Change is the defining feature of history. By history, I mean human history; specifically, the history of the human world, which exists over and above–yet never entirely independent from–the physical and biological world.¹ As time unfolds the present is influenced by the past; what is, has been conditioned by what once was; the human world of today is a synthesis of the human world of yesterday. Just as any given moment holds the necessary conditions for what is possible in the future, the necessary conditions of the world we inhabit today existed in the past in some way. Today has developed and emerged from new combinations and novel instantiations of a multiplicity of conditions existing in the past. A given moment may be said to comprise a “whole”, out of which emerges a synthesis constituting a larger, more complex, whole. Thus, there is a directedness to the unfolding of history. Like the expansion of the universe or the arrow of time, it would appear history moves in a single direction.² This phenomenon–in which the totality of circumstances constituted within the human world influences and affects itself over time–I will call historical conditioning.³

I am ignorant of whether or not this theory, or something like it, has been stated before. Certainly those familiar with historical thinking will find much of this essay old hat; though the approach may offer a unique perspective for some, while others may be shocked at some of the conclusions I draw. As far as my influences go, there are obvious affinities with Hegel, and to some extent, Marx, Ibn Khaldun, Giambattista Vico, and more recently, the work of Thomas Kuhn and Francis Fukuyama; evolution by natural selection, and the second law of thermodynamics should also be mentioned. Original or otherwise, a number of clarifications and qualifications must be added. And not the least because what was stated above is almost incomprehensibly general and abstract.

To begin with, I deliberately refrain from using the word “determined”, as in “the present is determined by the past”. I do not think there is a direct causal connection between “what is” and “what has been” if this is taken to mean historical events or changes could not have been otherwise. Rather, I use the words “influenced” or “conditioned” to connote that, while there is a necessary connection between what is and what has been, it is not deterministic.⁴ At any given time throughout history, the present provides the necessary conditions–but not the determining form–of the future.⁵ The most obvious explanation of this is the observation that change cannot occur ex nihilo, that is, out of nothing or without explanation.⁶ In the natural world, many examples may be given. Species or offspring do not develop without a progenitor. Gravity cannot exist without matter. Evolution cannot occur without genetics.⁷ And so on. In these examples, genetics, matter, and progenitor species constitute the necessary conditions of specific forms of future change in the natural world.

Yet I am not offering a possible theory about the history of the natural, but of the human, world. Although I have said the human world exists over and above the natural world, it is nonetheless limited by it.⁸ Homo sapiens cannot transcend the laws of nature; the limits placed on us by our genes or by gravity are well known. But the human world also includes the rational, social, and political, conditions which open up new spaces of possibility and potential. Thus, within the sphere of the human, some of the possibilities inherent in a given epoch that provide the basis for historical conditioning are actualized by human beings. Such actualizations constitute change, over time yielding new epochs–themselves characterized by new possibilities–which are, again and in turn, actualized by other human beings. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

This process of historical conditioning unique to the human world becomes possible when Homo sapiens acquire language and hence the ability to transmit information. Without a common stock of ideas and concepts, and the ability to communicate them, the basis for knowledge and therefore historical conditioning would not be possible. The content of the sphere of developing knowledge forms the basis of the necessary conditions that determine the possibilities inherent in a given epoch–possibilities that influence or condition the future. Whether or not these possibilities are actualized depends on the human beings of that time and place–it is only through their actions that the process of historical conditioning will occur.⁹ Thus, the transmission of information (that forms the basis of human action) is the mechanism through which the historical conditioning of the human world becomes possible.¹⁰ But this barely gets things off the ground, as it were. It is the phenomenon of writing–transmission of information that is durable and persists in time, able to be interpreted after long ages–that greatly accelerates the process of historical conditioning. Printing, in turn, exponentially increases the acceleration of this process.¹¹ To illustrate, I will discuss four spheres of historical conditioning occurring in the history of the human world.

The first is what I will call theoretical history. This sphere encompasses the history of thought, philosophy, mathematics, natural philosophy (the precursor of natural science), et al. Consider the influence of the pre-Socratics upon the intellectual world of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle–that unique tripartite of brilliance, standing like pillars of white marble in the gleaming sunshine beside the wine-dark sea–who each have, in some way, single-handedly influenced nearly every subsequent thinker the West has produced. To be more specific yet somewhat clumsy, Socrates influenced Plato, Socrates and Plato influenced Aristotle; each had followers throughout classical antiquity, older generations influencing younger. The Stoics, Plotinus, the tradition of Neoplatonism; Jewish and Muslim Aristoteleans–such as Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes–began influencing Christian scholars when Aristotle was rediscovered in Europe during the 12^th and 13^th centuries; St. Thomas Aquinas, whose writings and disputations take account of almost every thinker throughout the then known world; the Scholasticism of the High Middle Ages–a veritable lineage can be traced right up through the rise of modernity to this very moment. And this fails to consider other thinkers, like Euclid, Pathagoras, Hippocrates and so many others in the West. In the East, consider the influence of Laozi (老子) and Zhuangzi (莊子), of Confucius (孔子), Mencius (孟子), and Xunzi (荀子), of Han Feizi (韓非), of Sima Qian (司马迁)–again, to name a few out of very, very many–each influencing generations upon generations of thinkers and commentators, dynasties and culture.

The second example is religious history. Foundational to every major religion is the sacred text, which is in turn copied, propagated, contemplated, analyzed, commented upon; generation after generation adding to and building upon those who came before. Traditions of interpretation and the development of doctrine emerge. It is difficult to imagine Christianity or Islam developing without Judaism, which predates them. Hebrew scripture forms the basis of the Christian Old Testament, as well as parts of the Qur’an. The Vedas constitute the basis of Brahmanism, from which the Upanishads and Hinduism developed, in turn spurring a long history of commentary, debate, and proliferation of texts, such as the Mahābhārata–the most famous part of which is the Bhagavad Gita–itself the subject of further interpretation and great debate. Though largely seen as heterodox in its native India, Buddhism contains a rich history of practice, commentary, and debate, especially in China and Japan, and over the centuries has in some ways overlapped with Daoism. Mani–the successor to Zarathustra–attempted to synthesize the faith of his teacher with, among others, the teachings of Buddha and Jesus. The result was Manichaeism, which St. Augustine professed for a time in his early years. Zarathustra’s teachings are also said to have affected the development of Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought, to say nothing of his inspiration to the 19^th-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. The Christian New Testament is ubiquitous throughout the Common Era history of the West. Religious history also inevitably overlaps with other spheres of history, as time passes both actively influencing and being influenced.

Political history is my third example, which includes but is not limited to the history of government systems, law, diplomacy, and armed conflict. Among the best examples is the influence of classical Greek civilization upon its Roman successor, which, taken together, influenced thinkers of the late medieval, Renaissance, and American epochs.¹² The practice of law arising in the High and Late Middle Ages offers a further instance. Joseph Strayer’s little book, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, shows how the modern political state did not emerge ex nihilo, but rather steadily evolved from a set of changing circumstances and influences throughout the Middle Ages. It’s hard to imagine Napoleon Bonapart without the French Revolution, just as it is World War II and Adolf Hitler without World War I and the Treaty of Versailles.

Lastly, consider what I will call material history, which includes things like economics, technology, architecture, the development of cities, et al. The rise of modern society from that of primitive hunter-gatherers can be seen in the slow but gradual development of technological understanding cumulating over time. The use of rocks or the intense rubbing of sticks together to create fire provides an example of combining preexisting conditions in the natural world in order to develop a novel effect. Animal domestication, farming, housing, urban development, roads, the use of money, trade–slowly emerged from man’s use of rational thought upon his environment and circumstances. The far subsequent scientific, industrial, and technological revolutions–again–did not emerge ex nihilo, but rather from new combinations and novel instantiations of a multiplicity of factors. In his theory of entrepreneurship, The Theory of Economic Development, Joseph Schumpeter argues that economic development arises from new combinations of already existing conditions in a given economy. The primary methods of development, according to Schumpeter, are (1) the opening of new markets, the (2) introduction of new products and services, the (3) invention of a new method of production, the (4) restructuring of an organization, and/or (5) obtaining less expensive or alternative raw materials or goods. Consider also the evolution of military tactics on the basis of changing technology, such as the Greek phalanx being replaced by the Roman legion, or heavily armored French knights being conquered by the English longbow.¹³

These examples should not be understood as exhaustive, but simply preliminary sketches attempting to outline some of the ways historical conditioning has occurred in various spheres of influence. In future essays I hope to expand on this theory, as it seems to explain a great deal about the world in its current state. If it is true that the totality of circumstances constituted within the human world influences and affects itself over time, it would follow that the history of the human world moves toward ever-increasing complexity.¹⁴ It may be tempting to call this progress. But progress is a metaphysically loaded word, and begs the question, “progress for what?” Even though the mechanism of historical conditioning is as old as the human world itself, the unique circumstances of the modern world have created an environment characterized by an unprecedented level of change. What is unprecedented about the modern instantiation of historical conditioning is its speed and exponential increases of acceleration; what Zygmunt Bauman has called “liquid modernity”.¹⁵ The printing press has given way to electronic media and instantaneous communication, in turn yielding a world of virtual reality in which what is and isn’t real becomes more and more difficult to distinguish. As the scope of what is possible expands–as it has; at first slowly, now very quickly–so too does the possibility for confusion and disarray. The dark side of complexity, it would seem, is entropy–disorder, disorganization; the chaos and pandemonium of a fraying and unraveling humanity–like the ends of the branches of a great tree, ultimately ending in sheer nothingness.¹⁶ Heraclitus, it would seem, may have his revenge after all.

Notes:

1. In this theory I am taking for granted the existence of the human world; moreover, I am using its existence as a starting point. In many ways, this essay is an attempt to pin down and vocalize my ideas on this subject, and to help test whether or not they are tenable. See also my essay, The Individual and the Human World.

2. To be clear, this is an analogy. One which can hold perhaps only up to a point. I do not wish, nor am I sufficiently informed, to engage in debates about physics or cosmology.

3. “Historical evolution” was a close contender. Although there are obvious affinities to evolution that capture a great deal of what I am trying to explain, I have deliberately avoided the term in order to reduce the potential for confusion.

4. The necessary connection between what is and what has been can be explained in this way: The totality of circumstances existing at a given moment sets the limits for what is possible in the immediate future, i.e., What actually occurs in the immediate future is “made possible” by conditions existing in the immediate past–yet not wholly determined by them.

5. Thus, if it was possible to “restart” the history of the human world, I do not think it would unfold in exactly the same way. This is reminiscent of Stephen Jay Gould’s comment about replaying the tape of life. See Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life.

6. Hence, at least metaphysically, this theory has to be grounded in some form of the principle of sufficient reason. My own proclivities incline me to an Aristotelean interpretation of the principle, but many forms could be used. Although the principle of sufficient reason seems to have been stated in some way by almost every philosopher throughout history, the most famous example is that of Leibniz. Lawrence Krauss’ book, A Universe from Nothing may be thought to prove a counter-example. But the scientism adopted by Krauss commits him to use the word “nothing” in ways that, strictly speaking, are not at all what a philosopher means by the word.

7. For an introduction to the theory of evolution by natural selection see Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True, or Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker.

8. Again, see my essay, The Individual and the Human World.

9. Notice, to rebel against the conditions of a given time and place is no less to be influenced or conditioned by them. Potentially hostile relationships or influences to extant circumstances are also common and influential. Consider the rebellion of the Enlightenment against tradition and authority or the Luddites against machinery in England. See also my essay, Human Action.

10. Thus, by analogy, the transmission of information is to historical conditioning what genes are to evolution by natural selection.

11. Notice that the phenomenon of language provides a necessary condition for the possibility of the written word; the written word, in turn, provides a necessary condition for the possibility of printing; printing for electronic media, and so forth.

12. The American experiment itself has influenced many countries around the world.

13. This would be an example of the sphere of material history overlapping with political history.

14. This would appear to be true as long as the human world lasts. At some point, should humanity suffer the fate of the dinosaurs this ever-moving trajectory would cease. It could also suffer serious setbacks or regressions, as some have argued. The creation of the Dark Ages by Italian humanists is an example of this view.

15. See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity.

16. To again push the analogy with the 2nd law of therodynamics: If this situation were to eventually terminate in a state of equilibrium, it would seem we would have reached the state of Nietzsche’s last man.

It is not an accident that the rise of democratic and republican forms of government in the modern period coincided with the rise of the public sphere of rational-critical debate.¹ This is particularly clear in the case of America, where the founding itself was the product of a rich and robust public discussion and debate. Although many members of the Constitutional Convention were not college-educated, they nonetheless were very well-read and informed.² At the time, it was even reported that some British booksellers were selling more law books in the colonies than in England.³ But although the genesis of government “of, by, and for the people” has its roots in a public sphere of rational-critical debate, such a foundation is equally necessary for the endurance and continued existence of such governments and societies. Yet today in America the public sphere of rational-critical debate has all but disappeared, in many ways existing only as a simulacrum of what it once was. For the most part, it has transformed into the mass media of opinions ready-made to consume and independent structures of sociological propaganda.⁴ This general weakening of the public sphere is connected to at least three socioeconomic factors, each of which in its own way undermines our ability as a society to participate in democratic behavior.

Begin with the observation that–to the extent there is an American culture–it is quintessentially characterized by business and the making of money.⁵ In a word, by work. In America, the land of the Protestant work ethic par excellence, the “spirit of capitalism” has reached its fullest expression. What this means for the vast majority of us today is that our daily lives are organized around activities associated with acquiring or maintaining–and yes, even increasing–an income. And this situation is not merely a contingent one, as though we were describing one American penchant among others. No, today it is necessary for us to live this way.⁶

Obviously earning a living or running a business or a professional practice or simply working a job places an enormous constraint upon our time. Indeed, for many of us, our work is the single largest factor in determining how our time is carved up. I have said before that work structures our everyday lives in the form of a telos–an end-goal or purpose.⁷ But the constraints placed upon us by the workaday world are not merely those of time, there are psychological constraints as well. Work demands our attention and commands an omnipresence in our lives that few other things can compete with. For many of us, even when we are not literally working our minds are pervaded by thoughts of work. Add to this the role of money in our lives and the psychological weight it places upon us: incomes must be managed, distributed, allocated, saved; expenses considered–current and future–budgets more or less followed, unforeseen losses and changes accounted for, and on and on.⁸ Work and financial concerns thus occupy a great deal of our time and psychological energy. Over time the tasks associated with them develop into daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly routines; our lives become divided into stages, such as education, career, retirement. And it is generally known that this way of life has resulted in many people having to adapt to retirement–that is, to not working–and many are often unable to do so easily. Josef Pieper has described this as the world of “total work” and Erich Fromm was not wrong when he said that man has become “a servant to the very machine he built”.⁹

The second factor I want to consider is the phenomenon of consumer society, which is concomitant with the world of work and financial concerns discussed above.¹⁰ The cultural meanings and significance and overall social importance of the purchase of commodities–goods and services–has, in contemporary America, gained a prominence hitherto unknown.¹¹ When we are not working or concerning ourselves with financial concerns, much of the “pie” that remains is–ironically–consumed by consumption activities. Of course, much of this is necessary: we need food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and so on, and cannot live well without them. The purchase of a home brings with it a multiplicity of further purchases (taxes, insurance, furniture, decorations, upkeep expenses, etc.), as does a car (insurance, fuel, maintenance, etc.), and many other things besides. There are also goods and services which are not necessary, but superfluous: various forms of entertainment and diversion, idiosyncratic hobbies, games, gambling, and so forth. (I do not call attention to these things to condemn them but to simply note that for many people such things constitute the primary preoccupation of their non-working lives.) Here too much of our psychological energy is wrapped up; when we are not actually consuming, we are often thinking about it, anticipating future purchases, and so on. It is also the case that a large part of our social life is characterized by consumption in one form or another.¹² In this way, our “culture of consumption” has in many ways taken over the time we have available for cultivated leisure.

The Greek word for leisure, skholḗ–in Latin, scola–is the etymological ancestor of “school” in English. Thus, the very word we use to explain where learning and education occur derives from a word which means “leisure”. And how very odd that is, since today we generally associate the word leisure with relaxation, taking it easy, or “doing nothing”.¹³ Yet both historically and classically the concept of leisure is very much bound up with learning, with the birth and development of culture, and is inseparable from civilization itself–both Eastern and Western.¹⁴ It is also the precondition for what Jürgen Habermas has called the public sphere of rational-critical debate. The time and energy and silence required for broad and deep reading and reflection, the exchange of letters, discussion with family, friends, and acquaintances is, in fact, accomplished in times of cultivated leisure. As Josef Pieper has observed, following Aristotle, “we work in order to do–to enable us to do–something other than work.”¹⁵ Indeed, leisure is what made the “American experiment” possible, fueling the rich and robust public sphere of debate that is so well captured in James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention–what became The Federalist Papers. But today such activities are alien to many in the industrialized modern world, and in no country is this more so than in America. This begs the question: When we are not working, or managing our financial concerns, or engaging in consumer activities personally or socially–what are we doing?

The third factor I want to consider is the commodification of rational-critical debate, which partially overlaps with the culture of consumption discussed above, and which constitutes the primary medium we encounter ideas today.¹⁶ By appealing directly to the theoretical frameworks of individuals, the mass media of the press, TV, radio, and internet, provide opinions ready-made to consume. Together with the phenomenon of sociological propaganda, individuals are provided with direct affirmations or challenges to their own systems of belief. And if such media is approached uncritically, it is simply adopted or rejected; in turn, leading to a partitioning of society in ways that are increasingly polarized.¹⁷

At the end of my essay, The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part II, I asked the question: In a world where most of our views have been provided for us in the form of ready-made opinions, how, in fact, do we know that the views we have adopted are actually our own? Whether it emerges as propaganda or otherwise, this is the fundamental problem of commodified opinion: It provides a ready-made alternative to thinking for ourselves and short-cuts the difficulty of critically engaging with one’s culture; it upends the telos of rational-critical debate and offers a world of certainty rooted in factionalism and isolation in its place; it exacerbates the problem of communication and thereby nullifies the possibilities of a genuine public sphere of rational-critical debate.¹⁸ As the public sphere has been steadily commodified, rational-critical debate has been taken over almost exclusively by specialists, who–as Habermas has observed–are critical but non-public, while private citizens constitute a public which is non-critical.

