ReDesigned
[Bruce Frohnen  02/27 02:26 PM]

A focus of Crunchy Cons' second chapter is the difficulty of leading a life of virtue in the grip of consumerism. Perhaps it would help to be specific about just what virtue it is that's missing? Clearly its not support for some ideological vision of what the market ought to be like, how we ought to farm, etc. These may or may not be important, but the key, I think, is friendship. Caleb mentioned Aristotle some time back, who noted that political friendship keeps the city together. Well, Aristotle wrote of several kinds of friendship, among them the friendship of utility. When I was in graduate school I was taught that Aristotle disparages this form of friendship, but he doesn't. The friendship of utility, rooted in mutual need, is what you have in a marketplace you frequent. You learn to trust the people with whom you deal (or they are run out of town) and frequent interaction leads all those involved to seek to make the interaction pleasant — we go to the extra effort of getting to know one another a bit, and find that we have more in common than we thought. It's the friendship an employer ought to have with his employee, buyer with seller, clerk with customer, and so on. And it requires that we focus on something more close to home than efficient national markets.