CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER ONE
Imagine all the people, living for today
John Lennon

All go unto one place, all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again
Ecclesiastes 3:20


Introduction:

Stop for a moment and look around. Maybe you are in a city, or maybe you are in a small town. Maybe you are inside, or maybe you are outside. Maybe you are experiencing life through your eyes, or maybe through another sense. Whatever the case may be, in whatever environment you may presently inhabit, you are likely surrounded by cultural artifacts; from the tree lined streets of the suburban community to the towering skyscrapers of the metropolis, from books to computers, engines to ideas; almost everything in modern society has cultural significance. Generally, this bounty of cultural artifacts signifies a great triumph of the human species to overcome the historic and evolutionary obstacles of its genealogical plight. Through the domestication of land and beast we eliminated the worrying need for hunting or gathering food provisions. By forming communal tribes we exponentially increased our chances for procreation. And by building stronger and more comfortable housing we became better protected ⎯ or at least insulated ⎯ from the uncontrollable chaos of the world beyond its walls.
Yet for all of the human species’ achieved evolutionary agency, it remains controversial whether such agency truly reflects a status of greater evolutionary fitness when modern generations of humans continually inherit exponentially greater problems and greater planetary debt. The human-caused degradation of the Earth’s natural systems demonstrates more than just the negative externalities of progress. More so, this degradation reveals a specific incongruity between evolutionary ends and means, causes and effects, wherein certain seemingly progressive efforts to overcome these problems ultimately yield deteriorative results.
The time to question the true cost of our evolutionary success is now. No longer can we justify our apprehension to make real cultural changes by claiming a need for greater scientific insight into the ramifications of our unique planetary presence, by defending the economic benefits of a consumer republic, or by focusing our energies on more present threats. It has become apparent and largely undisputed by members of the scientific community that the human-caused decline in these systems is rapidly approaching a threshold of carrying capacity whereby each single system can no longer sustain our way of life; our way of consuming. Beyond the apparent changes to our global climate and biospheric character, our parasitic presence on this planet has also resulted in the loss of a quarter of the planet’s topsoil and a third of its forest cover in the past half century alone. Freshwater ecosystems are diminishing at an alarming rate of six percent each year, 11 percent of the planet’s vegetative surface has been destroyed since only 1945, and the tremendous loss of species is presumed to be the sixth largest extinction in all of history. As well, more natural disasters ⎯ flooding, hurricanes, tornados, earthquakes, droughts, desertification, and loss of farmable soil ⎯ have occurred globally in the last fifty years than ever before. Even levels of global precipitation have increased in the last fifty years by nearly 20 percent.
Concurrently, however not surprisingly, both population and consumption continue to statistically be on the rise, with 64 of 105 developing countries experiencing enormous increases in hungry mouths and proportionate decreases in available food. By 2050 global population will be 9.1 billion people. A fifth of this increasing population consumes seventy percent of the Earth’s natural resources while holding eighty percent of its wealth. As well, the projections for the next twenty-five years estimate debilitating shortages of drinkable water for over one-third of the global population, a population of urban dwellers at more than 5 billion, and a mushrooming of megacities to more than 37 around the world. This swelling of urban environments is in no small part responsible for present global carbon dioxide levels, 381 parts per million, exceeding their pre-industrial levels by more than one hundred parts per million.
In the United States, this destructivity of blind consumption is intensified several fold with each average citizen boasting an ecological footprint of 24 acres ⎯ almost five times that of any other average citizen. The result of this larger footprint is the equally intensified emission of greenhouse gas pollution: the United States being responsible for more than South America, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, Japan, and Asia combined.
Nowhere else in the modern world is the practice of consumption so tightly interwoven into the fabric of culture than in the United States. And because of this, nowhere else are consumption behaviors and culture performed with such psychologically compulsive qualities, wherein each consumer seems to be willingly entrapped in a repetitive and rigid behavior of insatiable wanting, while perpetually haunted by the fact that what is truly wanted ⎯ immortality ⎯ can never be bought. Anthropologist Ernest Becker in explaining this compulsivity of modern consumer culture once described “modern man” as, “drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.” Becker’s most conclusive justification for such numbing behaviors relates to an imbalance between natural perspective, or awareness, and cultural perspective: “As awareness calls for types of heroic dedication that his culture no longer provides for him, society contrives to help him forget.”
Neither myself, nor Becker regard the modern American consumer as purely a victim in the sense that there is no choice, for many in America have chosen to live otherwise. Rather, the consumer of today appears to be more so a cog in a great system of control that I believe ⎯ and intend to prove ⎯ exploits the basic psychological fear of death in a largely retrogressive effort to concentrate global power in the hands of a few. Furthermore, this system of control, dependent on the maintenance of an illusory cultural reality of endless consumption and immortality, has disrupted the natural influence of evolutionary pressure and thus has obstructed humankind’s evolutionary momentum. The truth, then, of our believed championing of evolutionary obstacles is that an impasse was reached whereby survival no longer required fitness; whereby we still exist under natural laws, we just don’t abide by them; and whereby natural reality could be ignored by living in a cultural reality instead.
My theory is that we, as both a species and a culture, have not yet moved beyond this impasse. A theoretical triad of ideas connecting psychology, consumerism, and housing, which I will refer to throughout this paper, provides the necessary structure in which the effects of this evolutionary state of inertia can best be understood. For it is the most confusing of concepts that our evolutionary success would provide us the tremendous insight to recognize our own destructive behavior, and yet still we do little (if anything at times) to change course. When I speak of destruction or ecological degradation I am referring to issues that exist in natural reality such as the extermination of a species or the threat of an incurable disease. However, when I speak of modern consumer culture I am referring to the illusory reality that humankind has created and values so highly. In so much as humankind’s cultural reality ultimately exists as a buffer to natural reality, dealing in both, as humankind does, is a largely paradoxical and stressful endeavor. Similar examples of this paradoxical existence between cultural and natural reality can be found throughout the comparable relationships of Freud’s id and ego, or the limbic system and cortical systems of the brain, or even within our very nature; an existential struggle between our animal and symbolic tendencies.
This existential struggle of humankind is, as Becker suggests, an historical byproduct of the particularly advanced development of our brains, as well the anxieties that such struggle ultimately produces. Therefore, I propose that the compulsivity of modern American consumer culture derives from what Becker regards as “the condition of individuality within finitude” as interpreted within the modern context of our current evolutionary stagnation. In the layman’s terms, “individuality within finitude” represents the limits our inherent animality places on our perceived godliness. In context to where we presently stand in evolutionary history, this condition is intensified by a greater sense of individuality and yet also a greater awareness of finitude. The resentment this existential dynamic tension conjures in the individual toward its animality is far more a product of modern influences, specifically our near-unlimited technological prowess, than it is anything else. And consequently, this resentment, incubated in the fires of industrial progress, has spilled over to all things natural, all things finite, all things limiting. As a result, a defining characteristic of modern American consumer culture is its near-spiteful disconnection from the natural rhythms of life on Earth.
Ecologist David Abram aptly describes this disconnection as a loss of sense, or “immediate access,” “to the more-than-human natural world.” Openly, I question if this disconnection was truly as unconscious a process as it appears in hindsight or rather a condition of our managed existence in this cultural reality. For no other force has challenged our self-ordained dominion of this planet more intensely than the uncertainty of natural reality. And thus, in an effort to maintain our godliness I believe the human species intentionally created a reality of our own design in culture; a culture that denies uncertainty with dogma, denies animality with humanity, and denies death with consumerism. In this way, I believe we are both the controlled and the controlling, the sheep and the shepherd.
Regardless of these distinctions, once disconnected from these natural rhythms proper planetary stewardship cannot be executed. Existing in illusion, disconnected from the necessary evolutionary pressures of natural reality, has rendered us functionally lost and has inflated anxieties both for the individual and the society at large. It is then most alarming that scarcely anywhere in American politics are these anxieties being considered, discussed, or managed holistically.
This is especially true in context to waste and its management. Take for instance the fact that, “the average [American’s] daily flow of materials total more than twenty times a person’s body weight.” It is easy for Americans, indoctrinated with the capitalist principals of the “American Dream” ideal, to believe in this fact as a reflection of industrial progress, the fulfillment of governmental promise, or the good of the nation. However, the reality of this fact is that “flow of materials” refers to waste entirely. This waste includes liquids, solids, and gases; which make their way into “landfills, backyards, junkyards, recyclers, …the ocean, the atmosphere, rivers, streams, groundwater, soil, plants, and the flesh of wildlife and people.” Still, this image of individual waste is minor compared to the amount of waste expunged by American consumer culture in total: “waste in the form of tailings, gangue, fly ash, slurry, sludge, slag, flue gases, construction debris, methane, and the other wastes of the extractive and manufacturing processes.”
Feedback in nature (or natural reality) is continual. However, it is not so in our consumer culture. As such, our engagement in this culture largely blinds us to the ill effects of our own compulsive consumer behaviors and thus leaves us doomed to perpetuate and mismanage greater amounts of waste. In essence, we struggle ⎯ largely at our own expense ⎯ to define ourselves in relation to a set of values that will aggrandize and immortalize our godliness and yet still we cannot escape the limits of our animal bodies. As Becker states, “nature’s values are bodily values, [cultural] values are mental values, and though they take the loftiest flights they are built upon excrement, impossible without it, always brought back to it.” The disparity between these realities is tremendously unsettling in humankind’s psyche and lead to socially performed (though unconsciously fueled) self-destructive behaviors. For this reason, it could be argued that the modern consumer, in lieu of the global destructivity of conspicuous consumerism, is either eerily accustomed to the system of control that governs his behavior or he just behaves crazily: he is aware of the problems and their causes, he is aware of his role in their perpetuation, and yet he continues to slowly kill himself and his kind in a desperate effort simply to live.
The social stages upon which this causa sui tragedy of modern man’s compulsive consumer behavior most clearly play out are that of housing and community development. Taking from historian Kenneth Jackson’s description of housing as “an outward expression of the inner human nature,” I suggest that, historically, the treatment and arrangement of shelter reveal more about humankind’s evolutionary struggle with its own paradoxical nature than does any other realm of cultural artifact. Modern housing can best be visualized as English romantic poet, John Keats, once described: “square miles of identical boxes…spreading like gangrene…developments conceived in error, nurtured by greed, corroding everything they touch.” However grim, this description accurately relates many of the negative qualities of contemporary America’s most dominant residential pattern, suburban sprawl; “conspicuous consumption, a reliance upon the private automobile, upward mobility, the separation of the family into nuclear units, the widening division between work and leisure, and a tendency toward racial and economic exclusiveness.”
It cannot be through any single change to technology, cultural norms, population pressure, or social relationships that we will reverse the compulsive and wasteful trends of community design that are presently congesting our evolutionary development and threatening our continued social well-being. Instead, true change must occur in all of these areas simultaneously. We must adapt to the changing demands of the planet by modifying our behaviors toward it. This will require a radical revolution of values, much like the one proposed by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1967. Like with social harmonizing, political harmonizing, or racial harmonizing, the only way to end the negative consequences of our blatant disharmony with nature is to shift our relation toward it from a “thing-oriented society” to a being-oriented society, where “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights” are not valued above the good of the planet and all of its inhabitants. To accomplish this great and daunting task we must not begin by looking at individual areas of society that need changing, but rather by locating the connections between social problems and reworking them outright. It is an interdisciplinary field of research and study, such as the American Studies scholarship, which appropriately models how such a reworking must be approached. And so, it is through this American Studies approach that I examine in the following pages the influences of social death-denying practices, as stimulated by the constancy of mortality-salient imagery in culture, on consumerism in modern America.



