I’d like to quote from and briefly comment on this recent article by Paul Kingsnorth,
The less moored our identities become, the louder we shout about them
"all lasting cultures in history have been rooted. That is to say, they have been tied down by, and to, things more solid, timeless and lasting than the day-to-day processes of their functioning, or the personal desires of the individuals who inhabit them. Some of those solid things are human creations: cultural traditions, a sense of lineage and ancestry, ceremonies designed for worship or initiation. Others are non-human: the natural world in which those cultures dwell, or the divine force that they worship or communicate with in some form.
We need these roots. We need a sense of belonging to something that is bigger than us, across both space and time, and we underestimate that need at our peril. In her book The Need for Roots, written in 1943, the French philosopher and reluctant mystic Simone Weil puts the case like this:
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future.”
I won’t give a detailed analysis of the article, for the simple reason that none of it is news to me. I am trying to stop saying ‘I’ve been saying this since …’ But … I have been saying this for an awful long time now. I have issued work after work along these lines, but much deeper philosophically, morally, and sociologically. Read Kingsnorth’s article and, if it strikes a chord, come and read some of my work.
The age is rootless and hence fruitless. Worse, some of its most vocal representatives mistake the fruits of past and declining social and moral capital as foundations in themselves, very particular foundations which fit the self-image and self-identity of certain groups. What is asserted in authoritative voice is arbitrary in the extreme - hence the self-cancelling cycles of assertion and counter-assertion. The issue is much bigger and deeper than 'woke,' which is merely the expression of the loss of an overarching and authoritative moral framework. "And where do all these highways go, now that we are free?" (Leonard Cohen).
And with that question in mind, I shall refer you to a couple out of the many works where I examine these issues at length and in depth.
The Ecology of Good (2020)
I would just add that I tend to a more nuanced view than the one entailed by notions of being moored and anchored. We were never so tied and fixed as this, and the discovery of how ‘unmoored’ we are is leading people to the other extreme of thinking we flying away into the ether in an ‘anything goes’ existence. These extreme views are twin poles of the same misconception.