Rod quotes David Rieff, who writes in personally, and reflects:
consumerism is Promethean knowledge and [ . . . ] 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.
That big middle ground is only as stable as we make our capital, but it strikes me as too panicky and despairing to say that this is hugely difficult. What’s hugely difficult is to willfully change an entire culture in the direction of mediated stability. What’s not so hard is to do it yourself. Stop paying for cable television. Buy secondhand and antique furniture. Avoid the corporate toy machine when buying things for your children. Some of us worry that the only way to fight the cult of upward mobility is by encouraging a counterculture of downward mobility. This is not only impracticable but also unfair; what matters more, by my lights, is that we temper our interest in upward mobility by pursuing it only as a means to upward nobility . The economy of consumption isn’t going to go away anytime soon, because we’ve learned that the commodities we want most of all are the ones that give us a "sense of" harmony between our unique selves and the crazily, sometimes randomly shifting world at large.
Consumerism is only a real problem, in other words, to the degree that we lack the right ethic of consumption. And we tie ourselves erringly to an overly economic view of life if we think that more consumption is worse and less is better. Quantity is not the issue, but quality. And I think we can work out an ethic of upward nobility as consumers that helps us work out in a practical way what we should spend our free time and money on. Aspirational spending can "cash out" in a lot of different ways. An easy example sounds something like "buy a better education for your child instead of a big-screen television," or "buy yourself an electric guitar instead of a Spring Break vacation." It’s not just a matter of more "family-oriented" spending, as the family feast at McDonald’s can attest. And sure: it’s harder to buy "noble" goods and services when you’re less well off, but it’s obvious that Americans at every station on the class ladder have ample opportunities to blow their money on things that don’t really redound to the sort of abiding satisfaction they seek. You can’t buy that kind of deep, peaceful repose, but it strikes me as evident that, within a fairly wide range of incomes (and granting what Will Wilkinson and others say about the insane difficulty of being happily impoverished), you can use your money to fortify yourself with things and experiences that really strengthen personal nobility — whether you’re single, married, and with or without children.
In many cases these will be different combinations of goods, services, and experiences. But given how miserable we all know we can be trying to buy happiness, I think we have the cultural maturity to start talking about what the ingredients of our upward nobility might be . . . without getting into pejorative screaming matches. Given the Promethean quality of our knowledge of transaction, there may be no responsible alternative.
