Once upon a time in America, a person could walk into a grocery store, take a bottle of aspirin off the shelf, twist open the cap, and shake out a tablet or two. No plastic bands around the caps. No foil safety seals glued over the opening. It didn’t matter what company made the aspirin. It didn’t matter where the customer shopped. People with a headache might take a pill right in the store aisle. They’d throw the bottle into their cart and pay for it with the rest of their groceries.
Then, in the fall of 1982, seven Chicago-area people died after swallowing Tylenol capsules that had been laced with potassium cyanide. Copycat crimes soon followed. Alert to lawsuits and a loss of consumer confidence, drug makers started adding tamper-proof seals to their bottles. The FDA approved regulations requiring companies to safeguard their products from being opened without the buyer’s knowing it.
In the space of a few weeks, a nation of (then) 231 million people—people who had trusted one another to respect a person’s medical needs—became a country of people who wouldn’t buy a bottle with a tear on the edge of a safety seal. Today, no drug company would dare propose selling medicines without those seals. The public outcry wouldn’t allow it. Customers wouldn’t buy the unprotected product. The social trust that preceded the Tylenol affair is gone forever.
A lot more than medicine bottles has changed from the America many of us knew as children and young adults. The differences are important, and cataloging them is a matter of prudence, not nostalgia. We tend to imagine our politics and our culture as pendulums. In politics, elections seem to swing from Democrat to Republican and back, from a focus on government action to a focus on the free market and back. Or so we like to think.
Ronald Reagan’s influence was great enough to elect his Republican vice president to one term as president. But then the country elected Bill Clinton. Reacting to eight years of Clinton, it elected George W. Bush twice. Reacting to Bush, it elected Barack Obama twice. Even within the parties, swings take place. The “New Democrat” Clinton was followed by the more ideologically zealous Obama. The classically conservative Reagan was followed by the self-styled “compassionate conservatives,” Bush father and son. In 2016, yet another presidential election year, both major parties engaged in civil wars over their future direction: Bernie Sanders versus another Clinton, Donald Trump versus everyone else.
The pendulum image is misleading, though. It can easily make us complacent. It suggests that if we wait long enough, things will return to normal. But “normal” is a fluid word, and societies aren’t pendulums. They don’t swing only so far in each direction. They’re living organisms. They move through history. They grow, peak, and decline. They can become ill. They can also recover. But sometimes they die, often after a lingering sickness that eats up much of the good in their legacy. The lesson? Politics is important, but by itself it tells us very little. In fact, surface political changes can obscure deeper cultural contradictions. Conservatives may cheer new leaders who lower taxes and reduce regulation, but these changes can amount to not much more than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. They may in fact worsen a culture’s health.
What’s good for business is not always good for America because businesses have their own agendas. Some of America’s biggest companies, for example, are the most avid in backing same-sex marriage. Corporations including Eli Lilly, Walmart, and Apple were glad to join in what amounted to a social media lynch mob against Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 2015. Why? Because it allegedly harmed persons with same-sex attraction. In the words of Patrick Deneen:
The decision to #BoycottIndiana was not made because it was the politically courageous thing to do. It was made because it was the profitable thing to do. The [business] establishment could express support for a fashionable social norm while exerting very little effort, incurring no actual cost, and making no sacrifice to secure the goal. It had the further advantage of distracting most people from the fact that corporations like Apple have no compunction doing business in places with outright oppression of gays, women and Christians. Those real forms of repression and discrimination didn’t matter; Indiana’s purported oppression of gays did.1
How did Indiana RFRA supporters (like the small-town owners of Memories Pizza) become nationally reviled thought criminals?2 The answer lies in cultural disruptions over the past century that sped up rapidly after World War II.
Simply put, America can’t be the way it once was. As we’ll see throughout these pages, changes in the country’s sexual, religious, technological, demographic, and economic fabric make that impossible. And these upheavals have further reshaped our politics, education, and laws. Traditionally, nations depend on the continuity of generations to transmit memories and beliefs across time and thus sustain their identity. At least for the United States, that pattern is now smashed. Discontinuity, more and more, drives today’s American life.
