The spirit of capitalism, 2000 - emotional maturity of adults

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Bosworth

In Dickens's story, the climax of Heep's attempted usurpation of the head, house, and heart of the Wickfield family is his plot to marry Agnes, Wickfield's only daughter. It is a plot rich with symbolic overtones, for as the novel's highly idealized heroine, Agnes practices those very same traits of modesty, solicitude, and self-abnegation (true "humbleness") that Heep can duly fake. Through his blackmail, then, Heep is aiming to take possession not only of the home's sole, beloved child but of the incarnation of goodness itself. Simulated virtue is on the verge of conquering actual virtue--a triumph of fakery only foiled in the end by a comic-heroic intervention.

In our story, though, the tale of the postwar generation as stalked by the avid industries of consumerism through the "umble" appliance of commercial TV, there is no intervention. We, the culture's "new and improved" kids, overfed and overfeted, are gradually co-opted, subtly possessed. Actual virtue is gradually subverted by simulated virtue as, in true Heepian fashion, private resentments and personal ambition assume the guise of public compassion. In our story, unlike Dickens's story, "the helping hand" is subsumed by "self-help" while charity becomes an industry itself, complete with commission sales forces and perk-laden chief executives. In our story, self-interest on both the Left and the Right borrows the language of the idealistic ("liberation from oppression or creative destruction") as we manage to progress from civil rights to self-esteem; from "keeping the world safe for democracy" to the sanctification of selfishness and the commodification of everything.

In Dickens's world, imagined at the height of the Industrial Age, the family in distress is usually saved; the regimens of industry and the rituals of domesticity manage finally to coexist in their separate domains. In our world, as reinvented by the Information Age, their domains are no longer separate. Whether in child-, health-, or "aged parent" care, the industrial increasingly runs the rituals of the domestic, and the family in distress increasingly fails.

Faux rebellion: the salesmanship of "liberation"

Because the business of America has been business for so long, because commerce is our establishment, we lose sight of the ways in which modern capitalism is necessarily anti-establishment: how it promotes disruption, dissatisfaction, mini-revolutions in tastes, habits, and so, inevitably, moral behavior.

In the American economy proper, the specific recognition that certain qualities of personal rebelliousness, rather than overthrowing capitalism, might actually be exploited to expand its base, dates back to the origins of consumerism. Not only did selling the "new" mean, implicitly at least, discounting the "old"; the very nature of some of the earliest consumer products, such as the radio and the car, radically undermined both parental and communal authority, changing the moral landscape in the l920s and fueling a new hedonism in American life. The initial establishment response to these commercially driven shifts in behavior was a kind of crude denial and displacement of causes--to immigrants, to radicals, to urban and "un-American" sinners, to demon rum. (The grossest example of such scapegoating was Henry Ford's highly public and poisonously proselytizing anti-Semitism.) Yet by the sixties, driven by the desire to cultivate the enormous potential of the youth market, rebellion was being embraced as an ex plicit theme in advertising itself. Initially, Madison Avenue idealized the pose of liberation through traditional images of American individualism like the Marlboro Man, but soon it would learn to exploit even specifically political expressions of revolt.