March 15, 2006 at 11:15:58

The Challenge of Affluence: A Root of Our Moral Crisis?

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By Andrew Bard Schmookler (about the author) Page 3 of 5 page(s)

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Most of those youth, however, had grown up in a tightly disciplined world, had therefore already internalized many of those disciplines, and thus were able, after their youthful fling, to put together reasonably well-ordered lives.

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.

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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. (more...)

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