Epicurus at the food court.

When my tax return arrived this year, I drove out to the large mall that used to sit on the edge of town but is now surrounded by full-throttle "growth" or "sprawl," depending on your politics. A Sears Automotive Center resides in the middle of the mall's parking lot, next to an Olive Garden restaurant (imagine that aesthetic misalignment anywhere but in the United States).

I walked to the mall and wandered around. I hadn't shopped there for awhile and slowly a thought dawned on me: although no one wants to admit it, the United States is a country run by teenagers. Behind lifeless store manikins inevitably hang posters of smiling youths ranging in age from fifteen to twenty-one. Look where you will in the mall and almost every image you see is that of an adolescent. With their $90-a-week in disposable income ($141 billion annually, according to Kipp Cheng's 1999 Brandweek article, "Setting Their Sites on Generation 'Y'"), teenagers dictate style and, in turn, "economic growth" to the companies that then dictate tax incentives, tariffs, and the easing of environmental restrictions to the politicians whose election campaigns they bankroll.

I stopped at the food court--a corridor of neon opulence--and bought a soft drink. I found a table out of the way of the main foot traffic and watched people come and go.

The mall isn't just for the beautiful, though beauty, of course, is the goal. Nor is it just for the young, though they clearly seem the most at home here. You have to give the mall credit--as public space goes, it is fairly democratic. You can look, you can buy, you can loiter. When a black boy and a white girl walk holding hands, nobody turns to stare as they might in another public space--such as, say, the Baptist church I grew up in. As I people-watched I observed four sharply dressed professional women eating at a table that was next to a family which was obviously less advantaged. There were girls who shopped alone or in small groups, wearing black, butt-hugging pants that flare out around platform shoes. There were boys, seemingly always in packs, clad in NBA team jerseys. There were girls wearing low-cut tops trying to look older and women in "Tommy Girl" T-shirts trying to look younger. There were people in wheelchairs and couples with strollers. Nearly everyone seemed to be carrying a shopping bag bearing a picture of a bare-chested male model. On closer inspection, I realized this was the bag from Abercrombie and Fitch.

In my own satchel I had several books, along with some half-finished poems and a pile of students' papers that needed grading. But since I was sitting in the food court, I dug out the Essential Epicurus (translated by Eugene O'Connor). In a sense, the ancient Greek philosopher does belong in the food court. His name and philosophy survive chiefly in the way we refer to someone with a passion for good food and drink as an epicurean.

I turned to the 2300-year-old "Letter to Menoeceus," in which Epicurus declares that we must "pursue the things that make for happiness, seeing that when happiness is present, we have everything; but when it is absent we do everything to possess it." In other words, do what makes you happy. Nothing is intrinsically good or bad, a virtue or a vice. Values change with the empires.

As for the gods, says Epicurus, they may exist in some far-off realm but they certainly don't concern themselves with the carryings on of this diminutive planet. If they did, they wouldn't be gods--they would be next-door neighbors. So there is no need to fear the gods nor reason to pretend we can know anything about them.

Epicurean philosophy veers close to Buddhism in that Epicurus never sought a metaphysical reason for life's sorrow and suffering. The religions of the West say that we suffer because we sin, thus this world must always seem in some sense like exile. For Epicurus this was an intolerable position that always interferes with happiness--that all philosophy and religion can in the end honestly say is that pleasure is good, pain is bad, end of story.

Seen in this light, epicurean philosophy would appear to be very contemporary, very American. Couldn't the motto inscribed over the gate of the garden where Epicurus taught just as easily be placed above every mall entrance? "Guest, you will be happy here, for here happiness is esteemed the highest good." What do we seek at the mall if not things to make us happy?

On the opposite side of town, I often see poor Latino men and women shopping at a large Salvation Army store. Many of them are migrant workers who have come to cut tobacco, work on horse farms, and perform the many jobs citizens don't want. They shop out of necessity. They look for essential items: a pair of boots, some workpants, a winter coat. They purchase items that are vital, while across town most shoppers have what they need and are buying what they want--what they think will make them happy.

