Giving Stuff Its Due

Both E.D. and Mark have excellent posts up debating and discussing the merits of individualism versus communitarianism and lamenting the marketization of moral calculation. Regardless of which inflection you happen to prefer, I think that one can find a great deal to appreciate about E.D.’s careful and biting criticism of individualism run amok and Mark’s exemplary effort to carve out an alternative and ultimately more authentic definition of individualism.

Both writers note how morality and value qua materialism is perhaps the most pressing scourge currently facing us, and I am inclined to both heed and agree with their warnings. But that said, I think that it becomes easy in such a game of finger pointing to wind up up over selling one’s case and failing to mind a certain persistent set of details that beg acknowledgment. Listen, it is certainly true that unbridled consumerism presents significant problems on numerous levels — not just the philosophical ones to which Mark and E.D. point, but also environmental/survival problems to which Thomas Friedman somewhat recently alluded in one of his op-eds. The hollowing effects of consumerism therefore present a significant edifice over which we must scale in order to both embody our authentic selves and maintain the livable space in which to mount that effort.

That qualifier out of the way, though, I think we ought to be careful about not tossing the baby out with the bathwater, especially insofar as I think that baby includes several billion additional heads who might have something to offer to the project. It is easy for us in the West to disown and ridicule the excesses of materialism because, well, we’re the ones who are drowning in its mire. But to assume that such an outlook is universal is to commit the grievous sin of ethnocentrism: our circumstances are not the only circumstances effecting this calculation. There are whole sections of the world who look at images of the wealth, comfort, and stability of our culture and ask the perfectly legitimate question, “When will it be our turn?”

Indeed, the exercise of even pontificating about certain elements of life is in some senses a luxury reserved for those who have achieved (accidentally stumbled into?) a degree of affluence that affords them the time and space in which to engage such mental gymnastics. In some regards, we ought to be careful how thoroughly we thumb our noses at the junk of our lives, it is the ability to accumulate that junk that has given us the platform from which to have the privilege of rejecting it in pursuit of even more worthwhile realizations and modes of living — there are a great many (vast majority?) for whom such intellectual abandon is simply not a reality.

None of which is to mount some kind of economically-focused determinism. I’m not trying to make the case that poor people can’t be smart or can’t have valuable insight into life, all too often those of us who do not live in excessive wealth provide the important and stark foil of perspective to illuminate such insights. But there is a reason we detest and seek to remedy poverty almost universally and it simply goes without saying that it is difficult to engage with the search for the authentic individual or a more valued way of living with dodging bullets for armed militias, scouring garbage heaps for the scant possibility of food on which to live, or simply resigning one’s self to the inevitability of starvation and dehydration. Of course, I use extreme examples there to prove my point, but the same is true of those caught in barely sustaining cycles of poverty. The farmer who has to work themselves to the bone just to generate enough to maintain their family, the aspiring entrepreneur in a region/country utterly devoid of capital to realize his/her idea, and all the other lesser tragic, yet still paralyzing examples of life that is a quantum leap away from the quality we in the West enjoy.

It is for these reasons that I have a difficult time embracing the distributionist utopia that seems often to be the suggested solution to our woes, such a vision assumes a position that is at odds globalization by design. And it isn’t that I don’t share the concerns expressed by those who offer such solutions, nor that I think globalization is flawless and beyond reproach. It is rather that those globalized networks are normative creatures solely based on how we choose to use them and in that regard I think they have a role to play in not just ensuring our own continued life, liberty, and happiness, but in ensuring that the rest of the world is provided with an, again, the much deserved opportunity to enjoy the same.

As a good friend living in South Korea often reminds me and a group of friends who are given to such authentic self graspings, how would a distributionist system work for the people of Seoul? How would it work for the many other countries and regions for whom much basis of sustained quality of life is predicated on the importing and exporting of goods. How does it seem fair with all of our relative wealth to just sort of close up shop after generating that wealth and the back of the rest of the world and wish everyone well on their own. “Good night, good luck, let us know how those millions still not able to get one, let alone three square meals a day works out. On second though, don’t — we’re going to be eating at a restaurant that you, by definition, will never have access to.”

Harsh, perhaps, I know. And I equally know that those who propose such ideas don’t advocate a mind set like that. But that could very well be the effect wrought if ideas of protectionism and distributism and, perhaps ultimately, isolationism win the day in an unchallenged manner. As Patrick Deneen notes in his excellent post on free-riding, the critiques offered from within the crunchy-con school are vital and important, we are fools to ignore them. But like any worldview, if we don’t counter balance those critiques with the view from other vantage points, they bring their own brand of destructiveness and misery. And I worry that said misery will primarily be the dominion of others.

So let us celebrate the effort to find a new and simplified and more valuable way of living that sustains both us and the planet. These wanderings represent the twisting journey of our future. But let us also not forget the wisdom of the past, that our opportunity to live in a complicated fashion is part of what brought us to this exciting point in the first place, and that some of the machinery we seek to cast off might have useful application for others, in spite of our minimalist, authentic revolution.

Related posts...

• Glocalism and Decentralized Networks
• Without Political Form: Narrato-Political Self-Critique
• Poverty and Human Rights

Tags | affluence, consumerism, distributism, globalization, poverty