It’s perhaps valuable to consider that it is not merely about hedonistic pursuits, the pursuit of material wealth in itself or hoarding, etc.
Wealth is a means to an end. In a lot of cases that end is social status. Even hedonism is often not actually engaged in for the pleasure itself, but the perceived social status it brings.
The unfortunate conclusion would then be that the ‘have-nots’ are a built-in feature of the system. Without ‘have-nots’ there would be no one to have social status over.
Comparisons work within peer groups. People compare themselves with people in their own group they aspire to be like or have a life like. Its not usually a comparison between top and the bottom of the income scale unless you are delusional.
The pastor needn’t believe his sermon, but it’s classic biblical mythology. A sacred people, embraced the Sodomites, fallen, resurrected by the plain spoken, the new Golden Age arises, reasserting our right under the covenant as the exceptional chosen ones. Write that sermon citing book and verse and those who follow that civil religion will be led. Have too few believers and the people fragment.
I liked Robert Bellah when I was in college. I still enjoy work. IMO having a civil religion where we acknowledge that there is something bigger than ourselves up there (and you can call Him anything you like), respect the Constitution, and acknowledge the sacredness of the symbols that make America what it is could be a remedy to the issues of political polarization. But I can’t fix anything. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
"The phrase was popularized by James Truslow Adams during the Great Depression in 1931. Adams defines it as
that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. […] It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.[4]
Adam’s ‘dream’ restates the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” of the Declaration of Independence. Over time, the American Dream became an advertising slogan associated with home ownership, motor cars, and the open road.
Advertising, like it or not, is part of popular culture, which sits on a foundation of civil and religious cultures.
Most wage earners (90% of the population) do not see enough money to hoard it – they spend it all on shelter, transportation, food, clothing, insurance, and so on for their families. The 10% of the population who have higher earnings (and in diminishing percentages, far far more $$$) can and do hoard. What else are they going to do with it all? Carnegie gave a lot away (libraries and the like). It turned out to be a big job giving away many millions of dollars. the tech bro billionaires will find it even more difficult to unload their hoard in socially beneficial ways.
It seems like the civil / religious culture is in better than in poor health, let’s say it is “fair”. Where the common culture is fraying is at the extremes The extremes are loud, and antifa vs. white national types generate a lot of racket.
Between the extremes the civil and religious culture has deteriorated to “fair” condition by means of neglect. Education and participation are required for an excellent civil culture. Poor performance in education is all too obvious, but participation in civil and religious culture – Boy Scouts, church attendance, community organizations like Rotary, Masons, and so forth is also at a low level for youth and adults both (see Bowling Alone). Is low performance a symptom or a cause? Don’t know.
I’m not so sure because I cannot find a single regime of individualism that has ever existed anywhere in the world, so I’m skeptical of the diagnosis. Corporate bodies such as states, multinational corporations, NGO’s, and so on, are by far the most powerful actors on the world stage. The world is beset with group identity politics, nationalism, racism, and other collectivist aberrations.
Arguably the social incoherence of America is what has led it to persist in the first place, while the socially coherent societies, enforced as they were with violence and terror, have collapsed beneath the weight of their own militaristic conformity. Their ruins serve as a reminder.
He laments the decay of American society, asking how we can recover from Nixon (written in 1975). The answer unknown to him at the time was through the maybe real maybe not hyper-honesty of Carter, whose ineffectiveness gave us a resurgence in patriotism of Reagan. And not sure how to describe the long and winding road to Trump, but it has something to do with the US taboo of socialism.
To Bellah’s point, the coherence of a group lies in its consistency of ideology, mythology, and practice, and so you see the strongest unity and growth in the insulars, like the Hasidic and the Amish, but that’s not civil religion, that’s wagon circling.
I suppose every schoolboy knows that we can blame Sigmund Freud’s nephew for devious consumer manipulation.
Sigmund Freud’s nephew was Edward Bernays. the pioneer of public relations and modern consumer manipulation. In the 1920s, Bernays used his uncle’s psychoanalytic theories about unconscious desires to shift advertising from rational product pitches to emotional, identity-driven campaigns.
Bernays didn’t invent lying to the public – that’s as old as the first meeting we had when we climbed down from the trees. PR and advertising are not always exactly lying, but they are never in service to truth. A good deal of our national solidarity is built on not-exactly-lying. Most Americans consider the United States the best place on earth. (We are not unique in this feeling.) It’s myth making. Being convinced about our goodness isn’t the same as contributing to, and experiencing, that which makes the U.S. a good place. I don’t know what the percentage is, but quite a few people just seem to be “disconnected”. They’re not rebels; they’re not agitators; they’re not homeless. Generally they seem quite functional. But they are not “plugged in” to the usual social interaction of life.
