Rod quotes David Rieff, who writes in personally, and reflects:

consumerism is Promethean knowledge and […] the only alternative to it is economic catastrophe — something only the most convinced of misanthropes could possibly welcome.

Is he correct? Is the only alternative to being poor but virtuous being rich but corrupted by materialism? I think there’s a big middle ground, but it’s unstable. Sorokin finds the ideal society to be the mediation between ideational (i.e., religious or spiritual) and sensate (i.e., materialistic), but he admits that that’s very hard to pull off.

That big middle ground is only as stable as we make our capital, but it strikes me as too panicky and despairing to say that this is hugely difficult. What’s hugely difficult is to willfully change an entire culture in the direction of mediated stability. What’s not so hard is to do it yourself. Stop paying for cable television. Buy secondhand and antique furniture. Avoid the corporate toy machine when buying things for your children. Some of us worry that the only way to fight the cult of upward mobility is by encouraging a counterculture of downward mobility. This is not only impracticable but also unfair; what matters more, by my lights, is that we temper our interest in upward mobility by pursuing it only as a means to upward nobility. The economy of consumption isn’t going to go away anytime soon, because we’ve learned that the commodities we want most of all are the ones that give us a "sense of" harmony between our unique selves and the crazily, sometimes randomly shifting world at large.

Consumerism is only a real problem, in other words, to the degree that we lack the right ethic of consumption. And we tie ourselves erringly to an overly economic view of life if we think that more consumption is worse and less is better. Quantity is not the issue, but quality. And I think we can work out an ethic of upward nobility as consumers that helps us work out in a practical way what we should spend our free time and money on. Aspirational spending can "cash out" in a lot of different ways. An easy example sounds something like "buy a better education for your child instead of a big-screen television," or "buy yourself an electric guitar instead of a Spring Break vacation." It’s not just a matter of more "family-oriented" spending, as the family feast at McDonald’s can attest. And sure: it’s harder to buy "noble" goods and services when you’re less well off, but it’s obvious that Americans at every station on the class ladder have ample opportunities to blow their money on things that don’t really redound to the sort of abiding satisfaction they seek. You can’t buy that kind of deep, peaceful repose, but it strikes me as evident that, within a fairly wide range of incomes (and granting what Will Wilkinson and others say about the insane difficulty of being happily impoverished), you can use your money to fortify yourself with things and experiences that really strengthen personal nobility — whether you’re single, married, and with or without children.

In many cases these will be different combinations of goods, services, and experiences. But given how miserable we all know we can be trying to buy happiness, I think we have the cultural maturity to start talking about what the ingredients of our upward nobility might be…without getting into pejorative screaming matches. Given the Promethean quality of our knowledge of transaction, there may be no responsible alternative.

While much of the talk on this blog, appropriately enough, has been about the opportunities presented in defeat for a rethinking of conservative principles there might also be some occasssion for a reassessment of contemporary liberalism as well. The media insists on presenting Obama’s presidency in advance as a watershed moment in American history but in many ways it could result in a four year dimunition of executive strength—might it be Congress that will really run the show? And if Peter Lawler is right that Obama’s"negative landslide" doesn’t come with an accompanying political realignment, we might reasonably expect some overextension by a Congress that certainly thinks it just received a popular mandate. Will Obama be put in the position of having to chasten a Congress controlled by his own party? And from the right of them ideologically? Will this begin a reconsideration of liberalism from within the party that is the steward if its principles? Or will the next four years be characterized by a completely untethered liberalism?

One of our country’s most precious inheritance from the Puritans was the more or less compulsory cessation of commercial activity on Sunday.  But we Hobbesian/Darwinian survivalists increasingly think there’s not time enough to allow the wasting of even a single day.  Or we think we need a day of mere play as a respite from our demanding lives;  many of us have become "Seventh Day Recreationists."  Or we think Sunday should be a "lifestyle choice" for those who inexplicably have that kind of preference.  It would be tyrannical to impose anyone’s preferences on anyone else.  But to make Sunday merely a choice, of course, limits to it those who can afford it.  The day of rest becomes, not a right reflecting who we are, but a privilege for the privileged.

According to Tocqueville, the Americans, on Sunday, stopped working in order to hear and think about the "delicate enjoyments" and "true happiness" that come from acting virtuously as beings made in the image of the great and eternal God.  Even when they heard Christian sermons that enjoyed them to be humble, they wer exalted.  They were alwys told that, as beings with souls destined for immortality, they were more–much more–than merely beings with interests.  If people believe that nothing human endures, Tocqueville contends, they won’t produce accomplishments–thoughts, writings, and deeds–that endure the test of time.

