The Decline of Heroic Materialism
Where "Kinder, Gentler" Society Has Led To... Nothing Much At All
In his 1969 pop-history “Civilisation”, Kenneth Clark described the experience of the 19th and 20th centuries as being defined by Heroic Materialism - essentially, the transformation of society around industrial development along with the increased expansion of equity and enfranchisement towards previously less powerful groups, primarily built on the back of the prosperity created, but also limited by waning seeds of doubt as to the decline of spiritual, intellectual and moral life. This malaise was typical of the late 1960s when Civilisation was first broadcast and prefigured the continued challenges of the 1970s in the West, while also expressing a desire to move on from purely material pursuits into a more broadly educated and equanimous society.
There are of course many means to both advocate and critique the sense of Heroic Materialism as it existed, both in that day and today, but less interesting is the outcome of the fundamental infrastructures for which the ground was laid in that time, specifically: new waves of globalization, instantaneous communication and increased presence of media in everyday life, and the rapidity of travel and trade that mingled different cultural influences to drive new attitudes and cultural transformations.
Consider, momentarily, the influence of Hip Hop as a genre of music, which began in streets and “ghettos” and is now a definitive genre everywhere from Africa to Scandanavia. While it can be brash and braggadocious, this is arguably the exact kind of cultural form that Clark would look back in retrospect, on a different era, as descriptive of the tendencies and preferences of the time - different only in form but not necessarily function to the mannerism of the pre-Renaissance era.
Drawing forward again closer to today, the prevalence and preference of digital streaming and short-form video has drawn the attention spans of individual viewers ever shorter and narrower. We can think of this as an admonition to the neglect of the intellectual spirit, but is this not also a democratization of the intellect through video essays and extensive threads laying out everything from the critical nuances of interpersonal relationships to broad-based corruption of the world’s most powerful leaders and politicians?
At a certain point, the development of a new mass culture - not one that is tied to radio and television, but to the smartphone and to the everyday interactions between groups of people - has broken down previous class distinctions and in their place substituted “affinity groups”. These “affinities” are defined by resistance to outside influence and the coalescing around critical “influencers” and “thought leaders” according to categories, whether it be health, wellness, nutrition, beauty, makeup, dating, relationships, engineering, design, politics or global affairs.
Our online culture, much as it is a panopticon, has something for everyone, and yet in this context the very discipline which Clark himself practiced - a deep and patient study of history, society, social, economic and material change - has fallen out of favor.
Why should this form of knowledge be devalued in a world of shorter and shorter attention spans? The answer should be as obvious as “the medium is the message”, but limited time and attention is as much a consequence of the instant gratification it gives you as it is the short-termism which is definitive of our culture overall. Whether it is corporate quarterly reporting or the need to make a buck short term, the desire for ever-increasing stock market gains while social institutions and pensions funds become effectively insolvent, or the limited capacity for individualism to know what they will be doing in 5, 10, 15 or 20 years because of the whipsaw of global trends, society in itself has become impatient because leadership, because those who control resources, also feel the same insecurity, because they also have no patience for it.
In this place, what is the appropriate solution? Will the coming of AI job replacement allow us to have an “AI dividend”, a minimum income based on unlimited wealth created by the advance of autonomous technology, one that will turn every ne’er-do-well and retail worker into a poet and philosopher king? Or how about the nationalization of resources, whether in response to energy prices or restrictions on critical minerals - could this create a sort of futuristic society that creates unlimited wealth through electrified mass transit, Mag-Lev trains and 3D-printed social housing, so that the masses may finally be free to study Kant and Wittgenstein and understand the primordial hollowness of the language games they play in their everyday life, reaching enlightenment shortly thereafter.
These are not purposefully absurd suppositions, but they are in fact informative of something Clark - perhaps seeking relevance - overlooked. Namely: the drive towards materialism ultimately coincides with the desire to achieve spiritual growth and divine providence. Surely in parts it can appear to undermine it, but if one is pursuing pleasure for its own sake, and one is continuously seeking outcomes which can only demand more of the senses, become more stimulating, excite the appetites for new experience, and in these contexts it is eventually only the intellectual, the composed “spiritual aristocrat”, who can remain - every other personality is simply washed out by their constant desire for more, until they finally have their fill and seek more in their inner life at last.
This is the kind of malaise which has so punished society today. While there is “grindset” and “hustle culture”, there is a total absence of emphasis on collaboration, on large social projects, of damning the torpedoes because that willingness to have desires and achieve great things - for one’s reach to exceed their grasp - is “gauche”, “hollow” and “spiritually misguided”. Much as the medieval peasant of old might never go 50 miles from the village of their birth, so too have so many recreated this limited scope - they’ve simply done so on a digital plantation, instead of a physical one.