The spirit of capitalism, 2000 - emotional maturity of adults

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Bosworth

It is not simply commerce, then, but commerce's two separate moral regimens for production and consumption that are the new primary calibrators of our daily experience; they are "the monster[s] ... who doth all sense eat"--who, that is, have become so customary that, like the air we breathe, we cease to actively sense their influence. What I wish to emphasize here, however, is that both prospective identities are potentially destructive, the Producing Self no less than the Consuming Self, whose depravations are more commonly noted. Not only can a good employee be an awful parent, neighbor, or citizen; that employee is, I would contend, more likely to be an ineffective parent or neighbor if he or she continues to follow the customary values of the postmodern workplace beyond the bounds of the office, factory, or store. If, for example, delayed gratification were sufficient in itself to good citizenship, then who could be a more exemplary citizen than our computer consultant, a man willing to "sacrifice" his b ody now and put his head on ice for untold years before experiencing the "gratification" of his revival?

The end of adulthood

If I am right, then a recovery of moral maturity would require a new sort of abstinence, more expansively defined. In our struggle to relearn what it means to be good parents and neighbors, we would need to withdraw from those spheres where the narrow schedules of both the Avid Consumer and the Efficient Producer overly determine our daily experience.

Yet everywhere we turn these tacitly moral customizers now intrude. They have converted the public square, which has been subsumed by the commercial mall. They have infiltrated the private home, which has been saturated with commercial solicitation through radio, television, and now the Web. They have co-opted the processes of democratic government, which has become increasingly beholden to commercial interests, whether "left-wing" Hollywood or "right-wing" Wall Street, through the necessities of campaign financing, and increasingly rationalized into an "information product" by for-hire election technicians like Dick Morris. They have invaded our public schools, where advertising has been allowed to intrude into the hallways and even the curriculum in return for badly needed funding. They have been taking command of our universities, whose laboratories and classrooms are rapidly being transformed into duchies of the postindustrial economy--the new sites for product invention and employee training--and whose humanities curricula increasingly ape the fashion-line model of planned obsolescence. They taint the studio, movie house, and literary bookstore, which continue to contain paintings, movies, and novels espousing a robotic "anti-bourgeois" sentiment that is, in fact, obedient to the hedonistic ethos of consumerism. And, finally, they have even co-opted our religious organizations, which have become increasingly obsessed with publicity and the marketing of product lines. (This is truest of the most energetic and fastest-growing movements in postmodern America, including "right-wing" fundamentalism and "left-wing" New Age sects.)