Modern efficiency erases the ceremonious generosity that once defined luxury travel
Evidence
By being the equivalent to all the manifold things in one and the same way, money becomes the most frightful leveler. For money expresses all qualitative differences of things in terms of “how much?” — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9785 (
#expands, via linked claim)
In Shizuko Go’s Requiem, a painfully beautiful novel about the destruction of a vast web of social relationships in Japan through wartime deaths in the last months of World War II, the heroine Setsuko is entertained by an older woman whom she has never met before and is unlikely ever to see again. She recalls “the familiar precept of perfect hospitality: ‘We meet but once’” (Go 1985, 107). There is strategic subtlety in this bit of popular wisdom. If I know we meet but once, my hospitality is not an initial move in a potential trust or exchange relationship. It does not encapsulate your interest in reciprocity over the long run. It is purely a gift or an expression of my hospitable character. — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 817 (
#contradicts, via linked claim)
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Modern conditions have atrophied the faculty of genuine gift-giving — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 37; Money erases qualitative distinctions by reducing everything to quantity — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9785; Luxury goods shifted from craft to mass-produced status markers (+5 more)
Broader Connections
- Luxury goods shifted from craft to mass-produced status markers
#corroborates(0.82) - Money erases qualitative distinctions by reducing everything to quantity
#expands(0.80) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9785 - One-time hospitality is pure gift, not an investment in reciprocity
#contradicts(0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 817 - Modernity’s paradigmatic structures have failed the consumers of the good life
#corroborates(0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 463