Are we living in a material world?

June 20, 2021. Not really. And whatever happened to, "Diamonds are a girl's best friend?"

Today our deacon used the Madonna lyric, “We are living in a material world and I am a material girl,” to initiate his homily after the gospel where Jesus advised the apostles to take nothing with them on their journey, no money, no sack, no second tunic, just the one tunic, and sandals! The deacon then used Madonna’s words to remind us of all the “stuff” we own and seek, how advertising promotes satisfying wants rather than needs, and how basically Madonna was the voice of this generation, now about forty years old.

Citing Madonna for anything is problematic for me. What does she know? Do her lyrics have any authenticity, substance, thought? Can she be a material girl even in a world that is not so material? If Madonna said, “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” is there any validity to her prediction? So let’s not put too much credence in a pop song lyric appealing to teenage girls.

Madonna’s credibility notwithstanding, were we living in a material world in the 1980’s and are we living in such a time now? True, the 1980’s had the Yuppie greed element, fueled by the false belief that Reaganomics professed Gordon Gekko-like “greed is good” lifestyles. And yes, the mainstream media, pop culture and advertising played up to this crass element of life but as with most memes, the story has been grossly overstated and oversimplified at the same time. There was much more economic and individual freedom, a renewed sense of patriotism, a rebound from the Carter malaise, and meaningful declines in unemployment, inflation and mortgage rates. The 1980’s were as much the ‘boom’ of the ‘baby boomers’ who came to age as corporate leaders in the 1980s, referring more of the model of the Eisenhower 1950’s than the self-inflicted social, political and economic failures of Nixon and then Carter.

Today, the story is quite different. The Boomers are retired and rapidly dying off, accelerated by the opportunistic Covid virus, a virus that never met an elderly, obese, lifetime-smoking or otherwise immune-compromised person that it couldn’t bring to his or her knees, or to a ventilator in a hospital ICU. Thew Millennials are more interested in experiences than stuff and, most of all, in ‘free’ experiences. meaning experiences paid for by a third party, usually the government. This is most vividly found in education and healthcare, where new ‘rights’ to free or heavily subsidized higher education and medical treatment have been created out of thin air by politicians and by recent college graduates scammed by the higher education industry, broke and living in their parents’ basement, while earning $35,000 a year, with $100,000 in college debt (more, if they went to grad school), and demanding that those under 26 years of age and be able to stay on their parents’ healthcare plan or get cheap Obamacare, all the time boosting employer compensation costs, increasing already bloated healthcare budgets, and asking themselves why their degree in gender studies has not led to a rewarding career in self-interest.

So it is a different type of greed, and not for stuff. It is greed for something for nothing, for denying personal responsibility, for demeaning marriage and the traditional family. In a word, it’s ‘communism,’ masquerading as a ‘kinder, gentler’ form called ‘socialism,’ where Marx would be proud, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Only tens of millions of people refuse to use their abilities (or education) to be a productive contributor to the common good as well as the economy, and their wants have become their rights, their ‘needs.’

Two stellar examples: First, healthcare. It is not feasible to have a national health insurance policy that provides medical care that is of highest quality, easily accessible, ‘affordable’ (meaning free to most) for every person residing within our borders. But ‘free healthcare’ remains a cornerstone of progressive politics. Second, abortion. Abortion policy was intended to make abortion ‘free, safe and rare,’ only free medical treatment are often unsafe, and free abortions are likely to increase demand, not stifle it. Guaranteeing a free ‘out’ for extramarital sex and ‘unwanted’ pregnancies only increases the likelihood of both those behaviors, once seen as immoral or at least inappropriate, and now viewed as freedom of choice and a right to free medical care, i.e., contraceptives and abortion. Worse, the “follow the science” claims of the progressive left ring hollow when it comes to an understanding and profound appreciation of life at conception.

My sense is that the current cultural climate is much more of a ‘me first!’ generational chasm, where political and economic practices have increased debt, inflated the costs of healthcare and education, produced tribal tensions that have replace traditional patriotism (and tradition, period), expanded the gap between the top and the bottom of the economic ladder, and abandoned personal responsibility, initiative and resilience as critical elements of the common American ethos. The public, media debate is over the things that divide us rather than unite us. The usual ‘answer’ to this infighting is a larger, external enemy or challenge, yet nothing of the sort appears on the horizon. Our enemies – real and imagined – have been able to sit back and watch petty politicians, arrogant elites, and special interests of all types work to tear down Reagan’s city on a hill.