What I am getting at is that the constraints placed upon our time, attention, and energy by daily concerns–such as the workaday world, the management of financial concerns, and near-constant and ongoing consumer activities–largely preclude a private sphere of cultivated leisure, which in the practical sense makes a public sphere of rational-critical debate impossible. But if the principles of democracy presuppose the (genuine) active participation of a populace–which, in turn, presupposes the ability of that populace to engage in rational-critical debate–then a widespread loss of the ability to engage in rational-critical debate undermines the very foundations of a democratic society.¹⁹ It thus appears inescapable that, in order to live well in contemporary society, we must curb the demands of the workaday world and consumer society, so as to rediscover our humanity and engage in cultivated leisure. Moreover, if the United States of America is to survive as we know it, it would seem something similar must take place at the level of society as well.

Notes:

1. For an introduction to this topic, see my essay, The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part II; for a comprehensive account, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

2. This is immediately apparent to anyone having read The Federalist Papers. I am indebted to Daniel Robinson for this observation.

3. This was stated by no less than Edmund Burke. In his “Speech to Parliament on Reconciliation with the American Colonies” (March 22nd, 1775), Burke describes the general level of political education in North America: “In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers. But all who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law exported to the Plantations.”

4. See, for example, my essays on what I have called the isolated self. Particularly relevant here are Part II and Part III.

5. I have partially explored this in my essay, A Sketch of The Workaday World.

6. Of course, it is tempting to think that this has always been the case. It hasn’t. But although work and the management and acquisition of money have come to pervade our lives to an extent hitherto unknown (even in America), demonstrating as much is beyond the scope of this essay and is not necessary to my central argument.

7. See my essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World.

8. Money management is something that Americans are allegedly very bad at. The number of books and media about money and its management is staggering. Whole sections of bookstores are often allocated to the subject and a virtual cottage industry of programs and seminars has developed to help Americans deal with their financial problems. Also, the burden of poor management of one’s money likely places significantly more psychological demands on those caught up in it.

9. See Josef Piper, Leisure The Basis of Culture, and Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom.

10. Indeed, these are two aspects of one and the same world: each is inseparable from the other. See also my essay, An Introduction to Consumer Society.

11. In juxtaposition, consider the relatively recent phenomenon of “minimalism” or living a “minimalist lifestyle”.

12. I will once again call attention to my essay, The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part II, and Jürgen Habermas’, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Perhaps also relevant is Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.

13. I am indebted to Josef Piper for this observation.

14. See Josef Pieper, Leisure The Basis of Culture.

15. See Josef Pieper, Only The Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation; see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.

16. Again, for an introduction to this topic, see my essay, The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part II; for a comprehensive account, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

17. See my essays on what I have called the isolated self: Part I, Part II, and Part III.

18. This is unfair in some ways. Since not all commodified opinion does this. But the incredible power of sociological propaganda is difficult to overstate, and this is what I have primarily in mind with the words factionalism and isolation.

19. Adam Smith seems to worry about something like this problem in his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Up to this point, I have considered the isolated self as a phenomenon understood on the basis of hardening theoretical frameworks situated within the more general landscape of the contemporary struggle to communicate. The quest for certainty and calm in a world marked by historic levels of uncertainty and anxiety–as witnessed by the work of Erich Fromm and Jacques Ellul–has helped elucidate some of the psychological basis, or impetus, behind the emergence of this phenomenon.¹ Perhaps equally important is the commodification of rational-critical debate, as explored by Jürgen Habermas, which has become more pronounced today than ever before. Taken together, both help shed necessary light on the emergence and continued endurance of the isolated self and the factionalism it gives rise to.² But the picture I am attempting to paint in these essays will not be complete until a proper consideration of propaganda has taken place.³ Indeed, everything that has been said up to now has laid the groundwork for an understanding of propaganda, and will further bring into contrast the problem that we, as a society, face. In so doing, Jacques Ellul’s work on the subject will be my primary resource, especially when considered in light of the relatively recent development of the internet.

When Alasdair MacIntyre said that contemporary debate has become “necessarily barren”, characterized by “assertion and counterassertion”, and that ultimately “[n]onrational persuasion displaces rational argument”, he was talking about the state of rational-critical debate in the public sphere.⁴ This has, in part, resulted from the ever-expanding scope and quantity of possible theoretical frameworks, which has eroded the common ground of mutual understanding.⁵ What this means is that the common stock of ideas, definitions, concepts, and so forth–the basis for mutual understanding and meaningful discussion–has expanded to such an extent that mutual understanding itself has become increasingly difficult to achieve. Thus, persuasion is achieved by direct appeal to the theoretical frameworks of individuals rather than through a process of rational-critical debate rooted in shared understandings.6 This is commonly accomplished via the mass media of the press, TV, radio, and more recently, the internet–together disseminating the vast majority of “public debate”. It is at this level that we find the commodification of rational-critical debate; opinions ready-made to consume.⁷

In many ways, the “higher level” public debate has spilled over, penetrated, into the “lower level” personal debate which takes place in the private sphere where individuals engage each other directly. The ready-made or commodified opinion of the press, the internet, TV and radio, is thus consumed by a public made up of individuals that pick and choose what they believe and who they listen to.⁸ The positions advanced in debates taking place in the press, on the internet, TV and radio, are adopted, taken in, “consumed”, and are then (with varying degrees of understanding) parroted back to others as if they were arrived at independently. This is the point of contact where struggles to communicate occur, often devolving into breakdowns and eventually failures–the springboard of the isolated self and its corresponding factionalism.⁹

The internet is perhaps worth exploring further, since it indeed constitutes a “world” of its own, situated within the larger backdrop of the human world.¹⁰ In many ways the internet has transformed the “lower level” of personal debate between individuals into a platform where it increasingly resembles the “higher level” public debate of the mass media. That is, debates between individuals taking place online (via blogs, social media, etc.) become imbued with a kind of status that seems to be understood as both informed and authoritative. In this way, the internet offers its own peculiar commodification of rational-critical debate, creating its own buffet of ready-made opinions. This may have something to do with the internet being removed from our direct experience, taking on a third-person or “objective” dimension (similar to the press, TV, and radio). Yet at the same time many forms of internet media simultaneously maintain a first-person account, i.e., direct reporting from individuals to an audience (you and me) about what they allegedly have seen and heard and know. This is often portrayed as something like “the real truth”, and contributes to the narrative that older media forms (press, TV, radio) are at best corrupt, or at worst, nothing but lies.

What is no doubt the case is that the commodification of rational-critical debate has played a major role in the emergence of propaganda. Habermas himself attests to this when he writes that originally “publicity guaranteed the connection between rational-critical public debate and the legislative foundation of domination, including the critical supervision of its exercise. Now it makes possible the peculiar ambivalence of a domination exercised through the domination of nonpublic opinion: it serves the manipulation of the public as much as legitimation before it. Critical publicity is supplanted by manipulative publicity.”¹¹ This mirrors MacIntyre’s observation that, in the public sphere, “[n]onrational persuasion displaces rational argument”.¹² In his book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre goes on to say that “in a society in which preferences, whether in the market or in politics or in private life, are assigned the place which they have in a liberal order, power lies with those who are able to determine what the alternatives are to be between which choices will be available. The consumer, the voter, and the individual in general are accorded the right of expressing their preferences for one or more out of the alternatives which they are offered, but the range of possible alternatives is controlled by an elite, and how they are presented is also so controlled. The ruling elites within liberalism are thus bound to value highly competence in the persuasive presentation of alternatives, that is, in the cosmetic arts.”¹³ It seems to me that the “cosmetic arts”–or the “art of appearances”–are–along with Habermas’ “manipulative publicity”–conceptually on par with a general understanding of propaganda.

But both MacIntyre and Habermas are dealing with instances of what Jacques Ellul has called classic or political propaganda.¹⁴ In his book, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Jacques Ellul cites this propaganda when he writes that a “common view of propaganda is that it is the work of a few evil men, seducers of the people, cheats and authoritarian rulers who want to dominate a population; that it is the handmaiden of more or less illegitimate powers. This view always thinks of propaganda as being made voluntarily; it assumes that a man decides ‘to make propaganda,’ that a government establishes a Propaganda Ministry, and that things just develop from there on. According to this view, the public is just an object, a passive crowd that one can manipulate, influence, and use. And this notion is held not only by those who think one can manipulate the crowds but also by those who think propaganda is not very effective and can be resisted easily.”¹⁵ Thus, classic or political propaganda is a kind of “top-down” or vertical model. And although it describes what most of us think when we hear the word–such as that associated with Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels, et al.–it is not what I would like to primarily focus on in this essay. To be sure, this form of propaganda continues to exercise a great amount of power today, but in my view the emergence of what Ellul calls “sociological propaganda” is far more alarming and dangerous, particularly since the advent of the internet.¹⁶

“To understand that propaganda is not just a deliberate and more or less arbitrary creation by some people in power is therefore essential. It is strictly a sociological phenomenon, in the sense that it has its roots and reasons in the need of the group that will sustain it.”¹⁷ In contrast to the “top-down” or vertical model of political propaganda, sociological propaganda is a “bottom-up” or horizontal phenomenon. Ellul continues, “Sociological propaganda is a phenomenon much more difficult to grasp than political propaganda, and is rarely discussed. Basically it is the penetration of an ideology by means of its sociological context. This phenomenon is the reverse of what we have been studying up to now. Propaganda as it is traditionally known implies an attempt to spread an ideology through the mass media of communication in order to lead the public to accept some political or economic structure or to participate in some action. […] But in sociological propaganda the movement is reversed. The existing economic, political, and sociological factors progressively allow an ideology to penetrate individuals or masses. Through the medium of economic and political structures a certain ideology is established, which leads to the active participation of the masses and the adaptation of individuals. The important thing is to make the individual participate actively and to adapt him as much as possible to a specific sociological context.”¹⁸ “This propaganda may be called horizontal because it is made inside the group (not from the top), where, in principle, all individuals are equal and there is no leader. The individual makes contact with others at his own level rather than with a leader; such propaganda therefore always seeks ‘conscious adherence.’ Its content is presented in didactic fashion and addressed to the intelligence. The leader, the propagandist, is there only as a sort of animator or discussion leader; sometimes his presence and his identity are not even known”.¹⁹

If my understanding of Ellul is correct, sociological propaganda is far subtler and more nuanced than political propaganda, emerging spontaneously and organically from within a given social context. In this way, its growth and development is not obvious, and those individuals engaged in its propagation and consumption do so without consciousness of it as a form of “propaganda”. In an early example, Ellul describes one form of sociological propaganda as a result of “the extent that the combination of advertising, public relations, social welfare, and so on produces a certain general conception of society, a particular way of life.”²⁰ This leads the individual to believe “that those who live this way are on the side of the angels, and those who don’t are bad; those who have this conception of society are right, and those who have another conception are in error.”²¹ “What starts out as a simple situation gradually turns into a definite ideology, because the way of life in which man thinks he is so indisputably well off becomes a criterion of value for him. This does not mean that objectively he is well off, but that, regardless of the merits of his actual condition, he thinks he is. He is perfectly adapted to his environment, like ‘a fish in water.’ From that moment on, everything that expresses this particular way of life, that reinforces and improves it, is good; everything that tends to disturb, criticize, or destroy it is bad. This leads people to believe that the civilization representing their way of life is best.”²² What I am hoping to show with this example is the mechanism through which sociological propaganda works, that is, as a spontaneous, unpremeditated, and leaderless phenomenon. In America, this should be fairly easy to grasp, since many of us–particularly older generations–were raised with a certain understanding of “American exceptionalism” or the “American Way of Life”. And although at times political propaganda has overlapped with this more general phenomenon (such as during the Cold War with the Soviet Union), its primary mechanism was not political but social.

But the monolithic and homogeneous picture of society that is offered here is largely a myth. In fact, America is made up of innumerable groups, each developing their own paradigms and viewpoints, each to a lesser or greater extent coming to believe that, within their group, the “best way of life” is represented.²³ Thus, sociological propaganda reinforces the heterogeneity of modern society, for in the past what took place on a societal level now often takes place on the level of individuals come together as groups. What I would like to suggest is that through the relatively recent emergence of the internet, sociological propaganda has become even more widespread and powerful.

The commodification of rational-critical debate in the traditional mass media (press, TV, radio) was a necessary yet not sufficient step in the development of sociological propaganda (though it may have been sufficient for political propaganda). But with the advent of the internet the (virtual) published word became increasingly democratized; accessible by literally billions of people. For the first time in human history, anyone could say anything, and everyone could hear it.²⁴ This, of course, is an abstraction; access to the internet is always localized, and “seeing” or “comprehending” it all, at once, far exceeds human capability. The point, rather, is that when access to the internet is obtained, whoever has that access has a voice that can potentially be “heard around the world”. Predictably, just as humans gather together in light of shared interests and associations when they are “offline”–and develop viewpoints about the “best way of life” unique to their group–they do the same thing once they are “plugged in”. Hence, at least in its early stages, the landscape of the internet mirrored much of the human world in a uniquely virtual way. Being made and “populated” by human beings, it simply reflected the multiplicities of the human condition. But with the growth of the internet, and the development of new virtual technologies–like smartphones and social media–it became an autonomous world unto itself. In this way, the internet has played a dramatic role in propagating what Ellul has identified as sociological propaganda. That is, the infinite ideological neighborhoods of the internet serve as a means by which a sociological context–virtual, but no less powerful–comes to penetrate the thinking of individuals in the form of virtual (commodified) rational-critical debate. The massive virtual expanse becomes inhabited by individuals come together, loyal to the ideological group or groups they associate or identify with.²⁵ As members of a group, they are constantly reinforced in their views. Engagements with other individuals (members of rival groups) become increasingly shrill and irrational. As I noted in Part I, the “trenches dividing individuals and groups become deeper; the psychological distance between them, wider; self-questioning atrophies, certainty soars.”

Sociological propaganda on the internet emerges in a multiplicity of forms. Personal posts and debates on social media, message boards, personal websites and blogs, essays and articles published by large or small media organizations, YouTube channels, and on and on.²⁶ What appears most important is to acclimate individuals to a specific sociological context that ultimately and over time impresses ideas upon them, such that they are taken in and adopted as their own. And such ideas are not the result of a carefully formed opinion; they result from the consumption of ready-made opinions existing through a given sociological context.

Moreover, the effect of propaganda on the psyche of the individual appears to be difficult to overstate, as does its overall impact on society. Among many other things, it resolves inner conflicts and anxieties, it provides a feeling of importance and righteousness, it gives permission to act, it extinguishes critical judgment (and thus the possibility for rational-critical debate), and thereby partitions society and turns one’s fellows into enemies. To help complete this picture, I will quote Jacques Ellul at length in what follows. (As a reminder, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, was published in 1965.)

“Man, eager for self-justification, throws himself in the direction of a propaganda that justifies him and thus eliminates one of the sources of his anxiety. Propaganda dissolves contradictions and restores to man a unitary world in which the demands are in accord with the facts. It gives man a clear and simple call to action that takes precedence over all else. It permits him to participate in the world around him without being in conflict with it, because the action he has been called upon to perform will surely remove all obstacles from the path of realizing the proclaimed ideal. Here, propaganda plays a completely idealistic role, by involving a man caught in the world of reality and making him live by anticipation in a world based on principle. From then on man no longer sees contradiction as a threat to himself or as a distortion of his personality: the contradiction, through propaganda, becomes an active source of conquest and combat. He is no longer alone when trying to solve his conflicts, but is plunged into a collective on the march, which is always ‘at the point’ of solving all conflicts and leading man and his world to a satisfying monism.”²⁷ “It hands him a key with which he can open all doors; there is no more mystery; everything can be explained, thanks to propaganda. It gives him special glasses through which he can look at present-day history and clearly understand what it means. It hands him a guide line with which he can recover the general line running through all incoherent events. Now the world ceases to be menacing. The propagandee experiences feelings of mastery over and lucidity toward this menacing and chaotic world, all the more because propaganda provides him with a solution for all threats and a posture to assume in the face of them.”²⁸

“Though a mass instrument, it addresses itself to each individual. It appeals to me. It appeals to my common sense, my desires, and provokes my wrath and my indignation. It evokes my feelings of justice and my desire for freedom. It gives me violent feelings, which lift me out of the daily grind. As soon as I have been politicized by propaganda, I can from my heights look down on daily trifles. My boss, who does not share my convictions, is merely a poor fool, a prey to the illusions of an evil world. I take my revenge upon him by being enlightened; I have understood the situation and know what ought to be done; I hold the key to events and am involved in dangerous and exciting activities. This feeling will be all the stronger when propaganda appeals to my decision and seems to be greatly concerned with my action. ‘Everything is in the clutches of evil. There is a way out. But only if everybody participates. You must participate. If you don’t, all will be lost through your fault.’ This is the feeling propaganda must generate. My opinion, which society once scorned, now becomes important and decisive. No longer has it importance only for me, but also for the whole range of political affairs and the entire social body. A voter may well feel that his vote has no importance or value. But propaganda demonstrates that the action in which it involves us is of fundamental importance, and that everything depends on me. It boosts my ego by giving me a strong sense of my responsibility; it leads me to assume a posture of authority among my fellows, makes me take myself seriously by appealing to me in impassioned tones, with total conviction, and gives me the feeling that it’s a question of All or Nothing. Thanks to such propaganda, the diminished individual obtains the very satisfaction he needs.”²⁹

“[T]hese collective beliefs, which the individual assumes to be his own, these scales of values and stereotypes, which play only a small part in the psychological life of a person unaffected by propaganda, become big and important; by the process of crystallization, these images begin to occupy a person’s entire consciousness, and to push out other feelings and judgments. All truly personal activity on the part of the individual is diminished, and man finally is filled with nothing but these prejudices and beliefs around which all else revolves. In his personal life, man will eventually judge everything by such crystalized standards. But whereas his ordinary justifications are fragile and may always be open to doubts, those furnished by propaganda are irrefutable and solid. The individual believes them and considers them to be eternal truths. He can throw off all sense of guilt; he loses all feeling for the harm he might do, all sense of responsibility other than the responsibility propaganda instills in him. Thus he becomes perfectly adapted to objective situations and nothing can create a split in him. Through such a process of intense rationalization, propaganda builds monolithic individuals. It eliminates inner conflicts, tensions, self-criticism, self-doubt. And in this fashion it also builds a one-dimensional being without depth or range of possibilities. Such an individual will have rationalizations not only for past actions, but for the future as well. He marches forward with full assurance of his righteousness. He is formidable in his equilibrium, all the more so because it is very difficult to break his hardness of justifications.”³⁰ At the same time, this crystallization closes his mind to all new ideas. The individual now has a set of prejudices and beliefs, as well as objective justifications. His entire personality now revolves around those elements. Every new idea will therefore be troublesome to his entire being. He will defend himself against it because it threatens to destroy his certainties. He thus actually comes to hate everything opposed to what propaganda has made him acquire.”³¹

