The Poverty of Affluence. Paul Wachtel

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Preface

      In some respects, a preface is a conceit. It is the author’s reward to himself for the hard work invested in the pages that follow, an opportunity to reflect on the experience of having spent several years in an activity that is at once self-indulgent and self-denying. It is written in that special state of consciousness that derives from completing any large and intense project—an odd altered state, half elation and half depression, when defenses are exhausted on both counts. It thus gives the reader something of a special opportunity. My argument really begins with the Introduction, but those with a taste for eavesdropping may find this self-reflective interlude useful.

      This book is both a highly personal statement and an extension of my scholarly work. Its style reflects its dual roots. Where I have quoted others or cited facts or trends, I have documented and provided references. But in many places its tone is informal, and throughout I hope the prose is considerably livelier than is usually expected from the pen of a professor.

      The discerning reader will readily detect the influence of a number of venerable figures who are scarcely discussed in the text. Veblen, Tawney, Fromm, Weber, Marx, and others have been suggested to me by various readers of earlier drafts as candidates for more explicit attention. In the interest of reaching a wider readership, however, I have chosen not to provide the kind of detailed review of the literature that might be appropriate in a more strictly scholarly work. My intent is a serious one, not a “popularization,” but I do wish to limit the scholarly apparatus to what is strictly necessary to bolster or substantiate my contentions. I hope to contribute to the literature in a way that will prove useful to psychologists, economists, sociologists, and other professional scholars, but most of all I want to make my arguments accessible to the general reader. I believe the topic to be too urgent for scholarly discourse alone. I have no quick and easy remedy for the disillusionment and confusion that have gripped so much of our citizenry, but I do think I can offer the first step to such a remedy—a diagnosis of some of the basic assumptions that have led us astray.

      I must confess, however, that concern with liveliness of presentation is not the only reason I have not reviewed in detail the prior scholarly work from which the present arguments derive. I am also simply less clear about the sources of the ideas in this book than I usually am about what I write. Given the breadth of the topic, practically everything I have read since my freshman course in Contemporary Civilization at Columbia twenty-five years ago might have contributed to the shape my thoughts have taken. In addition, at least some of the decisive influences have no doubt filtered down to me through conversations and secondary sources in a way that makes it impossible fully to reconstruct the origins of the lines of thought presented here.

      In attempting to familiarize myself with the broad range of literature relevant to the present study, I have been heartened to find that the conclusions I had reached from a psychological starting point converge in important ways with those of a number of other writers who have approached the problems we face from the perspective of other disciplines. Among those who should be mentioned in this regard are, in particular, Robert Heilbroner, William Leiss, E. J. Mishan, Tibor Scitovsky, E. F. Schumacher, Jeremy Seabrook, and Philip Slater. It will be particularly apparent that the present work derived great nourishment from the continuing efforts of John Kenneth Galbraith to challenge our national fantasies about how our economy really works. Without his bold and authoritative analyses to lean upon I might well have shrunk back from the conclusions to which my own explorations led.

      I am sharply critical in the book about the way most of us in America lead our lives. This does not mean that I offer myself as an exemplary exception. Indeed, a key point in the book’s argument is that the concrete realities of our society as it is today make it difficult for all but the most extraordinary individual to extricate himself from the temptations and exigencies of the consumer life on his own. From street crime to a shortage of public recreational facilities to peer influences on oneself and one’s children there are a range of forces that make individualistic and consumerist choices hard to eschew. Understanding how our present choices are self-defeating is a crucial step in the process of change, but so too is understanding how the social and political context makes such self-defeating choices seem almost inevitable.

      One of the reasons that for a short time in the Sixties young people could so radically СКАЧАТЬ