DECONSTRUCTING THE CULTURAL CAPITAL.

The American Conservative's Kurt Hofer starts in familiar territory.

The preferences and pathologies of the upper class inevitably trickle down to the rest of society. And by the time the American elite’s neuroses wend their way downstream, they often look different. Witness how the boomer counterculture of the 1960s—initially a circumscribed dalliance in hedonism for the well-off—resulted, for the working class, in broken families and drug addiction. When “free love” went mainstream, out-of-wedlock childbirth soared; on the heels of pot came cocaine, meth, and now synthetic opioids.

I've rung that change myself.

Is the uncertainty [accompanying doing the bourgeois thing] enhanced or reduced, these days, in that people are free to demonstrate their transgressivity, and thus their risk, under the general rubric of "do your own thing?" How many times do I have to invoke the village that combines the redeeming features of the projects and a hippie commune?

These days, though, it's the overclasses overscheduling their spawn that might be the pathology.  Perhaps it's William Wordsworth's lament brought into the modern age that bothers Mr Hofer.

Busyness and consumer capitalism feed into one another: To ponder God, or, for the secular among us, to ponder “life’s great questions,” requires time, focus, and devotion. Life’s greatest achievements—marriage, children, careers—all require contemplation. As we age, we are confronted with a problem that becomes ever more acute even if our well-meaning parents paper over it with activities: Do we face our own restlessness, or do we drown it in diversion? The scales of life, particularly here in the affluent West, have been tipped away from contemplation and towards action, as Carindal Sarah so eloquently laments in The Power of Silence. Whether you take the undeclared war on silence and stillness as a spiritual crisis, which detracts from the truth of the divine, or a secular humanist crisis, which militates against some other form of meaning, like social justice or climate change, the problem nonetheless remains: Our brains appear trapped in a perpetual loop of distractions. And instead of slaying the beast, we feed it.

Stillness and contemplation have become acts of heresy against our civic religion of consumerism. In this light, tutors and sports and activities all assault the contemplative act so that we may at once pump cash into the economy—ostensibly a good in its own right—AND mask the ontological shallowness of our own existence. Consumerism and schizophrenic presentism—busyness, buying and consuming—feed into and off of one another. If you stop to contemplate why you are expending as fast you can accumulate, the house of cards collapses.

The way in which that sort of overscheduled kids manifests itself among the poor has not yet emerged, perhaps because it helps to have the bourgeois success sequence modelled in the household.