“[P]ropaganda makes disappear […] [e]verything in the nature of critical and personal judgment. Obviously, propaganda limits the application of thought. It limits the propagandee’s field of thought to the extent that it provides him with ready-made […] thoughts and stereotypes. It orients him toward very limited ends and prevents him from using his mind or experimenting on his own. It determines the core from which all his thoughts must derive and draws from the beginning a sort of guideline that permits neither criticism nor imagination. More precisely, his imagination will lead only to small digressions from the fixed line and to only slightly deviant, preliminary responses within the framework.”³² “The acceptance of this line, of such ends and limitations, presupposes the suppression of all critical judgment, which in turn is a result of the crystallization of thoughts and attitudes and the creation of taboos. […] The individual can no longer judge for himself because he inescapably relates his thoughts to the entire complex of values and prejudices established by propaganda. […] What the individual loses is never easy to revive. Once personal judgment and critical faculties have disappeared or have been atrophied, they will not simply reappear when propaganda has been suppressed. In fact, we are dealing here with one of propaganda’s most durable effects: years of intellectual and spiritual education would be needed to restore such faculties. The propagandee, if deprived of one propaganda, will immediately adopt another; this will spare him the agony of finding himself vis-à-vis some event without a ready-made opinion, and obliged to judge it for himself.”³³

“Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, that its actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened. At the same time, such propaganda contains elements of criticism and refutation of other groups, which will never be read or heard by a member of another group. […] As a result, people ignore each other more and more. They cease altogether to be open to an exchange of reason, arguments, points of view. This double foray on the part of propaganda, proving the excellence of one’s own group and the evilness of the others, produces an increasingly stringent partitioning of our society. This partitioning takes place on different levels–a unionist partitioning, a religious partitioning, a partitioning of political parties or classes; beyond that, a partitioning of nations, and, at the summit, a partitioning of blocs of nations. But this diversity of levels and objectives in no way changes the basic law, according to which the more propaganda there is, the more partitioning there is. For propaganda suppresses conversation; the man opposite is no longer an interlocutor but an enemy. And to the extent that he rejects that role, the other becomes an unknown whose words can no longer be understood. Thus, we see before our eyes how a world of closed minds establishes itself, a world in which everybody talks to himself, everybody constantly reviews his own certainty about himself and the wrongs done him by the Others–a world in which nobody listens to anybody, everybody talks, and nobody listens. And the more one talks, the more one isolates oneself, because the more one accuses others and justifies oneself.”³⁴

Now, I don’t know about you, but when it slowly began to dawn on me just how big of a problem this is–it was like the experience of gazing deeper and deeper into a Mandelbrot set.³⁵ Here I am thinking specifically of the phenomenon of sociological propaganda emerging via the media of the internet in all its forms. Individuals make contact with each other directly in what may at first appear a form of rational-critical debate, but is actually a process of mutual reinforcement. Participants are conscious of their involvement, engaged in intelligent and didactic communication. This process creates a sociological context through which others come to adopt similar ideas, solutions, and aspirations, culminating in the factionalism of the isolated self. As Ellul confirms, “Only in speaking will the individual gradually discover his own convictions (which also will be those of the group), become irrevocably involved, and help others to form their opinions (which are identical). Each individual helps to form the opinion of the group, but the group helps each individual to discover the correct line.”³⁶ The resulting factionalism ensures that no (or very few) genuine attempts are made to engage rival individuals or groups–those holding differing viewpoints. But a given group’s “refusal to examine and question ideas other than their own is characteristic of their condition.”³⁷ They have become bound by chains of their own making, by propaganda they themselves have brought into being. And fault cannot be laid at the feet of an evil genius, manipulating people behind the scenes–the problem, rather, is with society itself.

Notes:

1. See Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom, and Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society and Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.

2. See also my recent essays, Theoretical Frameworks and the Limits of Communication, The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part I, and The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part II.

3. My use of the word “complete” is only accurate in a relative sense, since the picture I am attempting to paint of this phenomenon will never be complete in the sense that there is nothing more to say. In fact, I hesitated for some time to write this essay, as the topic being introduced (propaganda) was larger and more complex than I had first assumed. And since I could take it in what seemed like a thousand directions, I was unsure of how to proceed. Ultimately, I decided to simplify my focus and confine myself to only what directly contributes to the narrative of the “isolated self” as it has developed in these essays. That being said, in the future I may continue my explorations of propaganda in other ways.

4. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p 343.

5. This phenomenon appears to be closely bound up with the structure of liberalism itself. I spoke briefly of this in my essay, Theoretical Frameworks and the Limits of Communication, and to a slightly fuller extent in The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences. Also, the rise of printing was likely a necessary factor. My essay, Some Further Thoughts on Modern Education, may also be relevant.

6. To be sure, this is merely one aspect of a much more complicated picture. Here I would direct the interested reader to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. Specifically, his books, After Virtue, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? In fairness, I would add that it is very difficult for many people to form an educated opinion of their own today. This, it seems, is mostly due to the constraints placed upon them–especially upon their time–by working life. Leisure activities have also been transformed–deep reading and reflection, and debate in the Social sphere have been replaced by consumer activities. In light of this, it seems that most people have no known alternatives but to consume ready-made opinions on the basis of their own theoretical frameworks.

7. For a more thorough explanation of what I mean, see my essay, The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part II.

8. Again, on the basis of their own respective theoretical frameworks.

9. There are basic ways to try to explain this. One is that differing “public” positions are necessarily derived from differing theoretical frameworks, which leads us back to the basic problem of my essay, Theoretical Frameworks and the Limits of Communication. When such “public” positions are adopted, taken in, “consumed”, the individual becomes bound to the theoretical framework entailed by the position, often without realizing it. The ensuing confusion of “lower level” debate is thus, most fundamentally, a confusion of unacknowledged or unexamined theoretical frameworks. This is exactly why the commodification of rational-critical debate has become a major problem–people increasingly adopt views that they know very little about, as well as alienate each other when they disagree.

10. I would include smartphone technologies, apps, etc., as part of the internet. The “world” of the internet also seems to be becoming autonomous. Another topic for the future, perhaps.

11. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p 178. Emphasis in original.

12. See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p 343.

13. Ibid, p 345.

14. See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.

15. Ibid, p 118.

16. I do not wish to discount the problem of political propaganda–it has been and remains a factor that still yields influence today and contributes to many of our societal frustrations (notwithstanding the number of Americans who would be shocked by this). Rather, I would like to approach political propaganda as part of the overall problem of this essay, but with a secondary role to that of sociological propaganda.

17. See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, p 121.

18. Ibid, p 63-64. Emphasis in original.

19. Ibid, p 81.

20. Ibid, p 65.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid, p 67. Emphasis in original.

It should be admitted that the impulse this plays on is likely as old as humanity. Perhaps the most popular example is the elitism of Athens in ancient Greece. Am I saying that the Greek attitude toward the “barbarian” was the result of propaganda, sociological or otherwise? No, I don’t think so. Mainly because it seems that one of the necessary conditions of propaganda is the commodification of rational-critical debate. There are also enormous societal differences between us and the ancient Greeks, such as that we are a “mass society” and the Greeks were not. This is a fine distinction, to be sure. But exploring it further will, for the time being, have to be postponed.

23. Or, in the case of conversion (political, religious, et al.), that of a different group appears more desirable.

24. At least potentially. I realize this is slightly dramatic, as there are limits. For example, not everyone is looking at the same thing at the same time, not everyone has access to the internet, not everyone speaks the same language, etc.

25. By “group” I simply mean other people or media who adopt a shared viewpoint. Groups, it seems, can be almost infinitely diverse; they can be political, economic, religious, et al., or some combination thereof. They can be united by an organized or disorganized ideology, come together over a specific branded consumer item, or protest against things like circumcision, and so forth.

26. Perhaps the most common example of sociological propaganda is the internet meme, especially those with political, economic, or religious intent. An internet meme is a peculiar form of commodified debate, but, to be sure, its popularity highlights a low-point of (virtual) social interaction. Memes are not arguments, but they fulfill the role of an argument in that they compel my immediate assent or dissent. They appeal directly to my theoretical framework and serve a reinforcing or threatening function (depending on whether or not I agree with them). If reinforcing, I am assured my group is right; if threatening, I am revolted by an opinion different from my own (maybe I “block” or “unfriend” the poster?). Memes are an interesting example because they encapsulate sociological propaganda so well, though I am unsure how threatening they are in the wider scope of things. Still, their primary function seems to be one of reassurance that my group is right, and others are wrong.

27. See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, p 159.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid, p 150.

30. Ibid, p 164-165.

31. Ibid, p 166.

32. Ibid, p 169. Emphasis in original.

33. Ibid, p 169-170.

34. Ibid, p 213-214. Emphasis in original.

35. I apologize to any mathematicians who may be insulted by this. Still, the idea of something that has the power described above–a power over the mind–yet without a “mastermind” behind the scenes, pulling strings and moving world events; autonomous yet anonymous–is perhaps among the most terrifying things I have thought about.

36. See Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, p 81.

37. Ibid, p 166.

The phenomenon of the isolated self is best understood within the more general phenomena of communication struggles, breakdowns, and failures that characterize much contemporary debate.¹ While in many ways the isolated self can be described on the basis of theoretical frameworks alone, there is also more to the story. Failures in communication fuel the psychological need for reinforcement and self-affirmation (especially by like-minded others), which in turn lead to a kind of factionalism² that understands one’s group as pure and righteous, and those whose views differ as at best mistaken, or at worst, evil. The pseudo-confidence accompanying this phenomenon ensures that isolated selves live within their own reality, cut off from those holding different perspectives. It appears that this overall condition has, in part, stemmed from the basic human desire for certainty that seems proportionate to the relative uncertainty of the modern world.³ But this is not all. The transformation of the public sphere of rational-critical debate into a commodity–to be consumed like any other–has led to its own problems and complexities, not the least of which is the role it has played in the emergence of the isolated self. To this, I now turn.

The rise of the public sphere is closely bound up with the development of the printing press, with the published word, and the increased rate of exchange of information.⁴ One of the earliest examples of this involves the long-distance trade of early capitalism, the traffic in commodities, and news.⁵ This was followed closely by the expansion not only of a formally educated class but also of general levels of literacy and education within society as a whole. “Society,” writes Hannah Arendt, “is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”⁶ Thus, the rise of rational-critical debate between private persons, indirectly in the world of letters, but also directly in the form of debates carried out in public–in the coffee houses of England, the salons of France, the table societies (Tischgesellschaften) of Germany, et al.–fueled the fires of public criticism.⁷ This ultimately led to the political transformation of early-modern Europe, in which the eclipse of aristocracy and monarchy steadily began, and ultimately bowed to the rising tide of democracy. “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason.”⁸ The history and evolution of this overall process has been brilliantly captured by Jürgen Habermas in his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which was not translated into English until nearly thirty years after it was first published. I will quote from it at length in what follows.

The early public sphere of rational-critical debate (in coffee houses, salons, table societies, etc.) was marked by many historically unprecedented characteristics. First, it was inclusive in ways that the court of nobility or aristocracy could never be: “However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who–insofar as they were propertied and educated–as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion. The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate. […] The public of the first generations, even when it constituted itself as a specific circle of persons, was conscious of being part of a larger public.”⁹ Moreover, a “public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ispo excluded was less than merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all.”¹⁰ Corresponding to this inclusiveness is the fact that the relevant institutions of debate “preserved a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether. The tendency replaced the celebration of rank with a tact befitting equals. The parity on whose basis alone the authority of the better argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy and in the end carry the day meant, in the thought of the day, the parity of ‘common humanity.'”¹¹ “The coffee house not merely made access to the relevant circles less formal and easier; it embraced the wider strata of the middle class, including craftsmen and shopkeepers. Ned Ward reports that the ‘wealthy shopkeeper’ visited the coffee house several times a day, and this held true for the poor one as well.”¹² “In the salon the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; ‘opinion’ became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence. […] There was scarcely a great writer in the eighteenth century who would not have first submitted his essential ideas for discussion in such discourse, in lectures before the académies and especially in the salons.”¹³ In this new environment characterized by inclusiveness and free expression among equals, the common concerns of the public–which were once the exclusive domain of church and state authorities–became accessible and debatable by the public itself.¹⁴

The evolution of the public sphere was led by Great Britain in the seventeenth century, and was later followed by much of continental Europe. With the Licensing Act of 1695, the “elimination of the institution of censorship marked a new stage in the development of the public sphere. It made the influx of rational-critical arguments into the press possible and allowed the latter to evolve into an instrument with whose aid political decisions could be brought before the new forum of the public.”¹⁵ Around the same time, “the first cabinet government marked a new stage in the development of Parliament. It was a first step along the long path toward the parliamentiarization of state authority that led ultimately to the point at which the public active in the political realm established itself as an organ of the state.”¹⁶ The more active role of the public in governance, in terms of critical public debate, “took the form of a permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition. […] The opposition, as the party of the country, always appeared to be in the right versus the party of the court corrupted by ‘influence.’ From the early part of the eighteenth century on, it became usual to distinguish what was then called ‘the sense of the people’ from the official election results. […] The ‘sense of the people,’ ‘the common voice,’ ‘the general cry of the people,’ and finally ‘the public spirit’ denoted from this time onward an entity to which the opposition could appeal”.¹⁷ “Public debate was supposed to transform voluntas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all.”¹⁸

This was the high point of the public sphere, in Habermas’ view. Of particular note is the fact that, at this point in time, the “rational-critical debate of private people in the salons, clubs, and reading societies was not directly subject to the cycle of production and consumption, that is, to the dictates of life’s necessities. Even in its merely literary form (of self-elucidation of the novel experiences of subjectivity) it possessed instead a ‘political’ character in the Greek sense of being emancipated from the constraints of survival requirements.” It was pure, so to speak. It was also non-instrumental, in the sense that–although many of the topics debated would have been practical–the debate itself existed for its own sake. But, like all truly great points in history, it was not to last. “The identification of the property owner with the natural person,[¹⁹] with the human being as such, presupposed a separation inside the private realm between, on the one hand, affairs that private people pursued individually […] and on the other hand, the sort of interaction that united private people into a public. But as soon as and to the degree that the public sphere […] spread into the realm of consumption, this threshold became levelled. So-called leisure behavior, once it had become part of the cycle of production and consumption, was already apolitical, if for no other reason than its incapacity to constitute a world emancipated from the immediate constraints of survival needs. […] When the laws of the market governing the sphere of commodity exchange and of social labor also pervaded the sphere reserved for private people as a public, rational-critical debate had a tendency to be replaced by consumption”.²⁰ What this means today is that our relationships with friends and family are more likely to be characterized by consumer activities than informed rational-critical debate.

In other words, the “public sphere in the world of letters was replaced by the pseudo-public or sham-private world of culture consumption.”²¹ “Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the institutions that until then had ensured the coherence of the public as a critically-debating entity have been weakened.”²² “Today, their place is taken by the popular advertiser-financed illustrated magazines distributed by subscriber services–themselves witness to a culture that no longer trusts the power of the printed word, their official goal of raising the level of book sales notwithstanding.”²³ “In the course of our century, the bourgeois forms of sociability have found substitutes that have one tendency in common despite their regional and national diversity: abstinence from literary and political debate. On the new model the convivial discussion among individuals gave way to more or less noncommittal group activities. […] The characteristic relationship of a privacy oriented toward an audience was also no longer present when people went to the movies together, listened to the radio, or watched TV. The communication of the public that debated critically about culture remained dependent on reading pursued in the closed-off privacy of the home. The leisure activities of the culture-consuming public, on the contrary, themselves take place within a social climate, and they do not require any further discussions.”²⁴ As public rational-critical debate has receded, it has been replaced by consumption activities that–while they are social in nature–require no cultivated appreciation of culture and thus eliminate the need to be educated and informed. Rational-critical debate in public has given way to the lifestyle enclave.

Yet so-called rational-critical discussion or debate has not altogether disappeared; rather, it has been transformed. In the twentieth century, so-called “debates were formally organized and at the same time compartmentalized as an element of adult education. Religious academies, political forums, and literary organizations owe their existence to the critical review of a culture worthy of discussion and in need of commentary; radio stations, publishers, and associations have turned the staging of panel discussions into a flourishing secondary business. Thus, discussion seems to be carefully cultivated and there seems to be no barrier to its proliferation. But surreptitiously it has changed in a specific way: it assumes the form of a consumer item. To be sure, at one time the commercialization of cultural goods had been the precondition for rational-critical debate; but it was itself in principle excluded from the exchange relationships of the market and remained the center of exactly that sphere in which property-owning private people would meet as ‘human beings’ and only as such. Put bluntly: you had to pay for books, theater, concert, and museum, but not for the conversation about what you had read, heard, and seen and what you might completely absorb through this conversation. Today the conversation itself is administered. Professional dialogues from the podium, panel discussions, and round table shows–the rational debate of private people becomes one of the production numbers of the stars in radio and television, a salable package ready for the box office; it assumes commodity form even at ‘conferences’ where anyone can ‘participate.’ Discussion, now a ‘business,’ becomes formalized; the presentation of positions and counterpositions is bound to certain prearranged rules of the game; consensus about the subject matter is made largely superfluous by that concerning form. What can be posed as a problem is defined as a question of etiquette; conflicts, once fought out in public polemics, are demoted to the level of personal incompatibilities. Critical debate arranged in this manner certainly fulfills important social-psychological functions, especially that of a tranquilizing substitute for action”.²⁵

To briefly summarize, while at one time the precondition for rational-critical debate in the public sphere was a certain amount of education–of deep reading and reflection, the exchange of letters, public dialog and debate with family, friends, acquaintances and strangers–the “educational precondition” has now come to be prepackaged. In other words the very debates that continue to take place today are largely fueled–not by the same sort of deep reading and reflection or the exchange of letters and personal dialog–but by opinions that have been ready-made to consume.²⁶ And the “consumption” (or adoption) of such opinions takes place within the privacy of ourselves. Where before, the formation of an opinion took place via the public sphere of rational-critical debate during episodic spans of leisure. Today, our leisure moments are spent watching sports or playing board games with each other. Once upon a time it was said that “iron sharpens iron”, now the iron is for sale–and we are told it is already sharp.²⁷

Habermas continues, to “the degree that culture became a commodity not only in form but also in content, it was emptied of elements whose appreciation required a certain amount of training–whereby the ‘accomplished’ appropriation once again heightened the appreciative ability itself. It was not merely standardization as such that established an inverse relationship between the commercialization of cultural goods and their complexity, but that special preparation of products that made them consumption-ready, which is to say, guaranteed an enjoyment without being tied to stringent presuppositions. Of course, such enjoyment is also entirely inconsequential. Serious involvement with culture produces facility, while the consumption of mass culture leaves no lasting trace; it affords a kind of experience which is not cumulative but regressive.”²⁸ In a word, it is hollow. Thus, it becomes clear “how the social-psychological criterion of a culture of consumers, namely, noncumulative experience, goes together with the sociological criterion of a destruction of the public sphere.”²⁹ At the high point of the bourgeois public sphere, “‘people’ were brought up to the level of culture; culture was not lowered to that of the masses.”³⁰ Perhaps the iron for sale isn’t that sharp after all?

