It is interesting to see a quantitative portrayal of the age we have been living through. People will feel the diremption and the disconnection, whilst nevertheless continuing to assert their right to pursue the good as they see fit. They lament the loss of commonality whilst continuing to assert their freedom to choose, untrammelled by laws, traditions, ethics, relations and responsibilities to others. My life, my choice, my good, my truth. Individuals have become as gods, creating ex nihilo. And then they lament the consequences. Civilisation has long since sunk into decadence, with degeneracy and depravity now increasingly apparent. Decadence begins with the loss of all sense of telos or final cause, other than the imperatives of money. Money remains to numb the pain of emptiness, filling the hollow hole where the soul once was.
Whilst there is plenty here that should be a cause for concern, there is nothing that should be a cause for surprise. Turbo charged economic libertarianism makes people value the cold cash nexus over the solidaristic ties of family, faith, community, and country. And it's gone global.
Who could have thought it possible?
“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe.”
(Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party).
"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned .."
And all that is left is naked self-interest and the nexus of callous cash payment.
Leonard Cohen sang the future that awaits us: "Things are gonna slide, slide in all directions ... I've seen the future: it is murder."
In another place he asked, "where do all these highways lead now that we are free?" (Stories of the Street)
It's been the age of discrete individuals choosing the good - and even truth - as they see fit. When 'humanity' takes things into its own hands, you find there is no one, singular 'it,' only myriad individuals and tribes and their rival goods, with nothing to check competing claims against. Such a world quickly reduces to money and power. What else?
It's looking more and more like not so much a lonesome highway as a lost one. I'm not going that way.
The need to resolidify is the central task of politics today. And crucial to that is finding the ends around which disparate groups can solidify.
I write knowing fine well that the libertarians of all kinds of the age will reject commonality as repressive of otherness and difference and religion as repressive period. Individuals are free to do as they please. In the end, though, they find little in the world that they have created that pleases them, and much that depresses them.
It is also apparent that the contemporary crises and crusades around climate, race, and sex stem from the thwarted, diverted longing that liberal secular individuals have for meaning, purpose, and belonging. Anxious in their isolation, progressives seek to recreate commonality and community in surrogate forms, advancing their causes with a religious zeal and fervour. From asserting the right of individuals to choose the good as they see fit, progressives come to find the burden of choice too heavy to bear in a social world. A pervasive anxiety stalks such a world and makes 'free' self-choosing individuals desire conformity to a strict moral code. Such individuals have a pronounced taste for austerity in any number of forms. Libertarians in time emerge as Puritans. It's not just a bogus religion, as many enlightenment rationalists continue to point out: it is a bad religion, a very bad religion, a religion which demands public contrition without mercy and forgiveness, in which damnation takes the place of redemption. I find a little reassurance in the fact that at least some people are beginning to see this. The tide may yet be turned. But it will take a lot more than a restatement of an Enlightenment rationalism and science for this turning – that secularisation is precisely what led to this wave of religiosity in the first place. An arid rationalism on the one hand will always generate the heresy of fideism on the other. Science and rationalism won't cut it. Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. If man does not live by bread alone, neither can he live on disinfectants.
Resolidification is the order of challenge of the times, and that's premised on discovering the grounds and ends around which solidity can form. That requires a notion of a substantive good that we hold in common. It also requires the formation of communities of character and practice so that that good is incarnated and lived through specific modes of social conduct.
We live 'after virtue,' and it shows. It's an age of virtue signalling, but one which is almost entirely without the moral and intellectual virtues. The only bonds of solidarity and solidification left in the contemporary context are abstract and remote, with attachments and loyalties to people and groups that one rarely meets . Such bonds are too thin and too extended to motivate anyone to do anything of much consequence. Actual social relationships are ever more attenuated.
What, then, is to be done? True virtue must begin with the local and the concrete within communities of practice and character and work outwards from there. Concern begins with ties of kinship, friendship, neighbourliness and work, with people who you can effectually support and help rather than just performatively signal about. The smaller circles of association expand being outwards into connections on a larger scale. Our bounded natures and circumstances make the primary loyalties the principal context for undertaking duties and responsibilities with respect to others. There are, of course, duties and responsibilities with respect to those who lie outside of the primary loyalties, but unless we focus on attending to our immediate relations first, we become selfish and mercenary, not kind and cosmopolitan - a performative approach within abstract communities supplants practical care and attention.
In 2018 wrote a 700 page text on the great disembedding which characterises the modern age, and what it will take to reconstitute meaning, being, and belonging. It was foundational work for a book on Lewis Mumford I was working on.
https://www.academia.edu/42323782/The_Quest_for_Belonging_Meaning_and_Morality_Morality_and_Modernity_2020
Please read my other essays and works.
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