The Age of Spectacle, Part 8
Chapter 2: Underturtle I: Fragile Affluence and Postmodern Decadence
I mentioned last week that Chapter 2 disappointed me, and hoped that engaging it for purposes of presenting it in The Raspberry Patch would somehow lead to its improvement. I think it has, somewhat at least.
I realized after posting part 1 of the chapter last week that it lacked a clear introduction to clue the reader in to the gist of the chapter’s argument. So I wrote it out, adjusted a few other paragraphs, and updated last week’s post. It’s in my Substack archive now and is available for first reading, or for re-reading should anyone be interested in doing that. So here, today, I begin with Chapter 2’s new introduction, and then skip to the second part of the chapter as planned.
The major themes concerning affluence as a precursor to the Age of Spectacle are four-fold.
First, the capitalist framework that enables affluence in contemporary times is good at valuing material things but poor at valuing virtue and character. As traditional faith communities have lost traction in recent decades, and not been replaced by anything as normatively sturdy and broadly shared, an imbalance has arisen in which desires are freed from communal moral discipline and the internalized self-control that has been a typical outgrowth of it. The result is the spread of a kind of aimless hedonism that is particularly vulnerable to decadence and dissipation. Aimless hedonism is boring whenever a new spark is unavailable to satisfy its restless appetites, and so an addictive side to the condition is common: One needs ever-larger doses of purchased pleasure to satisfy the cravings. Happiness this does not produce, only the emotional simulacrum of it.
Second, by leading away from material-defined competitions to status competitions, affluence displaces absolute metrics of well-being with relativized ones. More people can conceive what “enough” means in terms of basic living standards than they can abide others seeming to have more, and appearing to be happier for it.
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 far 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, a phenomenon that many observers—Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Max Weber, and others—have identified using other language. Pace the positivist presumption, few people are value maximizers except in very selective domains; most are satisficers most of the time, 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 exertions of all kinds. Whatever else it does, affluence makes life easy for satisficers; indeed, it makes it too easy.
Fourth and finally by way of major themes, affluence abets isolation and isolation at social scale depletes social capital. That, too, is a source of fragility to affluence, because genuinely earned national wealth—as opposed to riches found in the ground and sold—is a social achievement, not an individual one. For most, this point qualifies as a species of the retro-obvious: a valuable bit of knowledge that is immediately evidence only after someone points it out to you, having never previously passed into consciousness.
OK, and now the completion of Chapter 2:………
Neurosis, Loneliness, and Despair
Affluence conduces not just to intellectual laziness, which is simply decadence of mind, but also loneliness as an indirect consequence, the flip side so to speak, of the hyper-individualism it tends to abet. It also produces more than occasionally personal neurosis and social derangement, but perceptions here are often skewed. It is for example common and uncontroversial to call old women who hoard boxes, newspapers, cotton balls, and empty tin cans crazy; but we are reluctant to label with similar language multi-billionaires who obsessively seek their next billion. Both are hoarding something they don’t need and will never use to sate some nameless insecurity turned somehow into a behavioral tic. Limitlessness applied to material acquisitions of any kind is evidence of sickness, and obsessive behavior is always ugly; but in a materialist culture we give a pass to the well heeled. They’re not crazy or neurotic, merely eccentric.
John Steinbeck was well ahead of his time in 1952 when he dropped this sentence into East of Eden: “Maybe everyone is too rich. I have noticed that there is no dissatisfaction like that of the rich. Feed a man, clothe him, put him in a good house, and he will die of despair.”[1] Short of dying of despair he will yearn for simpler times. American culture is filled with examples of wistful nostalgia.[2] Consider this literary line: “. . .so it was important, in a wealthy materialistic age, to set the example of reverting to the old ideals, the family and the homestead, and so on.” The “wealthy materialistic age” referred to was America circa 1917, and the extract comes from Edith Wharton’s novel Summer. Skipping ahead to the early 1960s we may note a famous must-see “Twilight Zone” episode titled “A Stop at Willoughby.” And these are only two examples of hundreds, possibly thousands, that some enterprising Ph.D. student may one day compile and analyze.