The destruction of the public sphere can be further observed in the ratchet-effect that the consumer mentality³¹ has had on both the content and the dissemination of the news. “Public affairs, social problems, economic matters, education, and health–according to a categorization suggested by American authors, precisely the ‘delayed reward news’–are not only pushed into the background by ‘immediate reward news’ (comics, corruption, accidents, disasters, sports, recreation, social events, and human interests) but, as the characteristic label already indicates, are also actually read less and more rarely. In the end the news generally assumes some sort of guise and is made to resemble a narrative from its format down to stylistic detail (news stories); the rigorous distinction between fact and fiction is ever more frequently abandoned. News and reports and even editorial opinions are dressed up with all the accoutrements of entertainment literature, whereas on the other hand the belletrist contributions aim for the strictly ‘realistic’ reduplication of reality ‘as it is’ on the level of cliches and thus, in turn, erase the line between fiction and report.”³² “What in this way only intimates itself in the daily press has progressed further in the newer media. The integration of the once separate domains of journalism and literature, that is to say, of information and rational-critical argument on the one side and of belles lettres on the other, brings about a peculiar shifting of reality–even a conflation of different levels of reality. Under the common denominator of so-called human interest emerges the mixtum compositum of a pleasant and at the same time convenient subject for entertainment that, instead of doing justice to reality, has a tendency to present a substitute more palatable for consumption and more likely to give rise to an impersonal indulgence in stimulating relaxation than to a public use of reason.”³³ This latter quote, it seems to me, is a rather complicated way of saying that the “newer media”, or mass media, is characterized both by ambiguity and shallowness. Hardly the preconditions for rational-critical public debate. Thus, Habermas concludes, the “world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only.”³⁴ Still this world–and it is in many ways the world we occupy today–exercises enormous power.

“Radio, film, and television by degrees reduce to a minimum the distance that a reader is forced to maintain toward the printed letter–a distance that required the privacy of the appropriation as much as it made possible the publicity of a rational-critical exchange about what had been read. With the arrival of the new media the form of communication as such has changed; they have had an impact, therefore, more penetrating (in the strict sense of the word) than was ever possible for the press.”³⁵ The “penetration” that Habermas is talking about, is, it seems to me, demonstrated by the way that radio, film, and television “feed” information to us. In this way, we are in large part passive recipients of the information we are exposed to. While the printed word requires a certain amount of “activeness” on our part–reading allows us to maintain a “distance” from it in the way we attempt to comprehend and understand it; we pause, reflect, consider, reconsider–the passivity associated with the “new media” (disseminated in “real time”) eliminates the “distance” that allows us to reflect. It is always “in our face”, so to speak. Thus, within such a medium “active thought” is greatly inhibited, and if we are not aware of it, can be eliminated altogether. “Under the pressure of the ‘Don’t talk back!’ the conduct of the public assumes a different form. In comparison with printed communications the programs sent by the new media curtail the reactions of their recipients in a peculiar way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under “tutelage,” which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to disagree. The critical discussion […] tends to give way to ‘exchanges about tastes and preferences’ between consumers–even the talk about what is consumed, ‘the examination of tastes,’ becomes a part of consumption itself.”³⁶ It should go without saying that, with the advent of the internet, the “new media” has achieved a new crucible of power and influence.

Indeed, the world of the mass media has led to a situation in which “the private activities of reading novels and writing letters as a precondition for participation in the public sphere of the world of letters [have been largely] suspended. Concerning the conduct of the bourgeois reading public it may be considered an established fact that the frequency of book reading in the expanded public of the mass media has been decreasing rapidly. The custom of exchanging personal letters appears to have disappeared to at least the same extent. It is replaced in many ways by the participation in the letter exchanges carried on by the editors of newspaper and periodicals and by radio and television stations with their readership. In general, the mass media recommended themselves as addressees of personal needs and difficulties, as authorities for advice on the problems of life.”³⁷ Again, the historical preconditions of genuine rational-critical debate–deep reading and reflection, the exchange of letters, dialog, and debate–have been replaced by a buffet of ready-made opinions furnished at the table of the mass media.³⁸ “This phenomenon once more sums up the disintegration of the public sphere in the world of letters. The sounding board of an educated stratum tutored in the public use of reason has been shattered; the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical. Consequently, it completely lacks the form of communication specific to a public.”³⁹

Thus, the transformation of the public sphere of rational-critical debate into a commodity–especially with the emergence of the internet in general and social media in particular–has led to a situation in which opinions are “consumed”. Consumed, in the sense that they are adopted, taken in and made one’s own. The ready-made quality and scope of the commodification of critical debate ensures that–like many documentary films–the arguments offered are structured in such a way that contradictory evidence or opposing views remain unacknowledged and unheard.⁴⁰ In other words, they appeal directly to one’s theoretical framework. Similar to the experience of dining at a buffet–in which I choose to eat only what I desire from a wide range of options–the vast “public sphere” of commodified opinion offers exactly what I need to reinforce my theoretical framework and quiet the unquiet within. All else may be safely ignored. It, therefore, provides the ideal environment for the isolated self. At the historic apex of the public sphere of rational-critical debate, active debate was fueled by a multiplicity of educational and cultural preconditions. Furthermore, active debate was itself the precondition of forming an educated opinion. Now, the opinion takes the form of a consumer item. And we fool ourselves again and again into believing that by adopting it we are educated and informed. Inevitably, we encounter others whose views differ from our own. But because we have been seduced by opinions in the form of commodities, we are ill-equipped to engage in genuine rational-critical debate. We seemingly have no alternative but to find refuge in the company of others (people, media, etc.) whose views are the same as our own. But in a world where most of our views have been provided for us in the form of ready-made opinions, how, in fact, do we know that the views we have adopted are actually our own?

Notes:

1. See, for example, my previous essay, The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part I.

2. Here I refer to the partitioning of society into like-minded groups that are inherently suspicious of each other. Groups of “isolated selves” brought together by their shared isolation and common viewpoints.

3. I mean the general conditions of modernity, such as individualism, capitalism, et al., but also contemporary events, such as those witnessed in 2020 and early 2021.

4. I am speaking of this development in western Europe during the early modern period.

5. Like the written word itself, printing and the printed word seem to first be utilized for commercial purposes. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p 15.

6. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p 46.

7. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

8. Ibid, p 27.

9. Ibid, p 37.

10. Ibid, p 85.

11. Ibid, p 36.

12. Ibid, p 33.

13. Ibid, p 34.

14. Ibid, p 36. Although Habermas does not here concern himself with America, this emerging public sphere of rational-critical debate in Europe would appear to be equally applicable to the British colonies in America. Differences notwithstanding, the precondition for the American founding and independence would seem to require such a state of affairs. 

15. Ibid, p 58.

16. Ibid, p 59.

17. This in many ways mirrors the situation in contemporary America. Of course, election results were “taken to provide an approximate measure” of the sense of the people. The concept of “the sense of the people” is an early instantiation of what will become known as public opinion. The term public opinion was not introduced into Parliament until 1792. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p 64-65.

18. Ibid, p 83.

19. Note that this situation would have excluded many, most notably the poorest in society as well as slaves. In this sense, there has never been a truly public sphere, since it has never had–and perhaps never will have–universal access. This may be possible in small-scale societies, but it seems unclear how such a thing could develop in large ones.

20. Ibid, p 160-161.

21. Ibid, p 160. See also “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. 

22. Ibid, p 162. Among many, perhaps the most notable is the family. “For along with its functions in capital formation the family increasingly lost also the functions of upbringing and education, protection, care, and guidance–indeed, of the transmission of elementary tradition and frameworks of orientation. […] To a greater extent individual family members are now socialized by extrafamilial authorities, by society directly.”

23. Ibid, p 163. I would like to point out that The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in 1962. This is true even more so today, albeit in more diverse forms.

24. Ibid, p 163.

25. Ibid, p 166. Emphasis added.

26. In other words what we believe to be our own opinions are merely those that have been fed to us. We did not arrive at them through continued study or critical debate with others–we read a news article and agreed with it. We then parrot the position when the opportunity presents itself–because we feel we should have an opinion on almost everything. But if we are put to the question by someone who is informed and educated on the topic, we quickly realize our folly. We cannot give comprehensive reasons for our position, we don’t know them. Our intellectual life is fueled by a kind of intellectual fast-food. We can either admit to ourselves (and others) that we don’t know what we’re talking about, or we can dig in our heels and succumb to our own pride. The latter is the path of the isolated self.

27. See Proverbs 27:17. Depending on the translation you will find, among others: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” (New International Version.) “People learn from one another, just as iron sharpens iron.” (Good News Bible.) “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” (King James Version.)

28. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p 166.

29. Ibid, p 167. It is important to understand that Habermas‘ understanding of the public sphere is very much classical. Although today we engage in consumer activities publicly, Habermas does not seem to view this as characteristic of a genuine public sphere. See also, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.

30. Ibid, p 166.

31. I touched upon consumer culture in my essay, An Introduction to Consumer Society.

32. Ibid, p 170. As I will show in my next essay, cliches are very much a form of sociological propaganda.

33. Ibid, p 170.

34. Ibid, p 171.

35. Ibid, p 170.

36. Ibid, p 171.

37. Ibid, p 172.

38. Although genuine rational-critical debate continues to exist today in many places, it has become relatively rare among the vast majority of people. This would appear to be bound up not only with specialization but also the general phenomenon that people seem to have less and less time and ability to critically engage with each other. See also my essays, A Sketch of The Workaday World and An Introduction to Consumer Society.

39. Ibid, p 175.

40. Contradictory evidence or viewpoints, therefore, do not exist. To be sure, this is not always the case. But it does hold in general and for the most part.

In a previous essay, I offered some thoughts on the state of contemporary debate in America. At that time, debates over public health and economics (specifically in light of the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic) and systemic racism were front and center. Add to these the controversies over the 2020 U.S. presidential election and the events of January 6th in Washington D.C., and it is perhaps unsurprising that 2021 has followed the trajectory of 2020.¹ As far as the struggle to communicate is concerned, the problem has become even more pronounced and noticeable. In many ways, the breakdowns in communication over the past year have progressed. Progressed, in the sense that they have reached a new stage of development–one that is perhaps far more dangerous than many people realize. Such failures in communication lead to a peculiar form of isolation, one that is simultaneously beholden to and a consequence of various forms of propaganda and factionalism. For reasons which will become apparent, this essay is more or less an informal continuation of my previous essay, Theoretical Frameworks and the Limits of Communication. As before, this is an initial and undeveloped attempt to shed light on a situation that is in many ways unintelligible.

The negative progress of much contemporary debate (and of communication more generally) can be summed up in the following way. What often begins as a (1) challenge or struggle to communicate devolves into a (2) breakdown; when a breakdown in communication is sustained over time it becomes a (3) communication failure.² Let me try to describe each stage in this process. A struggle to communicate is exactly what it sounds like, and is characterized by all of the challenges I spoke of in my essay, Theoretical Frameworks and the Limits of Communication. A breakdown in communication occurs when interlocutors realize they are at odds and therefore cease to communicate.³ Breakdowns in communication become failures when ceased communication becomes the norm, and is sustained indefinitely. The upshot of communication failures is that over time people interact less and less with those whose views differ from their own. This, in turn, results in a crystallization (or solidification) of one’s theoretical framework.⁴ Interactions take on a character or reinforcement; those not sharing one’s views become (in practice) barbarians. This process provides a context for understanding what I am calling the isolated self.

The isolated self describes a person whose theoretical frameworks have become rigid, the lens they view the world through is largely fixed, inflexible. As such, they are unable to think or see beyond their current structure of belief; their opinions are settled, they no longer question themselves; new or novel information is interpreted in light of past understandings.⁵ As such, changes in viewpoints or interpretations become (in a practical sense) impossible. Put differently, they live within intellectual walls of their own understanding; their view of the world is the correct or real one; anyone differing from them is categorically wrong. This categorization of others can take various forms, such as thinking of others as not merely ignorant or misled, but even evil–thereby representing forces that must be defeated or even destroyed (sometimes at any cost).⁶ This, which I hope is clear, is a great danger to society.⁷ And the fact that increasing numbers of people appear to be captured (to some degree) by this description is indeed alarming.⁸

As I alluded above, because the isolated self seeks only to interact with those whose views coincide with their own, the information they associate with (in the form of people, media, et al.) becomes characterized by a cycle of reinforcement in which the ever-growing certainty of those who “know the truth” comes to take on a life of its own. Independent factions emerge, each seeking to buffer themselves from those not holding the correct viewpoints. Groups adopting incorrect views come to be understood as stupid, misled, brainwashed, corrupt, even evil or demonic. Society becomes increasingly partitioned. The trenches dividing individuals and groups become deeper; the psychological distance between them, wider; self-questioning atrophies, certainty soars. Bonds of family or friendship may serve to limit this to some extent, but often such bonds remain powerless as family members and friends become estranged.⁹ This buffering between individuals and groups exacerbates the problem further. And since resolving a multifaceted societal communication failure presupposes the ability to actually communicate, the gravity of the situation becomes all the more apparent. As Charles Taylor has said, “Idolatry breeds violence.”¹⁰

The isolated self also seems to be trapped in an endless cycle of self-affirmation. When individuals only associate with those (people, media, etc.) whose views coincide with their own, they lose the great benefit of having their views challenged. In other words, if I only associate with those whom I agree with, there remains no active challenges my theoretical framework. Over time, the structure of my beliefs (theoretical framework) will harden, become rigid, inflexible. I will become unable to comprehend what does not align with them. After this happens, if and when I encounter challenges to my beliefs, I will interpret such things through the fixed lens of my theoretical framework.¹¹ I become closed off, impenetrable from those who are different from me. But my awareness of others different from myself fuels my psychological need for affirmation and reinforcement. I become anxious; I must prove to myself that I’m right. So I seek out and associate with those (people, media, etc.) that reinforce what I already believe, thereby providing the assurance of my own purity and righteousness. Thus, the cyclical nature of the isolated self. Over time, groups emerge comprised of those who “know the truth”. Sometimes they meet.¹²

A book could easily be written trying to explain how this situation has emerged. Still, in what follows I will attempt to do so in some small way (though I expect multiple essays will be needed before I am done). In so doing I will draw mainly upon the work of Erich Fromm, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Ellul.

Begin with the fact that modern homo sapiens experience more stress, anxiety, and isolation than perhaps ever before in history. Erich Fromm summarizes these changes in his book, Escape From Freedom (1941). “The breakdown of the medieval system of feudal society had one main significance for all classes of society: the individual was left alone and isolated. […] Man was deprived of the security he had enjoyed, of the unquestionable feeling of belonging, and he was torn loose from the world which had satisfied his quest for security both economically and spiritually. He felt alone and anxious. But he was also free to act and to think independently, to become his own master and do with his life as he could–not as he was told to do.”¹³ This, in Fromm’s view (which was no doubt influenced by Weber), sprang from the doctrines of Protestantism that were developed in the wake of the Reformation, paving the way for man’s role in the modern industrial system. “What Protestantism had started to do in freeing man spiritually, capitalism continued to do mentally, socially, and politically.”¹⁴ “In one word, capitalism not only freed man from traditional bonds, but it also contributed tremendously to the increasing of positive freedom, to the growth of an active, critical, responsible self. However, while this was one effect capitalism had on the process of growing freedom, at the same time it made the individual more alone and isolated and imbued him with a feeling of insignificance and powerlessness.”¹⁵

“In contrast to the feudal system of the Middle Ages under which everybody had a fixed place in an ordered and transparent social system, capitalistic economy put the individual entirely on his own feet. What he did, how he did it, whether he succeeded or whether he failed, was entirely his own affair. That this principle furthered the process of individualization is obvious and is always mentioned as an important item on the credit side of modern culture. But in furthering ‘freedom from,’ this principle helped to sever all ties between one individual and the other and thereby isolated and separated the individual from his fellow men. This development had been prepared by the teachings of the Reformation. In the Catholic Church the relationship of the individual to God had been based on membership in the Church. The Church was the link between him and God, thus on the hand restricting his individuality, but on the other hand letting him face God as an integral part of a group. Protestantism made the individual face God alone. […] The individual facing God’s might alone could not help feeling crushed and seeking salvation in complete submission. Psychologically this spiritual individualism is not too different from the economic individualism. In both instances the individual is completely alone and in his isolation faces the superior power, be it of God, of competitors, or of impersonal economic forces. The individualistic relationship to God was the psychological preparation for the individualistic character of man’s secular activities.”¹⁶

Historically, economic activity had been understood as a means to an end, whether that end was basic survival or the flourishing one’s family, town, etc.¹⁷ With the rise of capitalism, economic activity becomes–for the first time in history–an end in itself. “In the medieval system capital was the servant of man, but in the modern system it became his master. In the medieval world economic activities were the means to an end; the end was life itself, or–as the Catholic Church understood it–the spiritual salvation of man. Economic activities are necessary, even riches can serve God’s purposes, but all external activity has only significance and dignity as far as it furthers the aims of life. Economic activity and the wish for gain for its own sake appeared as irrational to the medieval thinker as their absence appears to modern thought. In capitalism economic activity, success, material gains, become ends in themselves. It becomes man’s fate to contribute to the growth of the economic system, to amass capital, not for purposes of his own happiness or salvation, but as an end in itself. Man became a cog in the vast economic machine–an important one if he had much capital, an insignificant one if he had none–but always a cog to serve a purpose outside of himself.”¹⁸ Although Fromm admits that the achievements of the modern world would have been impossible without this process, he does not ignore its cost. “This principle of accumulating capital instead of using it for consumption is the premise of the grandiose achievements of our modern industrial system. […] Yet, while the principle of work of the sake of the accumulation of capital objectively is of enormous value for the progress of mankind, subjectively it has made man work for extrapersonal ends, made him a servant to the very machine he built, and thereby has given him a feeling of personal insignificance and powerlessness.”¹⁹ “Economic crises, unemployment, war, govern man’s fate. Man has built his world; he has built factories and houses, he produces cars and clothes, he grows grain and fruit. But he has become estranged from the product of his own hands, he is not really the master any more of the world he has built; on the contrary, this man-made world has become his master, before whom he bows down, whom he tries to placate or manipulate as best he can. The work of his own hands has become his God. He seems to be driven by self-interest, but in reality his total self with all its concrete potentialities has become an instrument for the purposes of the very machine his hands have built. He keeps up the illusion of being the center of the world, and yet he is pervaded by an intense sense of insignificance and powerlessness which his ancestors once consciously felt toward God.”²⁰

