Post Traumatic Shopping Disorder

[elfs]

Every generation that has produced another thinks that the future is going downhill compared to its own.. Tablets written in ancient Sanskrit contain complaints about how prices are rising, children are disrespectful, and everyone is a gossip. Several ancient Greek plays complain in much the same voice. And today the pundits are everywhere explaining why we're all headed downhill. Next century is the Chinese Century, when the autocracy of the Chinese combined with their pseudocapitalist system, authoritarian fingers embedded deep into the orifices of the economic system.

After my weekend at the mall I'm tempted to join them. As I watched my poor fellow shoppers suffer the indignities of interior designers influneced by Skinner and Torquemada, assisted by McLuhan, and equipped with the latest neuroscience, I watched all these tormented figures and wondered, "Where does all this wealth come from?"

A lot of answers float through my head. Issues about how cheap access to energy has created communities and neighborhoods that cannot survive without that energy, for one. From past industrial innovation, which our current severe anti-intellectualism is fast trying to doom. But the best quote that I found comes from Andrew Bacevish (and a hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for it):

The pursuit of freedom, as defined in an age of consumerism, has induced a condition of dependence on imported goods, on imported oil, and on credit. The chief desire of the American people is that nothing should disrupt their access to these goods, that oil, and that credit. The chief aim of the U.S. government is to satisfy that desire, which it does in part of through the distribution of largesse here at home, and in part through the pursuit of imperial ambitions abroad.

There's a lot to dislike in that quote. Phrase like "...in an age of consumerism..." and "...the cheif desire of the American people..." make it stand out, but (and I know that's a dangerous word), walking through that mall I couldn't help but feel that Bacevish was putting his finger on something.

I mean, was anyone in that mall generating, you know, wealth? Or were we merely pushing money around, from one cash-strapped entity to another, without real regard for our well-being? Is here a universal sense of mortality salience in the air?

I'm generally an optimisitic guy. And usually, I believe that free systems will produce the best possible outcomes. The Chinese have an innovation problem, and it takes Western-style innovation to create answers. Bjorn Lomborg has an editorial in which he claims that every dollor spent in research and development of low-carbon alternatives is worth ten dollars implementing existing technologies. The same is probably true of any industry. But the Chinese are good at adaptation. They could never invent CHO bioengineering, but they can probably implement knockoffs eventually, and maybe without the troubles they had with Heparin.

Today, I can easily see the US becoming a third-world nation, the majority of its territory slowly cannibalizing on its own corruption-infested fat, while powerful, bordered city-states supported by international cash, and defending with private armies their water and electricity supplies, supply rare pockets of Western-style research and development to the rest of the world. A train from one city-state to another through this American landscape passes hundreds of billboards with messages like "Darwin knows there's a God now!" and "God said, I believe it, that does it." (This isn't an original observation; actually, a train ride from the Washington Metro zone to Miami does resemble this!)

Well, at least the Enlightment will limp along for awhile. A kind of hothouse Enlightenment, protected from the harsh, cold twin realities: of autocratic voraciousness on one side and intellectual laziness on the other. Like most hothouse products, kept alive only because it's economically useful to someone.

Wow, there's a whole book or two in there.

And double-wow. My trip to the mall must have traumatized me quite a bit. Three posts in a row to process all that.

Comments

[mundens.livejournal.com]

I agree. I stay out of them as much as possible, or only enter shops on the edge, because it is easy to get lost in there, as all the wings and floors look the same. And our malls are probably smaller than yours.

It's like walking into a basement night-club in Prague, knowing it's populated with vampires, and having forgotten your crossbow.