4 Responses to “Post-Postmaterialism, Or Orthodoxy”

1. kitstolz, on June 22nd, 2008 at 9:12 am Said:

   I think it’s fair to say that most Americans do not feel an “oppressive and tyrannical control…from material goods” except when shocking circumstances trap them in the material and the moment; say, a car crash, or a foreclosure, or some other dramatically awful situation.

   But it’s an interesting argument, and may well be true even if we don’t experience it that way. And to say that we must first establish a spiritual discipline before we can find the right relationship between ourselves and the planet makes intuitive sense; how else not to be corrupted by material comfort and convenience?

2. TGGP, on June 22nd, 2008 at 2:46 pm Said:

   Speaking of orthodoxy, are you familiar with the writings of Matthew Raphael Johnson? Keith Preston pointed him (along with Jack Ross) out to me. He has a website here, and has written a book on Russia, Tsarism and Orthodoxy.

3. Daniel Larison, on June 23rd, 2008 at 9:21 am Said:

   I hadn’t heard of Johnson before. I’ll take a look. Thanks for the links.

4. conradg, on June 24th, 2008 at 5:27 pm Said:

   Any discussion of “hippies” these days is an anachronism that fails to understand that the “alternative values” of people who began to reject mainstream consumerist values in the 1950’s and 60’s are not homogenous at all, but consist of an almost endless set of alternatives, precisely because the rejection of consumerist values does not point in any one particular direction. I came out of that general world of people, even though I never considered myself a hippie, and I know people who ended up in almost every possible set of values, from deep conservative to deep socialist, from ascetical to self-indulgent, from anti-materialist to an embrace of materialism, from deeply religious to militantly atheist, from every kind of Christian sect to every kind of eastern or pagan sect, from high-powered professionals to working class stiffs to pot growers. At a certain point, there’s an intersection with every kind of ordinary human endeavor, and it’s very hard to tell who’s a hippie anymore. I work in construction, and there’s not a whole lot of difference between the working class rednecks and the working class hippies. They drink the same beers and smoke the same weed, often together. They have the same skepticism about mainstream American consumerism. They even follow a lot of the same politics, from Obama to Ron Paul. Yeah, there’s some kind of intersection between hippies and conservatives of a certain type, but that type is found everywhere, not just in certain fringe branches of conservatism or religiosity. The basic sense that something sucks in the mainstream world view is pretty much what links them together.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.