The unprecedented psychological state of modern humans is corroborated by others, including Jacques Ellul.²¹ In his book Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965), Ellul speaks of modern man’s peculiar psychology. “Above all he is a victim of emptiness–he is a man devoid of meaning. He is very busy, but he is emotionally empty, open to all entreaties and in search of only one thing–something to fill his inner void. To fill this void he goes to the movies–only a temporary remedy. He seeks some deeper and more fulfilling attraction. He is available, and ready to listen[.] He is the lonely man […], and the larger the crowd in which he lives, the more isolated he is. Despite the pleasure he might derive from his solitude, he suffers deeply from it. He feels the most violent need to be re-integrated into a community, to have a setting, to experience ideological and affective communication.”²² Both From and Ellul agree that this condition stems in large part from the working conditions of the modern economic order, what Max Weber has called the “iron cage”. “[I]n contrast to a medieval artisan the modern manufacturer is not primarily interested in what he produces; he produces essentially in order to make a profit from his capital investment, and what he produces depends essentially on the market which promises that the investment of capital in a certain branch will prove to be profitable.”²³

More problematic still is the instrumental stance that has come to permeate nearly every sphere of life, from working conditions to personal relationships.²⁴ “Modern man’s feeling of isolation and powerlessness is increased still further by the character which all his human relationships have assumed. The concrete relationship of one individual to another has lost its direct and human character and has assumed a spirit of manipulation and instrumentality. […] Not only the economic, but also the personal relations between men have this character of alienation; instead of relations between human beings, they assume the character of relations between things. But perhaps the most important and the most devastating instance of this spirit of instrumentality and alienation is the individual’s relationship to his own self. Man does not only sell commodities, he sells himself and feels himself to be a commodity. […] As with any other commodity it is the market which decides the value of […] human qualities, yes, even their very existence. If there is no use for the qualities a person offers, he has none; just as an unsalable commodity is valueless though it might have its use value. Thus, the self-confidence, the ‘feeling of self,’ is merely an indication of what others think of the person. It is not he who is convinced of his value regardless of his popularity and his success on the market. If he is sought after, he is somebody; if he is not popular, he is simply nobody.”²⁵

Both Fromm and Ellul maintain that this situation is a precondition for individuals to seek refuge and psychological security in various ways. Fromm thinks the outlets of authoritarianism, destruction, and conformity (cultural automatization) are clear paths. Ellul sees hurling oneself into the pseudo-world of propaganda as the fundamental and most common response.²⁶ I want to suggest that this state of stress, anxiety, and isolation that is unique to the modern epoch has created an environment ideally suited to the emergence of what I have called the isolated self. The constant pace of change, technological advancement, revolutions in social norms, threats of war, unemployment, and a multiplicity of other things, place an enormous amount of pressure on the individual. Add to this the fiery cocktail of 2020 and 2021, and it resonates to an even greater degree. The more uncertain the world appears, the stronger it seems is the desire for certainty and security. One way this is accomplished is through factionalism and tribalism; the spontaneous division of society into groups on the basis of shared theoretical frameworks and suspicions of others. The isolated self must in every way possible seek to quiet the unquiet within.

Note: In continuing I will consider the transformation of the public sphere of rational-critical debate as well as the emergence of sociological propaganda.

Notes:

1. In this essay I (again) maintain my precedent of not weighing in on current events. Since apparent neutrality can easily be mistaken for cowardice, I do feel I owe a few words. In my view, the problems discussed in this essay are far deeper and more complex than a simple accounting of current events. In other words, what I say here does not depend on any specific event that has happened this or last year. If the main events of the past twelve months had not occurred it would not affect my thoughts in this essay (though, in fairness, I also may not have been compelled to write it). Rather, the events of the recent past simply help make what I am saying more intelligible. So in many ways what I think about this or that occurrence in the country is irrelevant, at least insofar as this essay is concerned. But I will say this: When it comes to contemporary debates in politics and many other things I more often than not adopt the position of an interested observer. As events unfold I try to resist the urge to weigh in. This probably stems from my understanding of the nature of empirical claims. Specifically that they are almost always incomplete; more information is needed. Thus, my own approach to current events is generally one of caution and skepticism. The knee-jerk reaction of affirming whatever reinforces one’s theoretical framework is, I think, the fundamental problem to begin with.

2. To be clear, this negative progression or devolution in communication in terms of stages is simply a way I have come up with to think about the nature of contemporary debate. It is also a tool to help explain the bigger picture of this essay. As far as I know, these concepts are being used in a novel sense, and therefore any faults or conceptual problems that may be associated with them are entirely my own.

3. Note that at the very moment when communication could prove fruitful (as between people holding differing viewpoints) and the potential for a common understanding (in the sense of actually understanding one’s interlocutor) could be achieved–communication ceases! In a way, this makes no difference, since the participants may believe they do understand each other–they simply disagree and no longer wish to discuss the matter. This is perfectly acceptable. The danger, however, is when a temporary breakdown becomes permanent. Ideally, communication should oscillate ad infinitum between the struggle to understand and actual understanding. There will always be challenges to communicate; the goal, it seems to me, should be overcoming them in a way most conducive to the common good. Burning bridges is seldom a good idea.

4. If I shun those whose views differ from my own, I will never encounter new ideas; my perspectives and understandings will never be challenged. Thus, my views will become inflexible and entrenched.

5. What I mean here is that the basic worldview of such people cannot be questioned; all evidence is interpreted in light of a fixed narrative. Anything that challenges the narrative is thus re-imagined and reinterpreted. We could perhaps refer to such a narrative as a “master narrative” in the sense that it seems to direct all facts and information encountered by the isolated self. It is worth noting that the term “narrative” or “master narrative” is justhttps://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDOJ4l9rP38npUFW8UNEQjUn https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDN9pbuK-jdZDETXPGaG87AR

Our modern lives have become increasingly characterized by consumption. This is not to say that we merely aspire to consume, but that a life of consuming has itself (to varying degrees) become necessary in contemporary Western society.¹ Indeed, the everyday consumption of products and services has gained a prominence hitherto unknown. No sooner are the objects of our desire obtained, before others, new and unforeseen, present themselves. The ends of consumer society lure us onward and “upward”, into a sort of Sisyphean cycle.² In previous essays I have mentioned consumer society, but have yet failed to offer a more comprehensive explanation of what I mean. What exactly I mean, as well as some account of both how it developed and some of its effects, is what I hope to begin exploring in this essay.³

Given the multifariousness of “consumer society”, let me begin by offering a rough definition.⁴ Broadly, I refer to “the enhanced societal importance of the purchase of commodities and their cultural meanings and significance”. This implies a “comparatively greater role for consumption–in contrast with work and employment, religion, family, investment, or politics–in determining economic organization, cultural institutions, and personal motivations and experience.”⁵ Put simply, buying stuff–goods and services–has become a big part of our lives. Aspiration and necessity are two aspects of this phenomenon which I alluded to above. On the one hand, we desire things, on the other hand, we need them. In order to live comfortably, we need food, a place to live, and a great many other things.⁶ But we also want–desire–these things, as well as many others besides. There is a kind of relationship of entailment existing between consumer society and what I have called the workaday world, since it seems one cannot exist without the other. In order to have the things we need, we must procure an income. And to this end, the majority of our time and effort is usually spent. Simultaneously, what allows such activity to produce an income is the fact that it is economically productive, i.e., it contributes to the production of goods or services in some way–things which are then sold and, in turn, consumed. Thus, the workaday world and consumer society are two sides of the same coin existing within the human world. Each is a reinforcing aspect of the same cyclic system.

The origins of this aspect of the modern world are complex, involving not merely economic but also social and cultural, as well as psychological, considerations. I have explored some of this already.⁷ Consider first “the rational and methodical reorganization of life, structured around the idea of a vocation or calling”.⁸ In the wake of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, we have seen that the idea of a calling–one’s task as given by God–became the core organizing principle in the practical life of large numbers of people. Such a thing is “a duty, an obligation” and becomes “imbued with an imperative of success”.⁹ As Max Weber observed, this amounted to “attaching religious significance to daily work” for the first time in history.¹⁰ This imperative to succeed was, at first, theological; it was bound up with fulfilling God’s will, bringing His purposes into being. Built-in to the imperative of success is the imperative of improvement or innovation.¹¹ The endless striving for more–not in the sense of unrestrained consumption, for this was clearly condemned at the time¹²–but for more means. Means to achieve or fulfill one’s divinely sanctioned vocation or calling. i.e., The means to increase production and profit.

Over time, this theological imperative became increasingly secular, as the (secularized) concept of success gradually displaced the (theological) concept of a vocation or calling.¹³ “Over the course of centuries–centuries of continued work, improvement, profit, accumulation, investment, reinvestment, scientific-, industrial-, and technological revolutions, and many others–the human world was added to, expanded upon, and finally, transformed.”¹⁴ As Max Weber has said, “to the extent that asceticism moved out of the monastic cell and was carried over into the life of work in a vocational calling, and then commenced to rule over this-worldly morality, it helped to do its part to build the mighty cosmos of the modern economic order.”¹⁵

Notice, there is a relationship of logical entailment between the drive to succeed and the drive to innovate or improve. The continuous pursuit of success requires the continuous pursuit of innovation and improvement.¹⁶ This is part of the nature of competition, and economic interests are no exception to this. It is perhaps within the sphere of technology that this is most visible. For technology seems to set the limits–not only on what may be defined as a natural resource, and to what extent such resources can be used–but also on the nature of consumer demand itself.¹⁷ The role technology plays in consumer society has been clearly explained by the American economist Paul Zane Pilzer. “The way in which technology defines human need–and hence determines the nature of consumer demand–is quite straightforward. By providing us with new products and processes, advancing technology invariably induces change in our basic behavior–changes that are sometimes so fundamental that before very long we cannot imagine living any other way. The new product or process on which our way of living depends thus becomes essential to maintaining our way of life. In other words, it assumes the status of a necessity–something that we need in order to live the way we want.”¹⁸

The continual striving to succeed (i.e., for increased production and profit) has, in the form of endless technological improvement and innovation, has led to a world of ever-expanding goods and services–without limit. With the dramatic expansion of the Economic sphere, a new mode of life was brought into being. One characterized by production, acquisition, and consumption, with an increasing emphasis on the latter. “To the extent that asceticism undertook to transform and influence the world, the world’s material goods acquired an increasing and, in the end, inescapable power over people–as never before in history.”¹⁹ The “inescapable power” that material goods and services have come exercise over people is especially clear in the cases of aspiration (desire or want) and necessity. As the “floor of necessity” has steadily risen, new goods and services have emerged as essential, as time passes even becoming unthinkable to forgo. At the same time, the “ceiling of limitation” for new goods and services has been effectively removed. “The classic example of this sort of self-justifying innovation is the automobile. When it was first introduced, the automobile was considered to be a luxury–an expensive toy that men of means bought mainly to take their families for Sunday drives in the country. Over time, however, and not very much time at that, as mass production made car ownership practical for an increasingly wide public, people’s notions of distance and mobility changed profoundly. Before long, a sizable chunk of the population had actually moved to the country–or at least to that convenient strip of it that we now call suburbia–and suddenly the car was a necessity.”²⁰ “So it is that by creating new products that soon become the basis of an entirely new way of life, technology creates needs that did not exist before.”²¹

This takes us beyond what the British economist John Maynard Keynes thought about human needs and the nature of economic demand. Famously, Keynes was concerned that increasing affluence would, in the long run, reduce demand and even work against society’s economic stability.²² The richer people became, Keynes thought, the smaller the proportion of their income would be spent. Yet it now seems clear that the nature of demand is not so limited. As John Kenneth Galbraith has observed, “Once a society has provided itself with food, clothing, and shelter […] its members begin to desire other things.”²³ One reason for this has been the distinction between quality demand and quantity demand. “Quantity demand, […] is the consumer’s basic desire for more of what he or she already has: more food, a bigger house, an extra suit of clothing. […] If quantity demand can be thought of as the consumer’s demand for a larger supply of of an existing […] product, quality demand reflects the appetite for a different kind of product. […] When you have all the food, clothing, and TVs you need–as most Americans do today–you start wanting better food, better clothing, and better TVs. To put it another way, the typical middle-class American couple would probably have little if any interest in buying a third Toyota to add to the two they already own. Far more likely, they would get rid of one of the Toyotas and upgrade to a BMW. Moreover, this flip in the nature of demand is not one-way. For as the consumer begins to satisfy his or her desire for higher quality, quantity demand once again begins to work its magic. Now the consumer wants two BMWs […], the distinction we traditionally make between what we call luxuries and necessities is entirely illusory, for as we have seen, technology is constantly transforming the former into the latter.”²⁴

Still more perceptive is Pilzer’s observation that new products tend to perpetuate consumption. “Indeed, many of the new products created by technology are by definition incapable of satiating the demand they create, for they are themselves […] demand machines that generate endless loops of continuing consumer need. For example, when a merchant sells a consumer a new Sony Walkman for $50, he is in fact creating far more demand than he is satisfying–in this case a continuing and potentially unlimited need for tape cassettes and batteries.²⁵ That is, by buying the Walkman, the consumer has not completed a process that began when he first perceived his need for the product; rather, he has merely finished the first cycle of a potentially unlimited series of transactions–in the course of which he may well wind up spending far more each month on the accessories than he did on the original item.”²⁶ The same can be said for things that are not particularly new, such as the private home. “While the purchase of a house or apartment may satisfy the consumer’s need for shelter, it also simultaneously generates a wide-ranging series of fresh needs for everything from new furniture to new carpets to new appliances, the acquisition of each in turn creating another round of new demand.”²⁷ “The […] consumer can be thought of as a mountain climber trying to reach the highest peak in an unlimited mountain range in which each mountain he or she climbs turns out to be merely the foothill of another even higher peak.”²⁸

Now, Pilzer does not appear to have been the first person to notice this. Nearly 50 years before Unlimited Wealth was published, James S. Duesenberry wrote that “ours is a society in which one of the principal social goals is a higher standard of living… [This] has great significance for the theory of consumption… the desire to get superior goods takes on a life of its own. It provides a drive to higher expenditure which may even be stronger than that arising out of the needs which are supposed to be satisfied by that expenditure.”²⁹ Furthermore, as Galbraith has observed, because “society sets great store by ability to produce a high standard of living, it evaluates people by the products they possess. The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of a society to produce. The more that is produced, the more that must be owned in order to maintain the appropriate prestige.”³⁰ Pilzer echoes this, writing that what “matters to us in our affluent […] world is not the absolute level of our standard of living, but where it stands in relation to other levels: the levels enjoyed by friends and acquaintances, by people (both real and fictional) whom we see on television, by ourselves at some other point in our life. Moreover, there is a kind of ratchet effect to rising standards of living; our current standard, no matter how superior it may be to the standard we enjoyed last year, is invariably and inevitably the minimum we will accept […], it merely becomes the floor for a whole new array of desires.”³¹

Reactions to this phenomenon are mixed. Pilzer’s view is largely favorable; he sees it as a world of unlimited potential and opportunity, “we have the power to create unlimited wealth, what we can accomplish is limited only by our dreams.”³² Even still, he does admit that given “technology’s apparently unlimited ability to keep pumping out new and better goods, there is not much likelihood that more than a tiny fraction of consumers will ever reach that happy state of equilibrium.”³³ Galbraith is less optimistic. “As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied. This may operate passively. Increases in consumption, the counterpart of increases in production, act by suggestion or emulation to create wants. Expectation rises with attainment. Or producers may proceed actively to create wants through advertising and salesmanship. Wants thus come to depend on output. In technical terms, it can no longer be assumed that welfare is greater at an all-round higher level of production than a lower one. It may be the same. The higher level of production has, merely, a higher level of want creation necessitating a higher level of want satisfaction.”³⁴ The main thrust of this statement by Galbraith is that the process of production creates or kindles the desires necessary to consume. What I take him to be saying is that, very simply, the more there is–the more there is to want. And given what Pilzer has said about the role of technology in creating wants, this seems difficult to deny.

So while the massive expansion of production was fueled by the Protestant work ethic which helped build the “mighty cosmos of the modern economic order”, the number of goods and services available to consume exponentially increased across the globe. This actualized new possibilities latent in the human psyche–the desires for new goods and services that hitherto did not exist. In turn, this became a new floor upon which to stand while grasping for still more goods and services. Ad infinitum. The acquisition of goods appears inexhaustible–if one wants to play that game.³⁵ But it is hard to escape the gravitational pull of consumption; indeed, it is impossible to do so entirely, for we all must live. “Among the many models of the good society, no one has urged the squirrel wheel.”³⁶

A friend tells me that if you take the time to peruse the cereal aisle of a large grocery store, you will discover there are twelve different kinds of Cheerios on the shelves. Twelve. (Woe to the shopper who must make due without their pet cereal!) To what does one turn amidst the chaos of such endless consumption? Here the sunlight of the non-instrumental breaks through, illuminating the ancient view of good qua good. Schopenhauer may have been right after all.

Notes:

1. The aspiration to consume has always existed throughout human history, but in the past was largely limited by historical circumstance, as in the case of fixed social hierarchies, et al. The modern epoch has in many ways lifted the historic limitations of the past, increasing the potential and expanding the scope and scale of goods and services. Thus, increasing the potential for the human aspiration to consume. The ground floor of necessity has risen higher, and the ceilings (or limits) have exponentially increased.

2. There is an allusion of sorts that appears to be linked with the idea of increased consumption. It is this: as our consumption increases, there is a pervasive illusion of progress. Increased consumption is psychically associated with an increased standard of living, of “doing better”. Thus, it is a common mark of the onward march of progress. This is also evident in the widespread view that rising GDP is good without qualification. This was touched upon by John Kenneth Galbraith in his book, The Affluent Society.

3. My remarks will remain somewhat truncated, as (again) this is a massive subject.

4. This is sometimes called “materialism”, but to avoid confusion with philosophical materialism, I will avoid this usage and prefer the more correct “consumerism”.

5. Indeed, in many ways work and employment, investment, and politics, have become subservient to the altar of consumption. Their existence is directed toward–or “for the sake of”–consumption as an end or goal. The quotations are from The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology, edited by Bryan S. Turner; the entry, “consumer society”, was written by Alan Warde of the University of Manchester.

