Several days ago Rod Dreher brought up comments by Britain’s chief rabbi, Lord Jonathon Sacks, relating to the problem of mass consumerism.
“What does a consumer ethic do? It makes you aware all the time of the things you don’t have instead of thanking God for all the things you do have. … the consumer society is in fact the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness.”
Marx claimed religion to be the opiate of the masses, but Judeo-Christian religions, which preach respect and love for life, may be on the decline in America. Is a culture of nihilistic mass consumerism the contemporary substitution? Before the Thanksgiving turkey could even be digested, Black Friday kicked off — on Thursday. Several videos captured the chaos that ensued; people being trampled, shoved, and disregarded. One incident even had people getting pepper-sprayed. Let me not forget to mention the shootings, and fighting over $2 waffle makers. Here is one clip among many floating around the web:
Imagine this kind of chaos, elevated, if the American economy follows the Eurozone into crisis. Dreher is also pessimistic about such a development:
Can you imagine most Americans, whether on the left, right, or in the middle, in the 1930s having such an attitude? What happens to a generation that believes in nothing more than consumerism and sexual autonomy?
Rod Dreher wrote:
“Can you imagine most Americans, whether on the left, right, or in the middle, in the 1930s having such an attitude?”
There’s a point there, although it doesn’t take many Americans to create the ridiculous kind of events that take place only here and there on these Black Fridays so it seems to me limited.
The bigger question to me is wondering about the difference between “most Americans in the 1930′s” and most Americans today in terms of their respective beliefs in at least some smidgen of integrity left in the government and system worthy of defending.
After the big ’29 Crash, that is, and through the ’30′s, even though we had up to 25% unemployment and even though we had groups such as the commies and IWW urging violent overthrow of the government—commies and others who reflected an international zeitgeist even it seemed—we had no such big attempts at violent overthrow. There remained in the great bulk of average American enough sense that the government and the system at least had enough integrity to continue to stand by it.
What about today though? Who can look, say, at those bank bailouts and the Fannie and Freddie crap and on and on, and then the corruption of interest groups getting us involved in actual wars on false premises and etc. and so forth, and still feel greatly moved to defend the status quo in damn near any of the same shape?
Great revolutions generally aren’t made by the masses; they’re made by zealots and etc., but still need to be *permitted* by the masses in a sense. So where would are masses be today in the event of a huge meltdown when the radicals come a-calling, guns out?
Moreover my sense is that after the ’29 Crash to a simply huge extent the understanding of its cause lay fairly innocently. That … it was just a terrible feature of capitalism that caught us particularly bad but had to be put up with if moderated by New Deal sorts of means.
But today, in the event of a big crash, nuts, who would really be all that wrong saying that it *was* nefariously caused? By … outrageous greedy bankers, corrupt bureaucrats allowing them to get away with it, corrupt politicians paving their way, making Fannie and Freddie what they are, speculators, Wall Streeters, and on and on?
And then you *do* have that materialism that Dreher talked about where, if people don’t get a new Playstation every year they feel cheated…
A very difficult hypothetical it seems to me. As much as one might be willing to die for the Constitution, well, if *this* is what it gets you, I fear the sentiment might go… Dying for … Phil Gramm’s right to repeal Glass-Steagal and then walk into a UBS job? Newt Gingrich’s right to drink out of the Fannie/Freddie money blow-hole? The right of a foreign interest group to get us into endless, unbelievably destructive wars? Of Wall Street to corrupt the system into a half-capitalist/half-communist one where their profits are private but their losses get socialized?