If not consumerism, what?

David Rieff e-mails to say:

You've done something very important in trying to further the debate on the culture of consumption. I liked the piece you quoted very much, but would myself add two elements.

The first is --- and you must forgive me for showing myself to be such a person of my class and generation --- the alienation of labor. What I mean by this is less Marx's use of this as a predictive device since, after all, he was wrong about the class struggle or, at least, misunderstood its essential nature.

I am speaking literally. Most work is boring, whether it is the assembly line, the county or city office, the call center, the check-out line and the stockroom, etc.. From my experience of corporate America --- especially Wall Street --- many people there, too, think what they do is boring (think of what mergers and acquisitions really involves for those facilitating it!), and are reconciled to it only because of the money. And what money has been as a palliative for the alienation of Wall Street or corporate law, consumer goods have been for middle and lower-middle class people.

In my vulgar materialist, old-fashioned radical way, I actually think that it was the cheapness of Chinese consumer goods that kept the lower middle class from lurching in a liberal direction earlier, though this may be too deterministic. I don't agree with Thomas Frank that economic issues are by definition more important than social issues, but I do think that material pleasures combined with social issues are what, to tweak his formulation, really went on in Kansas.

The second point is the culture of celebrity and the thirst for recognition. In the past, this was the preserve of the aristocracy, later of Bohemia, and finally of the world of sports and entertainment. But the 'Andy Warholization' of the world --- not in the sense of his celebrated phrase that everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes but rather that everyone would hunger for fame --- almost inevitably entails dependence on the culture of the media, which means the market. Daniel Bell and Christopher Lasch had a lot to say about this. But if you haven't done so, read the 60s French anarchist [an over-simplification] Guy Debord on 'The Society of the Spectacle.' It can be hard going, but in fact this thinker and activists of the extreme left saw this all coming half a century ago.

So we ask people to do what? Work harder in their thankless jobs, but be less materialistic; say no to the major currents in the culture and replace it with what...? Rick Warren's purpose-driven life? Talk about anti-materialism lite! And your Benedict Option is, by definition in the classic dialectical sense, a minority movement.

Historically, the only way such majoritarian trends as powerful as consumer culture can be reversed is through a religious revival (Methodism in the Britain of the industrial revolution, and, I would argue, Islamic fundamentalism today [be careful what you wish for!]), or socialism, and of course the former is largely discredited even if it is staging a small comeback in Latin America at the moment. And the impetus toward the final victory of consumerism comes now from China --- perhaps the most materialistic society on earth at present and also one of the dominant forces of this century, even if, like me, you don't buy the idea of a Chinese century at least in the sense the 20th was the American century. I make this point because it is important to at a minimum take into account the very real possibility that anything those who want to offer an alternative to consumerism in the US do will be negated by the China's ever-growing influence.

My own view, which interests me a lot less than my analysis (I feel this way about all my work), is that consumerism is Promethean knowledge and that the only alternative to it is economic catastrophe --- something only the most convinced of misanthropes could possibly welcome.

Is he correct? Is the only alternative to being poor but virtuous being rich but corrupted by materialism? I think there's a big middle ground, but it's unstable. Sorokin finds the ideal society to be the mediation between ideational (i.e., religious or spiritual) and sensate (i.e., materialistic), but he admits that that's very hard to pull off.

I'm out the door to lunch in two minutes, but it occurs to me that the Netherlands is a great example of a prosperous culture in which modesty and frugality are deeply imbedded in the national psyche. They may not have religion any more in Holland, but they are faithful to the ideal of unostentatious living, and self-discipline. As I always tell people, the reason soft drug legalization can work in Holland but would be a big problem in America is the same reason that all-you-can-eat pizza buffets wouldn't work in Holland. It goes deeply against the grain of the culture.

Anyway, discuss (especially you, Daniel Larison and James Poulos). I'm going out for hummus. Nativity Fast, you know.