Why American Studies & Why Me?
At its core the American studies scholarship is an interdisciplinary realm in which the pragmatist is free to build intellectual connections where they might not otherwise be made in more traditional disciplines. In the forging of these connections, new levels of analysis are made navigable so that new levels of knowledge, perspective and understanding can be gained. Connections between death-denial and dominionism, industrialism and consumerism, politics and terror management patch together the research findings and methodologies of several important disciplines into a single usable understanding. Such interdisciplinary understanding requires the exercising of a more global perspective, which, for both the consumer and the producer enables smarter decision-making and design. Furthermore, inherent in the scholasticism of American Studies is a strong reflexive quality of social examination that I feel is otherwise lacking in contemporary academia and social problem-solving. More than just cultural criticism, research and analysis in the American Studies discipline serves a functional purpose of placing social problems in their complete situational context. For anyone looking at an array of seemingly unrelated problems in an effort to organize and solve them, this quality of American Studies ⎯ to break down the barrier of intellectual objectivity ⎯ is necessary for developing and implementing practical solutions.
The aforementioned triad paradigm of psychology, consumerism, and housing serves as the American Studies perspective I effectively implement to examine both the obvious and obscure connections between evolutionary psychology and modern housing, cultural death-denial and sensory distrust, wartime propaganda and the “American Dream,” and sustainability and modern American value systems. Placed in the narrowing contexts of modern war practices, modern community development, the psychosociocultural treatment of nature, and the evolutionary principals of survival of the fittest, these connections are illuminated by historical fact and psychological syllogization, and help to answer the central question of my thesis: Why do modern Americans consume so frivolously with the awareness that such actions result in ecologically destructive consequences? Though the modern American consumer is a relatively new phenomenon, I argue in the second chapter that the anxiety-driven need to consume ⎯ to control through possessing ⎯ has origin in basic tribal psychology. As such, through the implementation of this triad paradigm I have delineated three major periods of human evolutionary and social development for examination: that of hunter-gatherer tribes, of the Victorian era’s industrialization, and of the post-World War II/Cold War cultural epoch.
The tethering together of these individual periods of time by this triad paradigm creates a comprehensive linear history for analysis. Much like how our species’ evolutionary development reflects similar sequences of growth as does its embryonal development, so too does our social developmental history resemble the developmental stages of a single, culturally archetypal individual. This, I believe, is the most important connection to make with the multi-lensed prism of the American Studies perspective. For in understanding how one’s individual development from innocence to maturity, and naïveté to knowledge, carries with it psychological complexities that microcosmically mimic the psychological complexities of our macrocosmic evolutionary development, we become able to prevent future decisions from repeating past mistakes. Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond suggests that two major precursors to the collapse of a civilization are its resistance first to the idea that, “past peoples (some of them known to be ancestral to peoples currently alive and vocal) did things that contributed to their own decline,” and second by committing the error of, “viewing past indigenous peoples as fundamentally different from modern First World peoples.” So, rather than continue to fool ourselves into believing our advanced technological abilities, social comfort, and longer life spans reflect consequence-free evolutionary success, we should instead use the reflexivity of the American Studies scholarship to more deeply and honestly question how the same shortsightedness that brought down past societies is, once again, preventing present planning measures from appropriately addressing so much ecological threat.
On both personal and intellectual levels, it is this idea of social shortsightedness that inspired me to research these topics and strengthen these connections. Having begun my research in the study of rooftop gardens and urban greening, I could not understand how a technology as cheap, accessible, and historically guaranteed in its efficiency as greening would not be more immediately and widely adopted, especially in lieu of the many environmental problems America’s urban areas face: heat re-radiation, fresh food transportation, air and water pollution, rainwater runoff, and waste buildup. My confusion was further complicated when in October of 2001, America engaged its military force in Afghanistan, ostensibly inaugurating its “War on Terrorism”. While still reeling from the pains of the September 11th attacks, I began to feel a pervasive worry wash over me as I witnessed the nation’s priorities rapidly adhere to stringent forms of jingoism and militarism. Not long after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the nation’s financial heart, President George W. Bush even called on the American people to help keep the nation strong through the continued exercise of their seemingly unrestrained purchasing power. At the same time, the country was beginning its steepest decent into a highly predicted resource crisis of crude oil. The global politics involved in both the “War on Terrorism” and the oil crisis reveal a specific and important change in the character of the international community at this time: more people inhabit the planet, making the community both comparatively smaller and more diverse. Though I believe that with its undeniable power America should lead this transition into a greener and more sustainable future, I have also found that certain unconscious psychological influences prevent such leadership from happening. And so, with this paradox of humankind’s interrelationship with nature challenging my Americanist mind, with this reluctance to take responsibility for our actions uprooting all that I used to believe in America, and with this knowledge of practical solutions to our most pressing problems aching for expression, I began researching an answer to why a society as developed as ours would face total global resource depletion so passively.
As I anticipated in the beginning stages of my research efforts, the answer to this modern tragedy of the commons is not a simple one. However, if broken down into its component parts the answer is much more manageable than first thought to be. The largest of these component parts is the psychological one. For not only do its subcomponents of evolutionary social psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, and existentialism build upon each other, but so too do the interconnections between each of these individual subcomponents answer important aspects of the question at hand. To be so passive ⎯ so complacent ⎯ in a time of such threat is, according to my hypothesis, socially self-destructive and therefore representative of mismanaged anxieties. Furthermore, I will examine in the coming chapters how this mismanagement leads to compulsive behaviors and defense mechanisms that further keep society shortsighted and self-destructive, which ultimately (and not so unintentionally) breeds a future citizenry of ever-hungrier consumers with ever-greater problems.
A second component part to understanding the tragic irony of modern America’s compulsive consumerism is the rich history this compulsivity has played in humankind’s evolutionary and modern developments. Predicated on the dynamic tension of nature and culture, a study of our psychoevolutionary heritage reveals correlation between the origination of certain social anxieties and compulsions, and the shift in dominance from evolution of species to evolution of cultures that began with the domestication of the land and early forms of community. This shift in dominance would not fully manifest into the compulsion-driven consumerism that we experience today until the later years of the Victorian era. In this time an incongruity was forming between the promethean optimism of the official culture and the ever-strengthening sense of human finitude that (not surprisingly) intensified in this time due in large part to the morbid influence of Civil War-related reminders of death. This time was also characterized by great transition met with by an anxiety-driven social need for order, what sociologist Max Weber described as a “process of rationalization”; “the systematic organization of economic life for maximum productivity and of individual life for maximum personal achievement; the drive for efficient control of nature under the banner of improving human welfare; the reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated by rational technique.” Such rationalization in culture persisted well through the 1950s, shaping modern American consumer culture around the heaven-on-earth promise of the “American Dream” lifestyle. Although rationalization owes much of its influential success to the climate of emotionality caused by periods of war, such periods ⎯ as is later made especially clear in the Cold War ⎯ also prompted a realistic perspective that questioned why the triumph of modern culture had not actually produced greater autonomy as was promised earlier. Instead, people began to feel a pervasive sense of “moral impotence and spiritual sterility” in culture, as suggested by historian TJ Jackson Lears, which in turn affected the “feeling that life had become not only overcivilized but also curiously unreal.” It is at this point that I believe Americans reached said evolutionary impasse and truly began their mismanagement of resources, of waste, and of social power: a time gilded in American history as the Industrial Revolution.
The last component part in understanding the self-destructive compulsivity of modern American consumer culture is that of the sociological perspective. Understanding that culture is essentially nothing more than the meanings and lifestyles that texture a given society, a sociological perspective provides the Americanist with insight into how the psychological compulsions of modern American consumer culture are manipulated by market interests to affect greater purchasing. This becomes most obvious in the third major time period of examination, the Cold War: the late1940s through the 1990s and into the Millennium. Americans had developed new expectations during the Great Depression that greatly reshaped how consumers felt they should contribute to a functioning economy and polity. In these new expectations, citizen consumers were principally regarded as responsible for safeguarding the general good of the nation through either direct consumption or the protecting of consumer’s rights. With the outbreak of World War II, earlier governmental policy programs such as the New Deal coupled with newer economic philosophies such as that of the Keynesian revolution jumpstarted the triangular relationship between consumers, the government, and business that, collectively, is today the principle organ of national health. This triangular relationship shepherded Americans away from the poverties of the Depression, through the challenges of WWII, and into the vision of postwar prosperity imagined in the despair of economic bust. According to acclaimed historian Lizabeth Cohen, the center of this vision of postwar prosperity was “the private home, fully equipped with consumer durables.” By 1945, an acute housing shortage resulted in governmentally sanctioned domestic policy and war propaganda that publicly centered on boosting home front morale by reinforcing the ties between consumerism and military success. Suburban communities such as Levittown sprouted across the country: temporarily pacifying the fears of a threatened nation with the offer of a controllable, comfortable consumerist culture that, if fattened with investment, could prove a powerful weapon in the Cold War arsenal. Utilizing a sociological perspective in this way, one witnesses the top-down and bottom-up processes that occur between a society and its culture. This quality of a sociological perspective aids in furthering an understanding of the psychological components of modern consumerism by connecting certain sociopsychological causes ⎯ such as promoting frivolity over conservation ⎯ to their larger ecological effects ⎯ such as global climate change and dramatic resource depletion.
Beyond just my passion for this topic and my academic interest in matters of nature and culture, my qualifications for this research and analysis are many. Having focused my collegiate studies primarily on social psychology and American Studies, I have examined the many tangential elements that impact on humankind’s relationship to nature, culture, and society. I have independently studied the relationship between fear and consumerism within the field of terror management, and sustainability and housing within the field of urban greening. Ultimately, however, it is my Americanist mind that is my greatest asset to this project. With the belief that these many independent ideas, in their independent fields of research, orbiting in their independent schools of thought have culturally-significant relationships to one another that reveal a comprehensive causality between a cause and an effect, I forge in this paper the necessary intellectual connections to understand this causality. While my intentions are principally to diagnose America’s compulsive consumption behavior, I will also attempt to offer a prescription for treatment. However, solving America’s problems with consumption and waste is no simple task. Success with this project means breaking through the seductive influences of technology, domesticity, and cultural comfort and exposing the very real consequences of our current evolutionary arrest and cultural shortsightedness.

