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and the United States have denounced what Alfred Kazin has called "the
commercial rapacity that invades every side of American life." Moreover,
many of them have been quick to embrace the supposedly ascetic leaders
of Marxist-Leninist regimes in the third world because the leaders of
these regimes do not have "materialist values. "
The latter tendency can be seen in the political travelogues Susan
Sontag and Mary McCarthy wrote after they visited North Vietnam
during the Vietnam War. For McCarthy the North Vietnamese had a
"moral, ascetic government, concerned above all with the quality of
Vietnamese life," whereas the American government championed con–
sumerism and condoned "capitalist laws of marketing." The authors of
many left-wing political travelogues - North Vietnam was a popular
subject in the early 1970s, Nicaragua in the 1980s - tend to be less inter–
ested in learning about daily life under the new regime than in coming
up with evidence to support their strongly held belief that the United
States has always supported corrupt and materialist right-wing regimes.
If a preoccupation with American materialism has led many writers
to make dubious pronouncements about American foreign policy, it has
also lowered the level of debate about domestic political issues. During
the Reagan era, many critics of that administration's policies preferred to
attack motives rather than policies, and they tended, moreover, to attack
the rich rather than articulate policies that might benefit the poor. Aside
from lowering the level of debate, this moralistic approach to economic
questions - with its incessant talk about greed - probably weakened the
political power of the liberal left, since most Americans, at least in a time
of relative prosperity, have not been persuaded by populist-sounding
attacks against the supposedly materialistic rich.
Even before the Reagan era, there were many sermons decrying
American materialism. In
The Seven Deadly Sins
(1977), the late Henry
Fairlie, a British writer resident in the United States, claimed, "We
feverishly pursue wealth today, destroying our lives, and those of others
in the process...." Never at a loss for hyperbole, Fairlie contended that
this pursuit of wealth and possessions is "conducted with such single–
mindedness" that it "constantly detracts us from spiritual things and not
least from the spiritual side of our nature."
Who are these feverish people? Fairlie roundly condemns material–
ists, but he offers no evidence to support his argument. How, in any case,
does one judge whether someone is a materialist? Recently, a market re–
search survey concluded that "the hard fact is that materialism will con–
tinue to be one of the driving forces in American society over the next
decade.... " Yet should we call Americans materialistic because they like
to buy things? As one observer, commenting on the survey's conclusions,
