The spirit of capitalism, 2000 - emotional maturity of adults

Public Interest, Wntr, 2000 by David Bosworth

The information age

Wemmick's challenge is the perennial one of the democratic citizen living under scientific capitalism: how to partake of its unprecedented material bounty without succumbing to its spiritual depravations; how to use its machines without, in effect, becoming one. Although always problematic, his ironic solution--to use the economy's means to build, in a sense, a fortress against that economy's beliefs--was far more feasible in 1860 than in 1960, when the penetrations of the Information Age made any large-scale segregation of private from public impossible, and when the economy's own shift to boosting consumption made the family itself a necessary target for ideological instruction. The commuting fathers of postwar America might keep their family circumstances a secret from their bosses, as Wemmick did from Jaggers, but the economy's propaganda was still invading their homes daily through radio and TV, and no moat, wall, or remote locale could block its reach.

Although Dickens died long before the Information Age, one of the subplots in David Copperfield does metaphorically suggest the insidious nature of its coming threat to the family's domain. Here, too, law is the profession, but Mr. Wickfield's focus is financial not criminal, his small office is in his home, and he practices in suburban Canterbury rather than fast-paced London. In character, too, Wickfield is nearly the opposite of Wemmick's master, soft to Jaggers' hard, more devoted to his wife and daughter than to his job. He is an honest man, but after his wife dies, he increasingly retreats from the details of his practice into solitude and drink--a retreat that is encouraged and, in fact, secretly stage-managed by his single employee, the clerk, Uriah Heep.

Perpetually present, always volunteering to take over for his distracted boss, Heep flatters and fawns, and behind his unctuous protestations of his own "'umbleness," the resentful underling relentlessly plots: first taking control of Wickfield's practice, then tricking him into complicity in illegal dealings, then bribing his way into a formal partnership. Eventually, he not only runs Wickfield's business as if it were his own; he completes his domination by actually moving both his mother and himself into Wickfield's home. While Wemmick's virtual castle managed to maintain a safe space for the practice of "family values," Wickfield's family castle has now been invaded--its spaces occupied, its practices subverted.

As the central vehicle for consumerist ideology, postwar TV was very much the Uriah Heep of technologies: always hanging about the house and bowing obsequiously, always claiming to be our servant, our ever so 'umble and unworthy servant. Like Heep, commercial TV perpetually flattered its viewers, playing on our weaknesses while subtly subverting our traditional beliefs. Like Heep, it quietly became a household fixture, so mundane and demeaned that we ceased to see this high-tech, servile "employee" for what it actually was. We failed to note, as Wickfield failed to note, how dependent we had become on its "companionship" and "services." And we failed to suspect, as the domain of its influence rapidly spread, that its offerings weren't free after all, that the interests it served were not ours but its own, and that, like Heep's, its aims were insidious--de facto control of our business, our bodies, our children in our homes.