Today I read Rod Dreher <a href=”http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/11/peter-maurin-and-the-culture-o.html”>comments</a> on Freddie de Boer’s <a href=”http://lhote.blogspot.com/2008/11/economic-conservatism-and-american.html”>piece about conservatism and the American Dream.</a>  Immediately I was reminded of a conversation my wife and I had about the infrastructure of communities, and how we had built away our sense of neighborhood in America, and replaced it with a consumer culture ever-wired together by new technologies, which have both the power to congregate us and disband us depending on how we use them.

Dreher writes:
<blockquote>What Freddie’s post brings to mind is how our permissive, hedonistic culture hurts the poor and the working class the most. You don’t have to believe in God to understand social psychology, and how important it is for people who don’t have much of anything to live by a code that encourages thrift, modesty and self-restraint — because they have so very much to lose if they don’t. We have created a society in which it’s hard for people to develop the habits of the heart that help them achieve — well, if you don’t like the word <em>goodness</em>, how about <em>health</em>, or <em>sustainability</em>? Put another way, the way we’re living, and the culture of consumption we’ve created, both are unsustainable, because they depend on a distortion of human nature. As we are learning, and shall learn.</blockquote>

The more I read Dreher’s work on “Crunchy Conservatives”, the more I like what I see.  My wife and I have been mulling over this concept of the “American Dream” and how out of control it’s gotten.  The notion of an “ownership society” is all well and good, but when it becomes a “finance your boat and your five flat-screen TV’s with the future value of your home that you haven’t even paid off yet” society, then I think obviously things have gotten a bit out of hand.

We have become a nation without restraint, fed at the trough of greed and materialism, told we are worthless unless we are all CEO’s, unless we are all driving the best cars and watching our nightly shows on the biggest, flattest , most colorful screens available.  We are taught to emulate pop-stars and business executives rather than poets and heroes–unless, of course, those poets are rappers, or those heroes are only heroes of the Will Smith variety–fictional and easily categorized.

We have lost our sense of community and locality, and replaced it with a need to buy more, be more, and in a sense strive to transcend our humanity through artificial gains, through that promise of an American Dream which has grown ever shallower in the face of unbridled consumerism.

In society there are levels of structural units, building blocks, beginning first with the individual and ending up with the Federal Government or the National cultural scene (as in Hollywood, cable tv, etc.)  In between these stages are many smaller structures.  Perhaps most importantly we have the family unit.  Then there is the extended family; the neighborhood; the section of town; the town; the county; the State; the region; and so on into ever expanding levels of society.  In a global world, the scope becomes truly vast.

What has happened, first with the advent of the interstate system, and the build up of the suburbs, and now with the internet and mass communication, is a sort of systemic disassociation from the smaller structural pieces–family, neighborhood, locality.

We now prefer to listen to national hits on our radios when, at least in my home town, there are easily a dozen very talented bands and as many more solo musicians far more interesting and unique.  I can’t find a station that plays a single of their songs.  We skip local theatre in favor of big action movies, and could name fifty movie stars before we could conjure up a single local actor.

We ignore local politics in favor of the big, flashy national elections, even though in an ideal world, the election of our mayor or sheriff would have at least as much of a personal impact on our daily lives as the election of our next President.

What all of this leads to is a culture of easy promises which manifests into a population overwhelmed with high-interest debt, run-away levels of depression, and rampant materialism.  We trade in tradition and values for the rat-race.  Money, we are told, and fame are surest ways to be successful–and in some sense, it’s very hard to argue with this.  Some measure of financial success is completely necessary.  So is there a balance to strike?

I have the option to work overtime at my job, and make a great deal more money.  When I do this I am able to spend a great deal more, but I’m tired, busy, and a far worse companion.  In a sense, I view this overtime work as a tax increase on my time rather than an income potential.  If I could cut my spending, I wouldn’t have to raise this time tax.  It would no longer be necessary.  If I could live more frugally, I could spend more time pursuing my goals, and hanging out with my family.  But to do this, I can’t borrow endlessly.  I have to cut spending.  Plain and simple.  I have to set limits.

Our culture says otherwise.  The actions of our spend-all Government say otherwise.  The constant barrage of ads and materialist assaults on our sense of self say otherwise.  After 9/11 the salve with which we were supposed to treat our wounded nation was the simple, no-sacrifice act of shopping.  We weren’t asked to go give back to our country.  No indeed, the best way to do this was to go spend our money at Sears and Best Buy.

We no longer sit on our front porch for entertainment, hollering back and forth with the neighbors, or trading stories in our front lawns.  Most people don’t even have a front porch.  We no longer walk to the corner market.  Most people don’t even have a corner market, and the big superstore is too far away or at least it certainly seems too far away in our towns built for cars and not people.

This is what I like about the Crunchy Con movement and the New Urbanist movement, and how I see them becoming entangled.  They both evoke the spirit of neotraditionalism.  I just think change should emerge in a grassroots, community-first way, and that some of the most basic ways I believe we can change this culture of consumption is through an investment in our infrastructure, building cities that are once again friendly to the pedestrian and the neighborhood, rather than commuter islands built for the benefit of the oil and auto and construction industries.  Let’s create communities we can once again be a part of.  That’s real America–and it’s an idea, not a geographic location, or the arbitrary colors red or blue on a map.
There is no easy way to escape a consumer-driven society.  But it’s about time conservatives started talking about it.

By Ryan P. Christiano

In an address before The House of Commons, on the 1^st of March 1848, Lord Palmerston declared: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal, and those interests it is our duty to follow”. Which theory or theories of International Relations motivated the Iraq War, and more narrowly, inspired President Bush? The President’s State of The Union Address; four short months after the attacks of September 11^th, declared that a new ‘Axis of Evil’ exists in the world after 9/11. In the 2003 State of The Union Address, the President declared that America and her allies were the only things that stand between a world of peace, and a world of chaos and constant alarm; and that Iraq now threatened the world with chaos and constant alarm.

(more…)