Why do we seem ambivalent about materialism?

“In a recent survey of employed Americans, Robert Wuthnow discovered that his subjects consistently expressed extraordinarily contradictory attitudes about money. . . .This may, as Wuthnow suggests, have something to do with the present national mood; but it probably reflects as well a deeper, more hard-wired national characteristic. It is visible, for example, in some characteristic themes of American literature. What makes The Great Gatsby perhaps the most resonant and enduring of all American novels is the elegance with which it captured precisely the same ambivalence about materialism.” (Wilfred M. McClay)

Historian McClay offers a bold generalization about both American history and American culture. Is “ambivalence about materialism” a “hard-wired national characteristic?” If that is the case, then this “ambivalence” is not something out there, far removed from us. Can we recognize any traces of this “ambivalence” in our own orbits of activity?

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Where is that line between enough and too much?

In her book, Money and Morals in America, Patricia O’Toole declares that the American founders were troubled by some questions long after the Constitution was adapted. “Would Americans rise to the demands of a republic and nurture the common good, or would they prove as corruptible as the citizens of the republic past? Was it wiser to govern by appealing to the virtues of the people or by restraining their vices? Prosperity was healthy, but where was the line between enough and too much?”

There is that question, the puzzle that most of us have encountered before. Where is “the line between enough and too much” in your own life? In the lives of those close to you? 

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“Antidote to Covetousness?”

American Protestant ministers have long warned their flocks about captivity to the tyranny of more. The Puritans were among the first to sound this note. Indeed, even before the Puritans came to the New World, according to Andrew Delbanco, John Cotton and other Puritan divines in England during the 1620s “were speaking now less about lewd university lads and fornicating dandies, and more about a peculiar emotional numbness associated with the acquisitive life – too many days spent over balance sheets and nights full of planning.”

That same theme appeared often in nineteenth and twentieth century Protestant writings. Consider, for example, Samuel Harris observations about life in Massachusetts in the 1840s. All too often he found the church-going businessmen of his time "full of forethought and anxious calculation to realize the utmost of worldly acquisition; deliberate and far-sighted in planning, cautious in executing, lynx-eyed to discern an opportunity to gain, exact to the last fraction in their accounts, but heedless and planless in all they do for charity.”

All the available evidence suggests that these admonitions – and others in the same vein – have seldom been effective as “antidotes to covetousness” (Samuel Harris’ wistful phrase) in American life. Do you know of such “antidotes?”