In Consumer Culture in America, Wilber W. Caldwell observes that we are seduced, lured into a sparkling web so enticing that we perceive no reason to struggle. This book explores the enormous power of the marketplace that is reflected...

In Consumer Culture in America, Wilber W. Caldwell observes that we are seduced, lured into a sparkling web so enticing that we perceive no reason to struggle. This book explores the enormous power of the marketplace that is reflected so vividly by the countless agents of our popular culture as it pulls everything into its all-encompassing orbit. Oblivious to the runaway, self-perpetuating power that seeks to controls us, we are lost in a maze of materialist illusions created by a system that possesses only limited perspectives and sensitivities in the realms of social justice, war, human exploitation, and the fragility of the natural world. Our politicians may pay lip service to these issues, but at the end of the day, they are only puppets, chosen and controlled by a system that understands the value of creating illusions, including the illusion that these issues are being addressed.

Consumer Culture in America first explores the history and development of modern consumer culture, then carefully examines its intellectual and ideological underpinnings, and finally scrutinizes the current situation. This book answers many of our society’s most compelling questions. Are our media-driven marketplace illusions so enticing as to effectively mute any possible outcry of resistance, silence the historically predictable anthem of the exploited by obscuring from them the fact of their own exploitation, and sate any desire aimed at breaking the chains of material bondage? Does this culture of the commodity effectively mask widespread inequity, poverty, powerlessness, environmental plunder, even murder and genocide? Are we willing slaves to an invisible force that shapes our beliefs and our desires while it blinds us to its own workings? Or does today’s consumer culture have another side? Does it also spawn unforeseen meanings and supply important material and symbolic resources that ordinary people can use to invigorate their lives, their identities, and their culture in an otherwise hostile world?

The ruinous effects of modern American consumer culture are complex and deep-rooted. At its core, cultural operations seek to alter our perception of reality itself by so intensely focusing our attention on the gleaming reflection of the commodity that we become unable to see the wider world. Any realistic remedy will entail removing the veil and exposing our blindness. Indeed, part of the solution may lie within the complex folds of the culture itself. We may already be discovering unforeseen meanings amid the glitter - symbolic resources that we can creatively use to invigorate our lives, reconstruct our trampled identities, and rekindle the flickering fires of both the individualism and the community that once burned so brightly at the heart of our democracy.

A short excerpt:

Certainly, it can be safely said that, at least up to a point and beginning at its most fundamental level, the Modern’s critique of itself, and the Postmodern’s critique of Modernity, are in many ways the same. Both hold that, despite the notable contributions of science and enlightened reason to mankind’s material well-being, the modern technological era has produced some unlovely side effects, namely alienation, loss of identity, homogenization, numbing...

A short excerpt:

Certainly, it can be safely said that, at least up to a point and beginning at its most fundamental level, the Modern’s critique of itself, and the Postmodern’s critique of Modernity, are in many ways the same. Both hold that, despite the notable contributions of science and enlightened reason to mankind’s material well-being, the modern technological era has produced some unlovely side effects, namely alienation, loss of identity, homogenization, numbing bureaucracy, a chilling sense of powerlessness, runaway nationalism, and a pervasive false consciousness. The continued growth of exploitation, nationalism, war, sectarian violence, terrorism, poverty, environmental neglect, and man’s uninterrupted inhumanity to man has led many to criticize the course of universal enlightenment and to question the benevolence of a world ruled by the systematic logic of science and instrumental reason. Indeed, such horrors have led many to suspect that all modern rational systems have the power to subvert, to reproduce themselves endlessly, and to serve their own purposes. At the same time, the world appears not to be struggling toward unity but accelerating toward fragmentation. In these notions, we find the seeds of postmodern thought.