Consuming the Future

Two of my favorite authors recently started writing for American Compass, a site I didn’t know existed until Patrick Deneen and Chris Arnade showed up there. Their mission has a lot of overlap with ours, including this emphasis:

• REORIENTING POLITICAL FOCUS from growth for its own sake to widely shared economic development that sustains vital social institutions.

Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed was my top book recommendation in 2018. A year later, my top recommendation was Chris Adnade’s book Dignity. We live in very interesting times indeed that these two people, with very different backgrounds, contexts, and political dispositions, are sharing compelling, overlapping ideas in the same space. I’m going to focus on Deneen’s inaugural column, but will probably circle back to Arnade in the future.

In ”Thinking Big to Act Small”, instead of a “free market,” Deneen suggests we should view this as a marketplace of “free radicals,” which he describes as people unmoored from contexts of meaning, communities thick with inheritances, practices born of limits, exercises in self- and social constraints. Said another way, the individualism, whether it be of the “rugged” or “liberated” variety, that is now embodied in American culture is an unstable construct, kept afloat by a fragile affluence.

Make no mistake: this “market of free radicals” is a construct and the direct result of both public policy and huge expenditures of private industry. It is not merely a “given preference” that arose from purely market forces, but the culmination of an alignment of left and right liberal policies designed to shape our identities into creatures above all that consume.

Most of us today are debtors rather than owners; consumers rather than producers; wasters rather than fixers.  While apparently dynamic and innovative, our economic and social order is profoundly fragile, built upon assumptions of never-ending growth financed by debt that demands we consume the future, sacrifice (or refuse birth to) future generations, and madly continue expanding a civilizational Ponzi scheme.

In a way that is, at least a little bit, inspired by Strong Towns, Deneen powerfully makes the connection between the marketplace of free radicals and its manifestation in our development pattern, an expression of national economic policy imposed on local communities.

National policies that emphasized mobility, suburban prosperity, consumption and impatience encouraged a wholly different way of building our communities.  By aligning ourselves with these national objectives, we ensured a collision course between a set of national commitments that were based ultimately on unreality, and local requirements that would be first to adversely experience a confrontation with limits.

Local governments are discovering that they do not have the means, nor real and sustainable prospects of economic growth, to continue much less maintain the non-productive build-out that occurred at the expense of historically productive cores.  As those bills come due, local leaders still hope that they will receive the largesse of national economic growth, hitching their wagons to the prospects of limitlessness. Having sacrificed the common sense born of the bottom-up, they—we—are now prisoners to our own illusions, incapable of seeing the confrontation with reality that continually punches us in the gut.

Reading Deneen has always provided a level of clarity for me, something to ponder that gets far beyond the day-to-day debates of the news cycle into more profound truth. The article in the American Compass is a good example of this, but everyone should also read his profound book.

I know the term “free radical” from my undergraduate chemistry courses. My recollection was that free radicals are unstable, that they would exist for a short period of time before binding with something else to form a more chemically-stable condition. The experience of 2020 has seen forces of change create flashpoints of free radicals, but as I’m sure Deneen would agree, we are stronger as we inevitably move beyond that unstable, free radical phase and begin to bind together for common purpose with those around us. 

Cover image via Unsplash.

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