Consuming desire
I’ve just finished reading Judith Levine’s Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping. The New York-based writer commits to a year of frugality, a year in which she and her partner will shop for nothing but the basic necessities of food and personal hygiene. In diary form, Levine tracks her experiences and responses, interweaving them with reflections on more global issues of consumerism. The result is a highly readable, refreshingly personal and eminently sensible exploration of consumerist culture and its impacts ... one of the best I’ve read.
There is much in Levine’s writing that is helpful. But it's her reflections on the relationship between consumption and desire that I find most compelling.
Levine grieves that fact that utopian visions of society are long dead. The only utopian movements left, she argues, are “ecstatic embraces of discipline:” on the side of the religious Right, the pledges of sexual chastity; on the Left, the movements of voluntary simplicity. Quoting cultural critic Ellen Willis, anticonsumerism has become “the Puritanism of the Left.” On both Left and Right, desire is now cast as the enemy.
"Part of me is disgusted by America's 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 its 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."
For Levine, the problem is not that we desire too much, but that we do not desire enough.
"I don't want faith. As far as I am concerned, there is far too much blind faith out there; the worst, from Islamic jihadists to Christian anti-abortion assassins, are full of passionate conviction. But I do want something that religions offer in abundance: the permission to desire wildly, to want the biggest stuff—communion, transcendence, joy and freedom …”"We don't need religion for any of this … No, we don't need religious faith. But if we are going to desire the big stuff and get it, one kind of blind faith is necessary: the faith that it is possible."
"America's aspirations are not rising. They're a lead bob plummeting to zero. ... compared to what we might imagine, the desires of the American consumer are paltry."
Perhaps Levine is onto something here. Perhaps living well in a consumerist culture is less to do with overcoming our desires, and more to do with allowing desire its reign. As followers of Jesus, we are called to an audacious hope, an envisioning of life in its fulness. Desire boldly!
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