For richer, for poorer

It is an old-established truth, a truism in fact, that money does not buy you happiness — though, as the late Professor Joad pointed out, it does allow you to be miserable in comfort. Yet the great majority of people, knowing this, nevertheless devote their energies to increasing their wealth, which suggests that happiness is not actually their ultimate goal. In fact, most people don’t have an ultimate goal.

The authors of this book, father and son, seek to persuade us that we should devote more of our energies to things that are done for their own sake, that are good in themselves, rather than spend our lives on the treadmill of getting and spending, which is ultimately no more satisfying than the work of prisoners who are forced to dig holes only to fill them again. They want to

rehabilitate the common good to replace the militant individualism that actually leads to servitude and a decrease in freedom. They believe that the economy should serve us, rather than we it.

Personally, I am viscerally in sympathy with criticisms of consumerism. One has only to watch the massed ranks of British shoppers on a Saturday afternoon, searching for clothes but eternally scruffy and attired in the worst possible taste, to appreciate that a general increase in income will not necessarily lead to a richer life. An ever greater panoply of gadgetry is not the royal road to satisfaction; one is reminded of the opening words of Johnson’s Rasselas, that address

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow…

The modern consumer is surely the arch-pursuer of the phantoms of hope, who believes, or hopes, that the gadgets of tomorrow will supply the deficiencies of the present day.