infinite names for desire—Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream,She Is Me, Chinese silk handbag.
This year, Paul and I have volunteered to be children in a culture that equates adulthood with autonomy and autonomy with the ability to spend your way out of predicaments. Now, the predicament is boredom, the naming of desire. Not once since the year began have I experienced a surfeit of desire; never have I brimmed over with Keynes’s “pent-up demand.” Rather, pausing at that threshold, I have found myself in this infantile state of excruciating restlessness—waiting to know how to open the door, waiting to know what to want.
MAY 3–4
Monday morning, more purposeful and energetic, I pack a lunch and ride the subway to the Humanities and Social Sciences Library on Forty-second Street for a day of research. It’s three days after the photos of Abu Ghraib were released, and I am taking a break from the hideous news by reading a piece from yesterday’s SundayTimes Magazine. “Fixing Nemo,” by Rebecca Skloot, concerns the growth in veterinary medicine for fish. She reports that a common ailment for which pet owners seek such services is the “buoyancy disorder,” which may cause Goldie to float belly up or nose down. If the simpler treatment, the administration of a single cooked green pea, does not cure the patient, corrective surgery can be undertaken at a cost of $150 to $1,500. The article makes me feel a little different toward my tuna sandwich.
Before getting off the train, I look through the call numbers I’ve printed out from the library’s online catalogue. Then I hurry down Forty-second Street to arrive at the heavy wooden doors on the north side of the library at 11 on the dot. The doors are locked, blocked by a sign that says the research libraries are closed on Mondays as well as Sundays, “due to budget cuts.” Already, shortened hours have given a user barely enough time to check her coat and sharpen her pencil before the staff takes lunch.
Returning the next day, again with call numbers and sandwich, I wait forty-five minutes for my books to be retrieved from the stacks (last year two hundred New York Public Library staffers were lost to attrition and early retirement). One book just can’t be found (the book budget took a 40 percent hit in 2003, translating to 260,000 books). At the end of the day, I’m unable to copy my materials in the usual hour I allot, as three of seven copy machines are out of order (a press release on the cuts refers to “reduced technology, maintenance, and security, leading to equipment and facilities that are deteriorating”). If it’s a frustrating day for me, a person who has rendered herself dependent on this public system for a year, I’ve got nothing on the administrators and librarians whose livelihoods depend on that system and who are its year-in-year-out stewards. The NYPL absorbed cuts of more than $16 million last fiscal year and the system is looking at some $30 million more for 2004.
MAY 5
All right, I’ll try the Brooklyn Central Branch. I’ve adjusted my expectations. This is, after all, a popular library, not a research library. All I want are two texts of anthropology, one by Marcel Mauss, the other by Bronislaw Malinowski. Neither is obscure, and the catalogue says they are both in circulation, on the shelf. In reality, both are missing and unaccounted for.
The librarian initiates a search in Storage, many stories below. A half-hour later, the kid at the main circulation desk looks at the slip and tells me, “Nothin’ not found,” a confusing but sympathetically delivered message. Back upstairs in History and Social Science, I ask the librarian if there’s anything else that can be done. Sorry, he says. Maybe he should indicate the loss in the computer catalogue, I suggest, so that someone else might do something about it. “Oh, yeah, okay,” he answers, calling up the entry. But there’s no field in which to indicate anything about the book’s whereabouts or lack thereof. He starts to delete the entry.
No!I want to shout, but I’ve made too many demands already. I stand and watch, like a witness to the Stalinist redaction of the record of the destruction of a great public institution. He is committing official indifference; I, complicit silence.
Before I leave, I climb to the top floor, where arts and crafts books are shelved, to borrow a guide to fabric crafts. Since we’re not buying gifts, Paul and I are thinking of making two dozen silk roses to give my niece, Sarah, at graduation; I’m looking for a book on silk flowers. But these books, also in the catalogue, are gone, too. “Probably stolen,” the librarian tells me, sounding resigned as a widow to absence.
New York’s libraries are not alone. Thanks to tax cuts nationwide, the American Library Association’s publication reads like the newsletter of a nursing home: everybody is either sick or dying. In Rochester, New York, the public library “may be facing more reductions in hours and staff as a result of the mayor’s latest budget proposal…State aid to the libraries has remained the same since 1997,” says one article. In Brown County, Wisconsin, the library board is fighting the second shutdown (including temporary layoffs of the entire staff) during the last week of the summer. In Rockford, Illinois, school librarians are pleading to forestall the elimination of all the district’s pr
ofessional librarians and thirty-one elementary-school library aides.
Is it any wonder that in many towns Barnes & Noble, with its upholstered armchairs, shiny mahogany tables, and endlessly replenished shelves, has become the new public library? Public except, of course, that you have to buy something to use it, and those endless shelves contain only the books a marketing person considers saleable. On the way home from the library, I stop at Barnes & Noble. After all, the savior of smaller government is supposed to be the marketplace, whose Invisible Hand will distribute those things the state no longer supplies but people still demand. I pass the Chinese calligraphy bookmark display, the Tuscany section, and the For Dummies subsidiary on my way to the Anthropology section in a far corner. I search its two short shelves. The store carries neither Mauss nor Malinowski.
MAY 8
The doughnut maker Krispy Kreme reports a plunge in its share price of 29 percent. It closed yesterday at $22.51, down $9.29 and less than half the stock’s peak value of $49.74, reached in August. Market analysts say the company’s problem is overexpansion. The company attributes its losses to the popularity of low-carbohydrate diets. Nutritionist and food activist Marian Nestle suggests that both may be right. The food industry creates obesity by pushing more food on us, she argues: “If you eat less, they lose money.” On the other hand, Nestle and others in her field consider the low-carb diet another consumer product, falsely advertised and possibly harmful to health. Krispy Kreme is both villain and victim.
More obesity news: earlier this week, the Environmental Protection Agency reported that the average American car or light truck in the 2003 model year weighed 4,021 pounds, breaking the two-ton barrier for the first time since the mid-1970s. Vehicle size is the main reason that gains in fuel economy are at a standstill and crude oil consumption is climbing.
Not Buying It Page 9
