One could push a little more on exactly what “intentional” means and how much that covers. Borderline and perverse (I need a smoke!) cases aside, it strikes me that your health/harm criterion is unlikely to produce a list much different from the list it would generate for, say, a dog. This may be useful analytically in some contexts, but it doesn’t help us think about things like love or dignity which are not inherent in the person herself but in social interaction.

The other-people point I’m sympathetic with, though surely, as in Harry’s new wedding-present posting, we can also pay attention to other people’s wants, or even to things other people might like but don’t know they want!

This comes up in the literature on care, which sometimes likes to assert that care is about discerning the needs of others and meeting them, but which runs into difficulties when it goes beyond simple cases like a person needing insulin. Interesting epistemological difficulties arise in figuring out the needs of others, examined for example here:

Dalmiya, Vrinda. 2001. “Knowing people.” In Knowledge, truth, and duty, ed. Matthias Steup. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

On your last point, The “distracts” claim needs more evidence and argument. One might just as well point out that consumerism and advertising are full of inducements to buy things as gifts for others and to discern needs/wants in others that the others do not themselves discern—again, go back to Harry’s new posting and the happy discussion that follows it, a discussion that depends for its comprehensibility across space on the existence of brands and markets and entrepreneurial firms that make cool stuff that we can enjoy and get for other people. Now I’m not actually going to make that argument, but it does suggest that we can’t aprioristically reason from the fact that firms make an effort to get us to buy stuff to the moral condition of society.

To run it the other way around, there are plenty of examples of people ignoring (and worse) each others’ needs in situations of non-affluence.

It also—my last point, I promise—seems to me that there’s an implicit hydraulic theory of attention that gets invoked in the last sentence—the larger genre of argument taking the form that people aren’t paying attention to x (the thing I think they should) because they’re distracted by y.

The usual clue you are in the neighborhood of this argument is a tendentious effort to draw a line between needs and wants, and an argument that some people—other people—have been led astray into false wants.

The division between needs and wants isn’t obviously problematic: wants are intentional (you want something under a description) and needs aren’t (if you need X, you necessarily need anything which is identical with X). One can want what one doesn’t need, and need what one doesn’t want (perhaps because one doesn’t know one needs it).

A familiar definition of ‘need’: a need is a necessary condition of not suffering some serious harm. To say that a diabetic needs insulin injections is to say that she will suffer serious harm, perhaps death, if she doesn’t get them.

Of course, what counts as serious harm is open to dispute, and there will be borderline cases. But many cases are clearly not borderline: I want but don’t need an iPhone, because no great harm will come to me from not having one; someone who lacks access to basic conditions of living as a human (food, water, shelter, security, company, perhaps quite a lot more) is in need. She doesn’t merely want these things (she may not even want them at all); but she does need them (someone who doesn’t know she’s diabetic nonetheless does need insulin).

This doesn’t speak directly to the critique of excess you’re complaining about. But it could, if we add the obvious thought that what’s wrong with a system which creates and encourages wants – want after want after want – is that it distracts attention from other people’s needs.

I think he was tring to say that Michael Moore is fat, that’s all they say these says.

Yes.
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No doubt because they are interpellated into a subject position from which they misrecognize their relation to the false consciousness argument . . . damn! it just happened again.

Denunciations of luxury and excess are ancient; the rhetorical counterpoise may be asceticism or the virtue of the past. Jerry Muller’s The Mind and the Market (Knopf 2002) has the interesting early example in Justus Moser (o with an umlaut), an 18th-century German defender of serfdom, social hierarchy, and local values who was alarmed at the capacity of peddlers to stimulate new desires. Muller (p. 97) quotes Moser: “Our ancestors did not tolerate these rural shopkeepers; they were spare in dispensing market freedoms; they banned the Jews from our diocese; why this severity? Certainly in order that the rural inhabitants not be daily stimulated, tempted, led astray and deceived.”

The “stimulated, tempted, led astray and deceived” part seems very much alive in the Barber book and Uncle Zip’s posting. The usual clue you are in the neighborhood of this argument is a tendentious effort to draw a line between needs and wants, and an argument that some people—other people—have been led astray into false wants.

More generally the idea that we are oppressed by having too much stuff, the anxiety that we are diminished when businesses try to persuade us to buy things, and the apparent worry that OMG someone might actually enjoy a heavily-advertised mass-produced good, seem to me constant tropes of affluence itself. There’s nothing inherently right or left about them (if those terms have any stable meaning today at all).

What’s worrisome is that other more interesting critiques get confused with this stuff. One of Uncle Zip’s commenters opines that Barber says what Marx already said; a lot of people seem to confuse any left critique with windy lamentation about consumerism. Of course this is not Marx; it was not until the Frankfurt school that someone figured out how to cobble together bits of Marx with bits of Justus Moser.

Actually, I think it was a dig at those who market a religious text that has significant anti-consumerist content as a feelgood self-help book, with no apparent sense of irony.

(Though, considering the NIV crowd blatantly set out to “fix” translations they disliked regardless of rigor, “translating” certain passages purely to support their pre-existing dogma about abortion, premillenial dispensationalism, etc, etc, I think “Let it go” is a rather flippant dismissal of something that is intimately tied up with the dysfunctional nature of American fundamentalist Christianity.)

(Whew! Take that, M. John Harrison! You think your sentences are difficult to parse…)

But anti-consumerism makes much more sense as self-help, for example:

How To Want What You Have

For people who have a problem with over-spending, changing their own attitudes and behaviors is a much more practical approach than shaking their fists and railing against TV commercials, Walmart, etc.

…as opposed to cranial shutdown?

Like this one?
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