East Lake Park, Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1920s. I grew up right next to East Lake but can’t quite figure out where this is — maybe down at the eastern tip of the lake?
And here we have arrived deep in the belly of the neoliberal whale, just in time to watch the experts and technocrats hand out machetes to we, the swallowed. If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”…What the experts generally rarely say is, “Because we care for one another, want the best possible lives for one another, and would not be deprived of each other’s company one moment sooner than we must”. Why does your mom tell you to wear a helmet and stop smoking and lose some weight? Ok, sometimes because of the ordinary psychodrama of family life and its little struggles for power, but sometimes, often times, simply because your mom or your dad or your kid or your friend loves you. Because they value you.
As nations become wealthier, it is harder for them to sustain high rates of growth. That doesn’t mean that the United States is in decline, or even stagnating. When a nation is as rich as ours, it can realize larger absolute gains than it did in the past and larger gains than other nations even if it has lower growth rates. That’s because a growth rate of, say, 2.5 percent represents a larger increase in absolute wealth the richer an economy becomes. In 1900, a 2.5 percent increase in gross domestic product (GDP) per capita would have translated into about $150 in today’s dollars for every man, woman, and child in the United States. In 2010, it would have been roughly $1,200, reflecting the fact that in the aggregate, we are about eight times wealthier than we were 110 years ago. By focusing too much on growth rates and too little on absolute increases in wealth, we have failed to appreciate the magnitude of economic gains in recent decades.
Food is molecules, not bits—which also means it can’t be digitally copied, shared, pirated, or sent across the Web. And that may be the secret of its status now. The more virtual our experience becomes, the more we value the tangible, the sensual, and the immediate. Food is very intimate; we put it in our bodies. It creates and affirms our intimacy with others. Not for nothing do families gather around the table, dates begin with dinner, and religions use food as the symbol of communion.In the age of mechanical reproduction, Walter Benjamin famously argued, works of art have lost their aura of the sacred, their irreducible uniqueness and presence. One can only imagine what he would have said about the age of electronic reproduction. Forget about posters or vinyl or film; now we can be anywhere, to look or listen. But food is always unique. You have to be there, have to be present, have to be in contact with the thing itself. You have, in other words, to be here now. If the purpose of religion is to bring us into relationship with reality, perhaps it’s no surprise that food is our religion today.
I will say only this to its acolytes and votaries. Religions don’t stay innocent for long. Churches, dogmas, heresies, schisms, senescence: you have all this to look forward to.
Though Benedict XVI traveled widely and tried to promote the growth of Catholicism outside the West, he was nevertheless in many ways a deeply Eurocentric figure, perhaps nowhere more so than in his conviction that radical secularism represents the gravest contemporary challenge to the faith.But for Catholics in other parts of the world, it sometimes seemed a peculiar fixation. Catholics in Nigeria facing the rise of the militant Boko Haram movement, for example, or Catholics in India struggling with Hindu radicalism, often had a hard time getting worked up over the abstract threat of secular thought. And in Latin America, watching Evangelicals and Pentecostals eat into traditional Catholic strongholds, many Catholics would be equally reluctant to flag the struggle against secularism as job number one.
Medieval Batman, via Adam Roberts on Twitter
Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Lang (upper right), & crew on the set of Metropolis (1927, Fritz Lang) (via)
Here the decline in work-force participation is of a piece with the broader turn away from community in America — from family breakdown and declining churchgoing to the retreat into the virtual forms of sport and sex and friendship. Like many of these trends, it poses a much greater threat to social mobility than to absolute prosperity. (A nonworking working class may not be immiserated; neither will its members ever find a way to rise above their station.) And its costs will be felt in people’s private lives and inner worlds even when they don’t show up in the nation’s G.D.P.In a sense, the old utopians were prescient: we’ve gained a world where steady work is less necessary to human survival than ever before. But human flourishing is another matter. And it’s our fulfillment, rather than the satisfaction of our appetites, that’s threatened by the slow decline of work.