Popular wisdom tends to locate the seeds of today’s social conflicts in America’s “cultural revolution” of the 1960s. Those of us who are old enough tend to remember the sixties through the lens of the Vietnam War. And for good reason. Other wars had been unpopular, but Vietnam was the first big setback to America’s national confidence, to our sense of being the “good guys” in an American century.
The war opened the first deep cracks in how Catholics understood their patriotism. The brothers Daniel and Philip Berrigan, both of them priests, were among the many American Catholics who saw the war as immoral and who publicly protested it.
Vietnam was also the first war covered nonstop by global media. And the young men who fought in it served in a republican army, a citizen army used for ambiguous ends that critics claimed were imperial. The war’s conscript nature democratized the anger against it. And that anger of the young bled easily into other deep shifts taking place in the nation’s life fueled by postwar wealth, global security commitments, the Cold War, scientific advances, and the struggle for racial justice.
Little things, too, can have big consequences. The transistor, perfected in 1947 and hitting the popular market in the mid-1950s, transformed the field of electronics and made modern computers possible—and indirectly, all that a computer-driven society implies. A similar “little” thing was the advent of the birth control pill for public use in 1960. Looking back from the vantage point of 2016, we can see that the pill is a monument to unintended consequences. It was benign-seeming because its creators intended it to strengthen marriages by giving couples the power to space their children. But it was radical in its effect because in decoupling sexual intimacy from procreation, it sparked much deeper changes in American social attitudes and behaviors than anyone foresaw.
Feminist scholars were hardly the first to notice that sex has implications that go well beyond making babies. Sex defines and breaks relationships and personal identities. It can be a cultural glue or a powerful destabilizer. This is one of the reasons traditional societies have always surrounded sex with rigorous sacred rituals and protections.
Half a century after the sixties, many American young people are more committedly pro-life than their parents and even their grandparents. This seems ironic, but it shouldn’t surprise. They’ve seen what abortion does. They’ve lived with the fact that they could have been aborted. The humanity of the unborn child is obvious on any ultrasound machine.
The bad news is that many of these same young adults are less interested in marrying than their parents were. They’re far more open to same-sex relationships and behavior. They’re also much more casual in pursuing active sexual lives, with or without the baggage of long-term commitment.
Of course, young adult sex as a leisure activity is hardly stunning news. And we’d be unwise to ignore today’s unique circumstances that help drive it. In an intensely individualistic culture, absent a convincing moral purpose for their sexuality, many use sex in a callous and predatory way. For others, though, it can express a misplaced need for some form of deeper communion with another person and an antidote to loneliness they don’t fully understand.
Whatever the motives, this puts young people at high risk of sexually transmitted diseases, now a national epidemic. It also creates the risk of unplanned pregnancy and the heavy social pressure to abort that always follows. The best moral convictions in the kindest heart can unravel in the face of a life-changing choice such as bearing an unplanned child, alone and unmarried.
All of which underscores a simple fact: The surest way to transform a culture is from the inside out. And the surest path to doing it isn’t through reasoned debate (too tedious) or violence (too costly) but by colonizing and reshaping the culture’s appetites and behaviors.
* * *
WE NEEDN’T LOOK FAR for examples. H. L. Mencken, the satirist (and anti-religious bigot), once described America’s Puritan Christian legacy as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Today, applied to sex, the word “puritanism” conjures up a range of lurid images, from scarlet letters to boiling pots of healthy passion with their lids screwed down by moral repression. Modesty, virginity, celibacy, sexual restraint: These words are dust magnets in today’s vocabulary, antibiotics past their expiration date.
But liberating sexual desire has had awkward side effects—among them, normalized pornography. Porn is one of those topics nobody likes to talk about. Doing so can seem slightly obsessive. After all, the taste for pornography isn’t new. The walls of ancient Rome were alive with its graffiti. No society has ever been free of it. And really, isn’t porn just a cheesy sideshow for sexual losers? Hardly the shaper of a nation’s soul.
