William Wordsworth is a great English poet, but one poem he wrote irritates me. It’s the sonnet that begins: The world is too much with us; late and soon, / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. I beg to differ. There’s nothing wrong with getting and spending so long as you don’t do it 24/7.
I’m retired, so my getting days are over except for the money I make from writing. I am not much of a spender, but recently my wife and I had a spending bash: We renovated our kitchen to the tune of 20,000 bucks. The money came from taking out a new mortgage. This spending did not lay waste my powers; far from it. It gave me a new power, the power to cook. We replaced our wretched electric stove with a superb gas one, something I’d wanted for a long time. I do most of the cooking in our house and I hated cooking on an electric stove. Have you ever tried to simmer something on an electric stove? It doesn’t work.
The renovation was my wife’s idea. She disliked our kitchen cabinets with their fake wood veneer. Since she was determined to go ahead with the project, I countered with my own wish list: a gas stove, granite countertops, and a new refrigerator and dishwasher (the current ones were 10 years old). The stove would be easy to install because we have a gas line to the house; our heating system and water heater run on gas. Three months later the renovation was completed.
In his inaugural address in 1989, the elder George Bush asked, “Are we enthralled by material things?”—his point being that Americans are not enthralled by material things despite the widespread assumption among Europeans that Americans are mired in materialism. I’m not enthralled by my new stove, but I am mighty pleased. In the morning I feel a slight rush of pleasure when I turn on the gas and see the bright blue flame that is going to cook my scrambled egg.
I don’t think I’m making too much of my new acquisition. According to Samuel Johnson, “the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the performance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procurement of petty pleasures italics mine].” Doctor Johnson thinks there is nothing wrong with petty pleasures, provided they are harmless. My petty pleasure is cooking on my new gas stove.
I’ve never met a person who was totally indifferent to material things, yet intellectuals on the left and right frequently rail against materialism. In a recent Times Literary Supplement a reviewer quotes an author who argues that Western civilization is in bad shape because we spend “the better parts of our lives” pursuing “the material gratifications of a hedonic society.” I’m willing to bet that the smug author of those remarks has not spurned material gratifications. I’m sure he has enjoyed a new acquisition—a computer, a car, a coffeemaker . . . maybe even a new stove.
About a century ago the English socialist R. H. Tawney wrote a silly book entitled The Acquisitive Society. You don’t have to read it to know what he said: Capitalism makes people greedy for products they don’t really need—and so on and so on. Who on this planet is not acquisitive—except for monks and (maybe) nomads? When I was working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in the 1980s, I learned that many people living under Communist regimes were willing to pay a month’s salary for a pair of Levis.
Attacking materialism—aka consumerism—is the stock-in-trade of intellectuals. In Consuming Passions (1999), a collection of essays about the evils of consumerism, Roger Rosenblatt says that “ordinary citizens are becoming like the big spenders of the past, going on near-desperate hunts for new stuff to buy and to long for.” Who are these frenetic ordinary citizens? I’ve never met one. Another writer, a professor at Oberlin, pontificates: “The problem is that we don’t often see the true ugliness of the consumer economy.” Does he live in a hut in the woods, grow his own food, and cook in a fireplace? I doubt it.
Writers often sing the praises of alcohol, yet some people who drink become alcoholics. Why attack consumerism when only a small percentage of people are immoderate consumers? So I say, give two cheers for materialism and consumerism. These isms don’t lay waste my powers, or yours.
Stephen Miller is the author, most recently, of Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole.