Advertising coaxes just a bit of discontent out of us; discontent with what we’ve got (whatever that is) and offers us something better. Better blue jeans. New! Improved! Too much discontent is bad for business. Discontent needs to be soothed (or, if it gets out of hand, stomped on).
In general, though, most Americans share the commercial, Rebpublican / Democratic, chamber of commerce mythology. We approve of the way new goods keep showing up on shelves. We respect rich old Sam Walton [Walmart]. No, we don’t disapprove of fast food. Well, Taco Bell and explosive diarrhea excepted (cyclosporiasis from Mexico). We’ve been cheerfully voting Republicans and Democrats into and out of office. We are not too surprised when it doesn’t seem to make much difference. We like freeways, cars, and gas stations. The suburbs are great places to live. Thank you for your service, soldiers, sailors, marines, Air Force, coast guard, police, sheriffs, highway patrol, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (unless we are on the wrong side of the fence).
But I think if we had to go back to technology from 1910, we’d adapt amazingly quickly. Not saying that’s likely, but people don’t really need to live in a refrigerator in the summer. You can open the windows at night and then close them back in the morning.
That approach works when it cools off enough at night to actually cool the building before you close the windows. In the hotter heat waves with higher humidity levels we have now, that approach isn’t available, especially in dense urban heat-island environments.
Having said that, I agree we could would should adapt to warmer temperatures. And no, refrigeration isn’t necessary. If it is 110ºF in the shade, 85ºF inside will seem cooler at first, and won’t lead to heatstroke. But it takes AC to bring the indoor temperature down to 85 when it is very hot out. For the elderly, the safer temperature might be a little lower than for a younger person.
I think this is an interesting frame. Yes, Rorty himself pointed out that the left has split with the cultural left dominating and leaving behind the old reformist left of which he was a member. I think this is a reasonable framework and probably applies here in Australia too.
I think you also have a point about the lack of Burkean conservatives. As I understand it, there are few conservatives in the traditional sense. The word is often used simply to describe an amorphous right wing position.
I think what this implies is that “right wing” and “left wing” are almost meaningless categories.
It’s interesting. I don’t run air conditioning at home, and I don’t have it in my current place. I live in a country where summer temperatures can reach 110°F on your scale. I find that a fan does the job as well as anything. When it’s hot, it’s hot… but so what? You get used to it. As long as you are not facing West and have a tin roof…
I agree, though, that it may be different if you’re unwell, frail, or caring for a small baby.
I’m not sure what religious thinking is, either. I certainly don’t know that there is anything outside human values, frameworks, or practices for us to discover. Humans seem fundamentally unmoored, and understanding that may well be part of the reason we find ourselves in our current situation. We are working through this, and there will be casualties along the way. I certainly understand the desire to turn the clock back, to recover meaning. There are numerous nostalgic projects of that kind on offer.
For me, this is a problem that is unlikely to be solved by any superimposed value system or framework. I think we may be living in a transition period, and the old values are up for grabs.
The book I cited from 1975 argued the times they were a changin as well. I can’t imagine these times where we have the time to think about whether we have the resolve to survive AC-less are particularly transitory or challenging.
From 1850 to 1950, we saw the US declare war upon itself, the literal emancipation of the slave, the advent of the automobile, the world declare war on itself, the collapse of the economy, the world try to slaughter itself once again, with closing ceremonies of fireworks unimaginable over the East, and then finally Elvis.
Despite the massive changes we see today in technology of all sorts, with phones just a few years old now with embarrassingly low picture resolution, we force radicalism in our dress and speech maybe just to awake us from the doldrums and make us feel we’re in control.
It’s what my point was initially, which is that the suffering of poverty is from the powerlessness, not from having to endure an AC-less summer.
Is this not just Nietzsche from 1882:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”
It’s the superimposed shared value.
Well, you could accept Nietzsche’s solution, which is great men must make meaning.
Yes, I was thinking exactly that. The transition period predates Freddy, wouldn’t you say? I think that’s how Vervaeke (one of the leading nostalgia merchants) has it. Which is probably unfair: V keeps insisting he is not a nostalgia project.
I have no solution to this. I’m not even sure what the problem is.
I wasn’t really dwelling on your OP, more the related matters raised by @Existentialism97 and the comparative meaninglessness or right and left.
I’m not sure we’re trying to wrest control out of chaos. We might instead be trying to create even more chaos as a kind of self-soothing parallel process. But it’s also possible that those “radicalisms” aren’t connected.
