In 1962, one observer believed that America was on the brink of a spiritual breakthrough. But that’s not how things have turned out. What a joy it would be to show the America of 2015 to Edward T. Chase.
Chase, the author of a 1962 Atlantic essay titled “Money Isn’t Everything,” was positively euphoric as he observed the cultural changes of the post-war period “It is my belief,” he wrote, “that in fact we in the United States are evolving beyond the ‘consumption society—one that has mastered the problems of production and are approaching a new order of society, the society of self-realization.” Via the alchemy of mass prosperity combined with mass education, Americans, Chase explained, were losing their narrow-minded focus on material success, and were instead developing an appreciation for culture, conservation, and jobs that provided “self-fulfillment” over financial remuneration.
His evidence: a massive increase in spending on “culture,” a doubling in how much Americans spent on books between 1955 and 1961, an increase of 29 percent in library-book circulation over a five-year period, a boom in paperback sales, an explosion in the number of museums and in museum attendance, a rise in a desire to pursue “intrinsically important work,” and on and on.
Man, if this guy could see today.
By one measure, arts and cultural production” today accounts for 4.3 percent of GDP, or nearly $700 billion. Many, many more Americans read books today than did at mid-century (and young people are reading more than their parents and grandparents did). There are now some 35,000 museums across the country, The Washington Post reports. Museum attendance is huge. According to the American Alliance of Museums, “there are approximately 850 million visits each year to American museums, more than the attendance for all major-league sporting events and theme parks combined.” Both the number and percentage of Americans who have graduated from college continue to rise.
And then there’s the Internet. Chase would have been shocked by the Internet. Essentially free access to all the world’s information from a device two-thirds of Americans have in their pockets.
And yet, optimism like Edward T. Chase’s occupies little territory in the landscape of today’s sentiments, in which cynicism, contempt, and indifference tend to dominate.
Perhaps this is because Chase was wrong. A half-century of cultural edification has passed, and this country is still preoccupied with money and material accumulation. Even the wealthiest are working more hours than they were three decades ago the very people who are at financial liberty to ease up on work a bit and indulge in some of the nonmaterial consumption Chase idealized. Consumption, not culture, has triumphed as though the two were ever separate phenomena to begin with.
It’s not only that. America’s gloomy national mood is a reasonable response to very real and very deep problems. Despite the country’s prosperity and astonishing technological advances, wages have stagnated, segregation endures, women still lag behind professionally, and the climate has been dangerously destabilized. There’s no need to continue this list when any perusal of a newspaper will suffice. Unmitigated optimism today is the song of the naïve.
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