Benjamin Barber has hit the nail squarely on the head in this book on adulthood and citizenship.
He begins his work by comparing the current state of capitalism to Max Weber’s so called protestant ethic style of capitalism. Whereas today we see an emphasis on spending, consumption and credit as the lifeblood of our commercial and economic life, it wasn’t too long ago that capitalism valued saving and hard work as the path to wealth. Barber spends roughly the first two-thirds of the book to lay out the transition due to infantilization that has taken place in the west and gradually much of the rest of the world. Barber paints with broad strokes in this portion of the book. For a much more in-depth look at this phenomenon I’d recommend Naomi Klein’s No Logo. But exposing the infantilizing tendencies of consumer capitalism isn’t the most comelling part of the book. The really interesting stuff comes toward the end of the book, where barber examines the deleterious effects of consumerism on citizenship.
There has been a constant and not always slow erosion on citizenship since at least the ’60s, but much longer I’m sure. Citizens have abdicated their responsibilities and obligations to the common wealth in order to privatize. We’ve contracted out almost all of the most essential public services in the interest of wealth accumulation and getting things done more efficiently. We’ve cordoned off so much of our lives into private and government. There is essentially no public life left. We take only responsible for our own lives. And with levels of debt rising and saving achieving almost the level of myth, we are even letting go of that.
Barber references the novels 1984 and Brave New World to illustrate the threat we feared and the threat we missed. We feared a world where books were burned and speeched was silenced; what we got was a world where books are marginalized and speech is hollow, childish and abstract to the point of uselessness.
This is a fantastic book that diagnoses and offers a simple solution to one of the major problems crippling our civilization today; let go and grow the hell up. I highly recommend this book to anyone hoping to be an adult citizen.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
Anglopressy 