In between, in the 1950s, when the appreciation truly dawned of how very unusual American affluence really was in historical context—both its extent vertically and its shared nature horizontally—a rash of books appeared to account for and explain it to the reading public. The aforementioned John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society, published in 1958, was the best known of the group, but there were lesser others like Robert Theobald’s 1961 book The Challenge of Abundance. Galbraith put the dominant meme of this literature best and, echoing Steinbeck in a more intellectual manner concerning he movement from from bread-and-butter to more symbolic perseverations, he did it in the second sentence of his first chapter: “. . . beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn’t enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and he will be correspondingly less certain of their remedy.”[3]
Clearly, problems associated with unearned affluence are widely recognized. But new ground is broken almost every day in the variety of problems it generates. Some shifty lawyers working for wealthy clients have tried to instrumentalize that sympathy to provide legal excuses for inexcusably bad behavior--as in the infamous 2013 “affluenza” defense argued by Ethan Couch’s attorneys. This was certainly clever—both the neologism, and the inversion of radical sociology that invariably exonerates criminality perpetrated by poor people based on theories that “structural violence” took away their agency and “made” them do whatever illegal thing they did. Here we have the same “the devil made me do it/Flip Wilson” defense only applied to the super-wealthy instead of the poor.
Happily, the affluenza defense, despite being legitimated in court by a psychologist for hire named Tim Miller, did not get Crouch off the hook entirely. The judge sentenced him to probation. In the end Crouch did end up in jail, but he spent only 180 days there for each of the four people he killed while driving drunk and drugged at age 16, and that was only because he violated probation, skipped the country, and was propitiously apprehended along with his conniving, derelict mother while ordering a pizza in Mexico. You would have to strain hard to make something like this up.
More broadly, it is no coincidence that the economic sectors hurt most by COVID-19 were extrusions of mass affluence: entertainment, travel, tourism, every one of them luxuries of relatively recent vintage that were beyond the reach of all but a tiny number of wealthy people as recently as half a century ago. No one’s life or emotional wellbeing is really endangered by not being able to dine in multi-star restaurants, attend “destination” weddings, or jet across oceans and continents to take vacations. That many recently constructed “industries” of this sort and the jobs within them were harmed by COVID-19 might be construed as tragic, but it is just as reasonable to understand it as a wakeup call from a recalcitrant layered economic reality.
As Robert Nisbet pointed out, too, affluence that exalts hyper-individualism is obviously not great for community. Yet it is on community, on Edmund Burke’s famous “little platoons” of social life, that the small-government American constitutional design ultimately depends for its health.[4] All the Founders knew this because they had inculcated the wisdom of their principal canon: the ancient Greeks, some wiser Romans scattered here and there, and the Bible. “Commerce produces money, money Luxury, and all three are incompatible with Republicans,” wrote John Adams. (He meant Republicans as opposed to Monarchists, not as opposed to Democrats since neither of today’s major parties then existed under those labels.) Adams wasn’t suggesting the suspension of commerce or disdain for material progress; no New England politician of the late 18th century would have dared. He spoke rather of the need for balance in a political economy to create a healthy civic whole.
How did he know to do that? Adams knew Book VIII of Plato’s Republic, so he knew this: “There can be no doubt that the love of wealth and the spirit of moderation cannot exist together in citizens of the same state to any considerable extent; one or the other will be disregarded.” Adams also knew Deuteronomy 8:3: “Man does not live by bread alone,” which in his day was no allusion to a buffet. Similar advice populates Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, as well as forms the foundational point of the Book of Job: Material abundance is not evidence of God’s grace, nor does it imply that the wealthy are morally elevated over the poor. And certainly Adams knew Oliver Goldsmith’s then-famous 1770 poem The Deserted Village wherein the following shimmering line appears: “Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”[5]
If wealth leads to indolence, it constitute a double evil, so thus Theodore Roosevelt spoke in similar cadences in his 1906 Nobel Lecture: “No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues; and this without regard to whether the loss is due to the growth of heartless and all-absorbing commercialism, to prolonged indulgence in luxury and soft, effortless ease, or to the deification of a warped and twisted sentimentality.” The 25th President thus scored a hat trick of prophecy, but it did no good: By the late 20th century it was not the love of wealth that had been disregarded in America but rather Adams’s spirit of moderation.
Affluence and Empire
Notwithstanding Adams’s warning, since his day the sirens of materialism gradually but seemingly ineluctably changed the balance of values within American culture, to the extent such a balance ever really existed outside of a clutch of educated New Englanders and gentrified Virginians. The American concern with material abundance was likely built in to the founding of the European habitation of North America thanks to a happenstantial conjunction of geography and technology. America promised nearly endless free land, the most important factor of abundance for what was still a predominantly agricultural economy. Probably most of the 18th and early 19th-century European immigration to America was enticed by the prospect of cheap or even free land, especially, in some cases, in juxtaposition to the detested enclosure acts in Great Britain that were pushing Scots, Welsh, and Irish farmers off land their families had lived on for generations.
