Have Americans retained their Puritanical roots when it comes to quasi-ethical matters like not smoking, but become culturally deracinated financially? David Brooks wonders how we have wandered so far from the once-looming influence of Ben Franklin and Poor Richard's Almanack when, he claims, 56% of college kids carry at least four credit cards.
Similarly, my father, like many of his generation, belongs to the local Rotary "to give something back to the community". He and my mother ring the Salvation Army bell every Christmas (and always in some increasingly depressing shopping mall). I don't know anyone of my generation who belongs to a Rotary or Lions Club. That's because no one in my generation wants to give back to the community. While some indeed may be philanthropic, it is not towards a physical community as such, but rather towards a cause or institution, and usually in a way that smacks more of taking a victory lap than caring about the cause.
The age of Wall Street bonuses probably plays a role here as well. When a 28 year old can make more money in 12 months than a 1960's engineer could make in a career, that money comes with little sense of obligation and few cultural strings attached - outside of the latest bling. All of which may seem like fun times when things are going up; but life will be tough with no values - and no money - when they go down. And they will.
From Brooks:
The deterioration of financial mores has meant two things. First, it’s meant an explosion of debt that inhibits social mobility and ruins lives. Between 1989 and 2001, credit-card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. By last year, it was up to $937 billion, the report said.
Second, the transformation has led to a stark financial polarization. On the one hand, there is what the report calls the investor class. It has tax-deferred savings plans, as well as an army of financial advisers. On the other hand, there is the lottery class, people with little access to 401(k)’s or financial planning but plenty of access to payday lenders, credit cards and lottery agents.
9 comments:
I think near 100% of them have a least one credit card. Having a credit card at a young age is like getting a license to gamble.
There are less and less people joining groups like Rotary. I think this is because other causes or institutions like the Red Cross have more explosure to the general public.
Back in the day, the Rotary Club and similar organizations managed to combine the ethic of giving back to the community with an actual community and sense of social belonging. That need for a well defined "group" or "club" seems to be less acute now.
But to your larger point, you've planted a seed for a future navel-gazing post for me... Puritanism and Calvinism leading to Isolationism (and an often arrogant independence) giving way to other mores... creating a situation where expectations and belief structures are no longer aligned with reality vis-a-vis relative power capability.
"... a situation where expectations and belief structures are no longer aligned with reality vis-a-vis relative power capability"? Sounds like someone made it to a few grad school classes after all. Waitin' for d post.
Re the Red Cross and also the need for a community club, I agree. Globalization is erasing communities, full stop. To some extent they are being replaced by virtual communities, such as this site and other blogs, etc. In some ways that is better. In other ways it is worse. We are usually pretty good at accounting for life's marginal improvements - partially because someone is always taking credit for them or selling them to us. But we usually miss entirely the areas where we go backwards until it is irreparably changed.
I agree with you but I think the change is for the better. I rather live in this era because people are so much more connected and informed. For instance, people were quick to response to the recent earthquake in China. This is just one example and there are many more.
Communities nowadays are not in a conventional way. I kind of like it this way because I can contribute to a cause not necessary in my immediate world or work with a community that is in another part of the world. I can be flexible.
Good point. Virtual communities are "wired" (or now "unwired", I guess) so the information exchange is far more efficient than pre-internet. But while we are free to exchange information immediately with people far away and of different customs and sometimes cultures, those virtual communities are pretty much information-based communities only, lacking any of the shared values and customs that defined pre-internet communities.
Data points.
I am ALL ABOUT data points.
And I think Hannibal Lector said it best: "We begin by coveting what we see everyday."
There is an assortment of data points we get by sharing the same real world community with someone.
I'm not discounting the new communities allowed by the internet and so forth - in fact, I highly value it - our blog/commenting dynamic, for example.
But as happy it makes me that I can easily reach out to people a world away, it saddens me that I have no idea who my neighbors are.
It's true but with this arrangement, at least I don't feel like I have to conform to a fix idea or custom. Less peer pressure with more tolerance.
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