It wasn’t ideas that accelerated the drift away from America’s founding values and beliefs. It was affections. That, at least, is the argument put forth by James E. Block in “Captives of Desire”, The Hedgehog Review, Spring, 2025. “The turn in the early twentieth century to the dynamic of individual desire as a substitute for genuine individuality, connection, and empowerment turned out to shield the populace from the realities of ever-expanding organizational control. The result was what historian Daniel Boorstin called a world of images that enclosed Americans in a manipulated shroud of marketized fantasies oblivious to the real issues and challenges we face.”
The unprecedented rise in technology, productivity, and the ability to communicate broadly and quickly put businesses in a position to change the desires of Americans, leading them to focus less on the kind of selflessness and community spirit that characterized the nation’s early history and more on the acquisition of things, status, and leisure. Attempts to revive the “liberal” spirit of the nation have largely failed: “Amid the unending acceleration of production and technological innovation, omnipresent merchandisers and round-the-clock digital stimulants cajole and persuade individuals to pursue unprecedented enticements: indulgence in limitless appetitive striving and the pseudo-celebrity of ceaseless self-inflation.” The public mind and will have been subverted by an undisciplined heart making of “the modern American project” a vanity fare of “access to personal gratification”.
Schools were used to train the desires of children in the direction of getting and spending and, more recently, mere self-interest, and, over the period of the last 100 years, these have become the commanding values among the populace. The disillusionment this has created has spawned a wide variety of critiques aimed at the shallowness of the American dream and calling into question the values that were present at the Founding. The subsequent rise in militant individualism and calls for radical social change have erased any memory of those values with nothing solid to put in their place. As Block puts it, “the liberal consensus, with its grounding in Protestant-liberal cultural certitudes, was giving way to normative confusion.”
In the face of an unraveling social fabric, Block asks, “To what extent do the answers lie in the reorientation of the structures of desire that we are currently acculturated into, providing paths to new forms of self- and collective actualization. What resources might be identified in the wider culture to generate new norms and ideals facilitating enhanced forms of individuality and collective self-rule?” He concludes, “The challenge is to ask how society can retore belief in the forms of desire that promise genuine meaning for all.” If we in the Church were paying attention, we might see this situation as a call to reassess our own goals and values, rediscover our true guiding lights, and work to restore loving God and neighbor as the unyielding desires of the hearts of our people.
T. M. Moore