An Interesting Thought

From George Marsden. Religion and American Culture, pp. 194-195

The sensational reactions that marked the whole era between the two world wars reflected the tensions of rapid cultural change. They also sometimes obscured the significance of the changes since they helped create the impression, eagerly promoted by media, that anyone who would express alarm at the transformation must be a bigot or fanatic.
Nonetheless, some sober observers recognized the revolutionary nature of the developments taking place within American society itself. One of the most astute of these was the famed journalist Walter Lippmann. In A Preface to Morals, appearing in 1929, Lippmann observed that the irreligion of the modern world [is]... radical to a degree for which there is, I think, no counterpart." Modern Americans, he said, had "defied the Methodist God and have become very nervous." Lippmann, a secular Jew himself, was not recommending a return to old-time religion. Even though he thought that J. Gresham Machen had "the best popular argument produced by either side in the current controversy," he was convinced that anti-intellectual popular fundamentalism and extremism had irremediably discredited traditional Protestantism among the thinking people in the community. Yet civilization could not go on without a shared morality. Lippmann's solution was to base such a moral consensus on a new humanism. "When men can no longer be theists, they must, if they are civilized, become humanists."
Building a new humanist moral consensus was, of course, more easily said than done. And "the acids of modernity" that Lippmann described had sources that went beyond ideological or even religious change.
Perhaps most basically, the United States was increasingly becoming what the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin described a few years later as a "sensate society." That is, the operative values for most Americans of the time were increasingly defined by satisfaction of the senses- materialistic, hedonistic, or sensuous. This was an accentuation of the trend that Henry Adams pointed out at the end of the nineteenth century, that the United States was preeminently a materialistic civilization. It was materialistic philosophically in that it was built on a science and technology that regarded the material, empirically observable world as the "real" world. And it was practically materialistic in its efficient commercial and technological management of material culture.
Such broad cultural trends lay beneath the celebrated "revolution in morals" of the 1920s. Commercial interests particularly pushed Americans toward definitions of themselves in terms of things that they owned and pleasures they could enjoy. In the 1920s the wide promotion of such outlooks was relatively new. Commercial advertising was just emerging in its modern form. The commercial possibilities of sexual suggestion were just being developed. During the Victorian Era sex was a subject to be avoided in public. Once that taboo was broken, around World War I, advertisers made the most of it. As one observer put it, "Advertising, once pristine, began the transition which...was to transmute soap from a cleansing agent into an aphrodisiac."

More Cicero

Shun also the desire for money. Nothing is more the mark of a mean and petty spirit than to love riches; nothing more honorable and more magnificent than to despise money if you are without it, but if you have it to devote it to liberality and beneficence.
-Cicero. On Duties. (I. 68)

William Hogarth

Men's passive submission to the temptations of the corrupting material world was one of Hogarth's prime concerns. He was an artist whose social agenda was focused on alerting his peers to the dangers of being morally devoured by a world of material consumption. His art marks the emergence of a world in which consumer goods came both to define personal aspirations towards free will and to subjugate the individual in a new system of slavery, conformity to fashion and irrational codes of taste.
-Michael Craske. William Hogarth(12-13)

Still Holds True after 35 Years

Just as mankind once became aware of the intolerable and mistaken deviation of the late Middle Ages, so too must we take account of the disastrous deviation of the late Enlightenment. We have become hopelessly enmeshed in our slavish worship of all that is pleasant, all that is comfortable, all that is material--we worship things, we worship products. Will we ever succeed in shaking off this burden, in giving free reign to the spirit that was breathed into us at birth, that spirit which distinguishes us from the animal world?- Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Warning to the West. (145-146)