Maybe. But the profits involved say otherwise. Today is not like the past.
Today the porn business has massive scope and influence, easy access from anywhere, and the shield of domestic privacy. Americans will never return to a world without widespread, easily available porn. That kind of innocence is as lost as aspirin bottles without seals.
How did the sea change happen? Technology made the difference. Technology reimagined the industry’s dinosaur marketing and distribution systems. New technologies helped the porn business to grow rapidly and reach globally while remaining a private addiction. And private addictions shared by enough people eventually become accepted public behavior.
Americans have a deep libertarian streak. Too many people see pornography as a matter of personal choice. Too many resist seeing its wider impact. And as an industry, it exerts influence because too many people also make money from it. Globally, annual porn revenues now approach $100 billion, with more than $13 billion of that in the United States.3
Those profiting include major corporations that donate to candidates and have lobbyists in Washington. Most major U.S. hotel chains make “adult” programming available to guests as part of their entertainment systems. In a different era, that might make them vulnerable to public pressure. Corporate boards are alert to boycotts and bad publicity (remember Indiana)—but shareholders tend to focus on profits, not what they see as moral fine print. And the fact is, no mass movement has yet managed to inflict the financial punishment against porn that would force big companies to listen.
Today, anyone on the Internet, anywhere, anytime, can get hard-core pornography for free. Even the most extreme content—no matter how abusive or strange, legal or illegal—can be had for a price. Determined appetites can find even child pornography, and the criminal risks of getting caught with it, while real and severe, deter very few. Many American boys encounter pornography by their early teen years. Millions of men, and many women, seek it out addictively. Users make scores of millions of porn Web searches every day. And up to 30 percent of all data transferred across the Internet is pornography-related.4 Persons uneasy about their habit can easily hide it from others. Explicit content is now so mainstream that it runs on network television.
Clearly, pornography is not a fundamental factor in changing any country’s character. It’s typically the by-product of other, deeper forces. But it does have a formative effect on the appetites and interests of millions of citizens. Arguing otherwise is simply foolish. And, worse, pornography literally changes the brain.
The psychiatrist Norman Doidge describes the process in The Brain That Changes Itself. Porn impacts the part of the brain related to exciting pleasure, not satisfying it. In fact, not fully satisfying the appetite is part of pornography’s power. “[Porn’s] neurochemistry is largely dopamine-related, and it raises our tension level,” he notes. “Pornography, by offering an endless harem of sexual objects, hyper-activates the appetitive system” and actually rewires the brain. It creates what he calls “maps” that the user wants to keep activated. Doidge compares men using pornography to rats in an experiment, pressing a bar to get another shot of dopamine. They’ve “been seduced into pornographic training sessions that [meet] all the conditions required for plastic change of brain maps.”5 Doidge also notes that in recent decades much of pornography has shifted from romantic eroticism to increasingly violent and humiliating sadomasochism.
Pornography hurts more than the user. It alienates spouses. It destroys real intimacy. It reduces people to objects. And those are just the immediate human costs. The social impact is much wider and more damaging. It’s a major factor in divorce, infidelity, and broken families. And even more brutally, the porn industry also fuels and feeds on the exploitation of women and minors forced into “sex work.”
Today is not like the past. In the America of today, pornography is part of a very different new normal. A lot can happen in fifty years.
* * *
IN A 1789 LETTER to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson wondered whether “one generation of men has a right to bind another.” He concluded that the earth belongs to the living, “and the dead have neither powers nor rights over it” since, by the law of nature, “one generation is to another as one independent nation to another.” He went on to argue that “every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires” at the end of a generation. “If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not right.”6
Jefferson’s focus was narrow. At the time he wrote, he was worried about public debt. He feared the power of one generation to cripple future generations with a legacy of reckless spending. He did not repudiate the past, however. All the Founders, Jefferson included, worked with a keen respect for history and its lessons.
