What consumes us: the deformation of American values

Real American Ethics: Taking Responsibility for Our Country. By Albert Borgmann. University of Chicago Press, 232 pp., $25.00.

WE SHAPE OUR BUILDINGS, and afterwards our buildings shape us," Winston Churchill said to Parliament in 1943 after Nazi bombs destroyed the House of Commons. Churchill's intuition was that the physical places we construct and inhabit shape the nature of our discourse. Drawing on this principle, philosopher Albert Borgmann examines the institutions and tangible structures that we have built to create the United States and considers what kinds of life these structures make possible.

Our built environment--both physical and political--is not a neutral, passive backdrop, but instead is infused with moral content that shapes who we are and how we live. The urgent moral task is to recognize this relationship, take responsibility for it and ask what kind of life expresses our deepest shared values.

Borgmann says that "ours is a decent country," but one with troubling features, particularly its waning support for values of equality, dignity and justice, and for traditional American concerns for the poor and the environment. Increasingly these values are displaced by the focus on production, consumption and affluence. The culture of both the household and the community have become attenuated and fragmented in a social context marked by technology and commodification.

Borgmann has given these social dynamics careful attention in previous works, particularly in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life. In Real American Ethics he suggests ways in which ordinary citizens can make changes in their daily actions to reclaim the good life from the forces of technology and commodification in a distinctly American manner.

Reviewing what has made U.S. culture and history distinctly American, Borgmann traces the contributions of Enlightenment figures Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson to show how their views have shaped and grounded moral vision and practices. Generosity and resourcefulness, he contends, are the virtues that distinguish U.S. history when we have been at our best. But now moral malaise and indifference more and more mark U.S. society. "The ground of contemporary culture must be so compacted and barren that a rich and grounded moral vision has a hard time taking root and gaining public support." The task is to understand contemporary culture in order to devise an antidote.

What most distinctively shapes American life at the dawn of the 21st century? For Borgmann, technology is the key mediating factor in our interaction with the world, and commodification has become the central driving force, accompanied by ever new forms of technology. Neither of these factors is morally neutral. We shape technology and then technology shapes us by delivering commodities that promise us pleasure, comfort, leisure and convenience, but paradoxically leave us bored and distracted, alienated from what is real--other humans and the earth. Instead of engaging what is real, we commodify things, taking them out of their time, place and community and putting them in the decontextualized market where they are available for consumption, free of any moral claims they might make on us. Hence the latest iPod becomes more important than health care for the uninsured, spending on home theaters more important than providing for public parks, fast food more desirable than the labor of preparing the evening meal.

To frame this analysis, Borgmann reviews contemporary ethical theory. One of the finest features of this very fine book is the dexterity and clarity with which Borgmann leads the reader through the three main branches of ethics--deontological ethics, utilitarian ethics and virtue ethics. Most drawn to virtue ethics--Aristotle is a frequent conversation partner--Borgmann observes that a central problem with traditional deontological ethics (Kant) and utilitarianism (Mill) is that they focus on moral quandaries but leave unexamined the moral qualities of our daily lives, where the good life either thrives or languishes. In contrast to theoretical ethics, practical ethics focuses on the importance of moral practices in grounding the good life but pays too little attention to Churchill's principle that these practices are already conditioned by the environments we fashion. Borgmann posits that instead of the oretical or practical ethics, we need real ethics, which "investigates the moral structure of the material culture and thus reveals the levees, dams, and channels that constrain the course of life, and ... discloses the things of art and nature that inspire and engage us."

From the perspective of real ethics, two critical virtues Americans need are economy, "the art and virtue of the household," and design, "taking moral responsibility for the built environment." In relation to these, Borgmann discusses a range of activities, from decentering the place of television in our households and reclaiming the cultures of the table and the book to emphasizing local foods and voluntary simplicity. The antidote to the "moral malnutrition" of technology and commodification is the virtue of grace--creating space and readiness for recognizing and engaging the sacred in our midst.