Let's not let our supplements be substitutes!

Joshua Mitchell writes in City Journal,

...Rousseau’s important insight is that weapons can either be supplements to courage or substitutes for courage. If weapons become substitutes, modern soldiers live on borrowed time—eventually, warriors who know the right use of weapons will overwhelm them. Like Plato’s doctors, warriors must understand that they cannot turn supplements into substitutes without cost.

...Substitutism is the great pathology of American life. Any number of social and cultural developments, all of which seem unrelated, fall within its purview. Nearly everywhere we look, we are living on an unsustainable high, on borrowed time.

...Nothing so distinctly characterizes man than that his most important moments happen around the table. Without the liturgical recapitulation of the Lord’s Supper, what would have held together Christian churches through the ages? When tensions are high and things get serious, we come to the “bargaining table.” When we want the real scoop from our friends and family, we sit down for some table talk. For the family to remain the basic unit of human life, without which civilization cannot survive, its members need to gather around the table for a meal.

...The “high” of the sexual revolution involved turning the supplement of having sex within marriage into a substitute not requiring marriage. The lead weight of marriage, which linked sex to the labor of having and raising children, was turning into the gold of having sex, anywhere and with anyone, without cost and without regard to generation. Once this happened, and generative marriage was no longer the referent, there was no longer a compelling legal ground to confine having sex to men with women. Further, getting pregnant became the collateral damage of having sex, rather than its purpose, which invited not only the legality of abortion but also the subtle encouragement of it. Abortion is, in this view, merely a choice, rather than, say, a moral agony. These are the well-known consequences of the sexual revolution.

...In the case of Facebook “friends,” ample empirical evidence suggests that we are starving from social media. This starvation is peculiar, in that what we are voraciously eating cannot sate us. Therefore, we have more—opioids, vitamins, fast food, sex, or social media. That is why the hunger associated with turning supplements into substitutes is so dangerous; it leads quickly to an overdose. This problem cannot be remedied without establishing wherein the real meal lies. Social-media substitutism is an ever-growing ailment, which increasingly renders us incapable of meeting one another face-to-face, with all that that involves in the way of goodwill, patience, generosity, forbearance, compromise, and risk. Increasingly unable to make real friends, we settle for the scant nourishment that our online “friends” provide and “unfriend” those who disturb our Arcadian slumber. We deplore the growing polarization of our world, go to bed empty inside, and wonder why we hunger as we do.

...The evidence for this is what can be called the Best Buy Problem. If we already know what we need, we can order from Amazon without worry; but if we do not, we often have to go to a brick-and-mortar store to see, touch, hear, or smell the item that we think we might need. Brick-and-mortar stores like Best Buy become, in effect, the showrooms for Amazon: we go shopping there, where we apply and further develop our connoisseurship; then we buy online through Amazon, which reaps the profits. Amazon depends on the connoisseurship we develop by going shopping, but it does not incur the cost of assisting us to develop our connoisseurship, as brick-and-mortar stores do. Amazon purports to be a substitute for going shopping, but the real source of its revenue is not its warehouses but rather the referent—the brick-and-mortar stores that Amazon is gradually pricing out of existence. When these stores shutter their doors for good, Amazon will try to play the part of the substitute that it now claims to be; but over time, our connoisseurship will wither, and Amazon will be of less use to us.

...The founders of Amazon and Facebook are among the world’s richest men. Before they rose to that height, their companies were supplements: Amazon was the supplement to shopping in brick-and-mortar stores, and Facebook was the supplement to face-to-face friendship. Each company now monetizes our temptation to turn supplements into substitutes. Nevertheless, we must remind ourselves where the root of the problem lies. We want to believe that through online shopping, our households can become a home. We want to believe that through our Facebook “friends,” we can have substantive and enduring associations. Today, Amazon and Facebook are perhaps the best examples of the online substitutism through which we attempt to bypass the fixed order of things. The stock price of the two companies continues to soar in proportion to the “high” that their online substitutism produces—a high that only increases as our hunger grows.

...The federal government continues to expand, our social problems grow worse, and our political parties are locked in mortal and impotent opposition. Governmental substitutism is a problem no less pathological. It is obscured because members of both political parties think that they need go no further than declare that they are “pro” or “anti” this or that. They are “pro-government” or “anti-government,” “for” affirmative action or “against” it, and so on. This sort of thinking resolves itself only when one side overpowers the other. No wonder our politics grows uglier. When politics devolves into “pro” and “anti” sloganeering, members of the opposite party are not fellow citizens with whom we disagree; they are the embodiment of dark forces that need to be eliminated so that our own light may shine brightly. Politics today is the venue through which the righteous and pure find their scapegoat.

Substitutism is not a problem restricted to one political party, though governmental substitutism has become the cornerstone of the Democratic Party, by virtue of its 100-year embrace of Progressivism. Substitutism runs deeper than politics and animates our actions within it and beyond it. If our country is to heal, we need to identify all its manifestations and ask, in each case, what the referent meal is for which the supplement emerged in the first place. Then we need to declare our allegiance to supplementism rather than to substitutism. Our charge, in short, will be to return, in each case, to the daily bread needed for a sober life. From those fixed-referent meals, we can add supplements not only without harm but also to our advantage. This was the lesson of Plato’s good doctor and of Rousseau’s courageous warrior. It can be our lesson, too.

Read more here.