The Age of Spectacle, Part 7
Chapter 2: Underturtle I: Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence, part 1
Having completed Chapter 1 of The Age of Spectacle, The Raspberry Patch now proceeds with the first part of Chapter 2. (You were expecting a curveball maybe….Chapter 9, part 4? Nope.) The second and final part of Chapter 2 will post next Friday, May 24. I am not as happy with the way this chapter reads at present as I am with much of the rest of the book, but as already noted, I’m hoping that the drill we are running together on this manuscript will help me fix it.
Remember that the first part of the book (“Puzzle Pieces”….see the table of contents at the end of the post if you are not sure where we are) takes up precursors in the culture—each moving at its own pace and in its own way while often but not always intermingling with the others—for the birthing of The Age of Spectacle. Everything has an origin, and, as Terrance Deacon wrote in his 1997 book The Symbolic Species, “knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works.” Same here: To know how and why spectacle—astounding-complex-rich entertainment—has become so central to contemporary American culture, we have to understand synoptically the strands of its origin.
At a time of impatience and present shock characteristic of a spectacalized culture, some readers, especially young natives of the digitized world, may find this organizational scheme and rollout velocity tedious, almost maddening. If that’s you, I sympathize. But try to think of the ordeal as reality therapy, as a necessary corrective to the derangements of our dumbed-down, sped-up, and plutocratically rolled over times. It’s good for you to persevere, the way slow food is better for you than fast food, the way honest work is more valuable to you than passive leisure, and the way physical therapy invests pain for the sake of healing.
Here we go…….from the top of Chapter 2.
Undreamed of affluence in late 20th and early 21st-century America has conduced—as it always has everywhere—to decadence.[1] Decadence takes multiple forms; even a short list is not very short. A summary of major themes looks something like this.
First, the capitalist framework that enables affluence in contemporary times is good at valuing material things, to the point of obsession in many cases, but not very good at valuing virtue and character. As traditional faith communities have lost traction, and not been replaced by anything as normatively sturdy and broadly shared, an imbalance has arisen in which desires are freed from self-control and discipline. The result is a kind of aimless hedonism that is very vulnerable to decadence and dissipation as a way of life. Aimless hedonism is boring whenever a new spark is unavailable to satisfy its appetite, and so an addictive side to the condition is common, one that needs ever larger doses of pleasure to satisfy cravings. Happiness this does not produce, only the emotional simulacrum of it.
Second, affluence abets isolation and isolation at social scale depletes social capital.
Third, affluence kindles risk aversion, and so plays into the short-term flip-it mentality that doubles back to make affluence ultimately fragile. This expresses a key aspect of the cultural contradictions of capitalism about which Daniel Bell wrote brilliantly some years ago. The internal combustion engine of risk aversion is the well-established social science fact that most people care much more about losing some value they have than they do about gaining the same amount of that value looking forward. This aligns with rational improvidence, described below, that many observers—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Max Weber—have identified using other language. Pace the positivist presumption, few people are value maximizers; they are satisficers, to use Herbert A. Simon’s term, not only when it comes to material acquisition but also, in an age of increasing symbol manipulation, with regard to intellectual and ideational exertion of all kinds. Affluence makes life easy for satisficers, too easy.
Fourth and finally by way of major themes, affluence displaces absolute metrics of well being with relativized ones, leading away from material-defined competitions to status competitions. More people can conceive what “enough” means in terms of basic living standards than they can abide others seeming to have more, and being happier for it.
Beyond these major themes are many dozens of minor ones each with implications for how American, and also with variations most Western, societies think and feel about their circumstances. Whole books have been written about this by sociologists economics both macro and especially “behavioral,” anthropologists, and political scientists. We need not repeat them here. We need only cherry pick some of the insights we need to help on out way to understanding where spectacle has set down its roots.
Decadence as Laziness
Affluence has sired intellectual laziness in the form of a general preference for empirically unmoored spontaneous abstractions over patiently examined facts. It has called forth a general decay of standards in everything from writing to moral reasoning to plain politeness. It has helped sired the reduced status of truth relative to vague notions of subjective experience. It has diminished the status of work relative to that of creative leisure or, far more often one suspects, passive numbing leisure.
