Meanwhile, in the years since then, the effects of affluence --both liberating and corrosive-- have only deepened as the range of choices available to average Americans has expanded greatly. A child growing up in America in the past twenty years has had, on average, a far greater scope for the satisfaction of his or her desires even than that enjoyed by the average baby-boomer.
In just a few generations, then --barely an instant in terms of the usual timeframe of cultural evolution-- the proportion of life governed by how people answer the question "What do I want?" has expanded enormously. Yet the moral tradition has not been able to adapt and grow with anything like a corresponding speed. And with the old ethic of duty doing little to guide people in making wise choices for themselves, Americans have been falling into that moral gap.
America has become, as a result, a culture of indulgence.
Yes, the greater scope for the satisfaction of personal desire has its important good aspects. It is a form of liberation for people not to have to base so much of their choice in life on sacrifice and duty. But in the absence of the guidance and discipline required to make these new choices wisely and well, this new freedom leads not to fulfillment but to self-indulgence. And self-indulgence --being the slave of one's own impulses-- is not liberation, but rather a new form of bondage.
The Need for an Ethic of Wise Choices
What's needed is the wisdom to know which choices lead to mere gratification and which to true fulfillment, which will make one a lesser being and which will help the realization of one's best potential. As much as duty and sacrifice, these also are dimensions of the good. And the achievement of these goods requires a discipline that freedom does not impose.
Necessity, by contrast, instills a kind of discipline.
Taken on a back-packing expedition, a group of pampered middle class kids learns to focus on what needs doing. If they do not attend to the business of preparing meals, they'll have nothing to eat. If they don't put up the tent carefully, it will get blown over in the wind and they'll will spend the night shivering. If they don't keep track of their things, they're liable to lose them. If they don't attend to which rocks will stay still and which will roll when stepped on, they're liable to fall and get hurt.
When life is taken up with such basics, one learns the discipline of paying attention to one's choices and making them carefully. The consequences of such choices are clear and impossible to disregard.
Such a life teaches the difference between a good choice and a bad choice, and thus a kind of moral discipline. In a community depending upon each other in the face of such necessities, people learn to govern their choices by such things as duty, responsibility, obligation. Such a life ingrains the habit of disciplining one's impulses and desires in favor of something deemed superior to mere immediate gratification.
Our affluence --with its sudden widening of the scope given to the gratification of desire-- has relaxed that focus, and thus undermined that habit.
Lacking a profound tradition to provide wise guidance for our relationship with desire, we Americans have been sliding into lives diminished by self-indulgence. Without a discipline to orient our choices toward some notion of the "Good," the continual choosing of mere gratification can make us slaves to our impulses. Without a broader perspective on the consequences --for good or for ill-- of our ways of pursuing happiness, our culture's adventures into affluence have caused a general loosening of our hold upon the moral vision.
This loosening begins in our private lives, but then --because of the gradual replacement of the habit of responsibility by the habit of self-indulgence-- inevitably moves outward into the wider world, eroding the allegiance to the good even in the realm in which our traditional morality has held sway.
The choices we make have consequences.
At the first level, the choices we make --even in matters that seem to bear only upon the person making the choices-- effects what kind of person we become.
So, if we respond to an abundance of food by over-eating, we may become obese. Thus the much-reported rising epidemic of obesity --and of other unhealthful conditions associated with our over-indulgence of the foods containing excessive amounts of sweeteners, salt, and fats-- stands as an emblem of how we can hurt ourselves with unwise, undisciplined choices.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
Duty and Sacrifice? How about Hiroshima? Ideal? How about Jim Crow? Ethics? How about Rosenbergs and McCarthy? Aristotle? How about killing, killing and killing ih his name? Affluence? How about Vietnam? The aflluent people launched counterculture? Ever heard of affluent black people in the 60s? Obesity because of self- indulgence? Ever heard of deliberate sugar- filling of sodas, bad food, McDonald's and offices, offices, offices...
Fascism is a tool. It is being used when the ruling elite feels scared. It was scared by the rising tide of socilizaiton, by the new young, by the power of the people going up. And it has nothing to do with all those pseudophilosophical self- indulgences of Mr. Schmookler. In fact that is exactly it: seems like Andy is drunk from his own wording-so long and boring the writing is.
I am retiring to my self- indulgence and my counterculture TV. And I do not feel guilty at all.
We have a problem. We have to solve it. This problem is Bush. And the last thing we need is Andy Schmookler to tell us that all of that happened because we have self-indulgent culture. Come to think of it, who said it before? Ah, yes, Pat Robertson.
by
Mark Sashine (42 articles, 19 quicklinks, 226 diaries, 3198 comments)
on Wednesday, March 15, 2006 at 2:11:42 PM
It would be nice were the world as simple and as black and white as Panurg urges us to believe. All we must do then is defeat Bush and the forces of darkness that elected him and the world becomes an Eden. I rather doubt it.
