Crunchy-Cons and McMansions

Following up on my recent post about Rod Dreher's new book, "Crunchy Cons" . . . I thought this post, "McMansions on a Hill," at the "Get Religion" blog, was engaging.  It is about consumerism.  And, it quotes this note from Dreher:

1. As David Brooks has observed, many modern people make up for the spiritual emptiness in their lives by fetishizing material objects. I don’t suppose that’s really a modern thing; after all, the Israelites fetishized the Golden Calf. Its modern version, though, comes with the kind of lifestyle you see celebrated in the upscale shelter magazines. It’s easy for me to see that secular lefties fetishize the old historic houses as embodiments of a certain spiritual purity they see threatened by McMansionization, and what it represents (the “More, Faster” society of rampant consumerism).

I think this is true -- i.e., that some "secular lefties" make it a mark of virtue that they like (or pretend to like) old houses rather than McMansions.  In fact, I feel a bit sheepish, because I know that I tease my friends and colleagues who live in South Bend's "burbs" all the time, as if the the fact that I live in a drafty 90-year-old house makes me a better person.

2. On the other hand, a religious conservative like me arrives at much the same place, for different reasons. I don’t think I’m a better person for having chosen this old house of ours, but I do think, in a sacramental sense, it mediates a spiritual ideal of modesty and simple beauty, which I find much preferable to the McMansion ethos. And it’s important, I think, to conserve old places, because of the links they provide with our past.

Much better said, Rod . . .thanks.  I'll go back to teasing my pals in the McMansions.

Our neighborhood in Dallas doesn’t look like all the other neighborhoods, and the people who moved in long before us, when it was a dismal, drug-infested slum, worked real hard to reclaim the original beauty and integrity of these old houses, and restore the neighborhood to its original charm. All the things they fought for are now being challenged by Republican developers, and Texans who believe in the sacredness of Private Propitty. You can drive around my neighborhood and see obnoxious McMansions that dwarf the other older, more modest houses. What this says to me is that the person who builds and owns the McMansion says to his putative neighbors: Screw you people, I’m going to do what I want to do, and you’ve just got to live with it.

3. In this sense, perhaps, what secular lefties in that Maryland neighborhood are fighting is an individualistic ethic that asserts the right to disregard tradition and the sensibility of the community for the sake of exercising the sovereignty of the individual. As I believe a lot of what’s wrong with this country is out-of-control individualism (on the left, resulting in the extolling of sexual libertinism, and on the right resulting in the extolling of shopping), I would come together with the left-liberals in this neighborhood as a matter of principle. How we arrived at the idea that the old neighborhood ought to be defended is, to the outsider, a distinction without a difference. What matters is that we stand by tradition and community.

One wrinkle:  In many old neighborhoods -- that do have the charm and can (or could) sustain the values that Dreher values -- what is really needed is an influx of developers' cash.  "Tradition and community" are great.  Crappy, decrepit parks, houses, and sidewalks are not.  The danger (we come, finally, to law!) is that those with Rod's (and, I think, my) values will conclude that the answer to McMansions is short-sighted, exclusionary regulation.  I live in an old neighborhood, with plenty of charming, modest houses.  But, we could really use a Whole Foods, an Einstein Brothers, and a Starbucks.

Rick