It has also diminished the basis of the virtue of providence. Why be frugal and plan with care when fear of scarcity has lost its grip? A century ago, in a less urbanized and far less wealthy nation, nearly every non-farm household not stuffed into a city had a kitchen or cottage garden of one kind or another. It cut the costs of putting food on the table, reduced the frequency of needing to go grocery shopping, and typically provided fresher and healthier fare. But affluence created the multi-pronged isolation of suburbia and what for lack of a better term might be called rational improvidence.
Under other names rational improvidence has long been recognized as a mode of behavior of the wealthier segments of society, but when the vast majority of an affluence society practices it the culture experiences a qualitative state change. It creates a kind of inversion: People who make things, acquire touch skills, plan and work with discipline become not the majority but the atavistic freaks gawked at by those on their way home from the tanning salon, the medi-pedi experience, or the golf game. Seriously, they declaim, why grow your own peas and beans when you can afford to buy them processed in a glass jar or stuffed into a plastic bag at Whole Foods?
So out went the veg long ago, in came the ornamentals and flowers, and then much of the time came the commercial landscaping services to take care of them. People who do this often suppose they’re rich when in truth they are getting poorer where it matters day by day. Commercial landscaping services are great if you are engaged in a status competition, but hiring one to do what you are still able to do obscures what you lose in the process. Doing your own veg gardening takes physical effort as well as planning; you may even need to build something like a trellis or a fence. Heaven forfend you might get some exercise and not have to go to gym to do it. It takes time, too, and healthfully slows you down to normal circadian rhythms—indeed, gardening is the world’s slowest moving performing art. Many affluent people seem to prefer to spend time on doing nothing productive in particular. This is how touch skills are lost and brains impoverished in the process. It is also how lazy people make themselves sick. Affluent American society today is not a particularly healthy society, and no mystery occludes the main reason: laziness of all kinds. It’s great for Big Pharma though…
Lazy Politics
Affluence has also begotten alienation from politics. In modern, materialist times, political orders are like trees known best by their fruits, so if the expectation of abundant fruit is inured in most minds politics will seem to many either a luxury or a bother, or both. Some social scientists have called that attitude rational apathy. It goes nicely with rational improvidence. It is also a form of laziness.
All this was true before the digital age. Now that we surf the digital tsunami, or try to, affluence has acquired an additional and supercharged importance. As a category the most important aspect of this is the net effect, discussed below in a separate chapter—Chapter 5—both because it is that important and because elements of the end of modernity (Chapter 3) and deep literacy erosion (Chapter 4) are necessary to put the net effect in full context. But an array of subsidiary effects on the political culture begs mention first.
A vacuum of seriousness about the bottom really falling out of the economy allows for the development of politics as just another form of entertainment.[2] Affluence helps to norm immersion in fictive-like drama as a form of reality, especially when delivered as moving mediated images on two-dimensional screens that are not, after all, three-dimensionally real. As this form of ersatz or mediated reality becomes more salient it captures new domains of social life, including political life, as it projects its absorbed-by-repetition structural brackets outward unawares.
Example? Have you ever had a conversation with a friend or family member who seemed unable to distinguish, say, the plotline of an episode of “West Wing” from a granular newspaper account of something that actually happened in or near the Oval Office, and was even prepared to grant veracity’s pride of place to the former? This is a form of ideational laziness. It’s so easy to get one’s understanding of political reality from screens. No need to think, to read, to ask questions and seek answers, even to seek out others for face-to-face discussion: It’s all just served up entertainingly to each individual like cocktails and hors d’oevres, whenever and—with smartphones wherever—we want it.
Mistaking fictive and infotainment versions of political reality for the real thing is an increasingly common experience now that least a third of the world’s population spends the better part of any given day fixated on a television screen, a computer screen, a smartphone screen, and often all three….sometimes at the same time. Does its being so common make it more or less unnerving? A question worth pondering, perhaps.
