inconspicuous consumption

I have been thinking about how I/we buy things this week.  It mainly started after reading this article about books and publishing after Amazon.  Now, I buy a lot of books and Amazon makes it so easy to find them, order them, get them for cheap, and they offered my free shipping on any purchase no matter the total price because I am a student.  Mainly because of this last part, they have received a lot of money from me this past year.

It is easy to consume, but hard be consume well.  Responsibly.  Maybe even morally.  Emile Durkheim was a French sociologist back in the day and he worried about the effects of modernization on society.  In the pre-industrial revolution days, he saw society as being defined by mechanical solidarity - people are socialized and bound to one another because they were in community with each other and interacted or were aware of one another regularly.  After society modernized, this changed to what he called organic solidarity.  This was defined by a removed dependence on others.  I don't know who provides my gas for the car, but I need them, and so on.  We are all still connected, but in a different way; often unnoticed but still 'organically' needing each other.

I have mentioned before that I like Wendell Berry.  He is a critic of short-sighted modernization.  Being a farmer, this typically is aimed at agriculture, but he is aware of and talks about the wider implications.  This is a point of a great essay, where he argues that we try to solve problems by immediate and short-sighted solutions, or try to get unrealistic gains that don't take into account long-terms results.  (Solve problems with solutions that are the next problem to be solved.)  He thinks that we do not think about the fact that everything is connected in some way and changes, or failings, affect the entire system for better or worse.  (other related Berry posts talking about implications of this here and here... if interested)

My consumption is no different.  It is easy to not think about the authors, publishers, book seller, and all the other people involved with each of my purchases.  Amazon is arguably a less than responsible way for me to spend money, and my spending has implications for many other people out there that it is easy to forget about.  The other day I spent a bunch of time trying to find more responsible ways to purchase books because I think it is important for me to be cognizant of the effects of my spending.  This is the same reason we only buy fair trade coffee (I know, this list should be longer...).  My spending DOES do something, it is just a matter of whether that something is in line with how I ought to live or not.  We are blessed to be a society that has the option to consume; we are cursed to be a society habituated into doing it blindly.  And that is costly.