The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

One of the signs of the American depression is the opioid epidemic. Just read the most insightful article "The Poison We Pick” by Andrew Sullivan in the New York Magazine. “Opioids are just one of the ways Americans are trying to cope with an inhuman new world where everything is flat, where communication is virtual, and where those core elements of human happiness — faith, family, community — seem to elude so many. Until we resolve these deeper social, cultural, and psychological problems, until we discover a new meaning or reimagine our old religion or reinvent our way of life, the poppy will flourish.”

He refers to sociologist Daniel Bell’s 32-year-old book 32, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” where he teaches that the American culture is now well adapted to the principles and goals of the American economy: the mastering of nature, the accumulation of wealth, unlimited growth, and the commodification of producers and consumers. The American culture spreading throughout the world has become one-dimensional without a sense of the sacred.  Bell was in sync with Marcuse and Adorno of the Frankfurt School describing the loss of permanent values that causes the ennui and angst of a “post-industrial society.”

Bell, reaching back to the first sociologist Max Weber, identified the three major components of society: culture, economy, and politics and then attributed the woes of modern society to the “disjunction” among them. For Bell a diseased culture adapting to capitalism and lacking an enduring belief was the chief culprit. He named this culture, as did many others, “modernism” or, in its advanced form, “post-modernism.”  This culture was marked by the triumph of the rational over faith, the secular over the sacred, the material of the spiritual.  In modern art, religion, philosophy, and even science—all constituents of modern culture—anything goes.  All things are permitted as long as they are accepted by the masses.  That is, as long as they sell.

I certainly agree with much of what Bell and the Frankfurt philosophers were describing and even prescribing. I also think it is important to understand the distinction and relationships among culture, economy, and politics.  However, I disagree with the primacy he places on culture.  Bell describes himself as a cultural conservative, an economic socialist, and a political liberal.  I describe myself as a cultural liberal or even libertarian, an economic socialist, and a political conservative in the democratic republican tradition. While Bell would attempt to preserve cultural ideas and institutions, I want them all challenged and transcended.  However, in politics, especially now, I devote myself to the conserving of democratic republican ideas and institutions.