It is now de rigueur for observers of all political hues and philosophical persuasions to bewail the glaring, growing absence of social feeling. “That basic sense of peoplehood, of belonging to a common enterprise with a shared destiny, is exactly what’s lacking today,” the oft-insightful conservative columnist David Brooks wrote recently in the New York Times.[1] Lacking, we might say, by design: qualities like love, trust, caring, social conscience, and engagement are inevitable casualties—“sunk costs,” in capitalist argot—of a culture that prizes acquisition above all else.