Of course, the knotty question is: what will make us happy? Epicurus answered: self-sufficiency for one thing, prudence for another. And suddenly we are somewhere other than the mall.

"They take the sweetest pleasure in luxury who have least need of it," Epicurus wrote to Menoeceus. "Everything easy to procure is natural while everything difficult to obtain is superfluous." This formula strikes me as the hinge of Epicurean philosophy. The things that will make us truly happy are easy enough to get; if the cost of something is too great, we can be happy without it. Epicurus read the evidence for this maxim everywhere in the natural world, as would another teacher of voluntary poverty who, four hundred years later, urged his followers to learn their economy from the lilies of the field and the birds in the sky. Or, to transpose the maxim into a more familiar one, consider this uncharacteristically bitter passage from Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself":

   I think I could turn and live with animals, they
   are so placid and self-contain'd;
   I stand and look at them long and long.

   They do not sweat and whine about their
   condition;
   They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for
   their sins;
   They do not make me sick discussing their
   duty to God;
   Not one is dissatisfied--not one is demented
   with the mania of owning things;
   Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that
   lived thousands of years ago;
   Not one is respectable of industrious over the
   whole earth.

Whitman seems on the verge of abandoning the human race altogether, so far has it drifted from the laws of its own nature. His animals, by contrast, are perfect Epicureans. They fear neither God nor death; they procure only what they need; they are self-sufficient; they never question why life gets hard.

Epicurus adds that, while natural wealth reaches a point of satiety, "the riches of idle fancies go on forever." We might realize just how far our own artificial economy has drifted from the economy of nature if we would admit that our system is based precisely on the wager that our yearning for idle fancies goes on forever.

That the economy of nature cannot sustain for much longer the consumption-waste economy of the mall is a truth we try to bury beneath more and more acres of asphalt. Americans comprise 5 percent of the world's population yet consume nearly 25 percent of its resources. This statistic alone should tell us something about the events of September 11, 2001. Yet by September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush was urging Americans to be brave--and get back to the mall. What else could we do? We are caught in an economy of insatiability; the nation depends upon it.

I take this frightening dilemma to be the subject of the popular science fiction film the Matrix. In it, the Earth has been destroyed and a few humans war against machines that have evolved along a Darwinian model to form their own artificial intelligence. When the machines capture the human Morpheus, he is interrogated by the cyborg Agent Smith, who lectures:

   When I tried to classify your species, I realized
   you're not actually mammals. Every mammal
   on this planet instinctively develops a natural
   equilibrium with the surrounding environment,
   but you humans do not. You move to an
   area and multiply until every natural resource
   is consumed and the only way you can survive
   is to spread to another area. There is another
   organism on this planet that follows this same
   pattern. And do you know what it is? A virus.
   Human beings ate a disease, a cancer on this
   planet.

As with the best science fiction, the Matrix dramatizes a more mundane reality that most people choose not to recognize. Ecologists tell us that once ecosystems reach climax state they tend toward not exactly stasis but at least stability, a symbiotic equilibrium. And most alarming for Homo sapiens, according to Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan in the book Microcosmos, is that the fossil record reveals that overpopulation and overconsumption are the two surest signs that a species is on the verge of extinction. Alien cyborgs need not lift a finger. Nature itself will ultimately deal with the species that refuses to recognize the limits of the larger economy.

But what if we changed things ourselves? After all, says Epicurus, to study those laws of nature "makes men modest and self-sufficient, taking pride in the good that lies in themselves, not in their estate." Wouldn't the study of nature curb our insatiability, make us more self-reliant?

Consider the example of writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, who may have been the truest American student of Epicurus. Upon graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau delivered his first speech, a commencement address entitled "The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times." In it he presented the philosophy that would guide the test of his life. Instead of abiding by the ordinary workweek, which he believed stretches all the way back to the very first week of biblical creation, he determined to live in a way that required him to work only one day (usually as a surveyor) and make "the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul." Thoreau spent that six-day sabbatical walking for hours, studying the culture of the Penobscot, Maine, natives, observing the ingenious ways plants distribute their seeds, writing in his journal, visiting with friends, working in his garden--all pursuits that cost nothing but carry the satisfactions of discovery, well-turned phrases, and conviviality.