The seeds of what we now find on our world stage were sown long ago, and that they ripen now has little to do with George W. and a lot to do with things like market forces, emerging third world nations and the increasing demands on our dwindling resources by these new industrialising former colonies.
The self indugence and disinterest of our electorate is certainly a factor in the election and re-election of such as George to be certain. People are just not political, they have little time for such depressing subjects and the turnouts for even hotly contested races have less to do with the moral decay of our society than they do with human nature, in my opinion.
Events like 9/11 certainly energise folks but for a short period of time, they respond like Pavlov's dogs to calls for patriotism and flag waving, they curse the enemy, made cartoonish as it is easier to accept atrocities when performed upon such rather than thinking about killing real people, moms and dads and kids and such. Then, for the most part, they simply go back to sleep politically speaking trusting in those they have been manipulated into electing. Sad but true.
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2388 comments)
on Wednesday, March 15, 2006 at 6:05:08 PM
In the last paragraph Andy specifies that first thing is first and we have to get rid of fascism. And as Sncalir Lewis put in his book, in the US the facism comes with '$5000 per person' promise. Now it is not $5000, it is a promise of false security to shelter us from the world.
I would agree: our affluence disease sheltered us from the world for a long time until the world booted the door out on 9/11. Now the wind is blowing and we are afraid and mean. But no matter how mean we are, the worst ones are in the White House and they are the the source of the disease, the overall poison. We will prevail if we do the first thing first and boot that garbage out by addressing ALL the people ( culture, counterculture alike) about the danger od DEATH for them and their children if we do not prevail.
by
Mark Sashine (42 articles, 19 quicklinks, 226 diaries, 3198 comments)
on Thursday, March 16, 2006 at 8:07:48 AM
For me, this has been the best piece of writing I have read in a long time and is verified by the acrimonious responses posted thus far because he's touching some nervous truths. I've never posted a comment on the internet before now. Below is an edited copy of a comment that I sent to the author.
Sir,
Thank you for publishing your piece, "The Challenge of Affluence: A Root of Our Moral Crisis?" This will help settle a long-standing argument that I have had with my husband.
Before I tell you about my own situation, there is only one issue that I have with what you wrote about obesity as a reflection of self-indulgence. It is a bit more complex than that, as reflected by an article published in the May 15, 2006 issue of JAMA, titled "Status Syndrome: A Challenge to Medicine," by M.G. Marmot. Obesity can lead to a condition called metabolic syndrome, previously known as Syndrome X, or pre-diabetes, characterized by obesity, insulin resistance and hypertension. In his article, the author asserts that stress, which leads to endocrine system changes, often leads to metabolic syndrome. In addition, he also asserts that low social position, by virtue of having lesser control over one's life, can lead to poorer health.
This does not excuse personal responsibility for one’s choices though. One can choose to turn off the TV and choose to become educated regarding the influence of advertisers over food choices.
My husband is 50 years old and Scottish. Years ago, he worked for a major oil company in England. His job, and I am not making this up, was to entertain clients all around the world and have contracts signed. He did this for some years and was quite good at it. But then, how hard could it be to have a bottomless expense account and dine in the finest restaurants all around the world? He was approached to transfer to Houston, Texas which was great he thought, because in America, one can live much more extravagantly on far less money. And so he came. But so did the oil crisis of the 70's and of course his job was probably at the very top of the list of eliminations. He has done many jobs since, and is relatively successful, but he still has a very strong sense of indulgence, even though he was not raised that way. You can imagine the credit card debt that he has, for example. When he and I met some three years ago, I was a second year medical student and a single mom. Ten years prior, I inadvertently married a real, "Catch Me if You Can" con-artist and was married just long enough to leave me penniless, without a job, a car and none of my worldly possessions, plus a new baby. So when I started college at age 28, it was because I had always wanted to, but my parents made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid, yet not being educated themselves, spent their lives just getting by. In college, I worked as if my life depended on it, because it did. I used every Federal Aid program available to me (Food Stamps, WIC, Medicaid for my daughter, Pell Grants, Federal Subsidized and Unsubsidized loans) with the exception of cash assistance because there were too many strings attached. But what really made the difference between being able to pull it all off living alone without my having a paying job while studying my butt off and caring for my family were two things: The $354 from the Veteran's Administration because my father was "totally and permanently disabled" due to PTSD from working as a cryptographer in Vietnam, and the state funded childcare program in West Virginia. By and by I realized, with the help of my chemistry professor, that I was indeed not only smart enough to become a doctor, but that I also had more than enough compassion for patients, having been a patient myself years prior. When I got to medical school, I had learned to live on miniscule amounts of money. For example, when my son was a baby and in diapers, I used to sell plasma twice a week for diapers and to pay for gas for the car. And we were mostly happy because indeed, the best things in life are "free," like reading books from the library and playing in public parks.