Structure of Paper:
A proper diagnosis of the compulsivity of America’s modern consumer behavior must be carried out within the scope of each of the three aforementioned component parts ⎯ psychology, history, and sociology ⎯ and touch upon each of the three elements of the triad paradigm ⎯ the psychology of death-denial, modern consumerism, and housing. As such, the structure of this research paper includes three main chapters and a conclusion. As might already have been outlined in this introduction, the chapters look at the psychology of modern consumerism specifically in the realm of housing and community development. Therefore, the three chapters are broken up accordingly; one on the psychology of modern consumerism, a second examining the consumerist culture of the Cold War era, and a last examining, through comparison, the consumerist culture of the War on Terror. Each of these chapters is further broken down into three major areas of focus, and includes a primary text or historical case study to build from.
The first of these major chapters, chapter two, functions to establish a framework of psychological understanding that is important in examining later themes. Emphasized in this chapter is an analysis of the psychoevolutionary relationship between humankind and nature, which specifically highlights how the formation of community and the development of the “home” distanced humankind from nature and replaced sensory reliance with sensory distrust. I include here how the formation of communities in conjunction with the domestication of land and beast drastically altered the evolutionary pressures facing humankind, as well how those changes in evolutionary pressure created the right conditions for a cultural reality ⎯ separate and apart from natural reality ⎯ to be birthed. Within this analysis of evolutionary psychology I also examine the many smaller and related dynamic tensions that each uniquely color humankind’s behaviors. Such dynamic tension is witnessed on the physiological level (between the brain’s amygdala and cortexes), on the psychoanalytic level (between Freud’s id and ego), and on the existential level (between the realities of nature and culture). However unique, each dynamic tension seems to share a common theme of basic animal processing being enveloped and controlled by higher human adaptations. This theme becomes an important part of understanding the destructivity of modern American consumerism as it is at the heart of our dominionist agendas with nature, with other countries, and even with our selves. Even more importantly, though, is that despite our constant efforts to do so, nature ⎯ in the chaos before us or the animality within us ⎯ has yet to be controlled: provoking deep psychological unrest within both the individual and the society at large that seeks satisfaction in the form of compulsive behaviors.
This basic understanding of our psychoevolutionary heritage sets the groundwork for this first chapter’s second area of focus: Ernest Becker’s denial of death hypothesis and aspects of terror management. Here I prove true Becker’s theory that humankind is consuming itself into a state of numbness and suggest why this pathology thrives today. As well I examine the loss of heroic deeds that Becker describes and compare it to the loss of sense described by David Abram and others. Such an examination provides a necessary bridge from evolutionary psychology to modern social psychology. For in the loss of either heroic deeds or natural sense we as both a species and a culture have become disconnected from the rhythms of life that surround us. This disconnectedness from nature is at the heart of all of the problems I later diagnose and serves as a major connective thread throughout the paper.
My last subsection of this chapter examines certain elements of modern social psychology. So as to both reconnect to the earlier idea of dynamic tensions and form a new connection to resource management, I examine how the tragedy of the commons phenomena helps to explain many of the social anxieties I attribute to compulsions in modern consumerism. I then use this understanding and application of the tragedy of the commons phenomenon and theory of terror management to diagram how government, hand-in-hand with producers, controls an anxious consumer society and steers it toward greater consumption. This particular role of producers in the social psychology of consumerism plays an important part in painting an accurate picture of Cold War America and the selling of the American Dream house by house.
A proper analysis of the psychology of modern consumer culture, including its history, its causes and effects, and its application leads to a synthesized understanding of top-down and bottom-up factors in the development of consumer compulsion. One’s understanding of the influence of market and government propaganda on consumer culture would not be complete without an equal understanding of why the consumer is so easily influenced by such propaganda. As well, an understanding of dynamic tensions is worthless if not coupled with an equal understanding of the tragedy of the commons phenomena. A complete and total understanding of these factors is essential to the analysis of modern American history that is performed in the next chapter.
The second major chapter, chapter three, focuses on Cold War culture; its rise from the struggles of the Depression and the Second World War, its influence on American values and standards, its effect on the complexion of the international community, and its eventual deflation. To tie into points made in the psychology chapter, I begin my historical examination with a look at the threat of communism and how it stirred up anxieties in the social psyche. Furthermore, I examine how this threat was used in so many different ways by producers and government to inspire greater consumption, which, in turn, inspired greater production and profits. From here I describe the consumer lifestyle and the vision for postwar prosperity that skewed the ideologies of the Cold War era by appraising the many influences of the post-war housing boom. A full understanding of the Cold War way of life ⎯ with all of its intricacies and contradictions ⎯ allows for a contextual placement of my case study on Levittown, New York: an unincorporated suburban hamlet that was championed at the time as the model living community for returning World War II veterans.
My efforts in studying Levittown are not merely to point out what was wrong with its design, what was constrictive about its uniformity, or what is destructive about its legacy. Rather, I reconstruct an image of a then much-needed community that was designed, however poorly or not, with a shortsightedness that should not be repeated today. To isolate Levittown in examination is, for the purposes of this paper, to appreciate the past for its limitations, to (as Diamond suggests) understand that our success in the past does not carry-over as our success in the present, and to provide a theoretical plinth against which future community design projects and their designers may be emboldened to think more forwardly, less shortsightedly. For even though Levittown represents an iconic quality of our American past, elements of its design are still very prominent throughout contemporary suburbia.
The final subsection of this chapter looks at the legacy Levittown left in the social categories of waste management, suburban values, and the heaven-on-earth ideal of the “American Dream”. I illustrate here how the superficial achievement of post-war prosperity obscured the baby-boom generation’s conception of reality with the rose-colored glasses of cultural comfort and materialism. Essentially, this subsection serves to highlight many of the social problems that derived from this historical period, how they came to be, and why they continue today.
Understanding the sociopsychological factors behind Levittown sets the stage for a similar understanding of contemporary housing communities and the many social and ecological problems that derive from them. Similar to the last chapter, this third major chapter, chapter four, begins with an historic contextualization of the Cold War and the War on Terror, modern consumption behavior, and contemporary community design. In this subsection I examine how certain technological advancements, social changes, and wartime threats move both culture and social psychology away from democratic participation, ecological consideration, or interpersonal relation all within the proscenium arch of community development. As well, I compare the threat of foreign attack to the more substantial ⎯ though less publicized ⎯ threat of environmental degradation, demonstrating how in the face of mortality-salient reminders our prioritization of values becomes vulnerable to almost any suggestion.
It is important that while my description of modern American consumption may at times seem vividly scornful, it is not without hope. For the essence of this paper is not to discredit that which has been done in the name of renewing environmental connectivity, repairing our communities, or taking more seriously our planetary stewardship simply because there are still more who do nothing than who do something. Rather, this paper seeks to understand why that which has been done has not yet been popularly adopted into American culture as other preparatory measures have in the past. As such, the second and third subsections of this third major chapter aim both to clearly show causality between the Levittown-inspired design standard of suburban sprawl and the many social problems Americans face today, and to offer the alternative and ecologically-progressive design standard of New Urbanism through a comparative case study of the Village Homes community in Davis, California. Like with reading the Levittown community-ideal, I walk the reader through the Village Homes and describe how each element of its design is mindful, forward-thinking, and accommodating to both cultural and natural demands. In doing so, this paper goes far beyond simply identifying both the causes and effects of sprawling growth, and presents through clear example a workable smart-growth design standard inspired by a radical (though not altogether new) system of values.
The final subsection of this chapter will broaden the application of smart-growth policies to both the national and global levels, suggesting that in all areas of planetary stewardship we can reconfigure our behaviors to better fit the living rhythms of the Earth. Also, I will examine the many deterrents to this smarter growth and offer practical solutions to how they might be dealt with. In this particular examination I will underscore the importance of collectively taking social responsibility for the problems we currently face and how without such ownership we are doomed to collapse.
My conclusion will focus heavily on this; insisting that a radical revolution of values can only begin by both society at large and the individual citizen taking ownership of their respective compulsive social behaviors. As well, I will explain how such a revolution has already begun in many parts of the world, often without compromising the level of consumerism Western countries such as America have come to represent. Lastly, I will use my conclusion to speak to the need for greater leadership within this Green Revolution. For the efforts of a true leader should never be to maintain a quality of life, but to help guide a society through the difficult generational transitions of culture toward a smarter, more efficient, and more harmonious relationship to the planet. A true leader is one who can stop for a moment and look around and change what is seen.

CHAPTER TWO

Chapter 2
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt
Mark Twain

If you aren’t afraid of dying, there is nothing you can’t achieve
Tao Ti Ching

Wilderness is the arena of evolution
Dave Forman



From Animal to Manimal:


The late German ecologist, Ernst Haeckel, a contemporary of Charles Darwin, is best remembered in the biological sciences as having authored the famous “recapitulation theory” of evolutionary development. The theory, though largely discredited today in its absolute form, affirms that the embryonal development process of a given species (ontogeny) greatly mirrors that same species’ evolutionary development process (phylogeny). While this theory of recapitulation is most popularly used to explain certain non-functional developmental anomalies, such as the pharyngeal pouches (gills) and the pre-coccyxial tail of the antecedent human, it also proves helpful in understanding the psychophysiological development of the brain, wherein the cauliflowering growth in size and capacity of the cortexes around the more basic limbic structures echoes the evolutionary development of humankind’s intellect over the limited agency of its inherent animality. Like the transformative genealogical odyssey from fear-driven primate to culture-building demigod, our maturative developmental processes reveal much about the functions and purpose of our psychological faculty. Furthermore, as is postulated and substantiated in this thesis, I believe the unique relationship these maturative developmental processes have with larger evolutionary processes and pressures reveals both an interconnectivity between the human species and its evolutionary plight, and a barometric quality of psychological functions to register fluctuations throughout this relationship. Therefore, when we assess something such as modern consumerism specifically within the scope of housing, it is our psychical reactions ⎯ the more visceral, and thus more accurate ⎯ to our cultural creations that should be valued highest. With more than two million years of successful evolution as homo sapiens owing itself to this great quality of psychological awareness, it can be argued that the visceral reaction is more than just all we’ve got, its all we need.

