Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Scholarly objectivity shunned

There's a new book about how the arrangement of suburbs influence life,
social life...

I'd like to read it someday, but I can't forget something said in the book's blurb....

something along the following lines....

(paraphrase, very loose)

The author considers the positive side of urban sprawl and the values of home ownership....etc.

I'm sure they list some other values which I've forgotten.

But I don't believe a word of it. It's all about consumerist values, anti-social values, and it's all an illusion. You don't have an adequate self, so you seek a sort of symbolic gratification in purchasing things. But you've purchased them because you feel inadequate and unsatisfied. But those things you're buying can't fill up the empty space you feel.

It is analogous to the problem Hanif Kureishi once described when he imagined a character saying (another loose paraphrase): I'd spent half of my life trying to find things in books that you can only get from other people...

This is simply not a good, desirable, human way of living--and that's independent of the ecological irresponsibility involved.....("This" = life without public transit, with individual units of housing with their tiny patches of grass, and their fences, and their large trucks, and their dogs, and their garden gnomes and such.....)

GMOOH

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