But the founding and early growth of American society and economy also coincided with the greatest productively inflection in human history since the agricultural revolution. The industrial revolution, set in a piece of geography of continental scale and, after about 1815, with little worry about foreign interference in the expanding American project, supercharged expectations of abundance and waves of immigration. Initially, the industrial revolution had primary relevance for agriculture; Jethro Tull’s 1702 plow, and other advances in both tools and transportation infrastructure, greatly expanded the prospect of commercial agriculture. That changed how farmers and land owners alike thought about what to plant and on what scale to plant it. Manufacturing came later, rising on a crest of continued technological development, the development of more and larger cities and markets for manufactured goods, and a system of market exchanges that rewarded both ingenuity and hard work. Most American farmers were always commercially minded, always looking for better and more land, better tools, better marketing savvy, and better investments of their profits outside of land. The idyll of the homely self-sufficient American cottage is more myth than reality on the whole.
Arguments have been made that near-universal expectations of ever-expanding abundance is what is truly exceptional about America, arguably the most materialist nation in the world despite the stories Americans have long told themselves about its dissenter Protestant Christian origins. (If Protestantism really has had much to do with the basic national trajectory, it came in the form of a supercharged Calvinism long since sheared away from its theological base.) That, in turn, disposed the nation to a doctrine of unlimited expansion, and that, claim some, made the nation ipso facto an empire.
The first empire sought continental capture, and its main victims were Native Americans; its ancillary ones were the sons and daughters of Spain’s earlier North American empire. The second, once the frontier closed in 1893 according famously to Frederick Jackson Turner, was a commercial empire built on foreign trade in which imbalances favoring the United States made relative losers of less powerful competitors and of most foreign natives. And a third, some argue, following from the limitless-abundance obsession two centuries in development, has been modern fiscal and monetary expansion. In this case the victims will be future generations of Americans who will have to pay the bill once the opportunities for still further expansion are curtailed by impinging realities.[6]
Whatever we make of such arguments, capitalism, as its modus operandi changed over time, seems today to have overshot the mark. The developmentalist mental muscle memory has continued to exercise itself long after its core goal has been achieved. As a consequence, we in the 21st century are arguably paying the price for being much too materially rich for our own good, much too used to effortless ease, and too much disposed toward a warped sentimentality concerning all things material. Affluence beyond our powers of principled assimilation is behind it all. Karl Marx was a terrible economist and a misled philosophical determinist, but wherever he and other troublemakers reside these days, Marx would be justified in claiming that at least he got the material fetishism thing right.
This is anything but a new idea at base and it is easy to understand--and easy-to-understand ideas are roughly as likely to be profound as to be superficial. One classical expression goes back to the year 1377 in Tunis, to Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima. A contemporary paraphrase of the Ibn Khaldun’s basic cyclical theory of state-building and decay comes from the self-published novelist G. Michael Hopf:
Hard times create strong men,
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
And, weak men create hard times.[7]
Create hard times for many despite broad affluence is exactly what the decadent, hubristic, affluence-besotted Americans of the second half of the 20th century have done—the elite shard of that population in particular. They have ruled in such a way as to make American affluence fragile by under-investing and over-leveraging it. They have thrown the basic fairness of affluence’s distribution into doubt, whatever its objective status, undermining the moral basis of enjoying abundance as a reasonably harmonious and decent society. They have allowed the growth of a vastly wasteful economy, as well, thanks to the short-termist, made-to-break pseudo-philosophy that has infected nearly every niche of the culture. And they have covered up all of these failures by indulging in and celebrating by far the most superficial benefit of affluence: passive, unproductive leisure.
Indeed, at a time of spectacle as the new mode of consciousness, affluence often takes the form of a flight from reason. Indulgence in fantasies of every sort imaginable is ultimately based on the unnamed assumption that nothing will disturb the cornucopia that is our right. Flowing into this cornucopic state of mind, it must be mentioned, at least in passing, is the substantial percentage of the American population that uses recreational drugs on a fairly regular basis. Only a very affluent society can afford the time and money this takes, and can presume that legalizing all these drugs is the most natural and harmless thing in the world. Warren Buffet, choosing exactly the right verb, may have put this best: “Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money.” Too many Americans have become stoned Eloi with nice cloths, or want to be.
