Capitalism's last laugh?

Last Wednesday marked the 22nd anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. That this auspicious date has come and gone with such obliging unobtrusiveness would seem to belie its status as the most significant political-historical event of a young man’s lifetime—confirmation, perhaps, that the petty pace of time trivializes history itself. But this glib explanation is not and cannot be the whole story; for the annual national catharsis that takes place on Sept. 11 speaks favorably to our persistent capacities for commemoration and reflection.

Indeed, the specter of Sept. 11 seems now to occupy so central a place in our consciousness that it fully exhausts such capacities, to the point of eclipsing the famous Nov. 9 triumph in Berlin, which Europeans sometimes demurely refer to as “our 9/11.” To a certain extent, this subordination is justified. If the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolically marked the end of the Cold War, the fall of the twin towers marked the beginning of the War on Terror. Communism is a settled issue. Terrorism is the defining problem of our generation. No use then in reflecting seriously on the Berlin Wall. This, of course, depends crucially on how one interprets the events of Nov. 9, 1989.

By 1961, the year that the wall’s construction began, some 2.5 million residents of East Germany had left for the freedom and opportunity available in the West. It had become clear at the point of the construction of the wall that neither East Germany, nor the oppressive ideology that governed it was sustainable without forceful confinement. As long as people could choose, they chose to leave. The collapse of the Berlin Wall therefore marked the hard-earned political defeat of a system that had years ago openly proclaimed its moral bankruptcy before the world. Many optimistic observers of the past two decades have pointed out that, just as the world’s most oppressive ideology translated in the end to both a political and an economic failure, so too was it that the freest nations in the world were generally the wealthiest—prosperity and flourishing, capitalism and freedom, went hand in hand.

Although there are very few, even in the academy, absurd enough to defend the horrors of the Soviet system, the “capitalist” alternative appears increasingly unattractive and untenable. With the dramatic financial developments of the past year, free markets would seem to have failed the free societies that host them. Conversely, we are forced to confront the grotesque spectacle that regular offenders in the area of human rights are experiencing unprecedented economic growth. The defeat of Soviet communism, therefore, does not equate to the victory of free market capitalism, either in a material or in a moral sense.

If we in the West are neither capitalist nor communist, then what are we? Must we not have an answer to this in order to effectively defend ourselves against terrorism? In a more profound sense, must we not answer this question to decide whether or not it is even worth defending ourselves? We are told that the “Islamists” attack us because they despise our way of life. The unspeakable irony here is that, to the extent that we know what our way of life is, we rather despise it ourselves! This restless dissatisfaction exhibits itself powerfully in movements as diverse as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

The existential angst of the West (and the modern world more generally) runs far deeper than mere matters of economics or politics. It is nonetheless instructive to recall the popular philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s recent remark that the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and the emergence of Sino-Singaporean capitalism collectively indicate, “The marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.” Indeed, the behavior of many Occupy Wall Street participants exhibits all the destructiveness of an insecure child of divorce scrambling for the attentions of an abusive stepfather. In such cases pity rather than derision is the appropriate response. For what can one expect of a generation for which materialism and consumerism largely stand as the only viable modes of life? The sad irony is that some of the most sincere (and sometimes even noble) attempts to combat these characteristics merely serve to show just how deeply ingrained they really are.

Despite the economic collapse, the young demographic of Occupy Wall Street enjoys a far higher (material) standard of living than their peers during virtually any other period of history. They are not the starving homeless, but rather middle-class (mostly white) children with MacBooks demanding forgiveness for student loans. They seem to desire all of the latest mind-numbing tech gadgets without the trouble of having to truly earn them.

Talk about income inequality is fashionable and frequent. As an actual matter of social justice, this is surely warranted. But can we at least admit that vilifications of caviar and private jets, fair as they may be, would not have nearly their current moral purchase if our society cared a little less about such trivialities? I can’t help but get the sense that much of the current dissatisfaction with capitalism has to do, not with its cultivation of materialism and consumerism, but rather with the fact that it has not delivered on our ever increasing consumerist demands with sufficient promptitude and abundance. Free market or socialist, ours is a time that has forgotten the meaning of the word “priceless.”