An intriguing little tussle erupted last week between NY Times columnist David Brooks and Salon.com’s Andrew Leonard over an issue inextricability linked to the concept of consumer culture.

Brooks is well known as the ultimate journalistic oxymoron, a conservative NYT op-ed writer, he represents the fading intellectual wing of his movement – which makes him a pretty good read even if you don’t buy his overarching ideologies.

Leonard is an astute, tech-savvy blogger who specializes in, for lack of a less over-considered term, socio-technological contextualization.

It all started when Brooks wrote a rather unexpected column called Relax, We’ll Be Fine, that seemed at first like a refutation of the Modern Right’s assertion that Obama has America on a high-speed rail to Armageddon.

After a rather scattered screed about urban sprawl exurbs turning into true communities and highly fertile Americans breeding a new generation of hyper-productive social entrepreneurs he gets to the point that caught my, and Andrew Leonard’s, ear.

As the world gets richer, demand will rise for the sorts of products Americans are great at providing – emotional experiences. Educated Americans grow up on a culture of moral materialism, they have their sensibilities honed by complicated shows like “The Sopranos,” The Wire” and “Mad Men,” and they go on to create companies like Apple, with identities coated in moral and psychological meaning, which affluent consumers crave.

Where to start? How about Moral Materialism? Great term. If only I could tell what he really meant by it. It could be a way cool way to define a new form of values-driven consumerism.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Brooks seems to be on to something altogether different. In closing the article he refers to “…that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products” as if the concept is an R&D process for creating goods with deeper intellectual significance.

Or maybe that’s just Brooks.

I would have filed it away as interesting until I came across a column where the normally constrained Leonard went off on the whole concept, taking it as an affront to the justified and, to him, well-deserved sense of desperation we should all be feeling about now.

Rightly so, he calls Brooks out on his choice of TV shows as examples. HBO (or its legacy) shows are morally ambiguous, brilliantly conceived and executed, no doubt. But not what you’d call optimistic embodiments of the American psyche. Which I’d argue is Brooks’ point, but it’s not Leonard’s main quibble.

He then goes on a bottle and bricks throwing diatribe about the incredible irony of using TV shows about corruption, injustice and wanton desire as a form of escapism from our lives full of corruption, injustice and wanton desires. All the way down to pegging Steve Jobs as a “pusher man” purveyor of the kind of compulsion real crime syndicates would, I assume, kill for.

“…that’s our destined niche in the global economy of the future[?]…to package creative content that exposes the failures of the American experiment – growing inequality, environmental degradation, the persistence of discrimination based on race, class, gender and sexual orientation – you know, all that social injustice stuff.”

To Leonard, the moral materialism to which Brooks speaks is little more than an absurdly paradoxical form of escapism – a view into the real troubles facing the world around us through the lens of exceptionally well-crafted branded entertainment.

I’ll give them both points for tackling the tremendously under-reported subject of mass consumerism’s effect on culture. I can see Brook’s idea about how we’re getting better at putting moral values on the things we make and buy. That can’t be a bad thing. And yet Leonard provides the very voice of conscience we need. A movement towards a more informed and conscientious form of consumerism won’t work if we let brand morality go the way of leggy models, emotional storylines and starbursts – yet another marketing technique to intended to keep us spending without thinking.