More on the moral response to the economic crisis
Kurt Andersen, in Time, writes about the moral response to the economic crisis. (Andersen is the host of Studio 360 out of WNYC) He first outlines his streamlined, secular version of the 12 steps for “Bubbleholics” Annonymous:
• Admit that we are powerless over addiction to easy money and cheap fossil fuel and living large — that our lives had become unmanageable.
• Believe that we can, individually and collectively, restore ourselves to sanity and normal living.
• Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves and be entirely ready to remove our defects of character.
At this point, I’m reading and hoping against hope that he will actually explore number three instead of just shout that it needs to be done.
Humph, something like a post-partisan, non-ideological call to arms…but I’m not sure it’s the answer I’ve been searching for:
We haven’t come to the end of ideology, as Daniel Bell asserted in 1960 and Francis Fukuyama restated in 1992, but the familiar polarities of right and left are losing their salience. For a while, America will be in a state of ideological flux — which means we’ll be unusually free to improvise a fresh course forward. We can have universal health coverage and public schools unbound from the stultifying grip of teachers’ unions. We can tax fossil fuels so that solar and wind become more economical and commit seriously to nuclear power. We can impose sensible regulatory mechanisms and enthusiastically promote free markets and free trade. We can grow the armed forces to fight all necessary wars but also forgo pork-barrel weapons systems.
And a little encouragement to the venture capitalists–after all Microsoft and Apple were founded during our last major downturn (the 1970s):
The present chastening can’t mean turning into a nation of overcautious, unambitious scaredy-cats. This is the moment for business to think different and think big.
I’m having a hard time imagining that the craziness in the financial sector will somehow bring a bunch of young people into arts, non-profits, and publishing…Wasn’t funding for these one of the first things to go when the economy started to slide?
The end of the boom in the financial industry means that careers manipulating money will no longer be so seductive to such a disproportionate share of our best and brightest.
Ok, one call for a new kind of moral code–in sustainability of environment and things like health care/war on drugs:
Sustainability in this sense is as much old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicanism as it is newfangled kumbaya-ish green talk, and achieving it will require partisans on both sides to face facts and make unpleasant choices.
Fun and humor will not go away–think Marx Brothers in the 30s and Saturday Night Live in the 70s. And maybe art will finally be something new instead of remixing the old, like the last few decades
For three decades, too much of art and design and entertainment has seemed caught in a cul-de-sac, almost compulsively reviving styles and remixing the greatest hits of the past. (Think: post-Modern architecture, pop music based on sampling, ’60s-style shift dresses, pseudo-midcentury home décor.) Since we’re now finished with a 25- or 30-year-long era in both politics and economics, maybe a new cultural epoch will emerge as well. Maybe more of the next big things will be actually, thrillingly new.
And we’ll have to pull back a little on the empire entitlement bug. Get used to a new us not at the center of the world, like Britain had to do after their 19th century of power. This will require reassessment of what the good life is.
Andersen is a gifted and entertaining writer, but I don’t feel like there is anything new here. He says at one point we don’t need to become ascetics, just reassess buying the new laptop cause it’s cool and buying the third car…really? Is that all the moral call we can place on our lives. Think twice before buying toys, but don’t just pinch pennies…Am I missing something?
more weight issues and ballet fun
I got a dvd from the library that’s workout through ballet. I’ve never taken ballet, but I did pretty well for the first go–I have a lot of core strength and didn’t do any of the spagghetti posture she kept warning us about (well, as far as I could tell in front of a tv instead of a mirror). It wasn’t hard to keep my posture ramrod straight. I was breathing hard and letting technique go by the end of the tape. Clearly, I’m not in as good a shape as an athlete. But I must be pretty strong to do that tape? And I can haul our 40 pound water bottles up the stairs without too much problem. And I’m jogging (as slow as one can go and still be called jogging) 2.6 miles three times a week or so.
And yet still I gain weight. I’m forty pounds heavier than a year ago. Is this a doctor thing or a roses-is-still-eating-too-much-and-not-working-out-hard-enough thing? My mom calls me last night while she’s watching a Discovery health show about women who are pregnant and have birth without ever realizing they’re pregnant. It’s not that kind of doctor thing! But b/c I took the year off to write and now E doesn’t have a job, we have no health insurance at the moment. We’re sort of covered by Cobra, but Obama’s plan to pay for 65% of it hasn’t actually worked it’s way through the system yet (we have 30 days to figure it out). Without Obama’s plan, 1/2 of E’s unemployment would go straight to health insurance. I can get school health insurance when I start teaching again this summer.