Is one reason that we full of the (allegedly) postmodern awareness that everything human is so ephemeral is that we surrendered Sunday–the Sabbath?  Is that one reason we have so much trouble resisting the arrogant efforts pop-Cartesian experts who proudly turn themselves into gods by brutalizing everyone else?  The danger of our time, Tocqueville observes, is that the particular individual "will finally lose the use of his most sublime faculties, and by wishing to improve everything around him, will finally degrade himself."

Over at The American Scene, Alan Jacobs does the public service of reminding us that those medieval Christians didn’t put Earth at the center of the universe because they were arrogant:

The center of the medieval cosmos is not the most important place, but the stillest and deadest place, the place farthest from the full presence of God in the Empyrean. And if you doubt this, just read Dante’s Inferno: there the Earth is at the center of the cosmos, and what’s at the center of the Earth? Satan — who has fled there to escape as best he can from the Divine Presence that he loathes.

We moderns like the idea that medieval Christians believed that they were the most important beings in the whole cosmos, because we like thinking that our ancestors were more arrogant than we are. But come on: has anyone ever been more arrogant than we are?

One big stroke of modern arrogance, is the presumed centrality of…centrality. The ‘central’ truth of Cartesian spatial awareness is that it’s two-dimensional. There is no axis of hierarchy, and no way of plotting the Highest. All the time we slip into the language of centrality, often when what we’re really trying to say only has the purchase we want it to in terms of altitude. "Central values" are different in two ways from "highest virtues."

It’s easy for me to choose my friends: My conversation style involves blurting out bizarre and enigmatic sentences, and anyone with the patience to put up with it is a friend of mine. (Call it "argument by spaghetti": throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.) Case in point, this scene from the Fuddruckers near the Chinatown metro in DC:

"The problem with the liberals is that they can’t do irony."
"The hell? They’re the ones who love it to death."
"It’s because they don’t understand loyalty."

Miraculously, my interlocutor knew me well enough to follow what I meant, but here’s a little elucidation. In the liberal understanding of loyalty, I am a Democrat (or whatever) exactly to the extent that I agree with their platform; if loyalty ever demanded that I do something contrary to my own opinion, that would be a violation of conscience. Consequently, I can never be ironic about a party, country, person, or institution I love: either I agree with them, in which case irony would be inappropriate, or I disagree, in which case I should voice my dissent in plain terms. Why put forward the pretense of allegiance when the best way to show my "loyalty" is straightforward criticism?

Irony exists in the space between what I believe and what I claim to believe, and liberalism destroys that space. If Obama has a sense of humor about his politics (not to mention his cult of personality), it goes to show that he wants to open that space back up and make the world safe once again for pragmatic idealists and idealistic pragmatists.

All of this is by way of saying that James said something interesting when he suggested that an ironic temperament "could be a twist on Rortyanism after all — with real humility forced into the private sphere and irony made its only permissible public surrogate." James eyes this New Rortyianism with suspicion, but I’m pleased as Punch.

UPDATE: A relevant passage from Jim Scott in which he argues that poor people who’ve been brainwashed into really believing in their oppressors’ ideology are more likely to revolt than those who regard the enslaving ideology as manipulative bunk (i.e. false consciousness doesn’t prevent rebellion but, oddly enough, promotes it):

Contrary to the usual wisdom and to Gramsci’s analysis, radicalism may be less likely to arise among disadvantaged groups who fail to take the dominant ideology seriously than among those who, in Marxist terms, might be considered falsely conscious. In a perceptive study of working-class secondary school students in England, Paul Willis discovered a strong counterculture that produced a cynical distance from dominant platitudes but not radicalism. Paradoxically, it was the "conformists," who appeared, in form at least, to accept the values of the school (the hegemonic instrument par excellence in modern society), who posed the threat. Because they operated as if they accepted the implicity promise of the dominant ideology (If you work hard, obey authority, do well in school, and keep your nose clean you will advance by merit and have satisfying work) they made sacrifices of self-discipline and control and developed expectations that were usually betrayed. Employers preferred not to hire them because they were pushy and hard to deal with as compared with the more typical working-class youth, who were realistic, expected little, and put in a day of work without too much grumbling. The system may have most to fear from those subordiantes among whom the institutions of hegemony have been most successful.

Eve Tushnet has an occasional series called "Things I Know But Cannot Prove," a list that every man should compile for himself in spare moments, both to keep track of what he knows—I, for one, tend to forget—and keep a little humility about what he can and can’t prove. One item on mine used to be "Love of your fellow man is nice poetry, but, when it comes to how to behave, far better to trust good manners."

As it happens, that statement has been upgraded to Something I Know and Can Prove thanks to this passage from Florence King’s novel When Sisterhood was in Flower. The set-up is that our narrator’s traveling companion has begun to wreak havoc at a roadside motel, which is hardly surprising given that she’s a mentally unstable medievalist; in this case, Gloria’s confusion vis-a-vis reality has caused her to tear around the parking lot shouting "I hear the Plantagenet herald! Make haste to Gloucester!" and "Raise the portcullis in the name of the king!":

The manageress burst into a hoarse whiskey laugh and caught Gloria by the arm as she rounded the office. "Okay, kid, okay," she chortled good-naturedly. "You just had one to many, that’s all. Happens to the best of us."

