Review - Blubberland
The Dangers of Happiness
by Elizabeth Farrelly
MIT Press, 2008
Review by Lisa Bellantoni, Ph.D.
Sep 23rd 2008 (Volume 12, Issue 39)

Why do so we spend so much time and money pursuing material goods and status symbols that we don't really want and can't really afford? Noted Australian cultural critic Elizabeth Farrelly attributes this behavior to our "addiction to happiness" (Farrelly: 15; 113). We may be hard-wired as "super-consumers," yet those tendencies are stoked by mass advertising, which breeds "mis-wanting" and "over-choice" (Farrelly:106-8; 28-9). The former yokes happiness to our ability to consume an endlessly expanding array of material goods; the latter ties happiness to our unfettered self-interest, which, as typified by suburban sprawl, culminates in "pollution and congestion, obesity and depression, materialism, self-absorption, [and] cultural stagnation" (Farrelly:126; 188). The outward symbols of such pursuits - the author singles out mammoth houses or "McMansions" for particular disdain - rouse both aesthetic and moral repugnance (Farrelly:102). The problem is that "we," by whom she means consumers in advanced capitalist economies, know that we need to resist excess consumption, with its grave social and ecological costs, yet fail to change our behavior even when it does not yield our desired result: happiness.

Farrelly's moral objections to over-consumption are wide ranging, and her aesthetic critique skillfully weaves her opposition to McMansions, as informed by her training in architecture, with a broader evaluation of their social and environmental impact. Her moral critique, however, begs the critical question of whether we really are pursuing things we don't really want. She maintains that we should change our desires because we will be happier and healthier -- if materially poorer -- if we do so. Yet if our addiction to happiness is our primary problem in changing our behavior, how is pursuing a different flavor of the same drug a viable solution? Instead of addressing that question, the book bogs down in lengthy discussions of tangential aesthetic and literary points that never convey how the happiness that she alludes to is morally superior to the materialistic version she thinks we're pursuing now, or how its pursuit might be properly constrained by environmental concerns. Her concluding chapter proposes that, because democracy produces so much of what "we" don't want, we are better served by centrally planned cities that subordinate our malformed desires to "a radical shift in consciousness" that follows "the scripture of ecological living" (Farrelly: 199; 203). What those injunctions mean, alas, is left entirely to the reader's discretion. 

As a cultural critique, the book is lively, at times engaging, and distinctive in offering aesthetic, as well moral and environmental critiques of over-consumption. Yet it ultimately falls in line with a plethora of other works decrying McMansions and SUV's, pollution and urban sprawl, obesity and deforestation. The litany of grievances is dreary and familiar, and despite the book's distinctive emphasis on architecture and aesthetics, it sheds no new light on a question that it poses rhetorically – why do we consume so much if it doesn't make us happy – but doesn't take seriously. The author presumes that the pursuit of happiness through more or better stuff is a dead end. Yet even if that's the case, why would we continue that pursuit if it is failing as badly as she suggests? Conversely, if it is not in fact making us miserable, why should we change our behavior as radically as she recommends? That her proposed engineered cities might be better for the environment, and make us happier, is a legitimate prospect. But since the book opens with the assertion that we already know that we should change our behavior, it surely needs to offer more than vague hints about how and why its proposed alternative is appealing, and feasible, and worth pursuing. 

Indeed, most striking about the book is not how much it ostensibly asks readers to give up, but how few reasons it offers us to do so. Like many works of this genre, the cultural critiques it rehearses of material excess are well written, engaging, even entertaining; uncommonly, it also holds special appeal to those who find something indefinably ugly about gargantuan houses or mountains of landfill. Yet even here, it offers no new insight into why such ostensibly aesthetic abominations might prove otherwise objectionable. To the contrary, the book veers wildly between chapters well suited to a general readership interested in the environmental and moral questions posed by over-consumption, and abstruse discussions of aesthetic and literary theory more suited to a very different book and audience. On the whole, the book is sketchy and uneven. It offers little new insight to those who already share the author's predilections, and nothing new or persuasive to those who do not. It is readable and, in places, moderately informative, but on the whole, not recommended for a general reader.

© 2008 Lisa Bellantoni

Lisa Bellantoni, PhD, Philosophy Department, Albright College, PA