Over time, decades of affluence—and in the past thirty years the absence of perception of an existential national security threat—has debased politicians as reality managers and turned them into a collection of mostly feckless performative gesturers. Ever fewer of them seem to mind because they know where the audience’s head—the electorate’s head, that is—is these days, and most politicians seem to care more about preserving tenure than legislating. To achieve the former fundraising skills are paramount; to do the latter requires understanding some esoteric issues and doing some real work. It means wrestling with tradeoffs and possibly alienating part of one’s otherwise natural constituency. That’s real work: Why do it if it can be avoided? Pander to those who are receptive instead—so much easier.
And that mindset has gradually but significantly affected the nature of recruitment into American politics, partly explaining why all the young talent presumed to be waiting to lead the nation to ever greater heights is in truth….very, very thin on the bench. Not a few serious and capable people of genuine good character are repulsed by the idea of a political career, and not a few have left national politics of their own accord out of disillusionment over what it has become.
Consider in that light a vignette from slightly aged popular culture: In the 1979 film Being There, based on Jerzy Kosinski’s book of the same name, Peter Sellers, playing Chauncy Gardener, at one point emerges from a limo into a clot of reporters. One reporter shoves a microphone toward Chauncy and asks him what he thinks about today’s Washington Post editorial commenting on remarks he made the day before. Chauncy turns calmly to the reporter and answers, “I don’t read the newspapers. I watch television.” And with that the film’s director, Hal Ashby, has the camera zoom in on the reporter, as if the film’s viewer is suddenly watching the TV news from his living room sofa, and the reporter says: “There you have it: One honest man in Washington who admits he doesn’t read the newspapers.”
This is hilarious because everyone watching knows by this point that Chauncy doesn’t read anything, because he is illiterate. Now, nearly 45 years later, the humor in this scene has grown tenebrous, if indeed any humor is left in it at all. As was not the case as recently as the mid-1980s, in the U.S. Senate at least, few members of the American political class these days have inculcated a serious reading regimen, and we have had a President who even found it useful politically to tell the nation that he didn’t read—like Chauncy, he watched television. Televisions blare, the internet beckons, and Twitter/X spurts derange the coherence of time and logical syntax in nearly every House and Senate office as principals and staff alike feel pressured to “keep up” with the frenetic pace determined by the incessant social media flood. We are in a race to nowhere we should want to go, but somehow we can’t stop running. In that kind of mental space pandering of one kind or another is all that most politicians can find time for.
Away from the race, up in the spectator seats, there sits an overweening sense of entitlement among well-heeled elites—the “overclass” referenced in Chapter 1—and with it a relentless drive to lock in near-aristocratic privileges for the next generation. That drive has been mightily aided over the years by the much-discussed phenomenon of assortative marriage, itself a consequence of young women attending and graduating from college in numbers that would have astounded any of the nation’s 18th and 19th-century elites. That drive matches up against a keen corresponding sense of unfairness and envy among less well-situated classes, who have mostly grievances, real as well as exaggerated or imagined ones, to pass down.[3] Widening status inequality is at least as important a factor in American political life these days as income and wealth inequality. The former is underappreciated partly because it is hard for social scientists to measure; the latter is most often misunderstood and exaggerated because it too easy for ideologues to misrepresent what is measurable.[4]
Beyond the capacious impact of affluence and its recent discontents, failed myth maintenance combined with deep literacy erosion—our other two underturtles need to make a brief cameo appearance here—has created a vacuum into which simpleminded conceptions of both government and economy have flowed.
Classical liberalism represents an achievement of the political arts that emerged from the highly improbable conjunction of a rare moment’s twinned secular and religious innovation: the Enlightenment “Age of Reason” entwining with the Protestant Reformation. We’ll look more deeply into this twinning in the next chapter, but the basic result was something new and fine compared to the misanthropies of most pre-modern governance. It was, however, also something delicate and so requiring generation-to-generation transmission to appreciate, master, and turn to practice. Without study, an enterprise founded on certain minimal levels of at least semi-mass literacy will decay, and regressive pre-Enlightenment modes of zero-sum based thought will re-emerge.
