The Need for a Counterculture

This is the culture that needs to be countered.

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. 

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

In the last couple of essays, I’ve started to discuss “economic independence” as a goal for social progress. The idea is to reinvigorate families and communities by empowering them to reassume some of the responsibilities that are now outsourced to the market and the state. Thus far I have presented economic independence solely as a response to capitalism’s crisis of inclusion — that is, as a way to create conditions more favorable for human flourishing outside the relatively narrow confines of the professional, managerial, and entrepreneurial elite. I chose to start the discussion this way because the nexus between problem and solution is so clear and direct here. Since capitalism is rendering more and more people superfluous to the progress of the overall system, we should give those people better opportunities for purpose and status and meaning by opening up an alternative pathway for flourishing outside the system.

But I believe that a move toward greater economic independence could also be critically important to preserving and revitalizing dynamism – technological, economic, and indeed civilizational. The capitalist system has now extended its reach over the entire planet: although the details vary from country to country, the same basic package — a market economy motivated by consumerism, propelled forward by scientific and technological progress, and regulated by a large regulatory and welfare state — is now in place everywhere. The sun never sets on the empire of commerce and bureaucracy.

But universal empires are not noted for their dynamism, and monocultures do not make for healthy ecosystems. The institutional and cultural convergence we are now experiencing represents another dimension of capitalism’s overextension. It’s not just that we have maintained mass mobilization into the labor market well past the point when the strains it imposes outweigh the opportunities it provides for most people. In addition, the cultural pull of consumerism has grown so strong and so pervasive that, instead of empowering us by freeing up our time to focus on the things that really matter, it is so distracting and enervating that we end up focusing on the wrong things.

Consumerism has always been in bad odor with intellectuals, but that general contempt for the shallowness and vulgarity of commercialized pleasures is most emphatically not where I’m coming from. As I wrote in The Age of Abundance, “The progress of industrialization exposed a fundamental conflict between the two great expressions of the bourgeois Protestant ethos: the highly organized yet raucously competitive commercial order on the one hand, and the religiously inspired repression of individual desire on the other.” In that conflict, I stand with the commercial order and its liberation of desire: the “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” has never had a place in my value system. As the conflict has secularized, the basis for anti-consumerism has gradually shifted from otherworldly asceticism to aesthetic revulsion — snobbery against the base preferences of the great unwashed masquerading as high-minded moralism. Here again, I stand on the other side. While I’m admittedly snobbish about the importance of cultivating refined and challenging tastes, I’ve never understood the disdain for simple, easy pleasures. In this vale of tears, find your joys where you can.

Furthermore, it is only by virtue of consumerism that we are now in the position to grapple with the permanent problem and move to a higher level of social development. To see where we would be otherwise, imagine that the competitive struggle a century ago between Ford and General Motors had gone the other way. Henry Ford had blessed the world with affordable motorized transportation – but believed that the only further blessing to grant was making it cheaper. He resisted adding any new features to his Model T, and famously said his customers could have it in any color they wanted as long as it was black. At Ford’s upstart rival, by contrast, the visionary William Durant and his immensely able successor Alfred Sloan saw that the Model T only scratched the surface of the automobile’s potential. GM cars replaced the external crank handle with an ignition button inside, added windshield wipers, offered multiple colors, produced a fleet of different brands and models aimed at different demographics and price points, introduced yearly styling changes to encourage regular trade-ins, and pioneered consumer financing to make buying as painless as possible. GM’s more expansive view of the auto market triumphed in a rout: by 1927 Ford was forced to upgrade to the Model A, but that wasn’t enough to stop GM from overtaking Ford’s market share in 1929 and never surrendering the lead.