Evolutionary Psychology: Why are we so anxious?
I suggest that the compulsivity of modern American consumer culture is steeped in psychological factors that are themselves deeply rooted in the conditions of our evolutionary development and the character of our present evolutionary status. And so, it should be through the field of psychology that an analysis of modern consumer culture, and the often-compulsive behaviors it inspires, begins. For while history is able to prove the necessity of our consumption and chart its unique evolution from hunting-gathering to more managed agricultural practices, it alone can not make sense of why societies today conspicuously consume themselves into threat of annihilation. This is not to distinguish the compulsivity of consumer culture as an entirely recent phenomenon. Rather, historical evidence of civilization’s earliest stages, around 10,000 years ago, acknowledges a preoccupation with conspicuous possession and consumption wherein humankind is seen “relentlessly striving to accumulate money and lavish materials in vast excess of what is physically necessary to survive and prosper.” As was also most likely the case 10,000 years ago, today’s agglomeration of materials is both the chosen pacifier and agitator of a great psychological anxiety displayed prominently by the modern consumer. Only through a psychological lens is this conspicuous consumption behavior of the modern consumer understood as a direct result of the dueling psychological pursuits of self-worth and death-transcendence that our uniquely human awareness of mortality has engendered over the course of our evolutionary journey.
As anthropologist Craig Stanford argues, the ballooning brain size that characterizes our more recent ancestry occurred after the evolutionary road forked ⎯ delineating humans from apes ⎯ and is believed to correspond in part to our increased consumption of protein-rich foods such as meat. The earliest hominids were neither equipped nor skilled as successful predators, resulting in tremendous evolutionary pressure and adaptation on both the individual brain’s attention to the environment and its capacity for group cooperation. Stanford asserts that the learning factors involved with hunting prey ⎯ careful observation of one’s elders, coordination of actions with those of the hunting tribe, and repeat practicing ⎯ “suggest a strong role for the social group and a survival value in being a member of a close-knit social group.” Increasingly, the early hominid’s lifestyle and psychology began to adapt to the passive and active demands of the social group and the personal value of being associated with one. With the increased consumption of meat also came the cooking of such energy-rich foodstuffs as tubers. Though also credited with inflating the hominid’s brain size beyond expectable proportions, the cooking and consumption of tubers specifically played an important role in the development of our pair-bonding tendency and mating system, monogamy; an otherwise unusual reproductive method in the primate world. Exclusive bonding between males and females was now occurring for both protection and sexual availability, resulting in the lessened sexual dimorphism between sexes today. As well, the change in the hominid’s diet and consumption behavior also lead to a dramatic increase of parental investment in children, wherein adults had to organize and consider time differently so as to allocate much of it to the passing down of important hunting skills. All of these social changes developed with corresponding changes in psycho-behavioral considerations. The most important of which, the development of an objective social consciousness (functionally similar to that of Freud’s ego), included planning, forethought, abstraction, and more complex learning, and is associated with “bone tools, an aesthetic sense, burials, and community living.”
This development of an objective social consciousness is important in understanding the psychological factors of modern consumer behavior for two main reasons. The first such reason is that an objective social consciousness is vital to the interpersonal exchanges of community living and home life that were quickly becoming the standard dynamic realms of social engagement; indicating a value shift that was increasingly focused on housing and community as means for survival and consequently less focused on individual gains. Fossil evidence of structures built with mammoth bones and reindeer antlers suggests early family/tribe shelters as primarily simple windbreaks covered in dried brush or remaining hide from a successful kill. Though later designs would become more elaborate to accommodate more complex needs, these basic shelters communicate much about early humankind’s relationship with the natural world. While the need for shelter is inherent in the pursuit to survive, the historic elaboration of human windbreaks into walled sanctuaries and now gated communities reflects what psychologists Susan Clayton and Susan Opotow regard as humankind’s unique economic, rather than affective, approach toward nature ⎯ “caring for the environment primarily because it furnishes us with resources,” and fearing the environment for its frequently irrational conduct. Here, humankind’s inner paradoxical nature (which will be discussed at length in the coming pages) is largely experienced throughout quotidian life in the outward mis-relating to nature as either some personified duality of provider and destroyer, or as simply the more powerful “other” to be distrusted and revered, and someday conquered. Fueled by progressively more anxiety-causing discrepancies within the progressively more civilized self, the shelter became the cultural locus of escapism, a fortress in the face of fitness, and a man-made stronghold of possession and appearance to call home.
The second reason for the importance of the objective social consciousness is that such a consciousness signifies a great many social psychological “complexities,” or “emotions not primarily of survival, not to biologically based relationships such as attachment, but to social comparison.” Such complexities define our social behavior, and so to understand why we consume as we do we must first examine the nature of these complexities, how they developed, and how they still affect our role on this planet. As hypothesized by Darwin (1872), these complexities fall into two categories; those based in gratitude and intended toward reciprocity, and those based in embarrassment and resulting in a dominance hierarchy. Whether to avoid embarrassment or achieve gratitude, the social self, as Darwin suggests, is one that is goal driven and behavior oriented, and provides the human species with the profound capacity for awareness, self-reflection, and temporal and symbolic thought. Essentially, the social self ⎯ by fact of its reliance on emotions for feedback ⎯ is an emotional self, and though during evolution, like during individual development, emotions become “more intentional,” they also maintain a primitive quality that, as Darwin argued (1872), forever reminds humankind of its animal heritage. Therefore, in the formation of a group as the locus for human sociality came too a unique social self that valued monogamy over polygamy, trusted man-made life over natural life, and engaged in a world of others through the often creative communication of emotions; a symbolic world known to us today as culture.
In time, the course of the human species’ evolution would begin to be overlapped by the evolution of human cultures. In this process, which included rapid technological advancing, global population growth, and the expansion of territories, humankind sought more and more to regard itself as separate and apart form natural reality. Not surprisingly, such disconnect in our regard to nature paralleled an actual disconnection from nature in the vastly spread influence of the marketplace. Through these phenomena humankind found appropriate outlets for rejecting its own essential powerlessness, and found greater ways to convince itself of its believed inherent godliness. It is, as geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes, a “familiar story of people altering nature [in an] effort to distance themselves from it by establishing a mediating, more constant world of their own making.” Why humankind would do such a thing is, though complicated, neither altogether unreasonable nor far from understandable. Most basically, we are embarrassed by our animality while also trapped within its mortal parameters. We understand that death befalls all animals, a fact part and parcel of our earliest evolutionary education, and yet in this understanding is, quite paradoxically, a level of cognizance unlike that of any other animal. Although this cognizance conveniently reminds humankind of the very definitions of godliness its cultures support, such cognizance casts death’s shadow on life long before the event actually arrives. Ironically, culture ⎯ or more so, escapism ⎯ is a psychological mechanism for coping with death that employs the same cognitive agency that first allowed humankind to become aware of its mortality. Therefore, a culture of escapism is, as Tuan states, little more than a “circuitous route to unprecedented manipulative power over organic life,” which, in the simultaneous denying of natural reality and the fighting of circumambient forces, threatens our evolutionary guidance and ultimate survival as a species.
Before the more modern interpretations of this dualistic condition helped to explain the anxieties of consumer culture, the Ancient Greeks classified its outward manifestation with the word hubris. Used to describe the “reckless disregard for the rights of another person” as specifically resulting from an “exaggerated pride or self-confidence,” hubris became a consistent theme in Greek theatrical tragedies, usually resulting in punishment of the prideful with “fatal retribution” from the Gods. It is here, in the earliest classifying of behavior into words, that the modernization of humankind’s relationship with natural reality begins to alter the evolutionary state of immediate alarm known as fear into the more vague (and more general) sense of being in perpetual danger known as anxiety. This can be witnessed in the escapist cultural behaviors of the Ancient Greeks, such as the strong association of natural forces to specifically divine intervention. In hubris we see the destructivity of one’s inappropriate pride as being judged and administered also from divine intervention. Therefore, it seems at this stage in our cultural development there is a tragic understanding of humankind as being both godly enough to display arrogance but not godly enough to be justified in doing so. As well, I believe that however tragic a person of hubris might have seemed on stage that, in fact, such a quality was becoming acceptable as the world itself was becoming more civilized.
Regarding our budding arrogance to the natural world as tragic is, in keeping with my own recapitulation theory, representational of humankind’s early, and relatively less mature, social identity. As this identity aged over time and advanced with experience, so too did the sociopsychological mechanisms of escapism employed to pacify (and yet also perpetuate) our evolutionary anxieties deepen. The early pantheon of Olympian deities gradually lost credibility as judgers of human hubris and ultimately wound up as objects of jest and derision. New dynamic tensions arose in the social fabric as the definitions of shelter and community grew to encompass whole city-states. And with this juxtaposing growth of civilization and loss of polytheistic belief came a tremendous increase in the role of Emperor/Priest as interpreter and administrator of divine will. If trends in sociality at this time were to be likened to one of behaviorist Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages it would be that of childhood, wherein the individual ⎯ or in this case a personified civilization ⎯ is preoccupied with expanding influence in the world, with questions of power and control, and with taking self-guided initiative in daily life.
The psychological ramifications of this historic transition from the Greco-Roman societal structure and value system to the Judeo-Christian one are many and diverse. I choose in this paper to focus almost entirely on one such ramification, dominionism, for it is this concept, grounded in the arrogance of hubris, which has so tremendously deteriorated the sacred bond between humankind and nature. Dominionism, the sociopsychological belief that humankind’s stewardship has unchallengeable limits, derives from the Book of Genesis, in which God says to man, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Humankind, in this newly adopted psychological perspective, was the special creation of God (of the Old Testament), existing several orders of magnitude above all other creatures, and could directly converse with the deity so as to learn His “will and terms of life.” Though this made easier distinguishing civilian from barbarian, piousness from heathenism, and human from animal, it also further established stark contrast between natural reality and cultural reality, intensifying the anxieties of our paradoxical existence. Tuan aptly points to the belief in an omnipotent and transcendent single God as having disenchanted humankind’s world, “by shedding light and exercising authority everywhere…[freeing] it from haunted grottoes and dark woods, magic, sorcery, dread.” But such freedom, as Tuan continues, comes with a price: “An enormous weight was thus lifted off human shoulders…but in the process an even greater weight was placed on them by an insistent perfectionism that would have been annihilating but for the continuing existence of [culture].” In culture, this insistent perfectionism fueled dominionist actions and shifted human-nature relations from, for example, merely gathering wild food to actually engineering it into being with the harnessing of plants and animals for humanity’s own higher, God-ordained purposes. Large-scale and personal domestication of plants and animals along with an unprecedented population surge and vision of community as a ceremonial center, enabled the seeds of our modern consumer behavior to grow exponentially. According to historian Calvin Luther Martin, the successes and failures of humankind’s psychological evolution brought about its anthropos-logos, or anthropocentric view of the natural world, by furthering the relatively inconsequential arrogance of hubris toward its more consequential manifestation: exceptionalism. In this anthropocentric view, as Martin proposes, “time ceased being at once mundane, remote, farcical, and discordant, to become godly, human oriented and human encompassed, and purposeful ⎯ the principal instrument of calibrating the focal struggle between great good and great evil.” It was at this time that heaven began to be brought down to earth, and housing would be its expression.
Although in natural reality the condition of both natural and human affairs tends to verge on chaos, it is the true reality we evolved in. Heaven ⎯ the theoretical place where the dominionist’s actions receive reward ⎯ by contrast exhibits perfect order and makes more appealing the cultural reality from which it derives. This is especially problematic in modern America where cultural values have over time been heavily influenced by Christianity, which is, according to Tuan, neither a “humanism nor a natural religion because it teaches that our final home is not earth but elsewhere.” A cultural facet of Christian values directs our attention heavenward, frequently making secondary or even tertiary a consideration of other sentient beings while primary a consideration of our own divine path. The American Dream for community living that has permeated modern consumer culture is tethered to this idea of Heaven on Earth as the ultimate pacifier of our socio-psychological anxieties. The American Dream, like heaven, ideally has “no poor and sick, no exploited class, and so no housekeeping, no material caring, no revolutionary fervor to right wrong, none of those things that make up the bulk of ethical life on earth and that, furthermore, give individual human beings their sense of belonging, virtue, and importance.” Heaven is, theoretically, free of anxiety.
So, from early hominid to modern man, humankind’s psychological posture toward its surroundings has evolved in ways both extraordinary in scope and frightening in impact. Like the staged development of a single individual, the development of the human brain has produced over time great anxieties: each a byproduct of humankind’s inherently paradoxical nature. As well, the human brain has over time erected an alternative reality with culture to replace the undependable and largely violent reality of nature. We, today, have evolved to a point where the natural must adapt to us, where facts about the natural world need not be faced but deflected and where the performance of our perceived godliness is a vital part of daily life. We have, only in our own minds, evolved to be gods on earth with free and unlimited domain of all that we see. But, as Earnest Becker and others in the fields of Death Denial and Terror Management have postulated, such a false reality is conceivably no more than an posteriori rationalization for our inability to accept who we really are as human beings. It is this inability that threatens us all, for no animal can ultimately survive unless it perceives its environment as it really is; a lesson in much need of learning.

