The Mores of More : THE HUNGER FOR MORE Searching for Values in an Age of Greed <i> by Laurence Shames (Times Books: $18.95; 284 pp.; 0-8129-1656-5) </i>

In the summer of 1979, Jimmy Carter, in the manner of the Hebrew prophets he admires, descended from two weeks of seclusion at Camp David and declared to a less-than-enthralled nation: “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns.” Yet, Carter warned, “Owning things and consuming things do not satisfy our longing for meaning. We have learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

Laurence Shames, in his second book, “The Hunger for More: Searching for Values in an Age of Greed” alludes neither to that speech nor to the merciless prophet-stoning that followed. Nor does he quote George Bush, who--with no apparent irony--eerily echoed his former adversary: “ . . . My friends, we are not the sum of our possessions.”

But Shames, once the ethics columnist for Esquire, is preaching precisely the same message against Mammon as Carter and (dare we believe it?) Bush, targeting that inglorious decade bracketed by the two speeches as an “age of greed.” A feisty Baby Boomer (who notes that he grew up in a 1960s suburb), Shames is artfully re-packaging one of the grand old messages in American culture, from Jefferson to Thoreau, from Veblen to Schumacher--a message, in his words, of “the high and difficult ideal of a balanced life--a life that integrates labor and leisure, one that reconciles self-interest with an ethic of service, one that recognizes peace of mind not only as a desirable thing but as a moral achievement in itself.”

For Shames, who joins a host of decade-watchers now looking back in anger, the ‘80s, in fact, self-destructed on Meltdown Monday, Oct. 19, 1987. With the stock-market crash, he insists, came a dark night of the national soul, then the advent of a new era in which entrenched assumptions about money, success and what he calls “the habit of more” no longer went unchallenged. Never mind that Shames has, as yet, an empty bag of evidence for this happy turn of events; in his admitted optimism, he wants to believe it--and so, of course, will some readers.

How, after all, short of war, Depression or full-scale environmental disaster, could the lights get dimmer for many Americans than they did in the ‘80s? In bracing prose, Shames dissects a litany of the decade’s maladies: the society-wide worship of a money-based definition of success; the increasingly inequitable distribution of wealth; the erosion of the middle class; the sharp decline of American productivity and economic clout. It was a time of permanent limits, he argues, of a closed frontier on national growth, “but Americans have been somewhat backward in adopting values, hopes, ambitions that have to do with things other than more. In America, a sense of quality has lagged far behind a sense of scale.” Or, as he puts it in one of the many aphorisms that pepper his chapters: “Measuring more is easy; measuring better is hard.”

Pithy and bolstered with an impressive array of facts and figures, Shames’ analysis of what went wrong in the ‘80s is, nevertheless, by now, mostly warmed-over porridge: That Americans in the ‘80s denied the death of what economist Kenneth Boulding once called the prosperous, postwar “cowboy economy” is not exactly revelatory, nor are the psychological reasons he cites for why we shamelessly lionized the values of CEOs, consumed beyond our means, and obsessed on wealth in a time of identity crisis for both the middle class and the national economy.

Shames is more engaging when he gives rein to the sort of ethical preoccupations that marked his column for Esquire. In “Ghettos of the Conscience,” a wide-lensed retrospective of business ethics in the ‘80s, Shames argues forcibly that “people found it much less exposing to compartmentalize morality, to regard business as a sort of ghetto of the conscience, a bad neighborhood for values, but one that could be avoided in the evenings and on weekends.” This “ghetto view of conscience,” he concludes, “creates an atmosphere in which the bad guys can prosper. Denatured values, having lost their ability to balance money against other things that matter, allow this to pass for ‘winning.’ ”

True enough, but has the atmosphere really changed? It would certainly be lovely to think so. But no one really knows--only Shames, for whom saying is believing. “By the spring of 1988,” he writes, “eighties social fashions had begun to look as bad as last year’s suit. The rabid chase after the fast and famous dollar had already come to seem a trifle retro, a little out of sync.”

Maybe so. Maybe not. One reason he’s not convincing is that--as he does in virtually all his arguments--Shames either relies on his own instincts, rafts of statistics or books, magazines and other media. What about Americans in every nook and cranny of the country whose values he thinks are changing? Shames doesn’t leave New York to enter their lives, to talk over the thorny issues of revising their aspirations, so we don’t meet them firsthand.

The two people we do get to know, whose story of shifting values threads through the book, are a mid-to-late-’30s West Side couple making a combined annual salary of $460,000 in 1987. “They are not typical Americans,” he tells us. Right, guy. So what do they portend for the rest of us? Compelling as it is in many respects, at the heart of this book is an insular view of what’s going on outside Manhattan. It is that strange phenomenon of Shames’ era--and ours--of media-fed wisdom, of media feeding on itself.

No prophet, it seems, must go unstoned. Still, for what he lacks in method, Shames more than makes up for as provocateur. This is a spirited, often trenchant book by a disciplined essayist heralding what may be one of the most dramatic stories of the ‘90s.

“Success, to an extraordinary degree, was the constant target of will and exertion in the 1980s, the glittering but indistinct Oz toward which aspirations strained. What, precisely, did the word mean? No one seemed to know, but it didn’t really matter. Success didn’t need to be defined or examined; it was enough merely to invoke it, to intone the magic word. Success was invoked more often and with far greater assurance than was self-fulfillment in the seventies, it was pursued by far greater numbers and with far greater heat than were peace and love in the sixties. Those other credos, after all, set themselves up, if not in opposition to, then certainly in tension with, conventional self-interest: Some part of their vigor was squandered on resolving that tension, on trying to wrestle that tension to the mat while keeping one’s values intact.

“The credo of success, eighties-style, on the other hand, was the credo of self-interest. It was old-fashioned economic Darwinism dressed up in new clothes. Success eighties-style was survival-of-the-fiscally-fittest padding the jungle in running shoes. It was primal aggressiveness slaking itself not on blood but on cold-pressed virgin olive oil. It was the unchastened acquisitive impulse, the primal appetite for more, legitimized by social fashion and summarized in the deceptively mild war whoop, go for it.

“But in fact there was nothing at all mild about the eighties quest for success. That quest, rather, was feverish and a little hysterical, carried out in a kind of trance. The thing was to get there . Getting there was in the nature of a personal dare, and once you’d accepted it, you neither rested nor asked questions.”

--From “The Hunger for More.”