If Ford’s austere and narrow vision of innovation had prevailed, not only in automobiles but for consumer products more generally, product features would have frozen shortly after a new good was introduced and all subsequent innovation would be focused on churning out that unchanging merchandise ever more cheaply. In that alternative universe, as goods got progressively cheaper, consumers would run into increasing difficulty channeling their savings into new consumer purchases. They would have no choice but to purchase leisure instead, and Keynes’s forecast of a 15-hour work week could have come true decades ago. And, of course, we would be immensely poorer than we are today. It is to the liberated desire of ordinary people — for an ongoing parade of “new and improved,” and to invest material objects with additional meaning as markers of identity and status — that we owe capitalism’s phenomenal productivity over the course of the 20th century and into our own.

If consumerism is actually a good thing, what then could be the problem? The same problem that lurks in all good things: make the dose excessive and it becomes a poison.

If you’ve read other essays on this blog, it should come as no surprise that I see the advent of mass affluence as the key turning point in consumerism’s evolving relationship with human wellbeing. When the struggle to secure basic material needs remained at the center of economic life, and the human reality behind rising GDP figures consisted of the alleviation of grinding poverty and release from backbreaking drudgery, the nexus between the expansion of commerce and the march of progress was clear and strong. But once the fulfillment of basic material needs was more or less assured, what capitalism had to offer to consumers was the promise of a better life through added comfort and convenience and ever-more stimulating and absorbing entertainment.

That offer is nothing to sneeze at, and I have little patience with people raised in ease and comfort who fail to appreciate their good fortune. But the fact remains that the terms of the bargain between capitalism and consumers underwent a fundamental shift. Under conditions of mass affluence, capitalist growth provides a growing array of bells and whistles to embellish a flourishing life. But as far as supplying the actual vehicle to which those bells and whistles are attached, access to a wider set of consumer choices is of increasingly marginal importance.

Indeed, the endless pileup of more and more bells and whistles now constitutes a significant distraction in the pursuit of wellbeing. And again, it’s important to remember that it’s the dose that makes the poison. Nothing wrong with zoning out in front of the tube, playing video games, mixing it up on social media, getting turned on by porn, catching a buzz, or wolfing down a Big Mac — not in my book, at any rate. Things go wrong when acquiescence in instant gratification and undemanding pleasures starts to crowd out more challenging but ultimately more fulfilling pursuits.

It's become painfully clear, to me at least, that contemporary society is now overdosing. In an incessant bombardment by commercial pitches, puffery, and come-ons, we are told constantly: buy this to make you hotter, buy this to make you thinner, buy this to make you smarter, buy this to make you cooler, buy this to make you happier. And yet look at us now:

• We’re seriously overweight and getting fatter. Over two-thirds of adult Americans are overweight or obese.

• We’re getting dumber. After many decades of the “Flynn effect,” in which raw IQ scores were rising over time, the “reverse Flynn effect” has now kicked in and scores are dropping.

• We’re getting lonelier, as more people live alone and both the number of close friends and time spent with them are in decline.

• We’re plagued by growing mental health problems, and young people have been especially hard hit.

• We’ve stopped reproducing ourselves. The U.S. total fertility rate now stands at around 1.7 babies per woman – below the 2.1 needed to sustain the population.

This is where a half-century-plus of mass-affluence consumerism has brought us. With this track record, there is simply no warrant for thinking that more money and more cool stuff are a reliable path to flourishing and fulfillment.

To see what’s gone wrong, it’s instructive to compare the chief promise of consumerism today — comfort, convenience, and entertainment — with the actions that lead to flourishing lives. As to the latter, I think it’s hard to top the admirable compactness of John Rawls’s formulation of the “Aristotelian principle” in A Theory of Justice: “Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.”

Flourishing, then, is active and effortful: developing one’s capacities requires training and practice, exercising them requires seeking out challenges and meeting them. By contrast, consumerism promises to make everything easy and effortless. Flourishing cannot be outsourced: you have to do it yourself, you have to struggle and strive to discover your potential and then realize it. Consumerism, on the other hand, is all about outsourcing: why sweat and strain to do a crummy job yourself when you can hire a trained professional?