They are now doing so with alacrity as the erosion of deep literacy hollows out the capacity of the education system to teach the essential of liberal democratic orders which, in turn, depend for their stickiness on an ecology of liberty anchored in the three main plinths of modernity: individual over communal agency; secularism in the arts as well as in politics; and some idea of progress, if not the Whig idea so deeply embedded in most of the Founders’ heads, then some other kindred idea affirming genuine human agency and reasonable optimism. Unless a person’s daily experience reinforces a set of abstract ideas that form a culture’s origin stories of credit and blame, those ideas will incline to decay from inanition. Those elements of modernity all stand eroded or eroding today, and so institutions erected on their self-evident veracity, to paraphrase Jefferson, will suffer from a growing amnesia within the body politic. It’s just like a garden, then (apologies to Kosinski and Sellers): Fail to plant and nurture what is beautiful and useful, and the weeds will return in a trice.
Put another way, the shift from scarcity to affluence marks the difference between a work- and production-focused culture in which genuine scarcity remained a social-psychological fact of life to one in which it is a marginal vestige of a transcended past to most people. People who are genuinely destitute, and certainly such people do live in our midst, are destitute not because not enough material goods exist to go around, but for what John Kenneth Galbraith many years ago, in his 1958 book The Affluent Society, called “case” poverty reasons: psychological illness, dysfunctional families, drug addiction, and other over-the-guardrails things that happen to too many people for reasons endlessly bemoaned and studied.
Put still another way, the shift marks the transformation of the ratio between needs and desires from one balanced toward the former to one balanced so dramatically toward the latter that both the composition and the very terms of the ratio tend to dissolve in consciousness. Implications abound.[5]
On the older side of the shift, battling with and in the physical world was the name of the game. At the newer end, nature is relatively less present and other people, with their various ideas, motives, and behaviors, are more present. So on the older side we were mainly manipulating stuff; on the newer side we are mainly manipulating symbols. Of course both go on. People are always manipulating other people in the workday world; doing so, however, is at least as prevalent and salient in a world dominated by symbols and uneven knowledge about how to do that as it was in an economically simpler time. On the older side quietude is not only possible but common in a workday characterized by independent if not necessarily solipsistic labor; families often worked together. On the newer side quietude is much scarcer and labor is far more often characterized by interdependent technique ensembles concerning both ideas and things. Much rarer today than a century and more ago is the craftsman who can dwell in his or her studio, concentrating on deploying developed touch skills to make things of use and beauty. When we lose such people and those skills we lose part of the nation’s soul.[6]
An irony here abides. Good arguments can be made that the breathtaking and reasonably widely shared affluence these interdependent techniques have created in the advanced countries, and nowhere more so than in the United States, have helped to nurture an extreme individualism. Affluence does that generally, and has for centuries, via the more acute differentiation of tastes and hence the creation of aesthetic as well as economic classes. Yet that individualism cohabits a social sphere in which individual autonomy in workplaces has much reduced for most compared to decades past; today it’s not only factory workers who are cogs in large operations, but symbol-manipulating organizations, as well, have tended to reduce salaried employees to ciphers when no way can be found to dispense with them via digitized automation. In other words, broadly shared affluence has made America a more egalitarian-minded place in many people’s heads just as the reality of the labor profile and even the nature of high-value work has moved in precisely the opposite direction.
This shift away from concern with mastery of the physical world has been widely dubbed a process of dematerialization, of “living in our heads,” and to a point quite justifiably so.[7] It’s undeniable and can be tracked in myriad ways: the shift over time in Ph.D.s granted to American natives away from the hard sciences, math, and engineering (foreign nationals have increasingly taken those spaces) to psychology, social work, and journalism; a similar shift in the vocabulary of written academic publications, measurable in content-analysis research, away from language associated with empirical matters and toward subjective ones. But dematerialization does not mean, because it cannot mean, that the material substructure of the social world has become for all practical purposes ignorable. The intertwined crisis of global warming, constricting biodiversity, and nano-plastic pollution vividly show that to be untrue. Those things, pace postmodernist magic, are not just in our heads and they exist no matter how anyone feels about them.
It also does not mean that the authors of The Social Construction of Reality wished to presage or later approved of postmodernist pretense. Distinguishing the key phenomenological characteristics of the social world from the physical world, on the one hand, and claiming that the physical world based on empirical reality does not for any practical purpose exist, or in some formulations even exist at all, is not a small nuance. It forms an epistemological abyss.[8] Phenomenology is not mysticism; it is sociological realism. Postmodernism often seems to come quite close to mysticism via the subjectivism of the mythical consciousness.