Free Money: The Reductio Ad Absurdum of Affluence
Speaking of which and referring back to COVID policy, the financial giveaways that began in the Trump period but continued into the Biden Administration were at best double-edged. It may have been necessary to stimulate demand and spending lest the lockdowns and supply chain disruptions produced massive unemployment levels. But the handouts should never have been called “stimulus” payments, because that has contributed to the Federal Reserve’s addiction to stimulus whenever the threat of a recession rears its head. The payments should have been called COVID Emergency Funds or something of that kind, to delink them social-psychologically from previous stimulus initiatives. As it was true centuries ago it remains true today: It ultimately makes a big difference whether would-be prudent credit expansion undertaken by monetary policy managers is based on savings or on debouching the currency.[8]
Certainly, those handouts need not have been as generous in the Biden era as they were. Anyone could see the inflationary potential of those large payments at the time—anyone who didn’t work on the upper floors of the Federal Reserve, apparently. Anyone could also see the impact they would have on a national debt then sailing over the $36 trillion mark and still rising.
This is not to say that less generous payments and lower inflation than we have lately experienced, and the contribution of it all to lowering the size of the debt a tad, would have deterred the Republican-dominated House of Representatives from trying to destroy the administrative state and/or hurt the Biden Administration by turning the debt ceiling increase into a game of chicken. The Republicans would have done it anyway and backed off, again as before, just in time, as the show reached its politically useful zenith. But politics has clearly affected both sides: Giving people lots of free money buys votes—just ask the Perón family. So looking out to the critical 2022 midterms, Biden’s political advisors found it one of the easiest task in another long day to persuade the President to push the shovel in deeper.
Lately the White House has been blaming past and persisting inflation on corporate price gouging, and no doubt there has been plenty of that to accompany the oligopolistic behavior of insurance companies, for-profit hospitals, energy companies, and more besides. But that line is just populist me-too-ism designed to cover up the politics, and the economic policy mistakes, the Administration indulged in 2021 and into 2022.
Affluence clearly abets such political tactics. Affluence of the scale we enjoy lacks any intrinsic perceptual limit. People quickly get used to the style of living they can afford and then want to be able to afford more. The sky is not the limit once one knows that outer space exists.
More important, once material wealth reaches a point of satiety, absolute conditions give way to relative positioning in the eyes of many if not most people.[9] This is part and parcel of what status competitions are all about. After a while many people seem to lose the plot line of what money is actually for, except to sparkle as a large number in a bank account that makes adults happy the same way unicorn regalia seems to delight most five-year old girls. Popular culture bears almost too many expressions of this discontent, yet lots of people manage to ignore them all, just as they know but ignore the truth that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Once upon a time material wealth in the American context bore a religious interpretation. Calvinism, the anti-modernist shard of the Protestant revolution, saw material abundance as a sign of grace set aside for the Elect. One has to wonder if Calvin ever read and actually understood Job for, as already noted, its basic point is the exact opposite. Never mind Weber’s brilliant 1905 analysis—The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—of how that belief affected behavior and how, within a generation or two, the Calvinist interpretation based on salvation anxiety lost credence and devolved more or less to the Anglican norm. The point is that wealth had meaning in relation to a larger set of truths, and in that manner Calvinism still exists in a highly redacted form in the “prosperity gospel” of many American megachurches. It also exists in contradistinction to Catholicism in much of Latin America, and in that context it manages to produce affluence without decadence, so far. It produces the kinds of virtues—hard work, punctuality, patience, prudence, deferred gratification, and family loyalty and coherence—that match Weber’s 1905 description pretty much to a tee.
Why? Because this is affluence earned and hence appreciated, not affluence inherited, unearned, and hence unappreciated, so taken blithely for granted. Of course we can see the difference with our own eyes here in the United States when we contrast hard-working and grateful immigrants from Latin America and Asia with assorted heirheads and legacy-admission Ivy League brats from denatured meritocratic families. The contrast teaches not that there is something wrong with affluence as such. Ask anyone who has experienced real poverty and you’ll be well tutored on the subject. No, the problem is not material riches, but poverty of character in handling them.
Avoid Heirheads
I used the neologism “heirhead” just above. Let us close by dwelling for a moment on what I mean by it, for it applies to whole societies as well as to individuals.[10]
An heirhead is someone who inherits much family money but lacks the character, maturity, or brains to know how to manage it usefully. Not all heirs are heirheads; some families have found ways to transmit virtue, common sense, and good character to their well-heeled offspring. Inherited disaster isn’t inevitable, only merely often common.
