Small and vulgar pleasures
As I was reading some of the reactions and blog postings this morning about yesterday’s primaries in Pennsylvania, something sparked in the far reaches of my memory. Something I had read many years ago, and, as with so many things of this persuasion, I had to seek it out. I found it in the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, and inscribed 168 years ago in a still-prescient volume:
I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn and apart, is like a stranger to the destiny of all the others: his children and his particular friends form the whole human species for him; as for dwelling with his fellow citizens, he is beside them, but he does not see them; he touches them and does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone, and if a family still remains for him, one can at least say that he no longer has a native country.
Could anything better describe the culture of consumerism better?
This entry was posted at 1:30 pm on 23 April 2008 and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
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Not really. But it does describe suburbia pretty well.