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October 26, 2007
Daniel Bell in his Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) argued that the contradictions of contemporary capitalism resulted from the unraveling of the threads which had once held the culture and the economy together, and from the influence of the hedonism which has become the prevailing value in our society. He unpacked this by saying that the Protestant ethic was becoming sundered from bourgeois society leaving only the hedonism Work was no longer a calling, but a mere means of seeking pleasure as a way of life.
In this reworking of Max Weber Bell argued that the restraints of the Protestant ethic on unrestrained economic impulses and acquisitiveness were undercut by capitalism itself through such innovations as installment buying, instant credit, mass production, and mass consumption. While the business corporation wants its employees to work hard, pursue a career, and delay gratification, at the same time its products and advertisements promote the vision of pleasure, instant joy, relaxing, and letting go.
This is freedom as self-fulfillment and self-realization. For Bell it signifies an unrestrained self that seeks to supplant rationality and restraint with sensation, simultaneity, immediacy, and impact.His example is the 1960s.
This is pretty much the cultural conservative's diagnosis of liberal capitalism--today they point to the way that the cinema, the magazine rack, and the Internet are swamps of pornography and sexual obsessions. Thus Keith Windschuttle, on becoming the new editor of Quadrant, says that he will target the arts:
I’ve become concerned in recent years about the cynicism and decadence that you get in the opera, in the theatre, in other parts of high culture - even the dance companies. Consider Wagner’s Tannhauser, that myth of the sacred and profane now on show at the Sydney Opera House. There’s a guy painted in gold (who) stands there with a giant erection - symbolises lust or something. That kind of gratuitous offensiveness is almost everywhere.
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