[Caleb Stegall 03/03 01:03 PM]I don’t know Rod, I may have to part ways with you here. I’m not so sure your enjoyment of a wide variety “of good food and attractive furnishings” is all that crunchy. Aestheticism, at least in its philosophical form, involves discipline, not just the satisfaction of appetites — even an appetite for beauty. So beauty and joy, yes! But true beauty and joy are always rooted in the limits of what it means to be human. The global marketplace is extremely efficient at satisfying appetites, and is clever enough to recognize that there is an appetite for aestheticism and satisfy it too.
You ask: “Is it crunchier to buy these great coffee beans from the little guy in NYC, or from the local not-so-little guy purveyor in my own city?” The reality is that it’s crunchier not to buy them at all.
That’s not to say you won’t buy them, or I won’t buy them for that matter. There are lots of parents who might send their kids to daycare (and believe me, my mailbox was stuffed with their missives), and some are genuinely crunchy. The difference is between those who justify their decision on one ground or another and those who remember the mother who kept her kids home even with a hole in her kitchen floor and know — somewhere deep down — that she is a better parent than they, and then they let that knowledge trouble their soul.
