Henry James was not at home in America | Hacker News Reader

Henry James was not at home in America

newrepublic.com

19 pointsbenbreen14 comments

Another publisher who hates their content so much they make it impossible to read with multiple flying adverts and so on. I was interested but gave up fighting to read it.

I cannot see any. No problems reading that with JS off. Reader view should fix it too.

More like they love their content so much that they think those who want to read it would endure that penance.

If you are seeing ads it’s probably because you inadvertently disabled your ad blocker or it’s not properly configured.

Now here's a guy who said, "If Rutherford B. Hayes wins this election then so help me I will move out of the country forever and I mean it", and he meant it.

> Everywhere James looked, he saw money motivating people away from the cultural pleasures and beauties that he loved (theaters, libraries, and art galleries). It is hard to think of an American writer who was more disgusted with the dirty realities of capitalism, or one who worked so hard to make money doing the brighter, cleaner things he loved—composing books, stories, plays, and essays.

Henry James had this thought in 1907, and I had this epiphany in 2019. But now the hyper-financialization of the West has so thoroughly permeated life that people cannot even fathom an alternative. Westerners cannot even imagine what life looks like outside the over-optimized, over-financed, late-stage capitalist West, and I say this as a person born and raised in Canada.

In 2019 I moved to a small, poor, non-EU, European country. The first thing I noticed was how well the restaurants were decorated, as if the owners put their heart and soul into it, profit-be-damned. And I only paid $10 for the meal. It's breathtakingly beautiful, yet still incredibly cheap. As I stayed over the years, I got a taste for what an entirely different life looks like outside the late-stage capitalist West. Small boutique coffee shops, mom-and-pop custom furniture stores, local clothing manufacturers, family-run hotels, lots of small independent entrepreneurial ventures - things that could not exist in America anymore due to the stranglehold of megacorps and private equity like BlackRock. It's more than just a breath of fresh air, it's actually something of heaven on earth. It's what I imagine Henry James America looked like.

Albania? If so, hardly the best counter-example to "late-stage capitalist West" (whatever that means)...

> Small boutique coffee shops

Those are everywhere in Europe.

Many of your examples are due to the people being poor. Restaurants are cheap for you because the locals are poor, for instance, not because it is an utopia of putting art before profit.

Maybe it's ok to be a bit poorer if it makes you a bit happier.

The issue in all similar stories is that it is not "a bit" poorer and not happier at all.

This is the typical Western have-it-all superiority complex thinking. "No one has it better than us. No one has built a better civilization than us." I say that as a Westerner myself. You simply can't imagine what a better life looks like, and how shitty life has gotten in the over-financialized West until you actually experience something truly different.

A bit harsh. This is not a "superiority complex" this is my experience of actually visiting third world countries and the reality of data (education, health, migration, etc). Also strange to hit on Westerners when you mentioned that you live in Europe.

This sounds a little like the utopian and ideological Westerner who thinks that the West is 'bad' (I don't even know what "over-financialized West" means...) and non-Westerners may be poorer but happier, which in the extreme archs all the way back to the "Myth of the Noble savage" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage

It is Europe but not the West. The “West” I am defining here as the NATO countries with a high GDP. Over-financialized means exactly that — over-reliance on interest-based and venture capital funding, and a culture of profit optimization at all costs that ruins everything else.

Squandering money is easy, so that's a theory you can test yourself.

No, not Albania. Yes, the people are poorer when measured in USD, but infinitely richer in quality of life. This is not just my observation, I knew quite a few expats from the West (US/UK) that share my opinion after living here for years. I know people who work minimum wage jobs in this country earning less than $500/month that live far better lives than those earning minimum wage jobs in Canada and the US. You can get an apartment here for $100/month. They have their own apartments (or share with friends or family), live dignified, independent, interesting, non-lonely lives with lots to do and enough free time. Meanwhile, the minimum wage workers I know in Canada and the US struggle to survive and have nothing to live for. Admittedly this is not just about cost optimization, this is about something gone wrong with culture and way of life in the West.

And restaurants are not just "cheap for me" because I earn in USD. It's also relatively cheap for them, i.e. they can afford to occasionally enjoy a beautiful restaurant even on a minimum wage salary. Anyway cost is not the issue, the point is that they do things that make no sense financially, such as maintain a collection of live houseplants and vintage artwork in their restaurants and stores, just because there's a culture of beauty and art as opposed to a culture of pure profit.

Would James's earnings have kept him going without inherited wealth?

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