Modern Group Psychology and Death Denial:

The intellectual legacy of psychologist Ernest Becker is best preserved within his 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death, wherein he informally diagnoses the anxiety-ridden animal labeled “modern man” as “drinking and drugging himself out of awareness, or he spends his time shopping, which is the same thing.” A consumer for the sake of consuming, “modern man” has evolved, according to Becker, into the quintessential victim of his own creation; reaching the evolutionary dead-end I described earlier. To this day, Becker is largely regarded as representing a vastly important voice in modern psychology’s examination of the motivational underpinnings of human behavior and its conspicuous consumer culture, specifically through his trailblazing theories on socialized death denying. “Death-denial,” as he had coined it, seeks to explain why modern man perpetuates his own victimizing anxieties, how that perpetuation is maintained throughout history within social group dynamics, and what ways this perpetuation is manifested socially. As well, death-denial integrates and synthesizes insights from an array of different psychological and intellectual disciplines and minds including Freud, Rank, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Fromm, Maslow, Rogers, and Darwin; weaving them into a comprehensive theorem with a singular concentration; to uncover modern man’s most basic essence. And it is through death-denial that we are able to see how certain primal qualities of our animal ancestry remain today hugely influential to our circadian psychology. Despite the simplicity of its name, death-denial is neither simple nor obvious: it is not just about avoiding life-threatening events. Often this nominal simplicity overshadows the true ubiquity and complexity of death-denial. So, what then is death-denial?
Death-denial is a theory in modern psychology that asserts that the philosophical “essence” of being human is not some fixed, deep-seated, single quality, as others have postulated. Rather, as was first fashioned by Becker’s contemporary Eric Fromm, “the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.” It is an imbalanced existence largely caused by what Becker regarded as the unique condition of “individuality within finitude” wherein:
Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history…This immense expansion, this dexterity, this e thereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god…Yet, at the same time, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it.

This paradoxical nature, it seems, splits “modern man” into two, often opposing but always conjoined, forces and presents to him an image of the real world as simply too terrible to admit while also, as the Darwinian assumption states, too promising to abandon. The first such force, as has been mentioned before, is the inherent animality of our evolutionary heritage. Through this force we see ourselves as a small, trembling animal that will, like all others, decay and die over time. Marked by a general fear response of fight-or-flight and a strong servitude to biological principles, the psychological presence of our animality, while the launch pad of our evolution, is also the unfortunate bane of our existence. We are embarrassed by our own bodies, often to points intolerable for some, as it is this finite body that reminds us daily of the tenuousness of our historic reach toward, what Tuan calls, “some more elevated status called ‘human’ or ‘spiritual’.” And yet, without our animality we would be without our senses and thus completely disconnected from the more-than-human natural world. Having largely achieved his biotic potential to master his domain ⎯ a feat well preserved in the architecture of contemporary societies and their shelters ⎯ “modern man” now readily escapes from his animality into a world of cultural creations that reassures him of his exceptionalism.
The second such force in modern man’s paradoxical dilemma is just that: exceptionalism. When developed enough to conquer over more basic limbic structures, the cortical brain and its unprecedented evolutionary faculty achieved an awareness of the world so exceptional that it could even fathom its own demise. This exceptionalism, according to Becker, has, itself, two forms. The strongest psychological form of exceptionalism is that “[modern man] has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty.” At the same time, however, this awareness can be torturous to the human psyche: “reflective and conceptual, and [all other] animals are spared it…[living and disappearing] with the same thoughtlessness.” And so, by fact of his exceptional abilities, modern man is exceptional. The second form of exceptionalism is witnessed specifically in modern man’s destructivity to the environment around him. As if a toddler throwing a tantrum because he cannot socially identify himself as either a vulnerable baby or a more powerful child, modern man ⎯ located in something of an evolutionarily recapitulated developmental childhood ⎯ destroys his world both passively and aggressively. Becker believed modern man’s passive destructivity to be more revealing of an existential cause:
He is not just a naturally and lustily destructive animal who lays waste around him because he feels omnipotent and impregnable. Rather, he is a trembling animal who pulls the world down around his shoulders as he clutches for protection and support and tries to affirm in a cowardly way his feeble powers.

And so, also by fact of his exceptional awareness of the world, modern man is exceptional. The intersection of these two forces, like the meeting of two opposing ripples on a lake, produces many smaller paradoxes that deserve examination. However, in the interest of clarity, I suggest that these smaller paradoxes of modern man all be understood as functions of two specific defense mechanisms employed socially and maintained culturally: transference and illusion. Both transference and illusion work to manage the day-to-day terror of our much beloved unique human awareness. Terror, an otherwise threatening word, is used by Becker simply as reference to the ultimates of life and death in context to modern man’s avoidance of both. But, as will be proven in this thesis, there is no way for modern man to avoid either life or death completely, and thus, as Becker surmises, “it is probably poetic justice that if he tries to do so he destroys himself.”
Transference ⎯ Becker’s “taming of terror” ⎯ derives from the inherent awareness of nature as chaotic and powerful. In that we, as animals or humans, can never fully overcome this seemingly opposing power we instead endow certain persons in society with it and regard them as leaders. Throughout history the social dynamic of following a leader, be it a physical individual or divine entity, has rested on that leader’s ability to seem larger than life itself. Father of psychodynamic theory, Sigmund Freud, proposed that in transference another form of recapitulation occurs, wherein the grown citizen, the follower of a leader, displays many of the characteristics of a child: “a child who distorts the world to relieve his helplessness and fears, who sees things as he wishes them to be for his own safety, who acts automatically and uncritically, just as he did in the pre-Oedipal period.” Where once guidance, structure and safety were all provided by the parent/guardian, now the adult modern man seeks such security out in the hypnotic spell of a leader/guardian; suspending his own sense of ego to either the will of the group associated with the leader, or even that of the leader himself. In a cultural reality this leadership specifically replaces the natural (and less secure) leadership of biological life’s living rhythms. Deifying a person, as opposed to deifying nature, allows the group to participate in an imagined quest for immortality: correlating their own degree of participation with the imagined power of the leader, and then correlating that degree of power in the leader with immortality.
Ultimately, transference relies on the second defense mechanism, illusion, for its hypnotic affect, as does illusion depend on transference for its cultural application. Psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel describes Becker’s “modern man” as “longing for being hypnotized” through the social projection of illusion as a means of achieving the “oceanic feeling” once felt constantly under the protection of parents, before entering the torture of awareness. Combining this idea with the aforementioned success of cultural evolution over human evolution, it seems that upon creating a reality of culture in which to escape from the realities of nature we began to engage in the upkeep of illusion, which today can be most prominently seen in the houses and communities in which we live and grow. From the illusory paradise of Neolithic spiritual mysticism, to the illusory paradise of the Christian heaven, to even the paradise on earth promised by commercial industrialism, cultural evolution has spawned many satisfying images of paradise but not nearly as many such images of reality. So vicious is this engagement in illusion that we as individuals, nations, and peoples lose sight of natural reality. Only when natural reality is most chaotic (as in war), irrational (as in loss), or seemingly spiteful (as in premature death) ⎯ championing even over the powers of our leaders ⎯ are we reminded of that which we so deeply fear and brought back to our original state of death-denying anxiousness: achieving little, wasting much.
In this falsified reality of our culture, detached from nature by denial of our inherent animality, we are as vulnerable as ever; all that’s changed are the threats. Becker suggests that this endless pursuit of invulnerability ⎯ of immortality ⎯ has arrested modern man’s natural evolution to a point that “[he] is doomed to his present form…that anything he might achieve can only be achieved from within the real nightmare of his loneliness in creation and from the energies that he now has.” But pessimistic the motivations of Becker are not. Rather, Becker offers that within the small window of “paradise through self-knowledge” ⎯ a circuitous trick of sorts for getting people to escape to natural reality ⎯ modern man has a true chance of finding peace with his anxieties about death.
Becker’s immense legacy not only changed the worlds of cultural anthropology and social psychology but also spawned a field of its own called Terror Management Theory (TMT). TMT examines how the vulnerability of modern man’s paradoxical nature both affects him and drives him to affect. “Following Otto Rank, Norman Brown, and Ernest Becker,” writes Sheldon Solomon, a founding-father of TMT, “we posit that humans, ingeniously but quite unconsciously, solved their existential dilemma by developing cultural worldviews: commonly held beliefs about reality that serve to reduce the potentially overwhelming terror resulting form the awareness of death.” In the coming chapters, I defend that in fact modern man solved nothing real but did an amazing job convincing himself he did. More so, I suggest that in developing cultural worldviews as he did, modern man essentially bit off more than he could chew, fronting the bill to future generations. This single behavior of reducing threat by denying it has, over time, developed into a pattern of behaving, a pathology of escapism, that each subsequent generation seems to perform with greater and greater anxiety. Today, this anxiety is exhibited vividly in the way Americans generally shelter themselves, live with each other, live within nature, and consume. We are in the beginning stages of a global resource crisis ⎯ a fight for our very existence ⎯ and if we do much to deny it and little to disallow it, we will certainly lose the fight.

