Best Buy or some similar store is running a bunch of commercials where a smug, aggro-mom is all about outperforming Santa. She smiles and eats the cookies and drinks the milk reserved for Santa, while a hapless Santa sputters and stammers on about how it looks like there’s not enough room for his gifts.
Is this really what mom-dom is about nowadays? Competing against everything, including Santa? It’s kind of abhorrent and probably a confusing message for kids.
It led me to think about this recent debate we had in my urban sprawl class, which I enjoyed greatly. The class was divvied up into three teams: one representing the traditional liberal viewpoint, the other representing the traditional conservative viewpoint, and the third group representing the family viewpoint. Just what that is should be evident in a few sentences. The topic, I think, was the definition of progress – each side had to present and argue for a particular viewpoint of what constitutes progress and what the future looks like in light of that definition.
So, you can easily imagine the conservative argument: progress is brought about by markets. It is efficiency that can only come from a decentralized economic system, and it allows individuals, according to their own hardwork or merits, to achieve wealth and preserve it for future generations, unmolested by the government. In this society, all can achieve wealth and purchase the things they’d like to own. The liberal viewpoint is that progress occurs when the government intervenes sufficiently in free markets to ensure that the rising tide lifts all boats: it’s vaccines, it’s public health initiatives, it’s appropriate regulatory interventions. With this, the liberals envision a future where the standard of living gradually improves, so that, in the future, all can achieve happiness, some degree of economic security, and purchase most of the things they’d like to own.
The family group went in and argued that progress is measured by familial relations. It’s a function of emotional growth, of knowing when you have enough to be happy, and of pulling back from the aggressive search for wealth in order to nurture those familial relationships, to give successive generations a moral center, to create good human beings. In terms of the world’s finite resources, it’s easy to see where the traditional liberal and conservative viewpoints put us in the same place, on a similar timeframe: all the resources get used up, and whether that happens in, say, 500 years or 700 years, it still gets us to the same final destination. The family viewpoint stands out, then, as a kind of antidote to using more resources and amassing more material wealth – in a way that’s entirely appealing, even for a careerist such as myself. (The conservatives did repudiate the anti-careerist tone of the family’s position, by the way.)
So, for me, the point of the Best Buy ads may be that they give us the dark side of the family viewpoint: the family as an a single economic unit, a tribe out to vanquish all enemies in the interest of its own self-preservation. A tribe that knows no idols, where traditions are just antiquated notions that deserve to be outperformed.
Also, the more I type the word “family,” the more I think about Mr. Bungle’s ‘Stubb (ADub).’
