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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
I was a little disconcerted to come across this article on what it calls the new puritans:"According to the Future Foundation, we are increasingly curbing our enthusiasm for profligate consumption, and health and environment-threatening behaviours. Gone is the guilt-free pleasure-seeker, to be replaced by the model well-meaning citizen, the New Puritan - a tag interchangeable with neo-Cromwellian, if you really want to seal its 17th century origins - who thinks through the consequences of activities previously thought of as pleasurable and invariably elects to live without them...
'Civilisation offers no gifts to liberty,' he quotes from Sigmund Freud's Thirties essay, Civilisation and Its Discontents. Whybrow suggests that we use America as a cautionary tale, 'an indication of what happens when citizens turn into consumers, solely driven by immediate reward, and when consumerist impulses become substitutes for communities.'"
The reason for my being startled was the realisation that I do seem to fit in with several of the descriptions being used; I don't "smoke, buy big brands, eat junk food, have multiple sexual partners, waste money on designer clothes, grow beyond [my] optimum weight, subscribe to celebrity magazines, drive a flash car, or live to watch television." But I've never seen myself as an ascetic puritan; quite the contrary (indeed, I've always described myself as a materialist and liberal, finding the coercive and judgemental aspects of the people the article describes to be more than slightly sinister). I suspect the reason for being startled is that whereas most of the above are examples of conspicuous consumption driven by concerns over social status, this is something I've always been indifferent to. I don't have reservations about consumption as such, as it long as it provides a sense of pleasure that isn't dictated by society at large. Pleasure for me is often something that comes from the smallest things rather than the marks of status. Certainly, the reason I don't eat junk food is simply that most of it is inedible; similarlym if I don't watch television much it's simply for the reason that current programming can rarely be described as a pleasurable experience. Perhaps this is the type of philosophy that should form the basis for a 'New Cavaliers' movement?Labels: Culture
posted by Richard 7:28 pm