It also does not mean that when many highly reputable macroeconomists told us around thirty years ago that no socially significant differences existed, again for any practical purpose, between a manufacturing- and a service-focused economy they were not as tragicomically wrong as has since become apparent.[9] The fragility of American affluence in this century is to some extent predicated on not just analytical error of this sort but on forms of lazy wishful thinking that only a arrogant affluent elite, including a political elite, could conjure.
Just as the cybernetic revolution has brought about structural changes in institutional scale and process, generally favoring larger scale as we will see in Chapter 5, the partial dematerialization of economic energies has sired a host of downstream changes. The least surprising is that in a post-scarcity world symbol manipulators tend to have higher status and larger bank accounts than stuff manipulators and service workers. The action that matters happens in a virtualized social world, and the money goes where the action is thought to be because profit in market systems often aligns with the pioneer cutting edges of change. Over time that condition bears massive implications for authority and nearly all institutions in society that deploy authority. Authority has moved from men of action, men of martial competence, builders and enlightened tinkerers toward more genteel and feminine qualities, toward braininess and management, and from bands of brothers to gray faceless bureaucracies. Just as authority memes and institutions changed when the world moved from an agriculture-dominated economy to an industrial-dominated one, both are changing again as we move from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, and from that to nobody-knows-what-to call-it or even where, if anywhere in particular, it may actually be.[10]
With changes in authority in the culture come changes in tastes and aesthetics generally. It is, admittedly, notoriously difficult to distinguish real from artificial human appetites. Many have tried; no one considers the effort settled and done. But if one stands back a bit, it is impossible to miss the general trend, which Honoré de Balzac in an intriguing corner of Le Comedie Humaine, then Veblen, and then others noticed already a century and more ago, and which in the American 20th century tracks along reasonably well with the history of advertising--the core industrial folklore source of our day.[11]
Balzac, for his part, commented already in the mid-19th century on how any disposable monies accumulated by ordinary people were at one time concentrated into purchases of capital goods: better tools, looms, materials that could be fabricated into cottage-level merchandize. Then money tended to be spent instead on status goods: an elaborate door-knocker and fancier window trim for one’s house, a nice flower garden to accompany the vegetables, an expensive hat. From there, Balzac noted, people launched their money into dematerialized space, as we might call it now, for the sake of experiences: restaurant meals, concert tickets, summer vacations in the country.
If a writer saw this basic pattern unfurl during his own lifetime more than two centuries ago, what is to stop any of us from seeing its continuing upward tilt today as experience increasingly demands the excitement of spectacle? Yes, it’s another Potter Stewart moment: You do know it when you see it, but you must look.
Affluence and the Changing Image of Leadership
The passing or passed culture of the pre-affluent developmentalist age, depending on one’s judgment about what is still a moving analytical target, was moderated or gate-kept by social elites who for the most part took their responsibility for the common weal seriously. Politics was a vocation, to allude to Max Weber, and character beyond meritocratic metrics was an unashamed qualification for leadership. Before the middle of the 20th century, too, the vocational understanding of leadership, in politics and elsewhere, was tied to the underlying ethic of strong, near omnipresent faith communities. To be truly responsible, leadership did not lose sight of intergenerational responsibility, it tried at least to resist pushing disagreements into personal vendettas, and it recognized that humility was a virtue rather than a weakness. In the American context Protestantism’s normative precepts strongly reinforced all of these characteristics.
As a culture still rooted in faith and its institutional embodiments, at least the pro-modernist shard of the Reformation, embodied a realistic view of human nature. It presumed a social world in which natural as opposed to artificial hierarchy—“the natural aristocracy of talent and virtue,” as Jefferson and Adams spoke of it in their famous post-presidential correspondence—was taken to be an inalienable fact of life. The onrushing or already ensconced culture is, broadly speaking, far less steeped in traditional faith and far more de facto and insistently egalitarian and idealist, now to the point of tempting a kind of this-worldly utopic overreach that picks up where not discounted other-worldly eschatology left off.