Terror Management and the Tragedy of the Commons:
Terror Management Theory asserts that, “the uniquely human awareness of death and the potentially overwhelming anxiety it engenders motivates people to imbue life with meaning, and desire self-esteem from cultural beliefs about the nature of reality.” Furthermore it explains how imbuing life with meaning and achieving self-esteem are most oftentimes extremely violent processes that pit nation versus nation, shape class struggles, equate failure with worthlessness, charge defensiveness to its most extreme expression, and reorient our relationship with nature from symbiotic to parasitic. From this great, internally-motivated desire to live meaningfully comes a great vulnerability of the masses to be lead not necessarily in a positive way by their hearts but all too frequently in a negative way by their fears. This is not to suggest that it is just leaders who exploit this exploitable emotionality of modern man in their favor. Still, TMT research has shown that “reminders of mortality affect [individual’s] concrete behavior as well as evaluations of worldview.” My interest in TMT for this paper is to show both how the acquisition of wealth, in whatever the form, culturally supports one’s value in society, “with the consequent assurance of safety and security in this life and figurative immortality thereafter,” and how the desire for this social value makes regularly problematic ecologist Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons theorem.
Denying the corporal limits of biological life, as Becker points out, can also be understood as the wanting to be valued in society. In most Western societies, a value of being and living “good,” obverse from being “bad,” connotes abundance of the kind that is specifically materialistic. According to TMT, in the modern capitalist system of Judeo-Christian America this desire for wealth is largely an end in itself: “rather than a reflection of religious fealty that spawned and sustained the Protestant work ethic, [wanting to be valued in society] has bolstered the power of the marketplace as the new immortality ideology.” When previously mentioned that modern man consumes for consumptions sake, I was referring specifically to this idea. In either the true absence of evolutionary pressure, or simply just in the denial of it, modern man’s materialistic desires and the pursuit to attain more, are, to him, a salient measure of potential self-worth. However, such a materialistic orientation, far removed from the cause-and-effect consequences of natural reality, is associated with “less socially productive and more antisocial behavior and a tendency to quickly deplete scarce resources, thus affecting everyone’s quality of life,” according to both TMT theorists and the Tragedy of the Commons.
While some accumulation of commodities has throughout our evolutionary plight been quite necessary to sustain life, the symbolic social prestige associated with an insatiable thirst for surplus has not. Intensified by their psychologically numbing qualities, the death-denying desires that inspire our conspicuous consumption are wholly misleading; leaving us ultimately with an ever-lowered quality of life from generation to generation; degrading the integrity of our social and physical environments; threatening the survival of our species and all others. This is the Tragedy of the Commons. Over-consumption of physical, environmental, social, or intellectual resources by any one individual or individual group, according to the parable, means a greater lack of any of those resources for the next individual or individual group. Hardin’s theory suggests, and my use of it supports, a theoretical common good in society that is threatened for all by individualistic concerns over community management and oversight. When we aim fixedly to satisfy the near-irrepressible desire to deny death, we forget the preciousness of life as even just a period of time in which to affect positive change: we accept our paralyzing obsession. Looking through the processes of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons theorem, it becomes clear that a value system dictated by this desire to deny is self-destructive to those who embrace it, as it dangerously obscures the line between a threatened reality and a threatened culture, thusly leaving the followers of it unprepared for the inevitability of consequence.
This is the time we are living in today: a time marked by sociocultural sensory deficits of a kind we have never experienced before. In many ways, we have become ignorant of our past and blind to our future. Likewise, we have become deaf to the cries of thousands of sentient beings, while also emotionally insensitive to their loss of life. We are lost in a reality of our making for having escaped a reality of our fears. And many of us are muted by a lack of value, of meaning, and of worth in our given culture. This is the evolutionary impasse we are seemingly incapable of conquering: not by fact of any handicap in agency, but by fact of an extreme handicap in perceiving the problems at hand. The challenge we face remains before us as it has since our victory in World War II ⎯ maybe even earlier, in another kind of victory during the Industrial Revolution. It is a challenge of recognizing our failures and adapting accordingly. It is a challenge of bringing to surface our deepest psychological complexities and taking true ownership of them. It is a challenge of forgiving our dominionist crown back to the Earth in exchange for a green tool-belt: the deserved and proper regalia of the compassionate steward. And in its broadest interpretation, it is a challenge of facing our mortality and returning to a life lived in reality.

CHAPTER THREE

Chapter 3

Culture itself comes to us as a commodity
George Lipsitz

War is the health of the machine
Lewis Mumford

Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
Franz Kafka


“The Business of America is Business”:

History is, as German philosopher Georg Hegel once wrote, that which “man does with death.” However morbid such a perspective might seem, its poignant accuracy highlights fundamental truths about our past and should not be ignored while building a future. Etched in the bedrock of our evolutionary history is the plight of an animal limited by size, ever-threatened by death, rising to conquer with brains that which could not be overcome with brawn. Our early social history continues with how these brains sculpted, from resources of the land, sea, and sky, a limitless living culture of illusion disconnected from the restraints of nature, and thus mortality itself. And in our modern history ⎯ the history we today contribute to ⎯ we realize firsthand (though fail to admit) the growing fallacy of an illusory culture, a disconnected reality; as the means of industrialism, materialism, and militarism which we once considered “progressive” are not being justified by the ends of global climate change, resource depletion, and endless war. With a naïveté reflective solely of our relatively youthful presence on this planet, our quest for immortality ⎯ be it in our eschatological obsession with salvation, our self-ordained dominion over life on earth, or even simply in our compulsive denial of death ⎯ is a history of misunderstanding destruction as creation, greed as righteousness, and dying as living.
The evolutionary impasse we have seemingly reached in this modern history, as was mentioned earlier in this thesis, directly relates in a historic context to the choice of a society, culture, or people to replay, with exponentially greater misunderstanding, the mistakes of the past. As technology continues to produce new methods by which we might try and exert our dominance over death, we loose sight of our repeated failures, and thus prohibit an important lesson from being learned by future generations; that death isn’t something to conquer over, but rather something to work with in life. While the rapidity of technological advancements may be to blame for the insatiable quality of our desire for immortality, it is not the root cause of it, as was explained last chapter. Still, both the reaching of this evolutionary impasse today and the manner in which it was reached suggest much about the immediate past, specifically from the Industrial Revolution to WWII, and the Cold War suburbanization of America onward.
While the interplay between humankind’s paradoxical nature and consumer culture has always been prevalent throughout the history of civilized societies, I choose to begin examining the destructivity of this interplay after the Industrial Revolution simply because it is at this time that the social confidence derived from consumerism’s limitless abundance began to negatively affect the individual consumer. The worship of material progress that so greatly characterized America’s Victorian era was being eroded socially by a palpable feeling of what historian, TJ Jackson Lears, calls “overcivilization.” “Europeans and Americans alike began to recognize that the triumph of modern culture had not produced greater autonomy (which was the official claim),” Jackson theorizes, “but rather had promoted a spreading sense of moral impotence and spiritual sterility ⎯ a feeling that life had become not only overcivilized but also curiously unreal.” Nineteenth-century Americans became obsessed with the obtaining of authenticity in both physical and spiritual experiences. Ironically, however, these same industrial forces that were streamlining natural reality ⎯ the relentless dynamism at the heart of capitalist development ⎯ were the same forces driving the antimodernism movement. Modern culture as we know it today began, in essence, with the triumph of rationalization over antimodernism: “the systematic organization of economic life for maximum productivity and of individual life for maximum personal achievement; the drive for efficient control of nature under the banner of improving human welfare; the reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated by rational technique.” Rationalization was the final recoiling from physical discomfort, from natural reality, and shaped how modern American’s valued time, space, and even life itself; it was the triumph of the modern superego; it was the triumph of the human cortical system; it was the triumph of cultural reality.
During this time, “work,” both actually and conceptually, became radically separated from “home” and more and more did the living rhythms of humankind’s reality become insulated from the consequences of its actions. In time, the home itself was enveloped by the influences of a market society and, as a result, became more than a shelter from the forces of nature but a scaled-down image of the afterlife constructed in the proportions of domesticity. Even the expression of selfhood followed this trend as the ownership of things came to matter more than the accomplishment of tasks. Modern culture itself began to reflect an evasive banality that, according to Lears, “obscured the erosion of autonomy in the emerging industrial society.”
Mentioning the 19th century in this section of the thesis is meant to act as a precursor for a larger discussion about housing, death-denial, and consumer culture ⎯ this paper’s triad paradigm. For it is within the era of the Industrial Revolution that tributes to family solidarity began modernizing into a focus on the nuclear unit, natural association with a community began transforming into a purchasable community identity, and the promise of greater democratic representation began eroding under the weight of civilian skepticism. Within the confines of the “home,” these structural social changes stimulated much superficial comfort. However, as the nuclear family became more and more an economic powerhouse through their frivolous consumption of material identity ⎯ purchasable immortality ⎯ the great comfort they strove for became more and more constrictive, controlling, and illusory: with the cost of denying death now the very experience of living life. So, if we stop for a moment and look around, what we see is history being made all around us. And like the times leading up to today, history is, as much now as it was then, that which we do with death.

