Book Review: The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America

This is a book about how the subtle power of consumerism in the 20th century gave way to the crises of the 21st century, written in the style of a 19th-century essayist (down to the emphasis on speaking to America as a nation and quoting Melville repeatedly). It's a challenging and rewarding, important read. This quote near the end gives the best summary of the multiple targets attacked by David Bosworth here -- or, more accurately, the multiple heads of the hydra:

"An anti-imperial imperialism, a conservative avidity, a multicultural illiberalism, a cynical sentimentality, a spiritual materialism, a liberating bondage: together these conceptual, ethical, and emotional nullities have been skewing the compass of our collective judgement. Their internal incoherencies have animated a Virtual America, within whose baffling spaces traditional symbols, beliefs, and rituals have been thinned to masks that conceal, in fact, an accelerating allegiance to their near opposites."

There's a chapter against Disney; a chapter against Reagan; a chapter against pharma; a chapter against NEA-funded artists; and, perhaps most obviously but no less necessarily, a chapter against reality TV. My one complaint is the distribution of the charges. Bosworth's ultimate target is both sides of the political spectrum, and against nostalgia as well as futurism, but he seems to throw more charges at the right than at the left, and more at the future (utopian technologists) than the past (gauzy nostalgists). The worst chapter is near the beginning because it's all about how childhood has changed, when the best is at the end when he moves from diagnosis toward treatment -- but there's not enough of that. His strongest statements are like the one above that draw unexpected, broad, provocative connections, because it's those connections that show the true nature of the problem and might show the way toward its solution.

Ultimately, this is a screed in the best sense of the word and well worth reading slowly and chewing over. Bosworth is onto something.