Back in the 1950s, an American television series called “The Millionaire” illustrated episode by episode the dangers of sudden, unearned wealth. Being between four and nine years old at the time, I took the lesson to heart. I only wished my family were rich so that I could face such daunting challenges. Alas, it was not to be. I didn’t realize at the time how genuinely fortunate I was.
Absent strenuous parental efforts, heirheads have problems natural to their rare circumstances. Because they never need to suffer the anxieties of finding ways to provide for themselves and their families or significant others, they tend to be less well steeled against adversity, lacking what we Americans call “grit.” As a result, many become perpetual adolescents who, when they encounter novel and perilous situations, tend to fall to pieces more readily than do those who have been schooled to stoicism.
Moreover, heirheads often cannot know whether those who keep their company really like them or just want to feed from their affluence and generosity, the premise being that nothing brings largesse like propinquity. The result is they typically don’t have normal friends and friendships, normal spouses and marriages, or normal children. Indeed, many of the offspring are fated to begin the heirhead cycle all over again, at least until the piles of money are frittered away.
People who lack close friends often develop warped theories of mind, which, in turn, sometimes cause them to have roller-coaster-inflected relationships. So lonely are they, despite an abundance of apparent friends, that they fall wildly for new friends and lovers, then fall wildly out of friendship or love when perfection doesn’t materialize, since no mortal can fill the void of their interpersonal hollow.
A similar problem often dogs very beautiful women. Great beauty can be a curse, for such women, too, have trouble knowing if their friends are really friends or just mesmerized would-be lovers or acolytes hoping for spinoff benefits from their attractive associate. Some very beautiful women look forward to aging. It’s not their own maturity they crave but the chance finally for others to act maturely toward them.
Stay aware of and away from heirheads if you can. It’s not always easy. It has been hard to avoid the depredations of the Orange Heirhead these past several years. Lesson to the electorate: Don’t ... ever ... do that again: No more heirheads near the Oval Office, please.
Otherwise I am not going to translate this conclusion into its meaning for America’s often bloated self-regard and how that bloating is viewed by others in the world. If you have read this far, you are clearly the sort of person who can work this one out with no further assistance from me.
The Fragility of Affluence
Beyond the discontents of affluence, summarily noted above, we must contend with and try to understand the fragility of affluence—or more precisely the perceptions of its fragility. Of course it is true that affluence is always to some extent fragile, particularly when it becomes dependent on highly interdependent and esoteric physical and social engineering systems that relatively few members of a society understand and could replicate in the wake of, say, a massive natural disaster such as a severe pandemic or a huge asteroid coming too close to the planet. But that is a separate matter from perceptions of fragility, and perceptions of fragility in turn break down into two kinds.
One kind of feared fragility is that the technological substructure of Western and specifically American affluence will generate more disturbances to social structure and stability than the society is willing to tolerate. The obvious candidate here is inequality at levels high enough to exacerbate divisions among defined social groups that they are deemed unacceptable according to reigning norms. Perceptions of unacceptable inequality can be embedded in presumptions of tilted playing fields, but extreme levels of inequality can become socially unsustainable even when no presumption of an economy being “fixed” is part of the perceptual mix. Isaiah Berlin perhaps said it best: “Philosophy comes from the collision of ideas which create problems. Life changes, so do the ideas, so do the collisions.”[11] Institutions are by nature conservative but technology-driven changes to labor profiles and social structure need not be, so absent heroic efforts by insightful leaders to adapt institutions to changing circumstances people can feel overwhelmed by it. In plainer language, stuff can happen at scale and negatively affect individuals and families even when no one means for it to happen.
Most people are reconciled to that reality in normal times; not everyone needs to devise a conspiracy to account for challenges and problems. But in times not or no longer normal, when for reasons already rehearsed so many people’s intellectual development has been stunted due in part to the selfsame rapid technological changes, equanimity concerning the unpredictability of change declines in relation to anxiety and anger over it. Nostalgia-tinged ideological thinking spouting overly simplistic and frequently conspiracy-tinged explanations takes pride of place in a culture no longer used to learning or even being able to identify and respect trans-fictive storylines.
A second kind of feared fragility flows from the lack of trust people develop in government to manage growing economic complexity. Government, after all, is responsible for creating and stabilizing money as a medium of exchange, and so takes responsibility for regulating banking and equity markets. These responsibilities, which only the state can discharge in the public interest, affect interest rates, the availability of credit, and hence the metabolism of employment and salary levels. In other market-based democracies central banks handle such matters, and in most such polities these banks are protected from political coercion. The U.S. Federal Reserve system differs from that of a typical central bank, and while it is also cordoned off from political manipulation, its peculiar design is not as reliable a deterrent to its being skewed by special interests at the apex of banking, finance, and mega-corporate relationships. Collisions change, said Berlin, and sometimes they change in ways that advantage some positioned interests over others.