There is no necessary conflict here: we can best devote our time to developing and exercising those capacities that matter most to us if we can efficiently outsource life’s scut work to the market. This is consumerism’s constantly repeated promise: buy this so you can spend more time on what’s really important.

The conflict may not be necessary, but we’ve fallen into it all the same. The ethos promoted by consumerism’s relentless offers of outsourcing is one of hyper-specialization: just focus on your job, and your spouse (if you’ve managed to find one), and your one or two kids (if you’ve taken the trouble to have them), and then leave the rest to us.

Which brings us to the epigraphs that begin this essay: the flip side of hyper-specialization is the atrophy of everything else. If we don’t regularly work to develop, exercise, and maintain our inborn capacities, those capacities will wither away. Use ‘em or lose ‘em.

Adam Smith certainly understood the immense upsides of specialization and an extensive division of labor. He began The Wealth of Nations with a visit to a pin factory, where the manufacturing process had been broken down into 18 distinct operations, all simple and repetitive. He recounted a small factory with just ten workers that could produce 48,000 pins a day; by comparison, a worker who did everything himself would be unable to produce 20 pins in a day, and may not succeed in producing one.

But in the concluding Book Five of his magnum opus, Smith called attention to the stark downsides of specialization. He recognized that while a finely grained division of labor was a boon to a nation’s overall productivity, its human costs were considerable. The more narrowly one specializes, the more one’s wider potential will atrophy and disappear.

It was on these grounds that Smith justified a state role in public education, but we can see now that this remedy wasn’t sufficient to the task. And just as Smith worried, specialization’s toll in lost potential is heaviest for ordinary workers. For most people in the managerial, professional, and entrepreneurial elite, and a fortunate scattered minority outside it, work is interesting enough and challenging enough to repay intense specialization with rich enough psychic rewards to form the core of a fulfilling life. (Even so, it remains a truism — seldom fully appreciated until it’s too late — that nobody on their deathbed ever looks back and wishes they had spent more time in the office.)

But outside the elite, most paid work — while perhaps not as cartoonishly vacuous as making 1/18 of a pin — affords little opportunity to develop and exercise one’s capacities in a challenging and rewarding way. The capacity most regularly and assiduously honed in most contemporary workplaces is a highly developed tolerance for subordination and tedium.

And outside of work, what opportunities do ordinary people have to develop and exercise capacities for flourishing? They can hone their capacities for love, friendship, and neighborliness in their personal relationships — though we know that the atrophying of these capacities is already well advanced, especially outside the elite. Hobbies of all different kinds provide occasions for the development of talents and skills and the feelings of flow and mastery that follow — for those lucky enough to have found some avocation that absorbs their attention and marshals their energies. But for all too many people, weariness after a day of work and chores and the absence of any well-developed passion make the siren song of passive consumption irresistible. Which is how we end up spending an average of seven hours every day — nearly half our waking lives — staring at one screen or another.

The atrophying of human potential under mass-affluence consumerism appears to be a progressive degenerative disorder. Just look at Robert Heinlein’s expectations for well-rounded human competence — already unrealistically lofty 50 years ago when those words first appeared in print. And if you think his list is too whimsical, make up one of your own: think of the practical skills and know-how that were widespread, say, 75 years ago — then 50 years ago, 25 years ago, and today. What direction do the trend lines point? When you try to come up with things where contemporaries have the advantage over earlier generations, almost all of them will have something to do with navigating the world behind the screen.

We all have seen those illustrations of the ascent of man, proceeding from knuckle-walking ape to stoop-shouldered Homo erectus and Neanderthal to statuesque, upright Homo sapiens. And what’s the next step in the series? These days, it seems plausible that the dispiriting denouement is one of the hover-chair-bound rollie-pollies from WALL-E. As Tim Wu put it some years back in the New Yorker:

Our will-to-comfort, combined with our technological powers, creates a stark possibility. If we’re not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity. That’s a future defined not by an evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts.