Thoreau's study of nature, of course, led him to a two-year sojourn beside Walden Pond. What he said first brought him there was a determination to discover what animals truly need to survive and how much more a human animal needs before driven to distraction--driven by "business" into a perpetual busy-ness that was no life at all. Thoreau decided that, most basically, what we need to survive is heat. So he built a stone hearth and a cabin around it. He planted beans that his body would transform into energy to heat the internal tire. He was able to survive. Soon Thoreau decided that he needed a white pine table, a few important books, his journal, and his flute. That was about it--and he was happy.

Thoreau's minimizing of his own accoutrements and his intense study of the natural world taught him how little he actually needed to be productive and content. Moreover, he realized at Walden Pond what the Epicureans discovered in their garden school outside Athens, Greece: that to live modestly and self-reliantly does indeed cause one to take pleasure in what lies within rather than in one's estate. Perhaps one must give up one's estate--as Thoreau gave up his father's pencil-making business--to see this clearly.

But once the realization hits, the formula's last variable falls into place. "The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom," Epicurus told his students, one of whom wrote it in a manuscript discovered at the Vatican in 1888. Thoreau was well aware of the most obvious meanings of the terms freedom and slavery (he had, after all, helped smuggle John Brown out of Concord, Massachusetts). But he also knew that each term took on more subtle forms. Being made to obey unjust laws is no kind of freedom and the freedom to buy can become its own kind of slavery. Thoreau had thought about buying a farm but soon realized that he would become its prisoner, laboring not to feed himself but to pay off his mortgage. "If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure, that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for," he wrote in the essay "Life Without Principle." It is precisely for this reason that Epicurus called poverty "great wealth" and, conversely, "limitless wealth, great poverty."

Which brings us back to the mall, where, more than any other social sphere, we have debased the ideal of freedom. We express this only in terms of choosing among a hundred or so stores--the same emporiums that fill every mail in the United States--instead of the freedom to have our voices actually heard when it comes to, say, defending the Clean Water Act, opposing the proliferation of cheap guns, or regulating the corporate money that buys elections. No, the mall isn't a realm of public speech but of quiet consumption. The American dream has become a dream of accumulation.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Thomas Jefferson charged humanities teachers with the responsibility to help liberate students from the ideas of the majority and teach them the intellectual tools of citizenship. The liberal arts, after all, derive from the Latin word liberalis: pertaining to the free person. I take this charge seriously. At the first meeting of every composition class I hold forth a Jeffersonian mini-lecture about what college is really for and I try to emphasize a citizen-over-consumer mentality. It is meant to be inspirational and my students listen, sometimes even nodding politely. But it is a hard sell, and each semester I hear myself sounding more and more antiquarian. It isn't that my students aren't willing to hear me out; they acknowledge that I'm a serious-sounding guy with ideas that are laudable in principle. But in the end most are pragmatists, deeply suspicious of any value system than cannot be qualified monetarily.

Presumably, immediately after my cri de coeur on writing and citizenship, my students walk over to the university bookstore, where a credit card application is placed in every shopping bag as they buy the books required for my class. The cover of the Platinum Citibank brochure promises an interest rate of only 8.9 percent (though the six-point print inside admits that it will jump to 18.15 percent after nine months). As a result, the average undergraduate owes nearly $3,000 in debt (to say nothing of student loans), according to a March 2001 U.S. News and World Report article. By the time students reach their senior year--the same age at which Thoreau was formulating his philosophy of freedom from wage slavery--it is too late for them.

A variant on Epicurus' maxim about self-sufficiency, stated by the ancient stoic Roman philosopher Seneca, runs, "If you shape your life to people's opinions, you will never be rich." Based on this definition, the United States is a very poor nation.