But ideas can have unforeseen results. More than two hundred years later, Jefferson’s words seem prophetic in an unintended way. They perfectly capture the ruptures and discontinuity at the heart of our current culture. As a people, we Americans have steadily lost interest in the past, and we’ve steadily grown in our taste for self-invention. If the earth belongs to the living, then we—the living—can do with it as we please; which means our appetites are licensed to profoundly shape the future, against and in spite of the past.
Why is that important? The baby boomers of the 1960s—the happy agents of America’s cultural revolution—had the benefit of rebelling against a society with a well-developed moral framework and coherent political memory, both of which they unconsciously borrowed from, even in revolt. They had children. Those children are now having children. And what those new young adults and teens think and do will make the next America.
And what will that “next America” look like? Plenty of data exist on the habits of today’s young people and emerging adults. Much of it is already well known. The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues have done some of the best research. It’s worth recalling parts of it here.
In 2011, speaking of Americans then aged eighteen to twenty-five, Smith wrote that, despite many good exceptions, large numbers of “emerging adults are oblivious to [spiritual truths, service to the well-being of others, and] other kinds of human goods … focusing almost exclusively on materialistic consumption and financial security as the guiding stars of their lives.” Addictions and intoxications of all sorts are “a central part of emerging adult culture.” And contrary to media reports and popular assumptions (e.g., regarding environmental activism), “most emerging adults today … have little care about, investment in or hope for the larger world around them.”
As Smith notes, today’s young adults are often “simply lost. They do not know the moral landscape of the real world that they inhabit. And they do not understand where they themselves stand in that real moral world.” They’ve had withheld from them “something that every person deserves to have a chance to learn: how to think, speak, act well on matters of good and bad, right and wrong.” And who did the withholding? For Smith and colleagues, “one way or another, adults and the adult world are almost always complicit in the troubles, suffering and misguided living of youth, if not the direct source of them.”7
Roughly half of all American Catholic teens now lose their Catholic identity before they turn thirty. The reasons are varied. Today’s mass media, both in entertainment and in news, offer a steady diet of congenial, practical atheism, highlighting religious hypocrisy and cultivating consumer appetite. As one study noted, many young adults assume that “science and logic are how we ‘really’ know things about our world, and religious faith either violates or falls short of the standards of scientific knowledge.”8 Others have been shaped by theories trickling down from universities through high schools into a vulgarized, “simple-minded ideology presupposing the cultural construction of everything” and fostering an uncritical moral relativism.9
But the example of parents remains a key factor—often the key factor—in shaping young adult beliefs. The family is the main transmitter of religious convictions. Disrupting the family disrupts an entire cultural ecology. Former Catholics tend to come from homes where parents were tepid, less engaged, and indifferent or skeptical in matters of faith. Divorce and single-parent households have furthered the problem. As families break up, fail to form, or simply lose interest in religious practice, the mental and moral universe of emerging adults becomes alienated from America’s past. And if the mind of the young breaks fundamentally with the past, so, too, does that of the nation.
It’s worth returning briefly to the impact of one particular technology. As Mary Eberstadt has argued, “the underlying and underappreciated quantum leap toward irreligiosity in the 1960s” owed most of its force to the birth control pill. It “[changed] relations between the sexes—that is to say, within the natural family—as never before.”10
Just as Darwin’s theory of evolution shook popular assumptions about human origins and identity, the pill “severed the cultural connection between Christian ethics and American common sense,” inspiring a private revolution. The resulting disarray “extended well beyond the narrow issue of birth control to encompass the entirety of sexual ethics. Over the course of a decade or so, a large swath of America decided that two millennia of Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality were simply out of date.”11
And not just out of date. The pill’s impact rippled out in political ways:
These changing attitudes led to the redefinition of the private sphere, in the courts and culture alike, and a widespread sense that issues like contraception, premarital cohabitation and divorce—and then, much more controversially abortion—were private matters where the government had no business interfering. The very idea of “morals legislation” became suspect, and Christian arguments about family law and public policy that might have been accepted even by secular audiences in the 1940s came to be regarded with suspicion as potential violations of the separation of Church and state.
