The spirit of capitalism, 2000 - emotional maturity of adults

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Bosworth

Capitalism's two selves

Thirty-five years ago, Marshall McLuhan supplied a partial answer when he observed that "everyone experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, and not understanding, that influences behavior." McLuhan was primarily concerned, of course, with the shift in communications from print to the electronic media, and the statement can be seen as a brief elaboration of his catchy aphorism, "the medium is the message." But the principle applies more broadly as well. To the extent that our daily experience is at all humanly mediated-"brought to us by" human ideas, technologies, architectures-it is necessarily suffused with implicit moral values. Churches and synagogues can tell us what we should believe, continuing to teach traditional virtues, but if the grounds and rounds of daily life are calibrated differently, our behavior will begin to shift accordingly. We can continue to "talk the talk" but won't "walk the walk" as, in Hamlet's words, "that monster, custom, who doth all sense eat," silently reconfigures our daily actions.

That since World War II our capitalist economy-its ventures, ambitions, procedures, and "messages"--has become the new primary calibrator of our daily experience is not a controversial claim. My subsequent assertion that its new predominance has led to the very patterns of rash and rational immaturity cited above, however, requires a more elaborate analysis. To begin, we can cite and extend the central thesis of Daniel Bell's recently reissued The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism-which is, in essence, a postindustrial updating of Max Weber's 1904 classic, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Among the contradictions astutely analyzed by Bell is that between the ethos of capitalist production-which still requires obedience, hard work, and self-sacrifice through delayed gratification-and the ethos of capitalist consumption, with its idealizing of hedonism, rebellion against authority, and impulsive behavior (such as deserting your children for a sudden vacation).

Simply stated, the two main divisions of capitalist commerce, production and sales, have come to require two opposing regimens of ideal behavior-one rational, the other rash--and these regimens suggest two discordant identities, a coolly mechanical and narrowly accountable Producing Self (Dr. Jekyll) and a hotly appetitive Consuming Self (Mr. Hyde). In the gotcha game of the culture wars each side cleverly identifies and "outs" the antisocial excesses of its opponent's Consuming Self even as it ignores its own. The conservative spotlights, in alternating tones of contempt and alarm, the dangers of the liberal's sexual and aesthetic excesses while the liberal satirizes and sermonizes against the excessive greed and conspicuous consumption of the corporate elite. Not only does each side see the moral ugliness of the other's Hyde while missing its own, both tend to miss the ongoing conflict all of us face in attempting to follow two essentially incompatible models of behavior. Neither side acknowledges the emot ional stress and cognitive dissonance of being asked to play, often in the very same day, both an abstemious Jekyll and an avid Hyde.