How the Cold War Turned Hot:
The capitalist economic system that was forged in the fires of the Industrial Revolution was in many ways unsound, As historian Howard Zinn points out, capitalism in its post-Industrial phase was “a system driven by the one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable, and blind to human needs.” Such instability, combined with wild speculations, made inevitable the eventual stock market crash of 1929; marking the beginning stages of the twentieth century with total economic collapse. Life in the wake of the Great Depression is remembered still with patriotic reverence as being one of the hardest challenges in American history, with a rippling down of misfortune from the closing of over five thousand banks, to the bankruptcy of several more business, to the laying-off of exponentially larger numbers of workers; workers with families; families with needs. Industrial production itself ⎯ the metronomic heart beat of the twentieth century ⎯ dropped in 1933 by a cold fifty percent, leaving roughly one-third of the American workforce unemployed. The country was, as President Herbert Hoover commented at this time, “not in good condition.”
Until the Second World War and its restoration of a sharable nationalistic worldview, America’s social complexion during the thirties was pocked with labor strikes, violent anticommunist fervency, and extreme economic hardship. Lubricative measures following the Depression, such as that of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, sought to relieve, recover, and reform the American economy through the advent and implementation of rehabilitative agencies. A literal alphabet-soup of these agencies ⎯ from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA) to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and National Recovery Administration (NRA) ⎯ revived, over the course of the decade, the American economy to pre-crash levels; simultaneously providing work for the unemployed and installing governmental safeguards against future stock-market problems: a national welfare state emerged, industrial relations were restructured around state-sanctioned collective bargaining and the federal government assumed more active roles in economic decisions. The hardships of the Depression era also added new perspective to the social psyche, which, in turn, was reflected in many New Deal programs. Through the Federal Theatre Project, Federal Writers Project, and Federal Art Project, audiences that had never seen a mural or a play were witnessing both in public space, working-class people who had never read a book or pamphlet were being bombarded with both, and new symphonies filled the airwaves. This blossoming of the arts exposed to all the conditions of the many unseen, unconsidered, and unappreciated members of society who, despite their sex, race, or creed, struggled for the same dream of social and economic freedom as did everyone else: the American Dream.
Americans changed much of their thinking in those days of crisis and rebellion, but by 1939 this excitement expressed for the arts was overshadowed by a new fear of war and threat to the American way of life. In Europe, Adolph Hitler’s Germany was on the march in Poland, and across the Pacific Ocean Japan was invading China. As involvement in the war ushered in the 1940s, agreement between previously dissenting groups had described the war between the Axis and Allied Powers as a “people’s war” against Fascism. Massive war spending for mobilization doubled the nation’s GNP, and patriotism ⎯ a once tarnished concept ⎯ prompted regular citizens and businesspeople alike to voluntarily work longer and harder hours. As well, the resonant drumbeat of war stimulated people to accept rationing and price controls for the first time in history. The Second World War set precedents for America not only in size and bloodshed, but more importantly in participation: “18 million served in the armed forces, 10 million over seas; 25 million workers gave of their pay envelope regularly for war bonds.” A more superficial examination of this time might make simple the causality between a perceived threat and its justified response of war. Such an examination would certainly cite Japan’s surprise attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941 as a cause that lead directly to an effect; a reminder of death that rendered the American people especially sensitive to and defensive of further impingements on their specific worldview. But Zinn wisely questions if such support was rather “manufactured” so as to rationalize warring against other possible alternatives:
It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil. Hitler’s Germany was extending totalitarianism, racism, militarism, and overt aggressive warfare beyond what an already cynical world had experienced. And yet, did the governments conducting this war ⎯ England, the United States, the Soviet Union ⎯ represent something significantly different, so that their victory would be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world?
Undoubtedly, the war meant more to the leaders of the United States than simply defeating an enemy or eradicating a threatening “other” worldview. Like never before, the alliance of big business and government was strong and both parties reaped tremendous benefit from their engagement in war, specifically in the result of narrowed concentrations in both power and wealth. The publicly propagated economic aim for America in the war, according to historian Gabriel Kolko, was “to save capitalism at home and abroad.”
By 1944, the United States well understood the enormous increase in production that awaited them after the war and the need such production would have for equally increased foreign markets. The war, it seemed, steadily provided both new opportunities for the American government to exert more control over its citizens and, as well, the positioning needed to eventually dominate much of the world. Then, in 1945, over the span of four days, America demonstrated its godly technological prowess by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: terminating the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents. With this single moment the Second World War ended, and the Cold War began.
In regards to the ideas of Becker’s Death Denial theory and its offspring, Terror Management, this single moment between the two wars is an extremely interesting one. The uniquely American worldview that was galvanized during the Industrial Revolution ⎯ a world view of democracy, and Christianity, and capitalism ⎯ proved itself viable as an ideological framework of self-preservation when after the near-fatal economic crash of 1929 it arose more prosperous, and then again after a near-fatal war it arose more capable; capable of spreading throughout the world, capable of bringing heaven to earth, capable of providing immortality through consumption. Although the killing of so many innocent lives is a gesture more barbaric even than it is animal, the American worldview after bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki psychologically made rational this deed as a protective measure against an opposing and “evil” worldview. Conversely, in the destruction of that “evil” worldview was the temporary absolution of any wrongdoing; America’s worldview, once threatened, was now free to spread its divine message and make the world a better place for all.
At the same time, the great domestic belief in this worldview manifested through the illusions of culture as the American Dream: a vision of postwar prosperity that included a private home fully equipped with consumer durables. Encouraging citizen consumer behavior was the key to economic recovery and, as propagated by John Maynard Keynes in his revolutionary economic theory, would mean the successful or unsuccessful conversion from wartime to peacetime. The Keynesian economic revolution essentially put forth that consumers were responsible for higher productivity and full employment, whereas a decade earlier that role had unquestionably belonged to producers. And to shepherd consumers toward consuming, promises were made in the form of televised and non-televised propaganda to boost home front morale by constantly reinforcing the "Americanness” of the single-family home. Two specific ways this shepherding was accomplished was through the passing of the GI Bill of Rights in 1943 and the seemingly boundless construction of new housing communities throughout the war.
The GI Bill of Rights, or Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, was the last of the New Deal legislation and provided returning WWII veterans a college level or vocational education, one-year of unemployment compensation, and loans with which to buy homes and/or start businesses. Prior to the war suburban living tended to be affordable only for the wealthy upper class, but the low interest home loans provided by the Bill allowed millions of American families to flee the hellish confines of the urban apartment for the heavenly lifestyle of suburbia. In every corner of cultural America this lifestyle could be witnessed; a utopia of unrestricted purchasing power, a streamlining of values, a democratization of the “American Dream.” And yet by 1945, a decade of economic depression and half a decade of global war had rendered the country weakened by an acute housing shortage. As was predicted during the war, mass construction of new homes provided the physical setting upon which a postwar consumption economy could flourish, both by turning the home into an expansive commodity for purchase and by stimulating demand for related commodities, such as appliances, furnishings, and (because of the longer commute to-and-from work) an automobile. As Cohen points out in her writing, “the futuristic highways, suburban ‘Pleasantvilles’ surrounding ‘Centerton,’ and appliance-equipped, single-family homes…were becoming a reality,” at an alarmingly fast pace.
Communities such as Levittown, New York, made tangible this suburban dream: this locale of the good life, this achievement of serenity that eluded older generations, this evidence of democratic abundance and divine intervention. It represented a source of security in a new world of high anxiety where America was now facing its former ally, the Soviet Union, as a major foe. It represented a source of meaning, a reinforcement of the American worldview, as the Cold War represented an ideological struggle between two superpowers that were both hoping to increase their power and influence across the globe. And, most importantly, it represented a compulsory fixation that could distract the American public from the powerful psychic hold that the fear of nuclear annihilation had on its subconscious. Atomic warfare, as a product of cultural reality, represented a strong contradiction to American prosperity, especially in the home: science had developed the potential for total technological mastery over nature as well as for total technological devastation.
Levittown was a great many things to the many people who lived there during this time, but more than anything it was the most permanent physical manifestation of the compulsivity of modern American consumer culture. Much of the psychical character of modern America ⎯ its anxieties, its developmental capacities, its social dispositions ⎯ can be observed from reading Levittown as not just a community of people in a distant past, but instead as a cultural artifact of a time much like today: rich with the dueling paradoxes of culture and nature, war and peace, and life and death. To fully understand a place and an idea such as Levittown, one must also conceptualize the community as part of the ideological contest between American and the Soviet Union to dominate the world; to build military machines far greater than the Fascist countries had built, to control the destinies of more countries than Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan had been able to do. Ultimately, Levittown was part of the grand lesson America never learned coming out of the first half of the twentieth century. For, as civil rights activist AJ Muste once asked, “The problem after a war is with the victor…[who] thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay…[but] who will now teach him a lesson?”