So do I wait till May to talk to a doctor about this? I just read in the NY Times about a woman with mental illness and high blood pressure who had a tumor on her adrenal gland…could that be the cause of these things in me? I doubt it, since I don’t have pains or wierd lumps or psychosis, but I suppose one never knows. But if I did have a tumor…and it was discovered while I didn’t have insurance, or had transitory insurance…….oh the financial nightmares that would be. And trying to get insurance in the future with a pre-existing health thing like that. But waiting till its worse, or has metastized doesn’t sound good. And one of my fears in life is going into a doctor’s office healthy (well, that used to be one of my fears–disapproving authority figures always did scare me–but I’m discovering that going into a doctor’s office unhealthy’s not a walk in the park either).
Is this economic crisis a moral crisis?
I’ve been wondering about this a lot myself, especially since all the news started off talking about just restarting consumption. Endless cycles of consumption. Probably too because my peeps were trying to rethink communism in the 20s and 30s. But they didn’t seem to come up with any good ideas. Speaking of Faith has a forum going on on their blog about “Repossessing Virtue.” They went back to all their guests for ideas about whether this current crisis is a moral one. It’s interesting. Tell me what you think.
collage
I ripped the face off my new collage. I hadn’t pasted it down well for just this contingency…..but it looks pretty funny now. The picture I’m stealing from has this perfect face–I’m realizing its a major part of its charm. But finding a similar face in the magazines will be close to impossible. I tried a totally different face (indeed–a polar bear) but that didn’t work.
And then my target said she wants music and aprons (not then an ice-skating polar bear)…….so we’ll see where the future takes me.
E is concerned.
comments
WordPress protects my site from “spam” comments. I’ve only ever had 2. The first was not a spam comment and I caught it before it was deleted. The second, I don’t know, because it got deleted before I could look at it (while I was on that trip west). So if you posted a comment and it didn’t show up, please post it again. I suppose it could be a helpful thing, but I haven’t found it so yet.
To bed with me!
more collaging was done tonight. This one was meant to be whimsical, but I think is creepy. We’ll see how I modify it before sending it to its target.
“The dispensation of knowledge must be grounded by the acquisition of knowledge”
More wisdom from Coates.
Bougie worries
I’m continuing to think about what my lifestyle choices mean about me as a person. A few things happened recently to bring this home to me. E applied for a job near Cleveland (or was it Cincinnati?). The next morning an article in the New York Times talks about it as a wasteland of boarded up homes (I haven’t actually read the article–couldn’t get past the opening).
Secondly, there was this funny confluence of articles in the current Atlantic. The first explains how the concentration of creative talent in cities is the best choice for our economic future, and how the next phase of our geography is likely to be yet more concentrated cities (emptying the suburbs). In the second, Sandra Tsing Loh writes about how creative types (the Xs–not for their generation, but for their class) has seen the end of their day and will have to stop living in segregated sectors and start living next to real people, like people of color and immigrants.
A block quote-y summary of Loh’s article. First a definition:
Fussell believed in an escape pod from this tyranny of classhood: residence in a special American psycho-emotional space called “category X.” … Fussell’s Xs were essentially bohemians, the young people who flocked to cities in search of “art,” “writing,” and “creative work,” ideally without a supervisor. Xs disregarded authority; they dressed down on every occasion; they drank no-name liquor …; they wore moccasins and down vests (in 1983, Fussell considered L.L.Bean and Lands’ End natural X clothiers); they carelessly threw out, unread, their college alumni magazines.
Second an update to said definition, placing Xs not at the periphery, but at the center:
Sadly, though, rebellion is not the outlier stance it once was. Xs are no longer America’s free. By 2009, Xs are neither what Fussell called the “classless class” nor an “unmonied aristocracy” with the freedom of the Out-of-Sights, if without the bucks. … Today’s Xs do not “occupy the one social place in the U.S.A. where the ethic of buying and selling is not all-powerful.” Thanks to the economic rise, over the past three decades, of what Richard Florida (betraying a wee bit too much admiration) calls “the creative class,” Xs now rule the world.
What is their essence? Themselves!!
It’s not just that Romantic Selfhood—Walter Pater’s notion of burning with a “hard, gemlike flame,” which is the true emotional underpinning of bohemia—has become commodified. Fairly harmless is the $4 venti soy latte purchased amid Starbucks’s track lighting, Nina Simone crooning, and a story about Costa Rican beans that have sailed around the world just to see YOU! It’s that Selfhood has its own berth now in the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” a generational shift presaged by American sociologists who, as early as the 1970s, posited that, while hungry people are concerned about survival, those who grow up in abundance will hunger for self-expression.
