New From FPR Books: The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America

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The first book published under the FPR Books imprint is out. David Bosworth’s The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession can be purchased from the publisher, Wipf and Stock, here. Or from Amazon here.

Here’s the description:

Although the financial disaster of 2008 proved devastatingly quick, the evolution of the bad faith that drove the collapse is a more gradual story, and one that David Bosworth powerfully narrates in The Demise of Virtue in Virtual America: The Moral Origins of the Great Recession, his sweeping history of the forces driving ethical, political, and economic change over the last sixty years. Here, Bosworth traces how the commercialization of public spaces and electronic information has created a new and enclosed American place. Chapter by chapter, he then shows how the materialist values of this Virtual America have suffused our everyday lives, co-opting the themes of our narratives, the planks of our parties, the practices of our professions, and the most intimate aspects of our personal lives, including our beliefs about God, marriage, and childcare. From Ronald Reagan and Disneyland to modern pharmacology and “prosperity theology,” from the phony conservatism of Wall Street to the faux rebellion of “transgressive” art, Bosworth’s alternative story of American life since 1950 relentlessly challenges today’s dominant narratives—narratives that, as he reveals, made both the calamitous invasion of Iraq and the economic collapse of 2008 all too likely.

We at FPR are proud to offer this as the first book in our list.

1 COMMENT

  1. Materialist values? EXACTLY WRONG.

    America’s problem is that our values have become totally divorced from the material world. Science deals with pure numbers and bizarre schizophrenic delusions (eg the Multiverse and the mystical evil power of Carbon), ignoring material facts and measurements. Finance deals with pure numbers, ignoring the real value of human labor and land. Culture ignores the hard material lessons of disease and mortality, and pursues the nonsensical delusion that you can pick your own morals and pick your own gender. Politics deals in pure semantics, creating a wonderful CGI animation of the R vs D wrestling match, while the real RDs get on with their business of destroying the world and destroying work and destroying culture.

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