6. I spoke of many of these things in my essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World.

7. Perhaps foremost is my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context.

8. Quoted from my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context.

9. Ibid.

10. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 3.

11. Eugene McCarraher explores some of this development in his recent work, The Enchantments of Mammon.

12. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

13. See my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context. Max Weber alludes to this when he writes, “As the paroxysms of the search for God’s kingdom gradually dissolved into the dispassionate virtues of the vocational calling and the religious roots of the movement slowly withered, a utilitarian orientation to the world took hold.” See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 5. To be sure, the idea of a vocation or calling still exists today, albeit in secularized form. The theological underpinnings of the past have for the most part been shedhttps://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDN9pbuK-jdZDETXPGaG87AR https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDO4F37WrQ_t3qbel3Iu4GjH

I have said before that the implicit yet common understanding of happiness today is preference satisfaction.¹ It is the view that sees the standards of happiness to be internal to the agent, existing solely within the purview of the individual. “To each, his own.” This is closely associated with what I have described as cultural existentialism.² The increasing pluralism of Western society has birthed a state of affairs in which there is no longer a common understanding of the good.³ What remains is the individual’s assessment, protected by law–insofar as he or she does not impinge on the rights of others. But if this view of happiness is pushed to its limits, as it were, the ramifications are unsettling, to say the least.⁴

Jean-Paul Sartre, while taking a critical stance toward the French intelligentsia, once said that the word existentialism “is used so often and to such an extent that it no longer has meaning.”⁵ Similar things may be said about the word happiness today. In fact, some writers even admit the futility of attempting to define it. Dennis Prager has said as much. Despite writing a book about happiness, he admits early on that there is no good definition of it.⁶ Quoting a U.S. Supreme Court decision on obscenity, Prager likens it to the concept of happiness, “I don’t know how to define it, but I know it when I see it”, continuing that–while describing his engagement with audiences on the subject–“the audience and I knew what we were discussing, however any of us might define it.”⁷ This highlights the contemporary phenomenon that “happiness has become an empty container, stripped of content and structure, allowing each individual to add whatever their preferences dictate.”⁸ Consider three examples below, which help reveal some of the tensions underlying this contemporary conception of happiness.

First, consider the drug addict who has the means to spend his days in a more or less continuous state of intoxication. As a person with a given set of preferences, who is in fact able to satisfy them continuously, we have no choice but to conclude he is happy. Suppose that such a person lives nearly the entire span of his life in this state, and further suppose he dies while blissfully intoxicated. From the viewpoint of modern happiness, we are bound to conclude that, not only did he die happy, but that he led a happy life. Yet, I think most people would at the very least hesitate to call such a life a happy one.⁹

Second, I offer the example of what I will call a “rights violator”. Consider a severely disordered individual, such as a serial killer or rapist, who possesses the means and ability to regularly satisfy his preferences for such terrible actions. Suppose he has sufficient intelligence and skill that enables him to elude detection or capture, and has the monetary means to move about and travel the globe at ease. Again, to the extent he is able to satisfy his preferences–which, suppose it is regular and often–he can be described as happy. Notice that, from the perspective of happiness, it makes no difference that this person is in fact severely violating the rights of other human beings. That such things are held to be evil, illegal, warranting imprisonment, or even death–is, again from the perspective of happiness–simply irrelevant. If someone is able to satisfy their preferences–regardless of what those preferences actually are–they can be said to be happy. Period. But, here as before, few people would describe the life of such a person as happy.

For my third and final example, I want to invoke Robert Nozick’s experience machine.¹⁰ Imagine a machine that can provide you with a simulated reality, in which whatever you desire is yours. By “plugging in”, you experience life exactly as you want it to be. Once plugged in, you cannot distinguish your simulated life from your (previous) actual life. In other words, the machine would offer you the chance to satisfy every preference you could possibly have, thus placing happiness within your reach.¹¹ But would such a life be happy? This too is suggestive, since it seems that what we really want is to actually do certain things, or to actually be a certain kind of person, rather than the mere “experience” of such things.

If happiness is preference satisfaction, then each of these examples entails a happy life. But, I think (and hope) few among us would endorse them as so.¹² Indeed, what these examples suggest is that the “to each, his own” model of preference satisfaction, in which the criterion of happiness is internal to the agent, is highly problematic. To be clear, although preference satisfaction is implicit in the everyday words and actions of people today, when its necessary entailments–its extremes–are brought to light, few of us would endorse them. Yet even so, happiness as preference satisfaction is largely unchallenged today, especially in popular culture. “How often is a challenge heard […] to spell out just what someone means by being happy? Our current assumptions governing moral disputes discourage inquiry about this foundational issue–anyone’s claim to person happiness is beyond reproach.”¹³ “Conflicts arise, therefore, the moment one begins to raise questions about the content or cause of another person’s happiness. Immediately, the interlocutor, or even the merely curious, may well be assailed with claims about the right to seek happiness, to define it, and to enjoy it in his or her own way.”¹⁴ “Each person is a law of happiness unto himself or herself.”¹⁵

This view of happiness presupposes a certain underlying structure of practical rationality, which has been discussed and criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre.¹⁶ In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, he writes, “individuals understand each other and themselves as each possessing his or her own ordered schedule of preferences. […] What are my wants? And how are they ordered? The answers to this question provide the initial premise for the practical reasoning of such individuals, a premise expressed by an utterance of the form: ‘I want it to be the case that such and such’ or of some closely cognate form.”¹⁶ MacIntyre goes on to argue that the expression “I want” has come to function as an independent good reason for action. What I take him to be getting at is that (implicit) initial premises like “I want such-and-such because it is good” have largely been replaced by “I want such-and-such–therefore it is good”.¹⁷ The criterion in the former is external, independent, impersonal; in the latter–as with modern happiness–internal to the agent. But this leads to all sorts of absurdities and self-deceptions, such as those illustrated by the examples above. It seems that if concepts of happiness are to avoid such problems, they must be based on, or derived from, standards independent of the agent.

Notes:

1. For example, see my essay, Happiness: A Brief Contrast.

2. See my essays, Introduction to Cultural Existentialism, Cultural Existentialism: The Absurdity of American Individualism, and Cultural Existentialism: Instances and Instrumentality.

3. It may be more accurate to say that the West has come to be characterized by a situation in which no shared conception of the good exists. Pluralism is a good word for it. For the record, I see such pluralism as more or less deterministic. That is, I cannot at this point see how it could have been otherwise, given the societal changes that have taken place, e.g., economic, technological, cultural, political, et al. Thus, I think this state of affairs to be unavoidable, and not necessarily the result of any one person or thing. I have discussed this before. See my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences.

4. “Unsettling to who?” Here, as sometimes before, I simply want to emphasize the strong current of subjectivity in modern thought. This is perhaps linked to the increasing use of the ad hominem in debate. Suffice for now that, as a point of contrast, it is unsettling from a pre-modern viewpoint. By “pushed to its limits”, I mean followed to its logical terminus.

5. Quoted from Sartre’s speech at the Club Maintenant in Paris on Monday, October 29th, 1945. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism.

6. See Dennis Prager, Happiness Is A Serious Problem.

7. Ibid. At best, this shows a kind of overlap between pre-modern and modern views of happiness, which the latter has not been able to fully integrate or reconcile. At worst, it shows that happiness has been reduced to an absurdity.

8. Quoted from my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences.

9. That we would hesitate to do so is suggestive, and this may be one area that pre-modern views of happiness still persist in our common understanding today.

10. See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

11. Note that here the “rights violator” could satisfy his disordered preferences–without actually violating any actual person’s rights. Likewise, the drug addict could experience endless intoxication without any adverse effects, such as risking one’s health.

12. Again, if this is true it would seem to suggest a sense in which pre-modern views about happiness still inform our implicit understanding of it.

13. See Deal W. Hudson, Happiness and the Limits of Satisfaction.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. MacIntyre is critical of this form of practical rationality in many of his books. See especially Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity.

17. A sort of Euthyphro dilemma. (See Plato, Euthyphro.) MacIntyre continues, “Desires of course had always been recognized as motives for action, and someone could always explain his or her action by expressing the desire which had motivated by means of some such expression as ‘I want’. […] What was new was the transformation of first-person expressions of desire themselves, without further qualification, into statements of a reason for action, into premises for practical reasoning.” See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

The rise of hookup culture in contemporary America appears to be closely bound up with the rise of freedom as an ultimate value.¹ In my essays on cultural existentialism, I have attempted to show the centrality that this “ultimate value” has come to occupy today–as witnessed by the view of the self as “unencumbered”–as well as its interconnectedness to what I have called preference satisfaction.² The phenomenon of hookup culture as a contemporary subculture, especially among the demographic of young adults, is a poignant example of this.³ Hookup culture itself is an instance of a broader set of changes involving relationships, which I will not attempt to address here. For the time being, I offer the following brief and preliminary thoughts.

Let me start by saying a few things about the idea of freedom, which undergirds this phenomenon. Again, following Robert Bellah, freedom in America is largely understood as “being left alone by others, not having other people’s values, ideas, or styles of life forced upon one, being free of arbitrary authority in work, family, and political life.”⁴ One important upshot of this is that “if the entire social world is made up of individuals, each endowed with the right to be free of others’ demands, it becomes hard to forge bonds of attachment to, or cooperation with, other people, since such bonds would imply obligations that necessarily impinge on one’s freedom.”⁵ That is, when we commit ourselves to others–whether in the traditional case of family, in personal friendships, or in romantic relationships–it reduces our freedom. Such relationships place restrictions on us, we can no longer do whatever we want; our commitment to others comes with certain duties and responsibilities.

Enter the phenomenon of hookup culture.⁶ By “hookup culture” I refer to the subculture in which people who have never met or have minimal knowledge of each other, meet up and engage in sexual activity of some form. And this sexual activity is understood as free from any form of commitment or restriction.⁷ This was once confined largely to college campuses.⁸ But with the onset of advancing technologies, such as high-speed internet and smartphone apps, it has emerged as a potential everyday option for anyone with a smartphone, and has become characteristic of the life of many young adults.⁹ User-profiles on apps like Tinder (and this is no less true of social media in general), tend to be about portraying oneself in a certain way. Ideas of self-creation and self-definition abound, often structured (in this case) to appeal to various or idiosyncratic sexual preferences. Yet another instance of cultural existentialism on full display.¹⁰

For many generations alive today, “getting to know someone”–over the course of months, or years–is what preceded sexual activity. Traditionally, marriage, such as that recognized by the Catholic Church–the oldest continuously operating institution in the West–was held to be the exclusive domain in which sexual activity took place.¹¹ To this day, the Catholic Church teaches that marriage is not fully valid (or binding) until it is consummated.¹² Sexual contact was predominantly viewed as a kind completion; an apex or summit of spousal commitment. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”¹³ Thus, what was hegemonic in the past has become, at least for many young adults today, extremely rare. This suggests a kind of “inversion” of romantic love.

The inversion embodied in hookup culture is one that the sexual act itself becomes–instead of the highest point of contact between lovers–the merely introductory point of contact. Sex is no longer the completion or apex of a relationship, but its mere prelude–often a potential prelude–as much of hookup culture is characterized by activity that does not lead to actual committed relationships.¹⁴ What was, in the past, the most intimate expression of oneself to the beloved has become a point of contact between strangers. If a relationship develops, it develops after many repeated sexual encounters.

This inversion is taken a step further when we realize that traditionally romantic love was understood to be an end in itself, and here we witness that few things today escape the clutching tentacles of instrumentality. I have spoken a lot recently about preference satisfaction, and indeed the particulars of hookup culture are a further instance of this. Here, individuals use each other as instruments of their own desire for sexual gratification. The context of commitment–what in the past constituted a basis for the sexual act–has been removed from the equation. Here a person–often a stranger–becomes an object of one’s personal search for satisfaction, unencumbered from duty or responsibility. Each reduces the other to the status of a tool, an extension of each other’s preferences, a means to an end. Love–or more appropriately a simulacrum of love–if it emerges at all, becomes a product of utility. Like happiness, love is transformed into preference satisfaction.¹⁵

Notes:

1. This is, in fact, a peculiar understanding of freedom. At least if we consider the historical understanding of the concept, which is no small task. The question of whether or not the idea of freedom inherent in the contemporary American psyche is misplaced, is a topic I would like to address in the future.

2. See my essays, Introduction to Cultural Existentialism, Cultural Existentialism: The Absurdity of American Individualism, and Cultural Existentialism: Instances and Instrumentality.

3. Notice the term “poignant” is a metaphysically loaded one. Poignant–from what, from whose–perspective? Who says hookup culture is regrettable? Who can pass that kind of judgment on the preferences of another person? Are we not free individuals–free to live our lives as we see fit–just as long as we do not impinge on the rights of others? This more or less summarizes the modern viewpoint that holds freedom as an ultimate value. It is not my intention here to challenge this viewpoint, but simply to invoke it as a further instance of what I have been talking about. Challenges to this viewpoint will have to be postponed.

4. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

5. Ibid.

6. I want to make clear that most of what I know about hookup culture has come from individual contact–that is, conversations–with young adults that claim to have engaged in hookups and related activities. Thus, my research and understanding of this subject has not (as yet) primarily been one rooted in reading and digesting a given body of literature, but rather, actual conversations with actual people. The brief reading that I have done on the subject has reinforced what I have learned from these conversations with young people.

7. Of course, this can occur between people who already know each other, but in this essay I want to focus on those that do not. My reason for this is because those who know each other possess at least a degree of commitment, in the form of at least being acquaintances, while strangers do not.

8. See Kathleen A. Bogle, Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus.

9. The technologies of contraception and abortion have also aided this phenomenon, in that they seek to either prevent or undo pregnancy. Thus, the absolute freedom of the individual is maintained. In the case of pregnancy, a child places limits or restrictions on the freedom of the mother, and (one can hope) father. And this, it seems, is the main argument for abortion: pregnancy will “ruin the life” of a young girl. That is, it will greatly limit her freedom. The underlying logic of this is that a life characterized by commitments, restrictions, obligations–duties–is not a life worth living. This is mirrored in the fact that many doctors recommend abortions to parents of unborn children diagnosed with special needs. The plausibility of all of this lies in the idea of freedom as a metaphysical absolute.

10. For a better understanding of what I mean by cultural existentialism, see my essays: Introduction to Cultural Existentialism, Cultural Existentialism: The Absurdity of American Individualism, and Cultural Existentialism: Instances and Instrumentality.

11. Obviously this was an ideal, and not always a reality. Nor was this view limited to Catholics, but was adopted by Protestant denominations as well.

12. See, for example, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1640.

13. See Ephesians 5:31.

14. Some people appear to engage in hookups as a way to eventually enter into a committed relationship. Others appear to have no intention of doing so, and view it largely as a game of unrestricted sexual gratification.

15. See my essay, Happiness: A Brief Contrast.

While the previous essays¹ laid the foundation and began exploring some of the architecture of what I have called cultural existentialism, at this point the following can be offered as a working definition: Cultural existentialism is the phenomenon that views the individual as entirely free and unencumbered–by history, family, community, tradition, inherited ideas, et al.–and, therefore, free to live and define themselves as they see fit; the sole author of their life.² In this essay, I want to explore some of the more outward forms of cultural existentialism, as well as its relation to what I have called the instrumental stance. In so doing, I hope to shed some light on the question of the more recent origins of this phenomenon. Again, my focus will remain on America.

Part of the origin story of cultural existentialism seems to be connected to the increasing compartmentalization of life. In my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences, I referred to this as “a range of compartmentalized spheres,” within which we find the “spheres of the personal, familial, political, economic, artistic, athletic, scientific, among others–each existing independently of the others, each with its own goods (per individual preferences) internal to it.”³ The primary source I was drawing upon at that time was Alasdair MacIntyre, and it is in many ways unsurprising that MacIntyre is sourced in the work of Robert Bellah and his colleagues. In Habits of the Heart, Bellah writes, “[I]n the course of history, the self has become ever more detached from the social and cultural contexts that embody the traditions [of the past]”.4 “The most distinctive aspect of twentieth-century American society is the division of life into a number of separate functional sectors: home and workplace, work and leisure, white collar and blue collar, public and private. This division suited the needs of the bureaucratic industrial corporations that provided the model for our preferred means of organizing society by the balancing and linking of sectors as ‘departments’ in a functional whole, as in a great business enterprise.”⁵

The growing partition of the personal as a distinct and separate realm from the common, what I called in my previous essay “the expansion of the Private sphere at the expense of the Public”, has led to a greater emphasis on the individual. “For a long time, private life and its leisure and consumption patterns were expressions of social status, in turn linked to social class, as in more traditional [premodern] societies. […] But as social status and social class came to depend more and more on a national occupational system and less and less on local communities, a degree of freedom became possible in private life that would not have been conceivable in the small town or even for older urban elites.”⁶ This “degree of freedom” provided an arena in which the exercise of personal preferences came to play an increasingly powerful role for individuals, ultimately to the extent that the self comes to be understood in terms of its own preferences. Again, in the past, the individual existed within a kind of social and cultural “whole”, in which “family and civic life” were closely intertwined; narratives were more easily understood, and roles were more clearly expressed. Thus, the “structure of possibility”⁷ for individuals was more restricted, yet at the same time individuals were not burdened by the immense pressure to “make one’s own way” in the world, or discover what they “really want”. “A century and a half ago, when most Americans still lived in small towns and worked in small businesses or on family-owned farms, the requirements of economic success were perhaps more easily reconciled with understandings of success in family and civic life.”⁸ That is, economic success existed within a wider context of social and cultural tradition. As time passes, this wider context narrows, sectors of life are increasingly compartmentalized, and the goods associated with each of them become more and more independent of each other. That is, the satisfaction of individual preferences comes to be the criterion upon which goods are based. “Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the major problems of life appear to be essentially individual matters, a question of negotiating a reliable and harmonious balance among the various sectors of life to which an individual has access.”⁹

The workaday world, what Josef Pieper has called the world of “total work”,¹⁰ provides one example of cultural existentialism today. Among the most pressing questions young Americans must face is, “What do you want to do?” Regardless of the actual choice, the answer–or lack of an answer–plays a powerful role in forming the trajectories of one’s life. “The demand to ‘make something of yourself’ through work is one that Americans coming of age hear as often from themselves as from others. It encompasses several different notions of work and of how it bears on who we are. In the sense of a ‘job,’ work is a way of making money and making a living. It supports a self defined by economic success, security, and all that money can buy. In the sense of a ‘career,’ work traces one’s progress through life by achievement and advancement in an occupation. It yields a self defined by a broader sort of success, which takes in social standing and prestige, and by a sense of expanding power and competency that renders work itself a source of self-esteem.”¹¹ Work–whether we want it to or not–comes to define a large, if not the largest, portion of our lives. This is particularly true in the case of a career, that self-chosen occupation in which one becomes a specialist and/or professional, and engages in throughout the working years of one’s life, and sometimes beyond.¹²

