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After affluenza: diagnosing 'affluenza' has become the 'stock-in-trade' of critics of consumerism. Kim Humphery asks for a second opinion.

Article Excerpt
The diagnosis is apparently simple, the symptoms often all too clear. If you are a manic shopper, hooked on credit card debt and have a house (and perhaps even a self-storage bay) full of things, then you've probably got it. If you are driven by the chase for social status, overworked, overstressed and perhaps even overweight, then the signs are not good. If you live a life of commodity excess but feel empty inside, if you crave happiness but don't quite have it, then it's almost certain; you've got affluenza.

The affluenza virus, or some similar pathology, stands as one of the core concepts within recent discussions of the ills of Western consumer society, from Robert H. Franks' Luxury Fever to Tim Kasser's The High Price of Materialism to, in Australia, Clive Hamilton's Growth Fetish. These and other similar bestsellers have, over the past few years, rejuvenated a much needed public intellectual critique of consumerism, of the Western (and increasingly global) indulgence in the glorious commodities of advanced branded capitalism.

The critique offered within such books, of communities in decay, societies fragmented, individualism lost and nature destroyed is perhaps familiar and open to argument but no less welcome because of this. Familiar too, however, and much more problematic, is the potent mix within many recent books of virology and social critique. Whether conceived as a useful political strategy to get people thinking or as an identifiable condition, talk of affluenza has become the stock-in-trade of the consumer critic. Clearly, recent commentators have seen the language of the virus, the fever, the obsession and the fetish as somehow potentially resonating with those many people within and beyond Western nations now feeling by no means at ease with rampant consumerism.

But just how useful is this language, and the idea of consumption as pathology?...

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