We Americans are consumer-oriented. We ASSUME that everyone else is to and
it is some kind of natural state. I disagree
Can you find me a civilization that wasn't consumer-oriented? Even in ancient Babylonia, the more cattle you had, the more respected you were. I don't know of a single civilization (except perhaps the Bushmen if "The Gods Must be Crazy" was anthropologically correct) whose leaders didn't erect unnecessarily ornate palaces, thrones, jeweled crowns, or the like to show their importance. South Seas natives wore more cowrie shells to show their wealth. It's not an American traditiona t all. It's basic within the human psyche -- we want not just to keep up with the Joneses, but to better them. More gold, more jewels, more cattle, more slaves, bigger house, summer house in the Appenines, whatever that particular civilization measures success by, people wanted more of than they really needed. And as societies they would go to war to obtain it.
As I get older I want less stuff, not more.
We live in a unique culture in which a) the vast majority of citizens has more than it really needs to be not only comfortable but luxrious--almost everybody in the country is adequately (or more -- obesity may be our major societal health problem) fed -- despite the horror stories, in fact a quite small percentage of Americans goes to bed hungry, which is a rare state of affairs in the history of the world. And, b) we live much longer than most people throughout history. When you only live to 35, you don't have nearly as much time to amass enough comfort and leisure to have so much stuff that you can say enough.
. I don't live in the biggest house I could afford nor do I
drive the most expensive car I could afford
No. But you DO have a house and a car. What you have, even if modest by contemprary standards, is unbelieve luxury to almost all of the people who have ever lived. And if I understand your lifestyle correctly, your family doesn't stint on movies or books -- you don't limit yourselves to one movie or one book a month. And I think you eat foods that are much more costly than you really need. Your diet doesn't seem limited to rice, beans, lentils, a small amount of meat once a week, no spices (costly, you know!), and pretty much only cabbage in the winter, no fruits or vegetables other than those grown within 20 miles of your house, which since you live in California is a lot more than I could eat in the winter.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not critizing your lifestyle. I'm just pointing out that your holding back, your principles of not having the most expensive things you could afford, are fine from our modern American lifestyle, but have little if any relevance to the way people have lived throughout history.
People don't want to die on average.
Again, our fetish on not dying is a pretty modern thing. I'm not saying people in the past WANTED to die, but I'm saying they had much less of a paranoia about it. Lots of things killed them that we don't even think about today -- infections from cuts, flu, childbirth, croup, dihrrea from bad water, and on and on. When you have lost in infancy or childhood six of the nine children your three wives bore (the first two having died in childbirth) I think you get a lot more casual about death. And when you live with farm animals, you are much more attuned to the natural cycles of life and death.
Roman legions were willing quite literally to die to the last man. Men marched off to war for millenia -- knowing that a lot of them wouldn't come back. When life is "nasty, brutish, and short," death may not appear such a terrible thing as it does to those of us today who can, if we take care of ourselves and don't get in the path of a drunk driver, expect to live in good health into our 80s or90s, with adequate food, warm and comfortable housing, interior plumbing, lots of good books and movies, cable or DISH TV, cars and planes to take us to exotic locales, Elderhostel to keep us mentally active, etc. Life today is remarkably delightful -- no wonder we want to live forever. But to the typical Celt of 300 AD, I suspect death was much less of a horror to avoid at any cost.
On deaf culture, I agree with you. My daughters took ASL in college and got bombarded with the deaf culture, and both they and I, frankly, thought it was pretty sick. |