And where it hit me–a list of all the cities these Xs want to live in neatly coincides with my list.
By contrast, writes Bishop, over the past 30 years, “there was a surge of people who wanted to live in cities for what could only be social—or even aesthetic—reasons.” … New “superstar cities” (a term coined by the economist Joseph Gyourko) were “metro areas where residence had become, in essence, a luxury good. People paid for the privilege of being in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Portland, Los Angeles, New York, Austin, and Raleigh-Durham because they wanted to live there, not because they expected an economic return.”
Completely contradicting other article without engaging other article’s argument:
Counterintuitively, an over-clustering of educated people in one region is not always a social boon.
Actually not–the other article is about an economic boon. She is talking about a social one. Xs flee from having their self-expression challenged by other people not like themselves.
(In the meantime, I’ve also noticed that Portland is much whiter than Los Angeles, disconcertingly white.)
So what’s the outcome of the economic pressure on the Xs? Perhaps a flight back to thrift stores, Folgers, public transportation (quaintly described in stories on This American Life), and public libraries.
This economic catastrophe is teaching the Xers that their prized self-expression and their embrace of personal choice leads to … the collapse of capitalism. Time to inculcate not those self-satisfyingly hip and rebellious values—innovation! self-fulfillment!—cherished by the creative class (a class, after all, that includes in its ranks those buccaneering entrepreneurs who’ve led us down the primrose path), but those staid and stolid values of the bourgeoisie: industry, sobriety, moderation, self-discipline, and avoidance of debt. [...] The age of narcissistic creative-class strivers has brought this country cool new neighborhoods and an infinitely better selection of coffees and greens, but it has also brought shameful social stratification and a consumer binge that our children’s children may well be paying off. The Xer is dead. Long live the burgher!
Humph. As someone who fled small town life for A2, and thoroughly enjoys all the good coffee and great greens in A2, as well as the social and political atmosphere, I get a little grumpy by this argument. Perhaps particularly because A2 is one of the most multicultural places I’ve been in…maybe because of the university…certainly more than the rest of the state. But am I grumpy at what is accurate criticism of myself and my group?
What do you guys think? First article or second?
The absolute take-home message is that I have to stop being a snob and work on my attitude about living wherever we end up. And be intensely thankful for these three years in my favorite town. (sitting as I am in the most beautiful small public library I’ve ever seen, with gorgeous use of wood and metal).
hum
Really productive day. Got a lot of paragraphs written, but mostly those from primary sources (no contextualization, no laying on of thesis, no checking for organization). So we’ll see how it goes when I check it over. I realized that my conference paper is due not at the end of the month (when the conference is) but by the 9th, if I have any hope of getting it considered for publication (I assume). Not sure how I’m going to pull that off. At least I have most of the primary source elements in place…the context will be there or not.
A gem:
At the meeting of the Southern Association of Colleges, Lusith[?], this new dumbbell from [?], who knows nothing of Negro education and whose wife fears that Fisk will ruin her daughter’s social standing, was sent to represent Fisk, although the Dean was available and it is usually the dean who represents a school on these occasions.
[?] is where I can’t read the handwriting. Fisk was one of the premier black colleges in this time.
equanimity
Ok, enough of my anxiety ridden posts. They are cathartic, but not terribly interesting. I’ll try to shove that into my journal to get it off of my soul without letting the icky gookiness of it stick to any one else.
I think I need to stick to a paragraph for awhile, instead of flitting from thing to thing. Maybe that will help the subsequent drafts not be quite so painful to read and edit.
fool
I think I may look a fool at the end of March. I’m going to a conference on blck wmn’s radicalism, with a ton of big named scholars. I’ve only ever dabbled in communism, and I know I’m going to face a depth of knowledge about it….ack. I just thought to email the nyu archives to see if they have Byrd listed–but the CP papers were only donated in 06 and are unprocessed. So do I try to get to nyu the day before the conference and scour the archive for some mention of byrd’s activities? or content myself with what i know (which will easily fill 10 minutes, but may not have the contextual stuff the audience will be looking for).
I still say conference papers that offer something knew, that people haven’t heard about, is the best way to go. I think Byrd is fairly unknown. So maybe she (not me) will save the day.
