Contemporary, Obsessive Materialism

The following piece appears in today's New York Times.  It sometimes seems that science and religion converge rather than diverge (i.e., some science and some religion).  To read the whole piece, which is quite interesting and provocative, click on the link below.

In New Book, Professor Sees a 'Mania' in U.S. for Possessions and Status

By IRENE LACHER

 

OS ANGELES - Aldous Huxley long ago warned of a future in which love was beside the point and happiness a simple matter of consuming mass-produced goods and plenty of soma, a drug engineered for pleasure. More than 70 years later, Dr. Peter C. Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, has seen the future, and the society he describes isn't all that distant from Huxley's brave new world, although the soma, it seems, is in ourselves.

In his new book, "American Mania: When More Is Not Enough" (W. W. Norton & Company), Dr. Whybrow argues that in the age of globalization, Americans are addictively driven by the brain's pleasure centers to live turbocharged lives in pursuit of status and possessions at the expense of the only things that can truly make us happy: relationships with other people.

"In our compulsive drive for more," writes Dr. Whybrow, 64, a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral science, "we are making ourselves sick."

[To read the rest, click here.]