A Case Study: Levittown, New York
The house and commodity boom during and following the conclusion of WWII had tremendous propaganda value for the American Establishment and its military-industrial complex. More than ever, a specific and identifiable “American way of life” was being bought and sold in every material object with the claim that the accumulation of things ⎯ property, commodity, or wealth ⎯ constituted the dreams that the soldiers were fighting and dying for. Even home ownership was being touted as both a patriotic duty (“defense through decentralization”) and the fulfillment of a dream. In many ways, the dream itself was of assimilation: classless, homogeneous, and family centered. The ranch house, as a specific and widely popular design scheme, was propagated as creating some kind of aesthetic unity with nature, but in reality it was a unity that pictured natured as a tamable and ever-plentiful environment. Within less than one decade communities of these houses, of these dreams and illusory ambitions, would sprout-up around every major city in America. Between 1944 and 1950, housing starts went from 114,000 to an all-time high of 1,692,000. And about half of the people who purchased homes in this time were white, returning veterans in their mid-thirties with young children.
The family that had the greatest impact on postwar housing in America was Abraham Levitt and his sons, William and Alfred, who, in the span of only a handful of years built more than 140,000 houses and revolutionized a cottage industry into a major manufacturing process. Already among the nation’s most contracted housing developers, the Levitt’s made history when, between 1946 and 1951, they transformed 4,000 acres of potato farms in Hempstead, New York, into the biggest private housing project ever designed in America. The construction process itself reflected the energy of the times and the feeling of dominion over nature; the land was immediately bulldozed to optimal horizon, trees pulled from their rooting, with an assembly line-styled construction ethic producing an average of thirty semi-prefabricated houses each day, or, as William Levitt boasted, roughly “one house every fifteen minutes.” When finished, Levittown had 17,447 homes housing 82,000 residents, supported minimal industry, and provided consumers with a 55-acre shopping center.
Returning veterans viewed Levittown as the answer to their most pressing needs and wants. Only a twenty-five mile commute to Manhattan, Levittown as a model suburban community was particularly attractive to young families who relied on the city for income but who also wanted to escape from it for luxury. Advertising for Levittown even offered in its early promotions “no down payment, no closing costs, and no hidden extras,” as well as a new washer machine included in the purchase price.
New York historian, Kenneth T. Jackson, cites five qualities of the post-war Levittown that upheld its superficial status as a model of suburbia. The first was its “peripheral location” to a major city. Cities, at the time, dominated by industrial factories, were both actually and circumstantially being viewed as congested and dangerous. Once the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 moved public policy toward emphasizing and benefiting the motorist, deconcentration became the motivation of those who could afford it and the automobile became ⎯ literally and figuratively ⎯ a vehicle into the future. The second of Jackson’s qualities, which, again, made urban living and its row-housing design comparatively unappealing, was Levittown’s “relatively low density.” This quality also rested heavily on the assumption that residents would have automobiles. Levittown residents were at the forefront of the detached-plot trend sweeping post-war America: each owning a typically sized lot, and participating in a more physically open community. The third quality Jackson cites is Levittown’s “architectural similarity” which derived from the simplification of production methods and reduction of design fees that lead to the half-dozen housing designs available: “a monotony and repetition that was especially stark.” Homogeneity of this caliber was not at all uncommon after the war but rather part of the inclusive trends in 1950s design of streamlining and conformity. More than just because of its cosmetic relation to nature, the ranch-style home gained much popularity after the war for its evocation of both the expansive mood of the suburbs and, as Jackson suggests, the “disappearing regionality of style.”
But more than any other of these general qualities of Levittown-suburbia, it was the newness of these houses that, in embodying the seemingly unstoppable post-war spirit of American capitalism, simultaneously attracted people to it and proved economically viable a consumer culture around the suburban lifestyle. Enabling the consumption of this newness and support of this capitalist spirit is the fourth quality Jackson cites: Levittown’s “easy availability and thus reduced suggestion of wealth.” Because of mass-production techniques, government financing through the GI Bill, high wages and low interest rates, returning veterans found buying a new suburban home ultimately cheaper than reinvesting in central city properties or renting at market price. The result of these factors was a lower threshold of purchase, which itself directly resulted in a stronger middle class consumer demographic. Finally, Jackson’s fifth quality of Levittown-suburbia, “economic and racial homogeneity,” relates specifically to the combination of income-based community districting, deconcentrating of community development outside of the city, and the enormous reliance on the automobile. Levittown, as a model suburban community, embodied these qualities and became an incubator for America’s middle-class value system: escapist, low-density, and in many places almost completely homogeneous in race, class, and creed.
Because of these qualities, the needs and wants of the returning veterans were largely met ⎯ or at least met superficially. But utilizing the unique perspective of history allows the Americanist to understand how the artificiality of Levittown was actually quite limiting to the experiencing and possessing of community; ultimately resulting in greater levels of psychological dissatisfaction and consequent practices of denying death. According to several research sources, specifically the 1961 Boston University Research Institute Department of Sociology and Anthropology’s study of Levittown’s appeal, the limiting factors of the community’s artificiality (which are later examined in the following section) should be viewed as a series of deficits.
Although almost every post-war community had some trouble determining its sociological boundaries, a majority of Levittowners in a 1954 survey defined their community arbitrarily as “that area including Levitt-built homes”; some even stretching as far as to say “that holding a swimming pool permit is the basic criterion in judging whether a person is a member of the community.” This obvious lack of well-defined sociological boundaries and the absence of a sharable worldview directly affected the Levittown community member’s loyalties and resulted, according to the study, in an “unfulfilling sense of neighborhood.” Loyalties, which play an important role in the psychology theorem of Terror Management, were found in this study to be stronger in smaller components of the community, such as school, postal, and fire department districting, than with the general sense of community as a whole.
According to the survey, loyalties in the category of community-government involvement were also missing from Levittown in large part due to its scant autonomy from the larger community governance of the Town of Hempstead, Long Island. Levittown’s lack of a local government was unique, with no city council, no mayor, no police department or department of public works to unify the community. The remediation of problems was greatly impeded by this lack of civic identity and widely noted in the study as a “limited set of services.” As well, Levittown, being residential, was devoid of industry and the variety of local employment that industrial plants provide, which in turn, restricted the development of cultural institutions such as museums, colleges, theatres, or art centers. Once again, this “limited set of services,” be it governmental or cultural, resulted in the heavier-than-usual reliance on schools and churches as major forms of communal expression. From the study’s sociological standpoint, “the siphoning of energy and support into the economic activities (of industry, government, and culture) [creates] a wider range of community interests, giving a scope for action to those who want to be active but who in the past have found the school issues a major outlet for their bottled-up energy.”
The lack of well-defined sociological boundaries and limited set of services largely defined Levittown as an experiment in community innovation. However, the artificiality of that innovation was, itself, also a determining factor in Levittown the community. In many ways, the experiment of Levittown was found in the first waves of post-war settlement: consisting of “young veterans, many of who were recently married, all of whom were concerned about becoming established and acquiring some kind of foothold or status in the postwar world.” Everything in Levittown was new, and as such there were no traditions of leadership or of community participation with which to younger families. The values that were transferred into the community tended to be more personal than communal, with principal interest in the individual’s own house and property causing, in part, community competition and an underlying sense of animosity. These “pioneer days” of Levittown were unlike similar foundational stages of other American communities in that members of the community were not jointly working toward a common good, but rather conspicuously consuming a prefabricated common good individually.
Basically, this lack of common traditions ⎯ of collectively working toward a common good ⎯ sets up the conditions of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons hypothesis mentioned in the last chapter. The playing-out of Hardin’s hypothesis is, then, reliant on an uncertainty in psychological identification to Levittown by community members. According to the Boston University study, a true sense of community grows from “the occupancy of a common living space within fairly well-agreed upon boundaries,” “the sharing of common services,” “and from the acceptance of a common value system”: all of which Levittown, in its artificiality, could not provide. A deficit in psychological identification extends Levittown’s artificiality into the realm of experience, as was statistically significant to the study’s results. Rates of assimilation for Levittowners were, in most categories, suspiciously higher than in other American communities, especially those with a greater history. It was as if assimilation, which at the time was largely assessed by one’s war-inspired willingness to “defend” the community at the drop of a hat, was something that came in signing of the Levittown lease.
The inauthenticity of Levittown assimilation had much to do with specific financial burdens that, despite Levittown’s industry-low prices, hit the young veterans hard while commodifying their experience as homeowners. Levittown, during this time, did not have any economically privileged group “living in homes of high assessment value” who might have been willing to lighten the tax burden (and thus economic margin) imposed on the younger working-class couples. As well, Levittown had an apparent absence of industry and other such business opportunities. The results of this financial hardship were strange; causing many to simultaneously pay their way into the illusory cultural worldview of conspicuous consumption that Levittown provided while also disapprove of any social climbing. In a sense, the illusion Levittown provided its residents, however costly, satisfied the psychological wants of community belonging and assimilation to a death-denying worldview over satisfying the psychological need for authentic community experience. So although the young Levittowner, for the most part, felt unable to face his economic future with equanimity, his purchase of a Levittown house ⎯ and all it came with ⎯ appeared as if ultimately worth it.
Although Levittown itself represented a secure worldview ⎯ the patriotic pursuit of symbolic prestige ⎯ the religious and organizational compositions of the community reflected many smaller, more specific worldviews; oftentimes conflicting with each other. Between 1952 and 1959, according to the study’s results, Catholics represented 51-55% of the population, Protestants 26-30%, and Jews 16-25%. While participants in the study confirmed no neighborhood clustering along religious lines, actual community involvement tended to be greatest among Catholics and Jews. The socio-psychological ramifications of this religious composition were most clear in the intermingling of faiths: a new and frequently difficult experience for many Levittowners. These ramifications included side-taking and stonewalling during community problem solving: “When issues became controversial, any individual who is forced to take sides finds himself looking for justification for his actions… he is apt to seize upon any ready-made reasons provided for him, thereby stating his position in terms of several considerations which may not have been originally germane to his reaching a decision.” Membership in community organizations was, due to these socio-psychological ramifications of living with differing worldviews, severely stunted. Except for the well-structured sports leagues, the numerous groups and voluntary associations attracted participants for highly personalized and individualistic reasons. Therefore, the organizational structure of Levittown was not of a unified power as were other, older communities, but rather comprised of “many diffuse, small, and barely interlocking voluntary groupings with very little coordination,” whereby sounding the call of “Rally ‘Round the Flag, Boys” would be symbolic of little more than the obvious fact, “I live in Levittown.”
With membership in community organizations low and individualistic consideration high, community leadership roles in Levittown, which were stable in duration and variable in sphere of influence, never really materialized in the post-war stages of development. Suggested by the study are several reasons for this: the fabric of Levittown had little texture, person-centered activities predominated, family and home considerations took precedence, and the traditional sense of privacy associated with modern home ownership. But ultimately, the greatest hindrance to community leadership was complacency. As is discussed in many modern readings of Levittown, the great ease by which Levittown’s heaven-on-earth lifestyle could be attained seemed to influence the Levittowner’s aggregate interest in community affairs: with the sense of entitlement that comes from purchasing a lifestyle trumping the sense of responsibility that comes from participating in a community.
Because of these seven deficits ⎯ no well-defined boundaries, limited set of services, lack of common traditions, uncertain psychological identification, total financial cost of illusion, religious and organizational composition, and leadership diffusion ⎯ Levittown was, at best, an unfortunate community; wasting both land and resource for illusion and artificiality. From its conception as a sellable slice of the American Dream, to its aesthetically and economically homogenous design, to its assembly-line construction, to its psychology discrepant sense of community, Levittown of the 1950s symbolized more than just the provision of shelter but the commodification of immortality through housing as well. As is true for a great many things in history, Levittown was by no means a mistake (such judgments should never be made in the American Studies scholarship). On the contrary, Levittown was exactly what America needed at the time. However, reading Levittown as an historical marker for the influences of death-denial and terror management reveals that the legacy of Levittown ⎯ of conspicuous consumption, inconsiderate community design, and containment through conformity ⎯ still negatively affects America and its paradoxical way of life today.

Reading Levittown Today:
Great patriotic fervor, of the kind that characterized World War II domestically and abroad, is a largely unstoppable force; motivated by anxiety and marked by sacrifice. Conflicting themes of war and peace, power and responsibility, retaliation and defense, stimulated by a pervasive desperation to escape a tumultuous past of economic depression, reshaped America’s material and domestic culture around such patriotic fervor; reforming the elementary aspirations of Americans toward a dreamlike domesticity ⎯ secure and comfortable, and easily obtainable. The home ⎯ what historian Kenneth Jackson regards as the “outward expression of the inner human nature” ⎯ became the natural repository for America’s dreams and allowed government and industry (often hand-in-hand) to cast a vision of the future around private homeownership in ever more glowing terms. This is precisely what Levittown stands for in history: an example of how deep social anxieties, agitated by mortality-salient threats to a particularly enveloping worldview (Democracy, Capitalism, Christianity, etc.), produce conditions wherein individuals escape into illusory realms of artificiality and consumption, however destructive such reactions may ultimately result.
In many ways, Levittown set a standard for modern American communities by providing its residents a fabricated slice of the American Dream to be bought and sold, consumed and wasted. But as similar conditions that spawned Levittown still actively influence community development today, we as planetary stewards must read Levittown’s history with critical analysis so that positive aspects might be properly replicated while undesirable aspects are phased out. To accomplish this task, and truly learn from the relative nescience of our past, I believe America must examine its historic cultural artifacts such as Levittown through the lensed interdisciplinary triad paradigm of housing, psychology, and consumerism.
The paradoxical nature of man, hypothesized by Ernest Becker, of individuality within finitude saw its most vivid sociological expression during this first half of the twentieth century: with industry bringing mankind’s splendid uniqueness sharply out of nature with a “towering majesty” and war returning him to the ground to “rot and disappear forever.” The outbreak of WWII and its psychological influence on death denying practices complicated the relationship between consumers ⎯ now seen as responsible for the economic health of the nation ⎯ and producers ⎯ who saw war as just the Keynesian jumpstart a still economically depressed America desperately needed. Success in the war ultimately meant the justification for this more complicated relationship. And as a prosperous postwar America became ever-more tangible in the lives of patriotic citizens, an eagerness to live the American Dream took center stage in the socio-cultural psyche.
Builders, like the Levitt family, especially looked ahead to the new postwar world because of both the anticipated enormity of demand for new and innovative housing, and for the technological breakthroughs the experience of global atomic warfare had opened up. Although communities such as Levittown brought the ideal of suburbia ⎯ heaven on earth ⎯ to the working class with the rapidity of America’s marvelous industry, it did so in such a way that frightened many critics. For the first time in history, as was stated by New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, communities like Levittown were “social creations more than architectural ones” ⎯ cultural extensions more than shelters for survival ⎯ condit