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Summary Of Cloutier's The Vice Of Luxury

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The central purpose of Cloutier’s The Vice of Luxury is to encourage the audience to redefine the way in which we think about luxury. Cloutier’s final comment is that we should “seek first the Kingdom” (279) summarizing his idea that our ultimate ends in life should be God and helping others rather than material goods. Oftentimes in society today we mistake materials goods to signal a good life, but Cloutier thinks we need to find happiness in the nonmaterial items in life. Cloutier clarifies that we should not give up all our possessions and believes that we need to avoid the current hero vs. villain mindset of all consumption or all charity. All of these different points work together in Cloutier’s book to emphasize that luxury needs to be …show more content…

Cloutier discusses the “distorting middle-class ‘exemption’” (6) early on to clarify that he is not simply targeting the upper class. Cloutier portrays the problem as a problem for everyone and that if we hope to solve this issue then we need to stop groups from putting off the issue onto other groups. Cloutier says that 83% of the American population fall between the poverty line and the $250,000 annual income scale and this group possesses “an enormous amount of resources with its spending choices” (7), so if the problem is to be solved it needs to be oriented around the middle class and not merely around the powerful, upper class. This is slightly different from liberation theologians like Cone and Harrison who pen many issues on the most powerful groups, like the upper class in this case. However, his views are similar to liberation theologians as well as he thinks the middle-class, a group with power and privilege, is largely to blame for this issue of luxury and classism. Cloutier addresses liberation theologies directly on page 126 and believes that these theologies offer guidance in restricting individual morality and private devotions. The reason for this widespread audience of Cloutier is that while the upper-class may spend more on luxury they only represent a small portion of the population – this means that if Americans truly want to solve the widespread issue of luxury then everyone needs to take it upon themselves to consume in a more frugal

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