At the same time, a more sweeping idea gained ground as well—the conceit that many of Christianity’s stringent sexual prohibitions were not only unnecessary but perverse.12
It’s tempting to shrug off this kind of worried analysis as yet another case of religious neurosis about the body, an exaggerated anxiety about sex. Many people do exactly that—it saves them the burden of thinking. But sex, as we’ll see throughout these pages, is intimately linked to how we understand ourselves as human. And in that regard, we’d be wise to recall that our roots as a nation are not just Protestant. They’re Protestant in a uniquely Puritan Calvinist way: restless, driven, and rigorous.
Calvinism is branded into our national character, even for unbelievers. And it’s a mixed blessing. In the words of the Catholic political scholar Pierre Manent, early Calvinism made a “magnificent contribution … to modern political freedom.” Why? Because in the Calvinist worldview, human power “is liberated or encouraged, but no human being, religious or secular, is above the law.”13
Yet there’s another side to the story. As the (also Christian) political philosopher George Grant put it, in North America, “The control of the passions in [Calvinist] Protestantism became more and more concentrated on the sexual … while the passions of greed and mastery were emancipated from traditional Christian restraints.”14 Translation: The peculiar frenzy for sex and acquisitiveness in today’s American culture has oddly religious roots. The libertine sex is a reaction against (perceived) excessive sexual codes of the past. The consumer acquisitiveness is a celebration of material appetite and possibilities.
The great irony of the sixties’ sexual revolution is this: In breaking down “bourgeois” morality—the covenantal bonds and sacred restrictions of Christian sexuality—it made all sex, and all relationships, a matter of transaction, a matter of consumption and disposal, between radically distinct individuals. The boomers, it turns out, were better free market capitalists than they knew. And their children even more so.
* * *
“NO MAN EVER STEPS into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” It’s a great proverb of simple wisdom, widely quoted on the Web. The words are probably a loose version of what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus actually said—that’s a matter of dispute—but they do capture the kernel of his thinking. Heraclitus was big on flux. He taught that all things change, all the time.
As with rivers and men, so, too, with nations. A simple example: In the seven years between 2007 and 2014, self-identifying Christians in the United States declined from 78.4 percent of the population to 70.6 percent. In the same period, Catholics dropped from 23.9 percent to 20.8 percent. As the Pew Research Center noted:
The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining, while the number of U.S. adults who do not identify with any organized religion is growing … Moreover, these changes are taking place across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups. While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education; and among women as well as men.15
There’s more:
Christians remain by far the largest religious group among legal U.S. immigrants, though their estimated share has decreased from 68 percent in 1992 to 61 percent in 2012. Over the past two decades, the U.S. has admitted an estimated 12.7 million Christian immigrants.
The second-largest religious category among legal immigrants is the unaffiliated, which includes atheists, agnostics and people who do not identify with any particular religion. In recent years, the share of immigrants who have no religious affiliation has held fairly stable, at about 14 percent. Since 1992, the U.S. has admitted an estimated 2.8 million religiously unaffiliated immigrants.
Over the same period, the estimated share of legal Muslim immigrants entering the U.S. each year has roughly doubled, from about 5 percent of legal immigrants in 1992 to about 10 percent in 2012. Since 1992, the U.S. has admitted an estimated total of about 1.7 million Muslim immigrants.16
According to Pew, of the roughly 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants living in the United States in 2011, some 9.2 million (83 percent) were Christians, mostly from Latin America. Many of the remaining 17 percent had no religious affiliation. Fewer than one in ten unauthorized immigrants were estimated to belong to non-Christian religious groups.17
Why mention any of this?
The American founding was a creature of the eighteenth century and one of its great political achievements. But demography matters, and the United States is a nation built on and by immigrants. Any such country constantly renews and rethinks itself as its demography changes. This is a good and healthy thing, so long as a mechanism exists to ensure a basic continuity with the past, to blend the newly arrived immigrant into the nation’s basic vision of who man is and the nature of a good society. This in turn presumes that the nation’s vision has some positive meaning, some higher common purpose. “Every man for himself” is poor soil for a shared identity.
