“In America, money is promiscuous. Money is ubiquitous. But most of all, money is virtuous.” These flamboyant claims introduce David  Brook’s essay, “Why the U.S. Will Always Be Rich,” The New York Times Magazine, June 9, 2002, p. 88f. We cannot reproduce the article here because of copyright restrictions. Perhaps you can find that issue in a library or on the Web.

A more accessible (and more modulated) version of Brooks’ thesis is at the heart of Chapter 4, “The Spiritual Wind” (pp. 111 –126) in David Brooks, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004). He does not deny the “crassness of American life.” But there is a “counter tradition.” Its champions – Emerson and Whitman, for example – “argue that America is an exceptional nation infused with unique purpose and spirit.” And so, our national life is “amphibious. It is crass but also visionary, practical, but also fantastic. America is the most moralistic nation on earth and also the most materialistic.” (The quotations noted above are on pp.114-115.)  

Another critic of the anti-materialist critics is James B. Twitchell. Among other targets of Twitchell’s disdain is the “voluntary simplicity movement.”  His book – Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) – begins by acknowledging a deep split in American culture. “The country with the highest per capita consumer debt and the greatest number of machine-made things is the same country in which Puritan ascetic principles are most pronounced and held in highest regard(p.3)." The book ends with a salute to “The Liberating Role of Consumption,” pp. 271-286. Read that chapter as well as the “Introduction” (pp. 1-15).