mark a. rayner Posts

I’d like to break away from the arms-length satire for a moment and ask, are we heading for trouble?

(Damn, even when I’m not trying to be sarcastic, it comes out that way.) A quick mine of The Skwib blogroll found some grist for the depressing notion that our consumer lifestyle is untenable, both in terms of what its doing to the planet and what it does to us as human beings.

First off, via the Rev., we read this long piece from Joe Bageant, which is a dispatch from the American Class war. Bageant quotes Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity:

It is a mistake to think that we live ultra-specialized lives and somehow add another ingredient called “community” on top of it all. What is there really to share? Not much that matters, to the extent that we are independent of neighbors and dependent on faceless institutions and distant strangers. Real communities are interdependent. Never in all history has there been such a lonely, inauthentic civilization.

Essentially, this is a meditation on the destruction of the American middle class as an incubator for community. And lest the Canadians reading this feel smug, we have enough in common in terms of our consumer culture that you will feel uncomfortable, perhaps even sad.

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