Immigration has served the U.S. Catholic experience especially well. In recent decades, Latino immigrants have sustained the Catholic Church as America’s largest religious community, second only to the country’s collective evangelical churches. Latinos account for a large percentage of the Church’s growth in America since 1960. They now make up between one-third and 40 percent (depending on the survey) of the country’s more than 81 million self-identified Catholics.18 They’ve brought with them a lively faith, deep traditions, and a strong commitment to family.
But unlike the past, the active engagement of newly arrived immigrants in Church life is much weaker. Many drift away after the first generation. Hosffman Ospino, of the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, notes that 61 percent of Latino Catholics in the United States were born in this country. But their future commitment to the Church can’t be assumed. “The secularization of Hispanics is the biggest threat to the future of the Catholic Church in America,” he notes. “Only 3 percent of Hispanic Catholic children attend Catholic schools and fewer and fewer Hispanics under 30 attend church. We run the risk of losing a whole generation of Catholics. If we fail to address the issues facing Hispanic Catholics and the parishes that serve them, then the parish structure in America will experience a dramatic decline as it did in Europe.”19
Many Latino immigrants become evangelicals. In a narrow sense, that’s almost “good” news. The worse news is that many others drop away from any religious affiliation. A Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study showed that 43 percent of Latino evangelicals are former Catholics. “They come to a country where more than half the religious population changes religious affiliation at least once in their lifetime, and the majority of them change affiliation more than once,” explained Luis Lugo, formerly with the Pew Research Center. “They come into a context where it is simply more acceptable to leave Catholicism for something else.”20
Additionally—and ironically—Lugo noted that “Latino evangelicals are much more socially conservative than Latino Catholics … So when these people convert from Catholicism to evangelicalism, they actually come closer to the official views of the Roman Catholic Church on social issues.”21
Again, why does any of this matter? The facts about immigrant faith, its fluidity and its decline, are important for a reason. Unlike the past, the formative spirit in today’s American life is cool to religion and no longer broadly biblical. Thus, the newly arrived are now shaped very differently from the past by their experiences in this country. And what immigrants believe and practice (or don’t) today will influence what the nation as a whole believes and practices (or doesn’t) tomorrow.
Demography, of course, is only one of the many factors that combine to modify the nature of daily life. The ideals of a middle-class republic owned equally by everyone, along with every person’s ability to improve his or her lot with hard work—these beliefs are still very much alive in the American imagination. The reality is more complex. Evidence is strong that, over the past half century, America’s wealth has congealed in the top 1 percent of the country’s population. The gulf between that elite and the rest of the country is deep and widening. Ordinary Americans still live well compared to much of the rest of the world. But the nation’s top 1 percent in wealth is worth as much as 70 times the wealth of the lower classes. Its members own or control roughly 43 percent of the nation’s total wealth. The next 4 percent owns or controls an additional 29 percent.22
Meanwhile, the cost of securing national office effectively excludes the vast majority of citizens and encourages the growth of a political class disproportionately peopled by the connected and privileged. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s wealth was valued at $4.5 billion, Hillary Clinton’s at $45 million.23 Both claimed to speak for an electorate whose 2013 median household net worth was $56,335.24
Social mobility for the remaining 95 percent of the nation is a more complicated picture. Some data, like those in a 2014 study by Harvard and UC Berkeley economists, suggest that “despite huge increases in inequality, America may be no less [socially] mobile a society than it was 40 years ago.”25 But in general, both major political parties agree that upward mobility has declined in recent decades.
America is also a nation of transients. American geographic mobility has decreased in recent decades, especially among persons of lower income.26 Nonetheless, in U.S. Census Bureau figures for 2012–13, 12 percent of Americans (about 36 million persons at the time) moved their home within the twelve-month period surveyed. Most moved within their local county, but they moved out of their neighborhoods, away from schools, churches, clubs, and other local attachments. Starting at age eighteen, the average American may move nine times in his or her life. Even after he or she reaches age forty-five, another three moves are common.
