Patrick Deneen, Abstraction

While it's certainly true that the most visible cause of this unraveling is attributable to the collapse of housing prices and mortgage defaults, reflection suggests that the root cause is deeper still: it lies in a culture of abstraction. At nearly every level this financial collapse was precipitated by transforming reality into abstraction, unmooring grounded commitments and obligations and fostering new patterns of fantastical behavior throughout the populace.

It begins with an altered perception of one's abode. A rootless people - abstracted from particular places and settled patterns of life - perceive their abodes as investments, as notional assets that are packaged and bartered. In the 1980s and 90's - at the height of the American build-out into the exurban wasteland, the transformation of farmland into cul-de-sacs, six-lane feeder roads and blighted vistas of strip malls and box stores - a generation of people clung to the advice of Martha Stewart on how to create a country home with both peasant and aristocratic touches by means of purchasing bedding and paint colors at K-Mart. Houses in developments called "Hunter's Glen" and "Meadow Run" - built usually by destroying whatever the development was named after, as Kunstler wryly has pointed out - were built in a faux Victorian or classical style, using materials that wouldn't likely last 25 years without need for replacement. Designed for indoor living, with professional kitchens in which little cooking was done and separate living spaces for every member of the family, these cookie-cutter houses were paeans to a domestic idyll that was crushed under a reality of abstraction. Far-flung commutes, deadening institutionalized public school days bookended by chaotic bus rides, a younger generation that lacked meaningful interaction with adults who were not paid to be with them, lives that could not be lived without large streams of electronically supplied entertainment and "news" (increasingly indistinguishable), and frequent automobile drives to places that supplied essentials and detritus of life at the end of worldwide supply lines fueled by decreasing quantities of petroleum were the hallmarks of our disconnection with everyone and everything. This is what we called "home." The abstraction of this existence was further supported by words that had lost their meaning.

Hrm. I was just struck with the thought that by now we could come up with a 'random generator' for conservative rants, just like people have done for movie plots or anime series. I would think that Walmart and Martha Stewart would be two items on the list used by the random generator.

It does make me want to build my own furniture, though.