Seneca adds to Epicurus' original sentiment the idea that accumulating superfluous material items is inevitably linked to seeking approval from others. According to my mall's directory of stores, forty-three sell clothes, ten sell shoes, ten sell jewelry, twelve are dedicated to "beauty," and then there is the food court. A handful of "specialty stores" sell electronics, compact disks, books, and greeting cards. If we imagine the mall itself as the body politic lying sprawled in a field of asphalt, we would have to conclude that what makes the millennial American happy is to be judged solely by outward appearance. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that the happiness of contemporary Americans--especially young Americans--is largely defined by the need for others' approval.

If we take the anthropomorphic idea further, we might conclude that all of this accumulation is a symptom of what psychologist Carl Jung termed the "empty self," where the persona (Greek for mask) has completely taken over. The mall is about nothing if not persona--the mirror defining who we are. It cares little for how we might define ourselves beyond clothes, shoes, cosmetics, and jewelry. The mall--that is, the self--has become increasingly alienated from its psyche, its soul, and as a consequence has abandoned--to borrow a phrase from Jung's essay "The Difference Between Eastern and Western Thinking"--"the self-liberating power of the introverted mind." Epicurus called this the good that lies within.

Jung wasn't the first to observe that, just as the East has always valued introversion, the West is inherently extroverted. He insisted, however, Westerners must still find the "East within" if the self is ever to move beyond persona. In "Passage to India," Whitman used the literal building of the transcontinental railroad as a psychic symbol of this bridging of the internal and external self. But the contemporary Westerner has refused Whitman's journey. To misquote Thoreau, we have traveled much at the mall.

In my own travels around the mall, I realized how all of the pleasures on offer are so passive and meant to induce the passive "wear this, watch this, listen to this." Aside from cameras, telescopes, and chess sets, I could hardly find any product that actually tasked the consumer to do or learn something. This is significant because we aren't educating children to take pleasure in what they might create or skills they might master--activities that would give them a sense of confidence, accomplishment, pride.

So, said Epicurus, we require prudence. "Prudence teaches us how impossible it is to live pleasantly without living wisely, virtuously, and justly, just as we cannot live wisely, virtuously, and justly without living pleasantly." But more seriously, we cannot, as Thoreau said, enjoy ourselves if we are standing on the shoulders of someone else. And yet so many items in the mall are made in a developing nation, under poor conditions, by poor, underpaid workers. Just check the labels. A leather Nike soccer ball stamped "hand sewn" might mean the hall was sewn by children with small fingers who were sold into slavery by their parents and who worked in a sweatshop for six cents an hour, ten hours a day, to buy their freedom. Sydney H. Schanberg, the investigative reporter made famous by the film The Killing Fields, recounted these grisly findings in his July 1996 Life essay "Six Cents an Hour." If Karl Marx's class theories seem outdated today, his theory of alienation of labor still remains prescient.

But instead of alleviating international hatred of the United States by alleviating the poverty we cause around the world, our leaders propose instead to inoculate us further from that other world with the promise of a missile defense shield. Our prosperity depends on the poverty of workers in developing nations. Were they offered education instead of oppressive labor they might lift themselves out of the sweatshop--but then who would make the shoes? Or worse, they might want the prosperity we enjoy--creating an even greater level of consumption that we know the planet couldn't sustain. We thus accept an economy whose byproducts are brutality, rapaciousness, and environmental contamination.

We could, if motivated, demand through the power of our credit cards that the manufacturers of the products we buy treat their foreign employees fairly by hiring only adults and paying them a wage that would keep their children out of sweatshops and in school. We could begin to think about the quality instead of the quantity of what we buy. We could move to an economy based on the principle of renewal through recycling, reuse, and repair.

The global ecology--the forest system in which a tree falls and decomposes, for example--is intelligent. Nature has been perfecting this economy and recovering from stellar catastrophes for two billion years--one billion, seven hundred fifty million years longer than homo sapiens' existence. If we could ever overcome our biblical delusions that we were put here to dominate the natural world, we might finally realize that the economy of nature is far more prudent, intelligent, and just than our economy of consumption.