Mobility can be a mark of economic success. People often move to provide more for their families. But it can also imply job loss and hardship. In both cases, this mobility—voluntary or forced—strains family life and interferes with the formation of stable long-term communities. Many people resist being “all in” for their community because it may not be their community for long. The sense of place, of rootedness, of having to engage other people because they’ll be your neighbors for a long time, of staying with a neighborhood, a church, local schools, and civic associations: That experience has been lost to many Americans. They identify more with their work than with their neighborhood.
Technology may seem to ameliorate this. It abolishes distance in a virtual sense. It brings people together online whenever they want. But the unifying effect of online communities can be misleading. Life mediated through a screen of electrons or a telephone is very different from the flesh-and-blood experience of dealing with real people who can’t be unplugged. In practice, despite its great value, the Internet isolates and masks as much as it connects and reveals. Working from a computer at home may sound blissfully domestic. But the long-term effect is that “home” becomes as virtual as the office that invades and colonizes it.
Technology has also played a big role—the decisive role—in disrupting and reinventing our economic lives. And it’s also changed how we think. To put it another way: We use our tools, but our tools also use us. In half a century, the United States has gone from a manufacturing economy based on production, to a knowledge economy based on consumption. The impact on our imaginations and behaviors has been huge. Production is a joint affair. It requires guilds, unions, and corporations. It needs assembly lines, investment, heavy industry, and communities. Consumption is a private affair. It requires only the self.
This difference between production and consumption is what the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls the gulf between solid and liquid modern life. Older, “solid” societies based on production find their security in property ownership, delayed gratification, rational organization, methodical progress, and bulk power. “Liquid,” consumer-based societies—children of the tech revolution and its rapid pace of change—feed on “incessant new beginnings” and experiences.
In liquid life, travel for its own sake “feels much safer and much more enchanting than the prospect of arrival: The joy is all in the shopping that gratifies, while the acquisition itself, with the vision of being burdened with its possibly clumsy and awkward effects and side-effects, portends a high likelihood of frustration, sorrow and regret.” The biggest fear is “drag coefficient”—the weight of having to live with bad choices.
Thus, as Bauman notes, a society of consumers “is unthinkable without a thriving waste-disposal industry. Consumers are not expected to swear loyalty to the objects they obtain with the intention to consume.” In fact, rapidly getting rid of past choices is the only way to make room for new ones. Inevitably, this approach to life shapes personal relations: Once the pattern “to reject and replace an object of consumption which no longer brings full satisfaction is extended to partnership relations, the partners are cast in the status of consumer objects.”27 In a very real sense, nothing is more liquid than no-fault divorce.
Bauman isn’t alone in his thinking. More than a decade ago, in his book The Age of Access, the social theorist Jeremy Rifkin described American culture as increasingly a “paid-for experience” based on the commodification of passion, ideals, relationships, and even time. In a rapidly morphing, tech-driven economy, he warned, ownership of property would be seen as an albatross. Ownership would decline, replaced by a preference for access to rented goods and services, and designed experiences.
Today, millennials are proving both Bauman and Rifkin right with spending patterns that are “not quite a stampede from ownership, but it’s close.”28
As James Poulos writes, “Buying means responsibility and risk. Renting means never being stuck with what you don’t want or can’t afford … There’s something powerfully convenient about the logic of choosing to access stuff instead of owning it.” As a result, “from flashy metros like San Francisco to beleaguered cities like Pittsburgh, rising generations are … paying to access experiences instead of buying to own.”
But there’s a problem. It’s this: Without “an organic and cohesive property tradition, freedom does not arise because it cannot even really be imagined.” And it can’t really be imagined because it’s “the habits of experience developed by ownership that make freedom a concrete, incarnate reality.”29
As the American Founders inconveniently saw more than two centuries ago, freedom requires maturity. Maturity depends on clear thinking and self-mastery. Property is real. And owning property makes demands. It anchors and disciplines the floating world of desire.
But the Founders have been gone a long time. And today is not like the past.