What I am getting at here is that work has become viewed as an extension of one’s self. “[H]owever we define work, it is very close to our sense of self. What we ‘do’ often translates to what we ‘are.'”¹³ To be engaged in a form of work over a period of years is to somehow come to be identified by it. “What do you do?” is often among the first questions we ask people we meet. It tells us something about them and vice versa. The person not actively engaged in a form of work is almost unintelligible to us. Here, as above, the concept of career plays a stronger role than the person simply working a job, since the latter seems to lack the same kind of commitment involved in a career choice.¹⁴ The concept of a career shares a connection of sorts with the Protestant work ethic, and its corresponding concept of a vocation or calling. But, as I noted before, at this point the end-goal of glorifying God has been shed, replaced by the secular concept of success.¹⁵ My recent explorations on what I have called the “culture of achievement” are a further instance of what I am trying to describe here.¹⁶ The culture of achievement views the self as a wellspring of unlimited potential; self-creation and self-definition through achievement. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.”¹⁷

Another concept I want to draw upon from Bellah’s work is the “lifestyle enclave”. “Though the term ‘community’ is widely and loosely used by Americans, and often in connection with lifestyle, we would like to reserve it for a more specific meaning. Whereas a community attempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of pubic and private life […], lifestyle is fundamentally segmental and celebrates the narcissism of similarity. It usually explicitily involves a contrast with others who ‘do not share one’s lifestyle.’ For this reason, we speak not of lifestyle communities, though they are often called such in contemporary usage, but of lifestyle enclaves.”¹⁸ “A lifestyle enclave is formed by people who share some feature of private life. Members of lifestyle enclaves express their identity through shared patterns of appearance, consumption, and leisure activities, which often serve to differentiate them sharply from those with other lifestyles. They are not interdependent, do not act together politically, and do not share a history.”¹⁹ Such enclaves are segmental in two senses. They involve only a segment of each individual, for they concern only private life, especially leisure and consumption. And they are segmental socially in that they include only those with a common lifestyle. The different, those with other lifestyles, are not necessarily despised. They may be willingly tolerated. But they are irrelevant or even invisible in terms of one’s own lifestyle enclave.”²⁰ Put differently, a lifestyle enclave is a private group of people who share some set of preferences, or “common interests”. They represent a demarcated area of life in which the private interests (via expression of preferences) of people can be shared in a common way. Bellah sees this as a further result of compartmentalization, “[t]he lifestyle enclave is in important respects an outgrowth of the sectorial organization of American life […] resulting from the emergence of industrialization and the national market.”²¹

Examples of lifestyle enclaves are almost endless, ranging from isolated groups of gamers, sports fans, athletes, collectors, bibliophiles, adrenaline junkies, outdoor enthusiasts (e.g., hiking, hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, et al.), hobbyists, recreational drug users, followers of alternative medicine, and on and on. Almost anything you can think of that brings people together privately. Such private groups or enclaves are segmental in that those comprising a given group share a common interest, but otherwise may have nothing else in common. “The contemporary lifestyle enclave is based on a degree of individual choice that largely frees it from traditional ethnic and religious boundaries.”²² Political, social, religious worldviews are basically irrelevant–what matters is a given shared activity or subject of interest. This is closely bound up with the (implicit) modern understanding of happiness as preference satisfaction, which has also come to bear upon our self-understanding. Lifestyle enclaves are merely gatherings of those who happen to share a common preference–a preference which partially defines their sense of self. This is yet another area in which what we do has largely come to define who we are.

If we back up a bit, and consider the individual as an individual, apart from a given lifestyle enclave, we find a set of preferences existing in isolation, internal to the self. Such preferences are expressed in various ways, which reveals our sense of who we are–not only to others, but also perhaps to ourselves.²³ Some of the more obvious examples include fashion–self-expression relating to appearance, clothing, footwear, makeup, hairstyle, physical fitness, and so forth; consumerism–especially in such a way that outwardly expresses oneself in terms of income, such as vacation homes, sports cars, RV’s, large boats–but also in terms of things like food preferences, tastes in literature, art, or music; sexual orientation and gender identity; internet identities–portraying oneself online or via social media in a certain way; legal name changes due to lack of identification with one’s given name, and so forth. If people are (abstractly) grouped together by common preferences, various dimensions of society, such as high-, middle-, and working-class culture come into view, as do the various identified subcultures, such as athletes, hippies, goths, gamers, punks, hipsters, hookup culture, and many more.²⁴

I want to close with some considerations of instrumentality. Here we can begin to see the immense interconnectedness of the phenomena in question. The workaday world is, par excellence, the sphere of life most characterized by the instrumental stance.²⁵ In it, our daily activities are largely structured by those involved in securing or maintaining an income. Activities which, over time, come to connote and bear upon our sense of who we are–whether in the weak sense of maintaining a job or in the much stronger sense of career. The economic security afforded by the workaday world, in turn, opens the world of private consumption, itself characterized by preference satisfaction. Here, the end-goal of satisfaction provides the logical structure through which preferences come to act as means. Preferences become means not only to self-expression and self-identity, but also to the satisfaction of the self, self-actualization. Patterns or routines of self-expression and consumption become enveloped within the sphere of instrumentality. Something is good or valued to the extent it satisfies one’s expressive preferences. Nearly everything we do comes to be understood under the criterion of self-satisfaction and self-actualization. In this way, to some extent both the Private and the Public spheres of one’s life become instances of preference expression and satisfaction.²⁶ And, as we have seen, this is deeply connected to cultural existentialism.

Notes:

1. See my previous essays, Introduction to Cultural Existentialism, and Cultural Existentialism: The Absurdity of American Individualism.

2. I use the word “author” as a point of great significance since an author by is definition the source of their narrative work. Here I am thinking of self-definition and self-creation, amongst and across a wide variety of areas, some of which I will explore in this essay. For the record, I believe this viewpoint to be false. In my view, whatever plausibility such viewpoints offer depends on a specified and delimited context. The idea of removing the context–which I see as required to provide intelligibility–is a cultural fiction, or perhaps what Charles Taylor has called a “social imaginary”. I would argue that cultural existentialism itself constitutes a social imaginary–another topic for the future.

3. See my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences.

4. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. By “structure of possibility” I refer to the aggregate set of options available for a given person (in a given place, at a given time) in terms of life choices.

8. Ibid. Wendell Berry draws upon similar ideas when criticizing the state of agriculture in the United States. See Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America.

9. Ibid.

10. See, for example, my previous essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World.

11. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

12. Consider that some doctors, lawyers, and politicians (for example), commonly work well into old age.

13. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

14. What I mean by this is that many people become employed in a sort of haphazard way. For instance, I may take the first job offered to me which provides the income I need to maintain my lifestyle–irrespective of what that job actually is or entails, or such considerations may be an afterthought. This differs from a career in the sense that I have not deliberately planned or chosen the occupation before it is actually available to me. It should be added, however, that a given haphazard choice in employment could lead to a career, provided one stick with it long enough.

15. See, for example, my previous essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations in Context.

16. The as-yet complete set of essays in which the culture of achievement is explored include The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part I, Part II, and Part III; Achievement Culture: Some Considerations in Context, and The Modern Culture of Achievement.

17. See Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich.

18. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Lifehttps://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDM6yiNgPD7DdhtLdxSOwF-n https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDPy9_wOqFtAzZu9CxXrVx4c

In the previous essay I hoped to make clear the connection between the phenomenon of cultural existentialism with that of its formal counterpart–the philosophy of Existentialism. Again, I believe the connection between them is one of similarity rather than direct causality, and that the primary difference between the two is merely the extent to which they are articulated. Still, the average person is not a philosopher–let alone Sartre–so in many ways the accusation that cultural existentialism is widely embodied but not articulated is unfair. For a more common view of cultural existentialism, I would like to turn to the excellent work of the sociologist Robert Bellah, and some of his colleagues, such as Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven M. Tipton.¹ Much of their research, findings, and collaboration on American culture from the early 1980s will help color the outline I have sketched thus far.

The ancestor of cultural existentialism is, of course, a certain kind of individualism.² Nearly 150 years before Bellah, et al., began their research on its American form, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed his thoughts on the subject in his book Democracy in America. In America, Tocqueville observed, individualism is “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself.” “Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”³ The danger here lies in the expansion of the Private sphere at the expense of the Public. “Citizens who are bound to take part in public affairs must turn from their private interests and occasionally take a look at something other than themselves.”⁴ Also of note in the late 18th and early 19th century are changes in child-training practices, which began to emphasize “independent self-sufficient individuals” instead of the traditional focus on “peace and order in the family.”⁵ Fast forward to the 1980s, and it is no surprise that “Americans tend to think of the ultimate goals of a good life as matters of personal choice.”⁶

Consubstantial with American individualism is the idea of freedom, upon which all notions of personal choice must be grounded. Bellah writes that freedom “is perhaps the most resonant, deeply held American value. In some ways, it defines the good in both personal and political life. Yet freedom turns out to mean being left alone by others, not having other people’s values, ideas, or styles of life forced upon one, being free of arbitrary authority in work, family, and political life.”⁷ The ideals of psychology take this notion a step further. He continues, “to be free is not simply to be left alone by others; it is also somehow to be your own person in the sense that you have defined who you are, decided for yourself what you want out of life, free as much as possible from the demands of conformity to family, friends, or community. From this point of view, to be free psychologically is to succeed in separating oneself from the values imposed by one’s past or by conformity to one’s social milieu, so that one can discover what one really wants.”⁸ What in the past (in pre-modern times) provided or structured the cosmos into which one was born–a cosmos with built-in meanings and purposes–is exactly what must now be conquered and overcome.⁹

“Clearly, the meaning of one’s life for most Americans is to become one’s own person, almost to give birth to oneself. Much of this process […] is negative. It involves breaking free from family, community, and inherited ideas.”¹⁰ This process of breaking free, or becoming free from the constraints of the past, is effectively what “empties the content” of the individual, allowing them to define themselves as they see fit.¹¹ This is the idea which structures the phenomenon of cultural existentialism as I see it (self-definition; self-creation). “The American understanding of the autonomy of the self places the burden of one’s own deepest self-definitions on one’s own individual choice. For some Americans, even 150 years after Emerson wrote ‘Self-Reliance,’ tradition and tradition-bearing community still exist. But the notion that one discovers one’s deepest beliefs in, and through, tradition and community is not very congenial to Americans. Most of us imagine an autonomous self existing independently, entirely outside any tradition or community, and then perhaps choosing one.”¹² On this view–which today wields a great amount of power and influence in our culture–I am not who I am because of a field of relations that I exist within (“family, community, inherited ideas”). Rather, I am who I am because of what I have chosen; I am the product of my own unencumbered choice. “Separated from family, religion, and [other] sources of authority, duty, and moral example, the self first seeks to work out its own form of action by autonomously pursuing happiness and satisfying its wants.”¹³ The question, of course, is what should one want? What are the standards or the criterion of happiness? All that remains is, in Bellah’s words, “radical private validation.”¹⁴ In other words, as I have written about before, the preferences of individuals.¹⁵

The dominant form of modern happiness consists of preference satisfaction, wherein one’s “own idiosyncratic preferences are their own justification, because they define the true self.”¹⁶ Freed of constraint, emptied of content, the individual is free to define him or herself. i.e., free to discover the true self.¹⁷ “Now if selves are defined by their preferences, but those preferences are arbitrary, then each self constitutes its own moral universe, and there is finally no way to reconcile conflicting claims about what is good in itself. All we can do is refer to chains of consequences and ask if our actions prove useful or consistent in light of our own ‘value-systems.'”¹⁸ “In the absence of any objectifiable criteria of right and wrong, good or evil, the self and its feelings become our only moral guide. What kind of world is inhabited by this self, perpetually in progress, yet without any fixed moral end [or good]?” Michael Sandel nods toward an answer in his book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice: “If my fundamental values and final ends are to enable me, as surely they must, to evaluate and regulate my immediate wants and desires, these values and ends must have a sanction independent of the mere fact that I happen to hold them with a certain intensity. But if my conception of the good is simply the product of my immediate wants and desires, there is no reason to suppose that the critical standpoint it provides is any more worthy or valid than the desires it seeks to assess; as the product of those desires, it would be governed by the same contingencies.”¹⁹

What kind of world is inhabited by this self? An absurd one. In such a world, “each individual must always know what he wants and desires or intuit what he feels. He must act so as to produce the greatest satisfaction of his wants or to express the fullest range of his impulses. The objectified moral goodness of Winthrop obeying God’s will or Jefferson following nature’s law turns into the subjective goodness of getting what you want and enjoying it. Utility replaces duty; self-expression unseats authority. ‘Being good’ becomes ‘feeling good.'”²⁰ “‘Values’ turn out to be the incomprehensible, rationally indefensible thing that the individual chooses when he or she has thrown off the last vestige of external influence and reached pure contentless freedom. […] The improvisational self chooses values to express itself; but it is not constituted by them as from a pre-existing source. This notion of an unencumbered self is derived not only from psychotherapy, but much more fundamentally from modern philosophy, from Descartes, Locke, and Hume, who affect us more than we imagine.”²¹ Subjectivism, indeed, is our point of departure.

Note: Up to this point I have failed to consider any concrete manifestations of cultural existentialism as it is embodied in contemporary society. This has not been overlooked and will be addressed in the future.

Notes:

1. My primary resource for this essay is their book, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

2. Again, I will have to postpone any investigation into the origins of cultural existentialism for the time being.

3. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

4. Ibid.

5. Quoted from Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Bellah explicitly cites Daniel Calhoun, as well as the views of John Locke, “whose political views were becoming popular in the colonies.” See Daniel Calhoun, The Intelligence of a People, and John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education.

6. Or, it may be a surprise. I will attempt to explore how this happened in the future when I discuss the possible origins of this phenomenon. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid. Emphasis added.

9. “Cosmos” in the sense of the totality of one’s circumstances.

10. Ibid.

11. It should be emphasized that this is not true of everyone. Many people do wish to retain a connection or adherence with their past, the history of their family, their community, or religion. The point I am making is that for all the people who retain such ideas, there are many others that do not.

12. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. See my essays, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences, and Happiness: A Brief Contrast.

16. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Note I am qualifying happiness here as “modern happiness”, as I am critical of the usage of the word happiness. My reasons–which I will someday make explicit–involve the absurdity of the concept as it is understood in the modern world. i.e., happiness in its modern sense is a reductio ad absurdum.

17. In some ways, it may be tempting to connect this with the contemporary phenomenon of narcissism, and that is not entirely without basis. In fact, narcissism appears to be the logical terminus of cultural existentialism. For a look at the subject of narcissism as it emerged in the 1970s, see Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism. For a more contemporary look (2009) see, Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic.

18. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. It is interesting to note that Bellah adds: “Where sympathy or already congruent values are not enough to resolve moral disagreements between ourselves and others, we have no recourse except to withdraw from them.” Enter the “unfriending” phenomenon of social media. See also my recent essay, Theoretical Frameworks and the Limits of Communication.

19. See Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice.

20. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Lifehttps://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDPy9_wOqFtAzZu9CxXrVx4c https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDMg5cHT93K7mUFW8UNEQjUn

At the close of my essay The Individual and The Human World, I spoke briefly about the contemporary West–and America in particular–as a place where “individuals determine and create themselves in their own image–rooted in the satisfaction of their own preferences–the sole authors of their lives.”¹ This phenomenon, which is admittedly broad and multifaceted, has become hegemonic in the contemporary West. Here I will attempt to explore some of its more obvious manifestations, though some of the fine details will have to be postponed for the time being. As a kind of umbrella term, I will refer to this state of affairs as cultural existentialism.²

The word “existentialism” may be somewhat misleading, though I hope the qualifier “cultural” renders my footing a bit more secure. I have to be careful here. By invoking a formal philosophy–Existentialism–I run the risk of putting too much content, as it were, into what I am talking about.³ Indeed, the philosophy of Existentialism is not explicitly what I have in mind.⁴ I am thinking more of an “informal existentialism”, which I would argue involves the expression of certain ideas within the mass of society itself, within the wider culture. Although these ideas are similar to those found in Existentialist thinking, I do not mean to suggest a kind of direct-causal link between the two. Rather, I refer to a mere relation of similarity, in which popular ideas have somehow come to mirror many of those articulated formally in Existentialist thought.⁵

Let me offer a picture. Consider the role that ideas–such as freedom, authenticity, choice, and responsibility–play in American society and culture today. Freedom is in many ways the ultimate value of the American psyche.⁶ Closely connected to freedom are authenticity and choice–being true to ourselves in our choices and actions–which, in turn, means we are responsible for the things we say and do. There is a sense that we are the authors of our lives–our lives being the summation of our actions over time. Our identity becomes understood in terms of what we do. Themes of self-determination and self-creation are witnessed in popular literature, film, and music; they exist in business and professional life, and in the entrepreneurial spirit of modern capitalism. This picture of ourselves has emerged within the structure of liberal individualism, which places the individual prior to the social and political, abstracting the self from the social context which, in past epochs, provided intelligibility.⁷ As an abstraction, the individual is emptied of content and is therefore free to define him or herself independently of any criterion.⁸ This is what I believe to be the primary idea embodied in cultural existentialism.

If we turn to the philosophy of Existentialism, this idea is expressed formally by the dictum “existence precedes essence”, which, Jean-Paul Sartre writes, is common to all Existentialist thinkers.⁹ What this means is that “man first exists: he materializes in the world, encounters himself, and only afterwards defines himself. If man as existentialists conceive of him cannot be defined, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature since there is no God to conceive of it. Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be, and since he conceives of himself only after he exists, just as he wills himself to be after being thrown into existence, man is nothing other than what he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism.”¹⁰ Furthermore, Sartre continues, “if it is true that existence precedes essence, we can never explain our actions by reference to a given and immutable human nature. In other words, there is no determinism–man is free, man is freedom.”¹¹ As an atheist, Sartre contends there are “no values or orders that can legitimize our conduct. Thus, we have neither behind us, nor before us, […] any means of justification or excuse.”¹² “What is more, to say that we invent values means neither more nor less than this: life has no meaning a priori. Life itself is nothing until it is lived, it is we who give it meaning, and value is nothing more than the meaning that we give to it.”¹³ Again, I am not suggesting there is a direct causal connection (such as a “trickle-down”) between the thought of Sartre (or other Existentialists) and the wider society or culture of the West. What I am suggesting is that Existentialism and its cultural counterparts are in some ways mirrors of each other, and in many ways differ only to the extent that they are articulated. Explicitly in the former, implicitly in the latter.

