Talking Tuesday: Consumer Culture and the Individual

A well-written book review is a thing of beauty, and, in the May/June issue of The American Conservative, Gracy Olmstead does not disappoint. She writes a fascinating book review of Matthew B. Crawford's latest offering: The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.  Crawford is a philosopher turned motorcycle mechanic, and I have say, you had me at "ethics of vocation."  He favors manual work and blue collar jobs, quite at odds with the popular culture's ideas about such things (I'm paraphrasing Olmstead's characterization of his writing).

"The premise of Crawford's book," she writes, " is that our distractedness is merely symptomatic of a deeper cultural defect, a misrepresentation of the self that has permeated society." (p. 54)  Crawford places the blame at the feet of Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers who systematically blew apart the old communal ways of thinking and being in favor of the atomized self that is now the cultural norm for the West.  This freedom from community, the freedom to make individual choices has consequences.

"Kant, by trying to secure our freedom of the will from outside influence, severed our minds from any causal relationship with the world.  With this isolation comes fragility--the fragility of self that cannot tolerate conflict or frustration....Autonomy, instead of bringing freedom, makes us slaves to the comforts of an arbitrated reality.

Consumer culture tries to destroy the discomforts and imperfections that are necessarily part of life....Our experience becomes every more "mediated by representations, which remove us from whatever situation we inhabit directly, as embodied beings who do things." (ibid)

~Gracy Olmstead, Against Kant and Consumerism, The American Conservative, May/June 2015, pp 54-55.

As I continue to ponder what it means to be in the world but not of it, to find out where the line of cultural engagement begins and ends for a person of faith, I find Crawford's writing to be much food for thought.  I admit that I am passionate about visual media, because I find that they tell something of the human condition that is important--the art of it shows, and I find that immensely interesting and engaging, as well as entertaining.

At the same time, however, there is much in modern entertainment that is probably not best to imbibe, and figuring out where best to draw the line is very difficult.  It would be easiest to simply cut the cord, go off into the desert (so to speak) and live as the monks do, cut off from the world.  But that is not the task of those of us not called to monastic life. I am at a bit of a loss, frankly.

The Lenten season gave me some valuable time to step back from many things, to consider my level of cultural engagement, and I did find that useful.  I've been much more deliberate about my time on Facebook since Pascha, for example, and I think the discipline has been good for me, but I know there are other areas that could use a similar going-through.  These things take time, I suppose, not only to change in practice and in habit, but in heart and mind.  I admit, I'm not there yet.

Post-Scriptum: I ran across another excellent review of Crawford's book by Damon Linker (another writer I admire) and highly recommend it as well.  I think Crawford's books are going to be added to our library very soon.