This notion of how "luxury" makes people "soft" has a kernel of relevance to understanding the present American crisis. But for us the discipline that's been loosened in us is not the toughness of warriors but the moral discipline we exercise in our lives.
This corrosion of moral discipline has occurred because affluence transforms the nature of the choices people face. By moving us from a life governed largely by necessity into a life that gives wide scope for desire, the rise of affluence compels us to make a new and unaccustomed kind of moral choice. And in this way, affluence puts us in need of new kinds of moral guidance for which the old strictures, developed under wholly different circumstances, are quite inadequate.
For virtually all of human history until very recently --actually within living memory-- the great mass of people lived lives not so very far from the subsistence level. Even in the richest of countries --such as the United States in the first half of the twentieth century-- the level of material wealth for the average person gave only very limited scope to the role of personal desire in their moment-to-moment, day-to-day way of living.
In other words, throughout history the great majority of people have lived lives governed by necessity. With the business of survival weighing heavily, people needed continually to be asking the question, "What is required of me?." The question "What do I want?" was, by contrast, something of a luxury, a relative rarity in the fabric of people's daily living.
This was how almost everyone lived during the millennia during which the traditional moral structures of our civilization were constructed. As a result, those moral teachings handed down to us by our cultural/religious traditions deal overwhelmingly with questions of duty and responsibility. And so this traditi0nal morality provides a well-developed set of guidelines for how to answer questions like, "What is required of me by virtue of my responsibility to others and to society and to God?"
Our traditional morality tells us not to steal or murder, it tells us to pay our debts, it tells us to do our jobs, it tells us of the virtues of hard work and patience and loyalty and honesty. It tells us, in other words, what is required of us by the surrounding world.
Although the realm of responsibility and duty remain an important part of life, people are now in a position to ask, much more than ever before, "What do I want?" They get to make choices, in other words, that are not about one's obligation to meet external demands but about choosing among one's own internal desires.
What do I want to do with my leisure time (now that I am no longer working from sun-up to sun-down, as so many of my ancestors had to do)?
What do I want to do with my disposable income (now that I no longer have to spend just about every cent I have, like my ancestors did, to take care of the bare necessities of life)?
What do I want to eat, and how much do I want to eat (now that I --unlike so many before me-- have a wealth of different foods available to me, and enough of them so that I can eat until I choose to stop and not until the food runs out)?
For recent generations, this greatly widened scope for the satisfaction of desire has had an enormous impact.
A half century ago, in the post-World War II era, Americans knew they were the richest people in the history of the world. Typical American baby-boomers enjoyed a degree of comfort, choice, and luxury unknown to their parents (or, indeed, to any mass population in human history).
No wonder the baby-boom generation launched the counter-culture!
As the first generation raised in such widespread affluence, this generation intuitively understood that the old morality of duty and sacrifice no longer sufficed. Once the realities of life loosen the grim grip of necessit, it no longer makes sense to restrict and repress desire so fully as the old strictures dictate. And so the youth, in a combination of insight and folly, threw off the old moral discipline in the name of the judgment-free ethic of "If it feel's good, do it."
Desire should reign supreme, the counterculture declared, and thus was launched the culture war between one side that clung to the old-time morality and another that imagined moral discipline to be superfluous.
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.
This corrosion of moral discipline has occurred because affluence transforms the nature of the choices people face. By moving us from a life governed largely by necessity into a life that gives wide scope for desire, the rise of affluence compels us to make a new and unaccustomed kind of moral choice. And in this way, affluence puts us in need of new kinds of moral guidance for which the old strictures, developed under wholly different circumstances, are quite inadequate.
For virtually all of human history until very recently --actually within living memory-- the great mass of people lived lives not so very far from the subsistence level. Even in the richest of countries --such as the United States in the first half of the twentieth century-- the level of material wealth for the average person gave only very limited scope to the role of personal desire in their moment-to-moment, day-to-day way of living.
In other words, throughout history the great majority of people have lived lives governed by necessity. With the business of survival weighing heavily, people needed continually to be asking the question, "What is required of me?." The question "What do I want?" was, by contrast, something of a luxury, a relative rarity in the fabric of people's daily living.
Our traditional morality tells us not to steal or murder, it tells us to pay our debts, it tells us to do our jobs, it tells us of the virtues of hard work and patience and loyalty and honesty. It tells us, in other words, what is required of us by the surrounding world.
Although the realm of responsibility and duty remain an important part of life, people are now in a position to ask, much more than ever before, "What do I want?" They get to make choices, in other words, that are not about one's obligation to meet external demands but about choosing among one's own internal desires.
What do I want to do with my leisure time (now that I am no longer working from sun-up to sun-down, as so many of my ancestors had to do)?
What do I want to do with my disposable income (now that I no longer have to spend just about every cent I have, like my ancestors did, to take care of the bare necessities of life)?
What do I want to eat, and how much do I want to eat (now that I --unlike so many before me-- have a wealth of different foods available to me, and enough of them so that I can eat until I choose to stop and not until the food runs out)?
For recent generations, this greatly widened scope for the satisfaction of desire has had an enormous impact.
A half century ago, in the post-World War II era, Americans knew they were the richest people in the history of the world. Typical American baby-boomers enjoyed a degree of comfort, choice, and luxury unknown to their parents (or, indeed, to any mass population in human history).
No wonder the baby-boom generation launched the counter-culture!
As the first generation raised in such widespread affluence, this generation intuitively understood that the old morality of duty and sacrifice no longer sufficed. Once the realities of life loosen the grim grip of necessit, it no longer makes sense to restrict and repress desire so fully as the old strictures dictate. And so the youth, in a combination of insight and folly, threw off the old moral discipline in the name of the judgment-free ethic of "If it feel's good, do it."
Desire should reign supreme, the counterculture declared, and thus was launched the culture war between one side that clung to the old-time morality and another that imagined moral discipline to be superfluous.
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.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