Government institutions, especially in electoral democracies, differ from social institutions in general. They also tend to be conservative and slow to adapt to change, but pressures welling up amid We the People are supposed to be able to supply the motive force to move them forward. When the electorate no longer trusts government competence, and especially if it perceives government to have been plutocratized by distortions of democratic representation and wildly uneven access to policymaking influence, then it’s not just concerns about inequality that create anxiety, but also concerns about competence in the context of uneven and unreliably disinterested pressures on policymaking.
These concerns have been near constants in the United States since the emergence of a national economy and banking system during and after the Civil War, and since the inception of the Federal Reserve system in 1913. Through Depression and war and postwar boom and Cold War and post-Cold War times fluctuations in the general level of confidence in government to manage the economy effectively has waxed and waned. Through it all, however, the economic pie continued to grow, new innovations kept the consumer economy humming most of the time, and affluence continued to rise and in the main to be spread widely if still unevenly throughout the population. That precisely is the norm which, in recent years, has come to be feared fragile.
It is not just that American affluence is extraordinary by almost any “vertical” historical or “horizontal” contemporary measure, it is not just that it is largely unearned by current age cohorts who did not help much to create it and so do not grasp its origins, and it is not just that it is therefore mostly taken for granted. It is that now, fairly suddenly as these things go—dating only from around 2008-9 and punctuated sharply in 2019-20—American affluence is as much a source of anxiety over its fragility as it is of pride over its achievement.
What has changed? Accelerating plutocracy is one change, by which I mean growing concentrations of private wealth that are used to bend government policy to the benefit of the rich generally at the expense of the not rich. Government misjudgment and mismanagement—it is hard to tell which is which much of the time, and to distinguish either from plutocratic suborning—is another. Employment instability and insecurity—the gig economy phenomenon, so-called—is another that exacerbates the kinds of uncertainty unconducive to marriage, parenthood, and setting up house. That uncertainty shapes America’s downward demographic trends that, in turn, portend major macroeconomic effects.
But beneath all these changes is something more basic and at least partly re-generative of them in novel forms: technovelty. We pick up that thread again below in Chapter 5, “The Net Effect,” which for analytical purposes concludes the necessary discussion of affluence, our first underturtle. The fact that underturtles two and three intercede between chapters 2 and 5 just serves as illustration that the argument here is not strictly linear because it cannot be, and it cannot be—let me remind you—because ideas that resemble constellations in the night sky are not linear.
[1] A similar sentiment concerning limitlessness graces the lyrics of a Roger McGuinn song from 1991 entitled “King of the Hill.” Here is the second verse: “The driveway is long, your princess is lovely/Your servants all wait for your knock on the door/ How many years will you crawl through this castle/So satisfied, and still wanting more?”
[2] For some data on nostalgia, see Lee Drutman, “The Surprisingly Simple Reason Why Trump Nostalgia Is On the Rise,” Undercurrent Events, May 23, 2024.
[3] Galbraith, p. 13.
[4] Nisbet, The Quest for Community (ISI Books, 1981).
[5] Adams knew it because Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield was perhaps the most read novel of the American Founders in the decade before the Declaration of Independence, making Goldsmith a literary celebrity for his time. Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life (Penguin, 2010) notes that Martha Washington read it, as well.
[6] See Katherine Epstein, “America’s Fiscal Frontier, Part I: The Foundations of Our Budgetary Dysfunction,” American Purpose, May 26, 2023. Epstein argues that the debt ceiling drama of May 2023, which occurred as she was writing, really goes back to the ur-national obsession with limitlessly expanding abundance.
[7] From Those Who Remain: A Post-Apocalyptical Novel (2016), quoted in Charlie Sykes, “Our Upside Down Politics,” The Bulwark, February 13, 2022.
[8] Note for example Condy Raguet, On Currency and Banking (1839).
[9] The subject of Robert H. Frank’s Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (University of California Press, 2007).
[10] Coined in my “Bullshistory and Philosoupy,” American Purpose, November 25, 2020.
[11] Berlin quoted in Ramin Jahanbegloo, "Philosophy and Life: An Interview," New York Review of Books, May 28, 1992, p. 50.
The Age of Spectacle:
How a Confluence of Fragilized Affluence, the End of Modernity, Deep-Literacy Erosion, 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