"We can’t raise the portcullis!"

"Chrissake, kid, you can’t get nobody to fix things nowadays. The plumbers charge ten bucks an hour and don’t do a goddamn thing." Her warm, husky, maternal voice did the trick. Gloria became docile and allowed herself to be led back to the cabin.

"You gals lay off the sauce now," Fran advised. "If you’re hung over tomorrow, just stay in bed, don’t worry about checkout time. My maid got shot last night so there won’t be nobody around anyhow."

Gloria put her arms around Fran and laid her head on the woman’s shoulder. "My liege lord has the pox!"

"That’s nothin’, you oughta see Harry’s piles. Big as baseballs. Now go back to bed and sleep it off. Night-night."

Two things are obvious: that the manageress has no idea what in God’s name Gloria is on about, and that she treats her with great humanity and humor anyway. Just think what would have happened if she’d tried to understand poor Gloria, or tried to love her (which would, at least to some extent, depend on understanding her); the interaction would have never gotten airborne!

This was the thought that sprung to mind as I read this post from James in which he unpacks this paragraph of Freddie’s on what politics should look like:

Fraternal love. Mutual respect. Understanding. These things are worth the fighting for, and I want no part of a political dialogue that doesn’t have, peeking out from the cracks, a sense of love, real love, hidden within it.

Manners were invented so we could get along with people we don’t love, understand, or respect, and they work. In fact, they work better than love, understanding, and respect insofar as those emotions, while better and deeper (ceteris paribus), are conditional. I love my friends and kin when they do things I don’t understand, but I’m sure I couldn’t offer such an unflinching embrace to every Democrat in America.

Edmund Burke said that magnanimity is not seldom the truest wisdom in politics. Magnanimity, civility, good manners: these are the watchwords of a healthy political discourse, not love, understanding, and respect. Looking through an old notebook yesterday, I found where I’d written in emphatic block letters "RITUAL, NOT THEOLOGY, WILL SAVE US NOW." This may have been something like what I meant.

If I read him correctly, President-elect Obama seeks to blur the ethnic-cultural aspect of the individual to the point where we can, as a nation, achieve true "diversity," a oneness of purpose that will unite America with the people of the world in brotherhood and, no doubt, spawn a new age of peace, love, and tranquility.
While critics may argue that Obama’s proposal may be seen as another example of the continuing orthodoxy of alienation which inevitably carries with it the desire to make opaque the reality of man’s relationship with the divine ground, it appears that at the root of his agenda is a belief in the American philomythos, the great "melting pot."
Ironically, the primary obstacle challenging Obama’s efforts at establishing the new tomorrow are the very people he seeks to fully assimilate into the American family, namely those people, legal or illegal, who have immigrated to the United States in the past generation or so.
While Obama’s programs will assist them in gaining political clout they do not appear willing to do more than modifiy their cultural proclivities, which is quite understandable.
The question is, will Obama’s proposals result in a period of integration or disintegration?

Apparently there being soul in cyberspace means that there’s adultery and divorce in cyberspace as well:

"I went mad — I was so hurt. I just couldn’t believe what he’d done," Taylor told the Western Morning News. "It may have started online, but it existed entirely in the real world and it hurts just as much now it is over."

Read the whole article. It’s one of the most depressing examples of online banality resulting in real-world LOLgistics that I’ve seen in a while.

One can surely make a reasonable argument that Sarah Palin was underqualified to be the next Vice President. Nevertheless, I argue here that the hyperventilated contempt shown for her by our cosmopolitan elites reveals a caricatured and ugly dismissal of the lives of ordinary Americans. It’s not just the breathtaking sense of cultural superiority that’s so discomfiting or the superficial conflation of a general urbanity with real philosophical gravitas. It’s also the thoughtless dismissal of prudence as a political virtue, an inflated sense of the value of political philosophy to political practice, and the overall view that a true populism results in the technocratic few beneficiently managing the benighted many.

Niall Ferguson offers a sweeping historical explanation — the clearest and broadest I’ve seen — of the financial crisis, including a delicious (to me) critique of the arrogant "quants" (quantitative whiz-kids) who created a "Planet Finance" in the sky and led us over the cliff.  Is not the creation and bursting of bubbles endemic in the modern project of mastery, which requires a kind of rolling, snowballing conspiracy against given limits?  Is there not something of the pyramid scheme in the compulsion always to raise the bid on the wager that more power will lead something good, a good ever deferred by the a newer, higher bid?  Not that there’s anything wrong with that…