Indeed, character itself has been deconstructed into a legacy of unfair parochial or “structural” advantage, leading among other things to interesting tussles at Harvard over admissions criteria and who gets to set them. Whether the Harvard trustees like it or not (they don’t), the meritocratic quantitative calculus is all that remains for entering into elite status, and money is the only agreed measure of merit in practice headed through career toward retirement and the grave-bound exit.[12] Elites are no longer expected to model character, to deploy inherited experience, or to exhibit virtue for the sake of emulation. They are there to show young people how to make money, how to act once one has made money, and how to show deference to worldly success. No more than that, except in various niches of traditional religious communities. So here the moral and vocational decay of elites bumps into the fact of material affluence and the shift from riches to status and experience competitions.
Situated in a context in which authority of all kinds has been disparaged and flattened by pseudo-democratic distortion, our self-diminished elites—our meritocracy, the word for once fitting Michael Young’s sarcastic original connotation[13]—with some noteworthy exceptions, accept little responsibility in practice for anything beyond their own personal or guild-professional interests.[14] Could such a thing happen in a world where working to avoid mass scarcity was still the name of the game, a world in which responsible and sagacious leadership really comes down to usually well understood and self-consciously life-or-death consequences?
Post-scarcity, dematerialized economics makes key legacy aspects of democratic leadership less salient. A more symbolically rarified and spectacalized politics can only set roots in highly affluent societies. American politics a century and more ago used to be largely about so-called bread-and-butter issues; hence Harold Lasswell subtitled his 1936 political science text “Who Gets What, When, How.” Western societies have long since entered an age of affluence so deep and pervasive that a sort of conquest of the Malthusian trap to the second power has occurred: The nature of political discourse has shifted from the concrete and the material more toward the symbolic and the relative. That, most likely, took politics half way at least to being amenable to be colonized by fictive devices and mindsets.
A sign of this is that the “old Left” in the United States and in western Europe used to be focused heavily on labor union demands and the rights of workers, but the New Left and now the even newer Left has cared more about distributional equity defined by group identity, and culture war battles having to do with race and gender. While those left of center have exaggerated material inequality in Western countries and in the United States in particular as a matter of course and ideology, their real passion is not material inequality but status inequality—a far more abstract, relativized, and hard to measure phenomenon that turns on questions of dignity, not dinner.
Not that such matters are unimportant and unworthy of political exertions; it’s just that the same sorts of things are not contested now as before, and they are not advanced by the same sorts of methods. If the gist of political bargaining and contestation consists of bread-and-butter issues, devices like tax policy, licensing, and regulation can serve as tools for compromise or amelioration of conflict. But if the gist is symbolic—status competitions, matters of impugned dignity and historical fairness, victimization competitions and attempts at guilt projection—tax policy and the like are nearly useless as means to address it.
American political institutions have been sideswiped by the switch-out from the mainly material to the mainly abstract, from policy outcomes that can be more or less measured to those that defy meaningful measurement, not having yet adjusted effectively to the change. One result of this refocus is that politicians hammered by demands for group-defined status equality “or else” have tended to shift their energies toward satisfying short-term demand for virtue-signaling. They pass vague laws that sometimes read more like sermons than legislation and rely on administrative bureaucracies to figure out how to translate legislative vagueries into actual law. They backburner or ignore altogether the more difficult, longer-term issues since they sense that the political prices for so doing will be less than the price of not responding to the latest Dickensian demand. Combine this tendency with outright pandering and you have most of the formula that explains why the Congress acts as it does, and why most people disparage it. Is it really just a coincidence, then, that the American national debt has been spiraling out of control, that Congress has not passed a budget on time for the past 27 years, or that the solvency of the Social Security fund is a rushing train wreck?
This shift over time in conceptions of hierarchy and leadership has had many lesser but non-trivial downstream consequences beyond those already mentioned. For example, one of several problems affecting the civil service is morale; public spiritedness is no longer an esteemed quality for many government workers. It’s just a job with good benefits. This is perhaps a reasonable attitude for rank-and file employee to take, but not would-be leaders.[15] Most of us have learned over time not to complain about bureaucratic sloth and inefficiency. We have in the United States a large but weak state compared to those of other democracies. Americans, however, tend to be too insular to realize this, and so think of it as both normal and inevitable. By historical and comparative standards it is neither.
