Judith Levine: Not Buying It

As Paul and I withdrew from private consumptions this year, we found ourselves more than ever out “in public.”  But we also became more intimate with the back roads of the places we live and with each other, doing what Paul calls “embracing the ordinary.” (p263)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

…I realize: I don’t want faith…But I do want something that religions offer in abundance: the permission to desire wildly, to want the biggest stuff–communion, transcendence, joy, and a freedom that has nothing to do with a choice of checking accounts or E-Z access to anything. (p261)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

[Herman E.] Daly distinguishes “development” (making things, and life, better) from “growth” (making more things).  (p257)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

No matter how far off the grid a person wanders, she still resides in a culture.  Human cultures are held together with speech and touch, ritual, religion, and law.  These immaterial relations are made of material things.  (p255)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

An atheist never really comes in from the cold.  (p248)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

Fashion depends as much on repulsion as attraction.  By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England, France, and Italy, notes the historian Chandra Mukerji, the “fashion-conscious…were beginning to be ashamed of wearing outdated clothing.”  At the turn of the twentieth century, Veblen described the way in which “the best of our fashions strike us as grotesque” a few months past their prime.  He called the phenomenon “aesthetic nausea.”  (p200)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

“What’s left of the counterculture,” he likes to say, “is the counter.”  (p198)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

…if participating in the election by joining MoveOn or Concerned Women for America is not as satisfying as shopping, it feels a little like using an Apple computer or wearing Nike shoes–what Merkley + Partners brand manager Douglas Atkins calls “joining a brand.” The twenty-first-century political group is not a group in the human sense. It has no voice, no flesh. There is no room to meet in, no one to meet. You send your money (or not), you get your e-mails (just like your software updates and porn-site come-ons), you “buy in” to the organization’s politics. Shopping may be “in lieu of,” as Ann says. But this kind of joining in is in lieu of, too. You might say it’s in lieu of political engagement. (p195)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

Everyone wants someplace to put her things, whether she owns one cup and saucer or half the Russel Wright dishware in America.  But household storage is not just a space, it is an attitude.  Things-to-put-things-in create a pleasant paradox.  They allow a person to enjoy the comfort of owning many things and also, since they place those things out of sight, the illusion that she does not own them.  She may have her cake and throw it away, too.  (p189)

Judith Levine: Not Buying It

Gifts may be symbolic objects, such as cowrie shells, that have no intrinsic use or monetary value. Yet socially, their value is central. (p117)