Mr. Ceaser (below) rightly took me to task for appearing to diss MAXWELL HOUSE. There’s nothing trivial about the effort that was required to bring a decent cup of coffee into the home every American. And if you go to a church supper here in the South, the first taste reveals with crystal clarity that MAXWELL HOUSE is still the coffee of choice.
But MAXWELL HOUSE — unlike, say, Folgers — hasn’t even tried to keep up with progress in coffee technology. Technological progress isn’t the same thing as moral progress. But it still can be, in its place, rather unambiguously progress. Better coffee is available to us all now, and at reasonable prices. The bean grinder available for $15 or less at the much maligned WAL-MART guarantees us all an authentically fresh taste. And the competitive marketplace does the same for low-priced whole beans.
Mr. Ceaser might as well have written in praise of WONDER BREAD, which was good in its time. But today, from our more techno-enlightened view, we know it’s virtually tasteless and pretty much devoid of nutritional value. Wonder Bread — our anti-capitalist Crunchies rightly complain — replaced good ol’ homemade bread. But now, thanks to capitalism, more and more Americans can conveniently buy designer bread better than they could ever make at home, unless they were to devote themselves to an alienated life of bread baking. Dr. Pat Deneen seems to worry that the craft of baking bread isn’t being passed on to our young. And we may regret that if the techno-collapse he sometimes seem to be wishing and hoping for comes. But for now, we can celebrated the fact that more and more of our young have been liberated from Wonder Bread.
I’m writing here, of course, in partial appreciation of globalization from an American perspective. Isn’t it wonderful that more and more Americans can enjoy excellent French food without having to be stuck with the emotional baggage of being French (or Italian or Thai or Ethiopian or Papuan or whatever)? I want to enjoy the best Europe has to offer (which is pretty much food and beer and wine these days) without having to leave my country. Mr. Ceaser and many other professors, of course, prance off to France every chance they get, and so their concern here isn’t as urgent as mine.
We can appreciate technological — including culinary — progress for what it is as long as we can subordinate to properly human purposes. So I have to disagree with tasteful libertarians, such as Tyler Cowen , who say that the whole point of contemporary life is to be a tourist or hobbyist, to consume from a detached, cosmopolitan, individualistic perspective all the good things the various cultures of the world have to offer. The libertarians celebrate our conquest of scarcity and the expanding menu of choice in every area of life as facets of a world where it’s easy to feel good without having to be good, where we — the liberated — can view those who actually are immersed in living cultures as being enslaved. But the truth is virtue is just as required as ever to live well, and human beings can’t live well without genuine cultural transmission, which is very hard — but far from impossible — now. The cause of the birth dearth is not the designer amenities that grace relatively ordinary lives today.
The new coffees we all enjoy are stronger than MAXWELL HOUSE. And so we’re more wired than ever. Somebody might say that the resulting paranoid edginess is keeping us from being relaxed enough to reproduce. But I tend to think that multiple large cups of powerfully caffeinated beverages assist us in our efforts to find genuinely social, relational ties in a lonely, ghostly time. Coffee makes you smarter in the short term, and it induces you to talk fast and straight. It releases you from some inhibitions and triggers others, making you charmingly needy and vulnerable. Coffee is certainly the beverage for philosophers. Wine might lead some to speak the truth, but often in a stupid, blowhard way. Coffee, take it from me, is a more erotic beverage. (The least erotic and most narcissistic beverage is bottled water , and I regard its prevalence as regression and a mighty fraud.)
