Category — Capitalism

What is materialism?  Since the early 20th century, materialism has meant, usually, the over-valuing, and habitual acquisition of things.  Forget the Marxist distortions of the word.  Materialism of this kind is behavior, not philosophy.  Members of any class can accuse members of any other class of lowbrow taste and selfishness by calling them materialists, and be a little more worthy themselves for having done it. 

The Christmas season can complicate these things, because it churns the easy condemnation of materialism to mud, with  economic demands to consume and to give.  To generate income for producers and sellers we must spend, as if the proper workings of a reward system depend upon some hazily immoral cost-benefit calculation. The correct purchase is a form of right conduct; it occupies more effort and thought than old ideas about sin, and gratitude to Nature or God, depending upon your viewpoint about either.  

To remind you of your blessings, you get all the media and church discussions you can endure on the subject of the unequal distribution of material wealth, so you don’t need to read it at NER.  I’m not one who believes that material comfort, or lack of it, are, either of them, necessary conditions for moral sufficiency, although G.B. Shaw (I think) was  generally right when he said that deprivation and hardship make people mean and cruel, not prosperity. 

Prosperity only makes us indifferent and insensible, and by “prosperity” I don’t mean wealth.  I mean having more than enough, particularly when the horizon of “enough” is glistening like a water-mirage down the road in the southern heat.  You move on but never reach it.  You can’t stop and pick up something meaningful along the road because your hands are full of junk.  And that’s the point.

However much we want to make materialism an issue of consumption and personal judgement, materialism is simply the philosophical position that human welfare, and human states of mind are reducible to some aspect of matter.   I think this is, vaguely, the central position of all the political ideas that descend from 19th century progressivism, even when they’re mixed with establishment or non-establishment religions.  But I don’t care about them.  There is so much missing in their worldview that asking them how materialism can help us transcend the material word itself, is impossible.   Conservatives used to be different.

What worries me is that popular conservatism is now the chief promoter of materialism as a transcendental pursuit;  in something called “excellence”, in the refining wisdom of markets - in the things you eat, own, wear, drive, observe, combust, feel, smell and even think, the best is the moral, where self-denial, moderation and thrift are exceptions.  When did this kind of lifestyle, rather than life, become a conservative virtue? Some of us can’t even admit to the social consequences of globalization; however irresistible it is.

We need to remember who we are, and where we went wrong.  Unless I’m “mis-remembering” things, the subprime calamity at hand started with the ownership society package of ideas of Jack Kemp and Margaret Thatcher.   Blame the Community Reinvestment Act, but the germinating idea was that people could be coerced to good and profitable citizenship by a material possession.  The whole idea is nonsense. 

…is the way the poor get richer.

Here’s part one:

Here’s part two:

This all assumes you have some gumption to to do something for yourself.