Choose wisely, not poorly.

From The Man Who Foresaw the West’s Fantasia by Gilbert T Sewall.

[Daniel] Bell’s masterwork, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, was published in 1976. This collection of six essays elucidates what he perceived to be the expansion of a culture that undermines its own moral basis. Society’s three interwoven realms—polity, economy, and culture—had grown in his word disjunctive. The requirements of the technical-economic order and mood of Western culture, prodded by mass consumer tastes, contradicted one another. One depended on merit and sobriety; the other sought self-actualization and release. “The contradiction is, in the longer run, the most fateful division in the society,” Bell said.

As Bell saw it, economic welfare and social order depended on wide allegiance to Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic, steady investment, and capital maintenance. It required logical thinking, delayed gratification, and prudence. Yet the modernist ethos, born at the end of the 19th century and conventionalized by the 1970s, encouraged pleasure, letting go, questioning authority, self-realization, and novelty. Distressing to Bell and any number of conservatives, Protestant codes of vocation and behavior were fading as dominant social authorities. Bell believed he was “witnessing the end of the bourgeois idea,” and sought to explain the “deeper cultural crises, which beset bourgeois societies,” and “devitalize a country, confuse the motivations of individuals, instill a sense of carpe diem, and undercut its civil will.”

What if modernism and luxury encourage the breakup of values that make bourgeois comfort and order possible, Bell asked. Liberalism approves reflexively of permissiveness but “cannot with any certainty define the bounds,” he noted. “And this is its dilemma.” For solutions, Americans were embracing a “revolution of rising entitlements” and suspicious therapeutic ministries. The contest would ultimately be between reason and anti-rationalism, Bell decided. Forty-two years later, it sometimes seems that the crazy train has arrived at the station.

Rage against bourgeois order and embrace of Dionysian expression, said Bell, furthers the “loss of coherence in culture, particularly in the spread of an antinomian attitude to moral norms and even to the idea of cultural judgment itself.” What Bell called a consumption ethic, grafted to a life unregulated by church, family, or school, and a fun morality, were blooming into a new zeitgeist. Bell could not perfectly foresee universal smartphones, multiculturalism, or Beyoncé, for example, but he surely glimpsed the appeal of their antecedents.

Bell is addressing an issue that has held my interest for some time - the system effects of societal evolution and the propensity for single attributes to undermine otherwise estimable achievement.

The classic example are the Shakers, a religious order which we know for the simple and spare beauty of their designs (especially furniture) and a song written by Elder Joseph, a member of the Shaker community in Alfred, Maine.

Performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Alison Krauss:


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Simple Gifts
by Elder Joseph

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come 'round right.

Great beauty and astonishing influence from a tiny cultural system. And yet. . . They practiced celibacy and therefore could only survive through conversions. Without any biological procreation, the community has trembled on the edge of extinction for decades.

Other examples of wonderful cultures which collapsed or were subsumed might be the Quakers. Plain, egalitarian, pacifist, with many prominent and influential members throughout history, they were influential in American history, settling in and dominating Rhode Island and Pennsylvania colonies for many decades. But their very belief system of openness and welcoming eventually led to their displacement. They became a disappearing minority in the colonies they helped bring to statehood.

A third example from our history are the Puritans. Some 21,000 emigrants from 1630-1640 to the New England colonies bloomed into a large population in the hundreds of thousands, principally owing to high birth and low death rates. Their fall was not due to extinction (Shakers) or displacement (Shakers) but due to evolution. Their belief systems were exceptionally strong and rigidly enforced.

Their disappearance was due to another cultural attribute - their dedication and veneration of education and learning. Their constant interaction with new ideas necessarily created tensions as they sought to reconcile their rigid beliefs with the new knowledge and thinking of the Age of Enlightenment. As creedal as they were, they were even more committed to education and learning and in doing so, drove further engagement with the logic of their own beliefs and the reality of the world being discovered. They evolved out of their creedal position of dominance into a more diffuse cultural influence.

All three of these groups were strong in their day and successful due to their belief systems and yet their systems had the seeds of their own destruction as well.

I think Bell is alluding to the same thing. The careful balancing of openness, tolerance, individualism, rule of law, natural rights, consent of the governed, equality before the law, natural rights, is extremely delicate. It is is indisputably successful in terms of attractiveness across the globe, economic productivity, innovation, etc. The Anglophone countries that are the inheritors of this magnificent cultural heritage (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand) are by far the most popular destinations for the best and the brightest of the rest of the globe.

And yet those very values of respect and openness create pressures. We tolerate fringe fanatical groups with divergent value and belief systems whose members reject the precepts that make their very existence possible. The various ideological groups trying to violently suppress free speech, enforce group identities, etc. can only exist in an environment of freedom and choice. I think that is a little of what Bell is alluding to. We have to choose to continue (and evolve) our traditions which have made us so successful, but those very values open us to subversive authoritarianism from the margins.

No easy answer other than to choose well. We don't want to get to this point.


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