The sofalarity (pictured memorably in the film “Wall-E”) is not inevitable either. But the prospect of it makes clear that, as a species, we need mechanisms to keep humanity on track.

My ideas about a movement toward greater economic independence represent an attempt to devise just such a restorative mechanism. By creating alternative social structures that exist outside of and as independently as possible from the surrounding consumerist monoculture, we may be able to develop the cultural resources to push back against hyper-specialization and WALL-E-fication. The idea is to try to foster a viable, sustainable counterculture — this time forward-looking and high-tech (though I won’t complain if they bring back rock music). Call it producerism — the antidote to consumerism, a DIY hacker culture that turns the tide on relentless outsourcing and celebrates the virtues of self-sufficiency and practical, real-world problem-solving.

Imagine if such a counterculture were to develop out of the economic independence movement I’ve been describing. Picture a double-digit percentage of people living in special pioneer communities, all dedicated to greater local self-sufficiency and innovation in the art of living. These communities would be test beds for cutting-edge agriculture and aquaculture, new building styles and materials and techniques, new cooperative institutions for child and elder care, and new local governance mechanisms. Their inhabitants would strive to provide for themselves, but would also employ their skills in a variety of home-based businesses. And producerism would be the guiding ethos: rather than looking for new ways outsource responsibilities to the market, the ongoing quest would be to expand capacities and skills and bring responsibilities back home.

Just think how this counterculture, this alternative pathway for cooperation and flourishing, might affect the larger society. Imagine the spread of thousands of little “communities of engineering and organizational practice” — to borrow Brad DeLong’s turn of phrase — that actually understand how to build, operate, tinker with, and maintain the technologies that support their material lives. After the long “retreat from reality” during the decades of postindustrial consumerism, a large and vital constituency would now execute an about-face and rediscover the challenges and rewards of problem-solving in the physical world. It is difficult for me to conceive of any social development that could do more to reignite technological dynamism and kickstart progress more generally.

We can be virtually certain that such a counterculture will not arise without strong structural support. The seeds for it are already scattered across the country in the form of the maker movement and the large subculture of DIY hobbyists, but it cannot coalesce into a coherent movement on its own. The gravitational attraction of specialization-and-exchange-for-profit is simply too immense. Unless you consciously stand outside and apart from the system, unless you reject the “will-to-comfort” and join a group of like-minded people who uphold an alternative value system of capacity development and self-sufficiency, consumerist capitalism will — as it has done again and again in the past — coopt any sentiments and impulses that push against its grain and end up transforming those sentiments and impulses into yet another “consumption community” subculture.

Wolf Tivy of Palladium magazine wrote an interesting piece recently that is relevant here. He argues that if you want to change the culture so that it encourages and facilitates a better world, find like-minded people to work on building a better world directly. If you succeed, the institutions you create and the examples you set will do more to change the culture, and thus the wider world, than any actions directly aimed at trying to change the way people think. The whole article is worth a read, but for present purposes here’s the key passage:

You look around and see that we now are too tied up in red tape to accomplish anything at all. Your neighbors are atomized, unhealthy, mentally ill, and strung out on drugs and bad ideology. You see politics and geopolitics spiraling into disaster. A great cloud of spiritual malaise hangs over our society, and you can feel its oppression. If only there were some optimistic ray of light in culture! If only other people could see the possibilities too.

But it wasn’t the optimism and popular appreciation for progress that created that past material health. It is the other way around: it is only once the heroes come home with the loot and tales of great deeds that the public ever catches on that great things are possible…. It’s better to focus on the desired material outcome itself, targeting it carefully and directly.

The question before us, then, is not how to inspire a vital culture but how to directly build a physically healthy society. What kind of world do you want to live in, and how can you build that world by your own hand? What are the technical possibilities?

That’s exactly the thinking that lies behind my interest in an economic independence movement spearheaded by pioneer communities. To change the culture, to change the world, we need to build.