The spirit of capitalism, 2000 - emotional maturity of adults

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Bosworth

Occasionally, one of the men would slip up the steps, but then only briefly, to pass to my friend an envelope thick with congratulatory cash, as if only this, his propitiatory offering, gave him license to approach. Otherwise we remained there in exalted isolation, on perpetual display. And what I remember most now, beyond my own discomfort, was how the stares of the adults kept drifting up, from their plates of prime rib, to locate us; how they would touch and then hold the hem of the moment--this carefully composed, happy tableaux of "youth on the cusp." My unrelenting desire to disappear was, of course, mostly the result of a social awkwardness befitting my age. But even then I sensed that there was something wrong in this reversal of status; something fundamentally (and frighteningly) false about the veneration we received in expressions that seesawed between proprietary joy and solemn awe.

Now, a parent myself, I better understand the temptations of such love, the ways in which our vanities survive, subversive to the end, through projecting their fantasies onto the lives of our reluctant kids. Now, glancing backward, I see that scene as especially representative of the post-War era: how religious rites of passage were being co-opted then into celebrations of materialist status; how Catholics, Protestants, and Jews alike--all of whom sat at the elevated table--were being converted to Mammon's melting-pot version of the mortgaged Good Life. What I see, when I glance back now, is the idolatry of childhood: the little god and goddess of Self-Esteem being raised on the altar of the secular dream.

About five years later, in the year of my own graduation, Time actually put the yearbook photos of a high-school senior class (from California, of course) on its glossy cover, confirming, as only a Time cover could then, the ascension of America's "youth culture." Not long thereafter Time also ran a cover daring to wonder if God were dead, thus completing the dual prophecy already implicit in that bar mitzvah scene. For the boosting of youth and the debunking of God were (and are) associate phenomena, each arising from the true cover story of the post-War age: the triumph of the consumer economy over traditional spirituality as the arbiter of social values.

The way that we, as a generation, were so oversold only shows how much the temper of commercial salesmanship had already tainted the raising of families by the 1950s. And our failures as a group in middle age speak painfully now to this economy's own failure as the dominant model for daily behavior. Its vaunting of self-interest, its reduction of people to contacts or products, its disingenuous blurring of moral improvement with material progress: these were the values that, in the midst of our "rebellions," we were stooping to obey, blind to the results until it was too late, That our becoming "better off" might actually make a worse human place was the sort of savvy calculation that an economy programmed to Great Expectations could not, and still cannot, make.