The Age of Abundance

Brink Lindsay's new book, The Age of Abundance, captures some themes I have touched on previously here, here and here. Namely that a lot of the cultural upheaval we are dealing with in our politics today is a by-product of the economic upheaval that has radically transformed our society and the world over the past 100 years.

Lindsay summarizes the point in a podcast overview of his book [paraphrased]:

It was in the post-war boom in the 1950’s that America represented something fundamentally new under the sun. By the 50's, this was a country where the vast majority of people were well insulated from the edge of subsistence where most human beings had lived for all of history.

Most people lived with a fair degree of material comfort, in fact an extravagant degree of material comfort by historical standards. Only a minority of people were considered in poverty. This is something without precedent.

Not only were they insulated from want, but they were insulated from nature. America had always been a prosperous country by world standards, but it was one where most people made a living as farmers, directly exposed to vagaries of nature for their well being.

Whereas by the 50s, most people lived in cities and began working in offices. Most people lived in a human created world, a world of human institutions and inventions, and didn’t face nature except for recreation. This is a fundamental change in the human condition. [em: mine]

I believe it is hard for us to imagine how radical this change is, since the society we live in is the one we have always known. But it seems that the change in our everyday conditions from one that is highly limited by the natural world (constraints on our existence are imposed from without) to one that is removed from nature and self-consciously constructed for our use (where limits are not imposed, but are overcome) has sweeping implications for our perceptions on human agency and freedom.

And given this far-reaching material change to the very nature of human existence, Lindsay argues that cultural change almost inevitably had to follow...

The end of scarcity pushes us towards cultural individualism. When people are poor, they don’t have a lot of choices. They don’t have a lot of stuff, they don’t have a lot of choice about what to consume, and they don’t have a lot of choice about where to live. So things are very simple: you do this or you die.

Likewise everybody is more or less alike. When people are poor, it means the division of labor is very underdeveloped. 90% of all people are subsistence farmers and so there isn’t a lot of variety in human experience.

And then finally, everything is the same from generation to generation. Without economic growth, one generation is just like the next. If your dad is a farmer you’ll be a farmer. If your dad is a cobbler, then more than likely you’ll be a cobbler too.

In this world of uniformity and changelessness and lack of choice, it makes sense that the kinds of cultural values that held sway were one-size-fits-all. People belonged to a group, they owed loyalty to that group, they had to do what that group says or else, because when there is no margin for error you can’t have a lot of freelancing.

Our traditional moralities that evolved during the agrarian era tended to be absolutist and didn’t give great scope for people to go their own way simply because the material conditions for them to go their own way weren’t there. But when those conditions changed, I think you see the inevitability of the culture opening up to accommodate that change.

And so by nature, when we change things, especially things that have been guiding society, relationships and human behavior over a long period of time, we don't quite know what we are going to get. And it is this uncertainty that seems to underlie much of the cultural angst that emanates from the socially conservative segments of our society.

I can understand the angst. There is a tension in facing the unknown. The thing that I can never fully appreciate is why cultural conservatives are so CERTAIN that any such change is by definition disastrous for humanity.

By contrast, I share much of Lindsay's tempered but hopeful optimism about the possibilities for our collective cultural future:

The rule is: 90% of everything is crap. A lot of [our culture today] is vulgar and base and stupid and trivial and shallow. And in moderation doing vulgar, shallow, stupid things is fine. It’s fun. It’s great to have a couple glasses of wine with dinner, it’s terrible to be wino. It’s great to be able to see world events live on TV, it’s terrible to be a couch potato. You have all these options and there are all kinds of ways to exercise them poorly.

But we have more of everything now. We have more trash and we have more superlative greatness than ever before. The opportunities to live a phenomenally well-lived life have never been more in our grasp. Whether everyone uses freedom wisely is a different matter.

But this is a fundamental faith that libertarians have: The very predictable ways people in which people misuse their freedom are more than compensated by the unpredictable miracles that occur when people are free to be creative. [em: mine]

There is a spark of our humanity that is lost if we snuff out this creativity for the sake of cultural continuity. We gain security but lose part of our essence as well.