Instead of making fashion a statement of superiority and shallow persona identity, we might think of fashion as an assemblage art that salvages the old into interesting and highly individual contexts. And by returning and exchanging our clothes at thrift stores, we would know we were no longer perpetuating a sweatshop economy. As far as athletic shoes are concerned, we should research purchases and buy only from companies that pay workers a true living wage.

Alas, the food court. Try to imagine what a U.S. city street looked like before it was lined with the fast food industry's gaudy, intrusive signs and vapid architecture. This landscape is so artificial, redundant, and lacking in character that we simply become immune to it. How much more pleasant would be clusters of locally owned restaurants surrounded by tree-shaded terraces, serving local regional cuisine, or French-style bistros where the salads and vegetables come from the gardens out behind the kitchens. We must make eating out more about our appreciation for those who grew, prepared, and served our food.

What all of this points to isn't only a natural economy but a local one. It would begin, for example, by making jewelry in one's own home, growing vegetables in one's own garden, and recycling "waste" in the backyard compost bin. This would expand to include local artists and artisans, as well as farmers who sell fresh, pesticide-free fruits and vegetables off the back of their trucks. We would know that the things we buy from these locals caused oppression to no one. And the more we produce, consume, and recycle within a local economy, the more we ease the burden we have placed on the rest of the world. To lose regional traditions is to promote a toxic cultural homogeneity. Nature doesn't plant monocultures and kids in Kentucky shouldn't be buying the same clothes and listening to the same music as kids in California.

I suppose what I find myself arguing for is an artisan culture to replace the popular culture for which the mall is the most enduring purveyor. William Morris, a Victorian poet and artist who started his famous "firm" in 1861, set about designing stained glass, wallpaper, furniture tapestries, and paintings. Morris could neither understand nor abide a society of mass-produced, ugly commodities made under oppressive or uninspiring conditions. For Morris, to see as works of art--and use--hand-thrown stoneware plates and hand-carved wooden spoons is to make an art out of ordinary daily life.

So, what if the mall were transformed and its stores made into after-school art and learning spaces where children from town might come to study dance, painting, music, photography, theater, pottery, poetry, filmmaking, cooking, gardening, clothing design, or furniture making? Students could apprentice themselves to local artists and artisans who would volunteer their services. In this way, an experiment in community would replace a failed exercise in competition. Students might learn to make traditional African drums or Appalachian dulcimers. A greenhouse might be built on the remnant of soil that still remains at one end of the mall and there students could learn the principles of organic gardening or landscaping. The greenhouse could supply the culinary shops that might run several "sidewalk" cafes in the middle of the mall. The common space would be an ever-evolving performance and exhibition area where students might combine different art forms, such as poetry and dance, to create experimental street theater. The abandoned movie theaters could be reutilized to premiere the works of budding filmmakers. Each Saturday could be a "market fair" where the artisan students sell their pottery, furniture, and clothes, while the artists sell their paintings and photographs. They might barter: a table setting in exchange for a prom dress. Slowly, these kids might forget about miracle bras, video games, and Eminem CDs.

A true popular culture must come from the populous and this is what these young artists and artisans would be creating: their own culture. And in the process, they would be creating something just as unique: themselves. This bildung, of self-cultivation, is a nineteenth-century notion that Emerson imported into American usage from German Romanticism. It begins with the shift from passive to active learning, from observing to experiencing, through creative acts. When inner resources are coupled with outward mentoring--when an artisan culture replaces a consumer culture--we can produce a generation that understands individualism to mean more than wardrobe exchange and cosmetic alteration. Through the skills acquired at this reinvented firm, young people would develop the prudence to know a well-made, beautiful object from a cheap, mass-produced fraud. They would be---dare I say it--happy.

Erik Anderson Reece is a freelance writer who has been published in Dissent, Great River Review, and the Seneca Review. His commentary on the paintings of Guy Davenport, entitled A Balance of Quinces, is available from New Directions press.