Thus, in light of your writings, it is easy to see why my husband and I argue nearly incessantly over how money is spent in our household and why I get so angry when he indulges my son in excessive amounts of clothes, candy and junk food. So much that even HE recognizes it and he is only 11 years old. I recognize that the lifestyle that he is being taught to expect will just perpetuate the attitude of entitlement. I get angry with him for buying me expensive jewelry for special occasions when we have so much debt that we don't even own a house. He is clueless as to why I get so angry and does not "get it."
Even though I may be book smart, when it comes to relationships, obviously, I could use a tutor. Although I love my husband because he is also kind and he takes care of the household when I have ungodly hours because I am a medical student, I do have this nagging feeling that he really married me for the promise of an extravagant lifestyle at the end of his life, even though I keep telling him that in spite of having earned a $25,000 scholarship, I will still be in debt some $200,000 when I graduate from medical school and that if Social Security is around by the time I retire, I'll probably have to use it to pay my student loans, plus I never want to be a slave to my stuff.
Since my son was very small, I have taught him, "We don't buy the cereal because of the toy inside," and that advertisers don't care one iota about his health and what their food products do to him. All they care about is making money by selling foods that just taste good. But I am losing ground every day that he exerts influence over him.
Being relatively un-smart about relationships, I don't know if we will make it over the long haul, but I am going to use your article as a springboard to test the waters as to how deeply ingrained his self indulgence really is.
by
capable1 (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 1 comments)
on Thursday, March 16, 2006 at 10:42:51 AM
I would preface my remarks by stating that I believe that you and I are rather close politically and I would not presume to argue that throwing the bums out is a great start.
Panurg:
I would agree: our affluence disease sheltered us from the world for a long time until the world booted the door out on 9/11. Now the wind is blowing and we are afraid and mean. But no matter how mean we are, the worst ones are in the White House and they are the the source of the disease, the overall poison. We will prevail if we do the first thing first and boot that garbage out by addressing ALL the people ( culture, counterculture alike) about the danger od DEATH for them and their children if we do not prevail
Ardee:
As we live in a democratic republic in which our officials are elected (presumably before the onset of paperless voting machines) the ultimate responsibility for the character of those we elect lies with us, the electorate.
That Bush was elected and then re-elected, even should one include the chance of fraud and deceit in the process shows me plainly that there is something seriously wrong with our system or our values, perhaps with both. Judging George W. on his record and his choices should lead to a vast defeat at the polls, one so large as to preclude any possible use of fraudulent means to overcome small differences in numbers. Obviously that did not occur, much to my puzzlement frankly.
Since Plato wise men have noted that we get the kind of government we deserve, so I think that, should one pursue remedies of a political nature, one must, sooner or later, address the sickness of our choices. Simply trying to throw the bums out of office practically guarrantees a new set of bums will arise sooner or later.
by
ardee D. (6 articles, 4 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 2388 comments)
on Friday, March 17, 2006 at 7:19:36 AM
I do not see anything puzzling in 'selection' and then reselection of George. The mechanism was prepared and exercised and any perosn who had noted how much money was thrown into it would understand the stakes and the ' passionate intensity' of those who wanted that to happen. I would also argue that we do not live in the 'democratic republic' or rather that our ' republic' is no different from any other ones except for one thing: we are not a nation and do not have any national idea. We also do not have nay national traditions. All those noises about founding fathers, principles of ethics, etc, are what they are- noises. Tell that to Hef. Only two slogans are in the US: 'honest work for honest pay' and 'I am honest until proven otherwise'. Thus we oscillate between those. And although in general addressing our vices would be a good thing, we better address the current situation: by hook or by crook that junta in Washington has to be gone or we will certainly have no time to discuss those vices anymore. We might on the way find out that we have a lot in common with those crooks anyway. Nobody is perfect. But it is IN OUR VESTED INTEREST NOW to get rid of them once and for all. And hey, if we win, maybe the new 'burns' will be not so fast to come out?
Let me be blunt: the criminals in power spend the least of their time trying to find out if they are wrong in anything or if there is anything wrong with them. We should do the same.
by
Mark Sashine (42 articles, 19 quicklinks, 226 diaries, 3198 comments)
on Friday, March 17, 2006 at 1:04:10 PM