The transition from a politics focused on a national developmentalist mission to one at once more personal, ethereal, and seemingly less urgent often makes politics itself seem hollowed out. If its substance has become so thin, what is left to look at in politics beyond its game-like and entertainment qualities? Moreover, if the herald of the Sixties has actually come true, that the personal is truly become the political, what is left of anything “public” to nurture, defend, or even pay attention to anyway?
[1] Ancient expressions of the insight aside, the true ur-text here arose in 14th-century North Africa: Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah. But the modern classic, focused on the West from the 15th century forward, is Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence (Harper, 2000).
[2] A development alluded to by Gabler in Life: The Movie, but it is not his principle concern.
[3] On the American meritocracy’s efforts to pass down its privileges to its spawn, see Brill, Tailspin.
[4] See Neil Gilbert, Never Enough: Capitalism and the Progressive Spirit (Oxford, 2017), and Tyler Cowan, “The Inequality that Matters,” The American Interest VI:3 (Jan.-Feb. 2011). The best database on this question belongs to Professor Larry Kotlikoff at the Fiscal Analysis Center of Boston University.
[5] Many efforts have been made to understand the impact of rapid and massive affluence on American culture and politics. One intriguing if not always persuasive effort is Brink Lindsay, The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture (Harper, 2007).
[6] Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin, 2009).
[7] See then Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Giroux and Strauss, 2015.)
[8] Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann were the authors of this classic 1966 book, and I got to know Peter Berger well many years later when he served on the editorial board of The American Interest, a magazine for which I was the founding editor. I asked him whether in 1965 and 1966, when he and Professor Luckmann were working on the book, he ever imagined that postmodernists would take their analysis to such airy strata. He looked at me wide-eyed and said, “of course not!” I asked him if he felt for having built an on-ramp to the postmodernist highway. He answered, “No, not really. How could we have imagined what others would do with it?” So I asked him if he would please write an auto-retroview of The Social Construction with all this in mind. He just shook his head and said, “Adam, I couldn’t bear it. Much too painful.”
[9] Note the special section of The American Interest titled “We Can Work It Out” in the January/February 2019 issue.
[10] The academic literature on the socio-political impact of major shifts in technology and subsequent economic patterns is so vast that citing even a fraction of it would be onerous and distracting here. Two classic sources, however, do merit a mention. First is Abraham Maslow’s famous “pyramid of human needs,” which points out that as basic survival predicates are taken care of, people start to care more about status, community, and self-actualization. (“A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review, 1943) Moving from psychology to political science, Ronald Inglehardt’s Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2005) is the gold standard with regard to empirical evidence about shifting forms of authority and related value hierarchies. Finally, note that Maslow’s concentric circle model of expanding motivation has an international relations application found, for the most prominent example, in Arnold Wolfers’s distinction between a state’s core and milieu goals.
[11] See Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (BasicBooks, 1995) for one far-reaching interpretation.
[12] Analyzed in Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton University Press, 2019).
[13] See the brilliant essay by Jonathan B. Imber, “The Far Side of Meritocracy,” The American Interest VIII:2 (November-December 2012).
[14] The broad critique of relevance here, already nearly a quarter century old, is Christopher Lasch’s last book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (W.W. Norton, 1996).
[15] Here the case of the U.S. Forest Service is instructive. See Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2014), chapter 11.
The Age of Spectacle:
How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, and Shock Entertainment Technovelty Have Wrecked American Politics
Foreword [TKL]
Introduction: A Hypothesis Unfurled
PART I: Puzzle Pieces
1. The Analytical Status Quo: Seven Theories of American Dysfunction
2. Underturtle I: Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence
3. Underturtle II: Lost Origin Stories at the End of Modernity
4. Underturtle III: From Deep Literacy to Cyber-Orality
5. The Net Effect
6. The Cultural Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
PART II: Emerging Picture
7. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
8. The Neuroscience of Spectacle: Shiny Electrons and the Novelty Bias
9. The Mad Dialectic of Nostalgia and Utopia in the Infotainment Era
10. Beyond Ripley: Spectacle and the American Future
EPILOGUE
What Our Politics Can Do, What We Must Do
Index