The spirit of capitalism, 2000 - emotional maturity of adults

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Bosworth

The new majority

But is it fair to use two such extreme examples as somehow representative of the nation's immaturity? Society, after all, officially condemned the couple (they were pilloried in the press, convicted of neglect, and lost custody of their children), and the court finally refused the dying consultant's request. Yet, although these individuals did transgress the borders of permissible behavior, their ways of thinking are, alas, not that far removed from the newly emerging cultural norms. Middle-class children are left on their own every day in postindustrial America, often by parents who are off satisfying their "own needs" as defined ever more expansively (and expensively) by our consumer economy; and the denial of death is an urgent and still burgeoning industry here. Millions of medical dollars are spent mechanically prolonging the lives of the mortally comatose and thousands of puffy words expended avoiding the pronouncement of the one-word sentence we all must share: i.e., death. Although our movies are not orious for their abundant body counts, our own real-life relation to the inescapable fact of our mortality is best captured by the perhaps apocryphal octogenarian lady who, when informed that she was dying, responded plaintively: "Why me?"

It is crucial to note, too, that such delusions are by no means limited to the uneducated or to a willfully superstitious laity. Supposedly serious scientists, associated with prestigious institutions like M.I.T.'s Media Lab, continue to make claims that we shall eventually invent our way into an actual immortality. (True to the ruling philosophy of the day, these claims are of two schools: the rationalists, like Hans Moravec from Carnegie Mellon, who believe that we will eventually "download" our individual minds into computers and, enacting a Cartesian escape from our merely mortal flesh, live forever as continuously evolving "software"; and the more traditional materialists who still focus on perfecting the flesh itself through drug protocols and genetic engineering.) Nor do political affiliation or philosophy seem to exempt one from these now pandemic temptations to immature behavior. Republican, Democrat, and Independent alike invest in cosmetic surgery, throw adolescent road-rage fits, flatter their "i nner child," variously defined, to the detriment of their actual children.

I open with this complementary pair of incidents, then, because I believe they illustrate my larger point: The behavior that disturbs us now is very broadbased and is performed by men and women of the middle class, by "us," exercising our freedom of choice as directed implicitly and explicitly by the values of our postindustrial economy-an economy that increasingly encloses and invades the everyday lives of both liberals and conservatives. Although most of us still cling to the traditional rhetoric of religious and civic responsibility, which has long counterbalanced America's radical experiment in individual liberty, these incidents illustrate the ways in which we have been drawn, often unconsciously, toward entirely different schedules of ideal behavior, schedules hostile to both the temper and the habits of a democratic community. That is to say, what we actually believe and what we think we believe no longer mesh. While some of that discrepancy may be attributable to an intentional deception-i.e., to the self-conscious hypocrisy that the opposing critics in our culture wars love to dissect-much of it occurs below the level of articulate self-awareness, Such a claim, that these destructive changes are both ubiquitous and largely unconscious, strongly suggests that, even as we admit the urgency of the problem, we ought to tone down the partisan scorn that has come to characterize these analyses. It also poses the grand question that haunts all our current cultural conflicts: Exactly how has our behavior shifted so dramatically without our self-conscious knowledge or consent?