Consider cultural existentialism as it relates to personal identity. In the case of self-creation and self-determination, who I am is who I have created/determined myself to be, a summation of my preferences which I have expressed in outward choices and actions over time. Here, the criterion of personal identity is internal to the agent. Thus, when Sartre speaks of “man’s inability to transcend human subjectivity”, adding that “subjectivity must be our point of departure”, he is following the Cartesian cogito to its logical terminus.¹⁴ Indeed, large sections of the modern frame itself are indebted to–or logically entailed by–Cartesian outlooks. As a point of contrast, consider that pre-modern understandings of personal identity situated the self within a social context that provided intelligibility.¹⁵ On this view, who I am is made intelligible by the field of relations I hold to relevant social structures. I am not merely what I decide to be–I am, rather, son to these parents and this lineage; brother to these siblings; husband to this woman; vassal to this lord; apprentice to this craftsman.¹⁶ The criterion of my identity is here external and not internal. Thus, the roles I inhabit largely determine the structure of possibility I exist within, i.e., the set of choices and duties possible for me. In the pre-modern world, I exist within a structure of meaning that I did not create, but was born into. In the contemporary modern world, I must discover meaning for myself. This has led some thinkers to take the “absurdity” of life as a starting point or a given, while others have noted the force with which the individual has come to feel alienated and dehumanized.¹⁷ I will continue this preliminary exploration in the future.

Notes:

1. Some would argue that this is not true for everyone, pointing to injustices associated with inequalities such as systemic racism, et al. This may indeed be the case, but it does not affect the point I will be making. Even if such a state of affairs is not equally accessible to every inhabitant of a given liberal democracy, it remains an active end-goal or telos which is built-in to the structure of liberalism. See also my essays, The Individual and The Human World, and Human Action.

2. I have used the small “e” existentialism in past essays, and here I take it up again. The term “cultural existentialism” is, as far as I know, my own coinage. I will attempt to explore what I mean by it in this and future essays. The ideas making up the phenomenon of cultural existentialism are not always clearly articulated or even fully acknowledged. They exist for the most part as theoretical frameworks within the overall structure of the modern frame itself. For an introduction to theoretical frameworks, see my essay Theoretical Frameworks and the Limits of Communication. 

3. What I mean by this is that there are many ideas and dimensions within Existentialist thought that go beyond what I am talking about here as merely cultural existentialism.

4. There are many thinkers and ideas associated with Existentialism. Though Jean-Paul Sartre is the most famous, some other thinkers commonly thought of as Existentialists include Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, as well as writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus.

5. How this came about is a question I will attempt to explore in the future. Both Existentialism and its cultural counterpart likely share a common ancestor, no doubt closely connected to the rise of individualism in the modern West.

6. Yet another topic to be explored in the future.

7. This is closely connected to ideas of the social contract and natural rights, such as those found in the work of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel von Pufendorf, and John Locke. Charles Taylor explores this to some extent in A Secular Age.

8. Perhaps relevant here is my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences.

9. For my purposes here I will restrict myself to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, specifically his work Existentialism Is A Humanism, which offers a succinct introduction to his thought. For a more comprehensive articulation and defense of Sartre’s views, see his work, Being and Nothingness.

10. Although Sartre is using a small “e” to describe existentialism, he is referring to existentialism as a formal philosophy, and not as cultural, as I am attempting to describe here. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism.

11. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism. Emphasis added.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid. Emphasis in original.

14. Sartre’s philosophy is heavily indebted to the work of René Descartes. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is A Humanism, and René Descartes, Discourse on the Method.

15. This has been explored by, among others, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age.

16. Some of these relations may indeed be the product of free choices. But what is relevant here is that it is my relation to the social structure which bears upon who I am (my identity) rather than my individual autonomy.

17. In the former, Albert Camus comes to mind. In the latter, Erich Fromm, and to some extent, Jacques Ellul. See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus; see Erich Fromm, Escape From Freedom; see Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society.

Among the starkest contrasts brought into view in the wake of 2020 (as it has unfolded thus far) is the struggle to communicate on a meaningful level. The United States in particular has witnessed an increasingly shrill level of debate over the unfolding and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic repercussions arising therefrom, and the widespread protesting in response to various forms of systemic racism. What is most alarming to me about the many related debates and discussions, which I have witnessed both privately and publicly, is the extent to which they appear interminable and incommensurable.¹ It is not merely that people disagree, it is that they appear unable to actually communicate meaningfully. Here I wish to explore, in (regrettably) inchoate form, one possible reason for this.²

Central to my argument is the concept of what I will call a theoretical framework. I have spoken before about “presuppositions, paradigms, and ways of thinking” that are unique to modernity.³ What I am talking about here is the same idea, albeit in a slightly more defined way. By “theoretical framework”, I refer to the idea that any opinion or worldview requires a certain underlying structure of rationality which is logically entailed by it.⁴ For most of us this framework exists beneath the conscious level and is therefore often unspoken and unacknowledged, if not completely unknown. Nevertheless, it is this implicit structure of rationality that allows us to make sense of our experience; it acts as a kind of lens through which we view and interpret the world.⁵ In viewing the world in terms of an underlying theoretical framework (from which we can never wholly escape) we necessarily place limits on our understanding. (The phenomenon of confirmation bias is an ideal example of being limited by one’s theoretical framework.) This does not preclude change or a gradual evolution, but it does reinforce a (apparently innate) propensity to solidify or become rigid over time.⁶ Theoretical frameworks are in large part a product of our socialization. Everyone, no matter who they are, when they are, or where they are, has one. (The modern frame itself describes the totality of such theoretical frameworks as they relate uniquely to the modern epoch.) Identifying, mapping, or deconstructing them is no easy task, and can likely never be done fully or definitively. There are eternal blind spots, from which we can never be certain of fully escaping.

Consider that two people can experience the same event, or set of circumstances, or body of thought, and come to completely different (sometimes opposite) conclusions or interpretations. This can partly be explained on the basis of their respective theoretical frameworks. If I believe,⁷ for instance, that people are the cause of things or events (in a deliberate/positive way), I may interpret events such as the COVID-19 pandemic as the deliberate action of a person or group.⁸ If I believe that God is the cause of things or events (in a deliberate/positive way), I may interpret the same pandemic in a theological way, such as an act of divine retribution. If I believe the COVID-19 pandemic can be explained on the basis of natural science, I may interpret such events in light of a contemporary scientific understanding. And so on. Of course, this is a dramatic simplification. But it should provide a general idea of the sort of thing I am trying to describe. Notice there is nothing about these beliefs that is mutually exclusive; indeed all three may be held simultaneously.⁹ Nor is it the case that such beliefs exist in a sort of vacuum, isolated and alone. Rather, they exist as part of a complex multiplicity of such beliefs, together constituting the theoretical framework of a given person. Notice further that I have phrased such beliefs in a way that makes certain logical entailments explicit, in a sort of “if p then q” fashion. However, if the conclusion (q) is taken as obvious (COVID-19 is the deliberate action of a person or group; COVID-19 is an act of divine retribution; COVID-19 developed naturalistically), the premise (p) is likely to be unacknowledged and/or unknown. When propositions or conclusions or even arguments are taken for granted, the rational structures which support them–their implicit logic or underlying belief system–is often hidden, unacknowledged, and/or unknown.

Consider also that much contemporary debate (particularly relevant here are those about COVID-19, economic repercussions, or systemic racism) often appears to be accompanied by a completely disparate set of facts. In other words, the proponents of various positions related to these debates appear to operate on the basis of a set of facts unknown or flatly denied by their adversaries.¹⁰ I would like to suggest that this apparent disparity as it concerns questions of fact arises–in part, if not to a very great extent–as a consequence of vastly different theoretical frameworks adopted both by participants in debate as well as their sources of information.¹¹ In such situations the common ground of discussion (and therefore the necessary precondition of all meaningful dialog) erodes, leading to a condition in which clear and meaningful communication becomes nearly impossible. At this point, a limit to the communicative ability has effectively been reached, and participants must resort to a form of argument characterized largely by assertion and counter-assertion. Thus, the character of much contemporary debate, which is analogous to two people speaking different languages to each other.¹²

One way to describe this is that the relative homogeneity of premodern society has been replaced by the heterogeneity of the modern.¹³ Here I am talking about viewpoints. The expanding scope and quantity of beliefs and values which characterize the contemporary world have created a situation that is historically unprecedented. In effect, it has led to an exponential multiplication of theoretical frameworks, each taking up a unique vantage point.¹⁴ Perhaps a better way to describe this is that the common stock of ideas, definitions, concepts, and so forth–which provide the basis for mutual understanding and meaningful discussion–has expanded to such an extent that such understanding becomes increasingly difficult to achieve. This can, I think, partially be explained by the structure of liberalism itself.

In a previous essay, I noted that liberalism recasts the human good in terms of the preferences of individuals.¹⁵ This means that liberal orders must govern by principles of justice which do not presuppose any overarching conception of the human good, so as to not impose any one worldview or way of life on the populace. This is ideally suited to a pluralist society since the sheer mass of possible theoretical frameworks precludes a shared understanding capable of identifying the human good. The closest form of agreement (which is really a simulacrum of agreement) are the results of the procedures for tallying and weighing the expression of individual preferences–what Alasdair MacIntyre has called “counting votes, responding to consumer choice, surveying public opinion”.¹⁶ The lack of a shared understanding may also account for the phenomenon that, in the public sphere, “[n]onrational persuasion displaces rational argument”.¹⁷ Again, given the structure of liberal societies this may be unavoidable, but it is disconcerting all the same.

I will not pretend to be optimistic, but I do have a few thoughts. If the discussion is to advance, it must occur in some way, at least initially, at the level of theoretical frameworks.¹⁸ At least a significant part of this crisis to communicate is wrapped up in the unexamined theoretical frameworks of individuals. The involved parties must understand this situation. Simply knowing it exists would (I hope) contribute to the increased charitability of those involved, as well as add to the possibility of a more mutual understanding. This would involve clarifying definitions, supplying context, implicit assumptions, logical entailments, and possibly many other things. It would involve a willingness to listen, and an honest attempt to understand one’s adversaries–not simply trying to get at the meaning of what is being advanced, but also the attempt to consider what context or what rational structure would enable the opposing position to be valid.¹⁹ Trying to understand the underlying basis for a given position is key not only to understand that position but also to identify potential problems with one’s own, as well as both common ground and potential weaknesses within opposing viewpoints. What matters then, insofar as meaningful debate and discussion are concerned, is an investigation into the theoretical frameworks that structure our thoughts and interpretations, and learning to communicate them to relevant others. When large areas of such frameworks can be discovered and disentangled in a mutually beneficial way, the actual conversation can move forward and become fruitful.²⁰

There is also a natural tendency to shun those with whom we disagree.²¹ I believe this is a mistake. It is increasingly common to see people label each other in some way, such as uneducated, racist, bigoted, “sheep”, even evil. In so doing, we limit our ability to actually engage with others. We also limit our ability to understand them, and in turn, our ability to persuade. The contemporary social media phenomenon of “defriending” is a case in point. Here a given person seeks to buffer him or herself from opposing viewpoints. The literal inability to tolerate the existence of other views is here on full display, as (for some) longstanding friendships are scrapped over alleged disagreements without even a discussion taking place. This is childish nonsense. We would do better to welcome the opportunity to engage with those offering an alternative viewpoint. And, if not engage directly, at least learn to consider what we do not understand. Before we open our mouths, we should, perhaps, think a bit.

Notes:

1. In a way, this is not alarming, as these are but the latest examples in a historical epoch largely characterized by such interminable communication. Here, the work of Alasdair MacIntyre is perhaps most relevant.

2. In many ways, the content of this essay is preliminary. At the very least the idea needs to somewhat refined and further developed. I have nonetheless decided to go with it, and will attempt to draw additional implications, and perhaps provide a clearer picture in the future.

3. See the Introduction to this website (www.themodernframe.com).

4. If this definition is not readily understood, think of a theoretical framework as an “implicit set of beliefs”. To be sure, I am using the word “theoretical” in a somewhat novel sense in my stated definition. I could perhaps have used the word philosophical or even metaphysical, but such choices carry more baggage with them than I would like to risk. Still, theoretical is perhaps no better. It may also be slightly misleading to refer to this framework in the singular, as it is better described as a logical network of interrelated structures of rationality, by no means necessarily coherent or lacking in contradiction. The idea of there being multiple rationalities, competing and various, is also something that many people may find difficult to accept. Again, here I recommend the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, specifically After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

5. It is actually more complicated than that. Following the same idea as #4 (above), there is probably no single “lens”, but rather many interchanging and interlocking lenses through which we view and evaluate and comprehend the world we see around us. Charles Taylor has written about this to some extent in A Secular Age and Sources of the Self.

6. This is of course witnessed by the phenomenon of confirmation bias. Those who seek to merely reinforce their own viewpoints are especially prone to this. There appears to be a danger in exclusively associating with people, or reading authors, with whom one already agrees. The danger lies in limiting one’s viewpoint, thereby being ill-equipped to engage in meaningful discussions with certain others who hold different views.

7. By “believe” I refer to my theoretical framework, which may be largely unacknowledged or even unknown to myself. Despite my lack of awareness, this framework nonetheless exerts a kind of power over me, coloring or shading my thoughts and perceptions, and ultimately, my conclusions about the world.

8. If I adopt such a framework, I may be increasingly prone to conspiracy theories.

9. As an example, consider someone who believes COVID-19 was caused by a group of people who used their scientific understanding of virology and communicable diseases to do God’s will.

10. Consider the proposition: There is systemic racism in America today. Is it true? You would think that the validity of such a statement would not be that difficult to confirm or deny, especially with supporting facts. Yet there are large groups of people that either confirm or deny this proposition on the basis of what they believe to be facts. How are such people have a meaningful discussion without simply talking past each other?

11. This is closely connected to the idea that facts are theory-laden, i.e., they do not exist independently of a theoretical structure. What I see and perceive and interpret–and therefore my articulation of a given fact–is ultimately rooted in my theoretical framework. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? See also, Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

12. Although it is not quite that bad (explicitly), it is (implicitly) in some ways worse. When two people speak different languages they at least know that they do not understan]]> Mon, 29 Jun 2020 20:50:56 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDPyuFw3fUIjmKrkJyTkC_2b https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDPafhWwDfbUKRhSCv31NykC

As the concept of a calling became unmoored from its historically religious roots it gradually gave way to the secular concept of success.¹ Over time, success effectively became the end-goal or purpose of everyday life and existence.² This is the framework in which the modern culture of achievement was born. It is not a coincidence that this culture originated, developed, and matured to the greatest extent in America–a country wedded more than any other to the economic system of capitalism. The dream of success became the preoccupation of many and was reinforced in what I have called the “mainline thought” of self-help or success literature as it existed in the early to mid-twentieth century.³ It is within the larger whole of socioeconomic circumstance as well as the particulars of success literature itself that the image of the modern culture of achievement finally appears.

In a previous essay I alluded that, as a hegemonic concept, success emerged both within and from the concept of a calling. It is a secular by-product of a historically religious idea: one’s task as given by God. To (again) invoke Max Weber, “[a]s the paroxysms of the search for God’s kingdom gradually dissolved into the dispassionate virtues of the vocational calling and the religious roots of the movement slowly withered, a utilitarian orientation to the world took hold.”⁴ This utilitarian orientation to the world–what I have called the instrumental stance–eventually transformed the outlook of the average person until the end-goal of fulfilling one’s duty in a vocational calling slowly gave way to the end-goal of success.⁵ This amounted to nothing less than yet another reorientation of human life: just as the (modern) notion of a calling displaced the (medieval) traditional economic ethic, the (secularized) notion of success displaced the (religious) concept of a vocation or calling.⁶ A paradigm shift; largely silent, yet no less revolutionary.⁷

One element of this transformation is the sense in which success became detached, or abstracted, from concrete circumstances. It became an idea, as well as an ideal. I have noted before that throughout history the rich and powerful have always enjoyed a certain amount of idealization in the psyche of the common man or woman. In the past wealth was largely fixed. What one owned depended for the most part on one’s place in society. The fluidity of wealth did not become widespread until capitalism reared its monetary crown. With capitalism came the increased ability to acquire a fortune–unconnected to one’s birth or inheritance. The hegemony of wealth, for the first time in history, became a reality. Such wealth began to develop on a widespread basis independently of the ruling class, ushering in the emergence of not only greater upper- but also middle-class wealth. The sight of the affluent became increasingly common, and nowhere was this more the case than in America, the “land of opportunity”. The newly created millionaire class served both as a touchstone and a concretization of the abstraction; wealthy individuals and millionaires were success personified. As such, they became the ideal of the American imagination.

Idealizations, such as the rich businessman or industrialist, can be found in success literature at least as far back as Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859) and also feature prominently in the work of Orison Swett Marden. The writings of Napoleon Hill were ultimately a distillation of the thinking that came before him, but more importantly, they served to further project and popularize the ideal beyond that of other writers. While previous writers were content to tell stories and offer practical advice with the end-goal of success in view, Hill took the end-goal of success and concretized it in the form of an ideal person: the millionaire.⁸ Thus, the telos of Hill’s writing is not merely success (as an abstraction), but the realization of a certain kind of person. And becoming such a person will allow you to achieve whatever you desire–especially money. Where common idealizations were concerned with what rich people possessed or (in prior success literature) how they got it, Hill’s idealization was concerned with the traits of who they are, and how to become like them. So, who are such people? They are what I have previously described as a “person fully wielding the powers of the universe, achieving success on their own terms”.⁹ They possess what Hill called the “Carnegie Secret”.¹⁰

If you get your hands on a copy of The Law of Success (1928) or Think and Grow Rich (1937), you won’t get very far into either of them before encountering a long list of names. These are people Hill claimed to interview, analyze, and study the life work of, over the course of no less than twenty years. “These names represent but a small fraction of the hundreds of well-known Americans whose achievements, financial and otherwise, prove that those who understand and apply the Carnegie secret reach high stations in life.”¹¹ “The author is grateful for having enjoyed the privilege of enlisting the services of the most powerful men on earth, in the building of the Law of Success course. […] These men have been the back-bone and the foundation and the skeleton of American business, finance, industry and statesmanship. The Law of Success course epitomizes the philosophy and the rules of procedure which made each of these men a great power in his chosen field of endeavor.”¹² In other words, each of these men is the embodiment of the idealization of success, i.e., they are instantiations of the ideal person. They comprise a pantheon of gods in the religion of American capitalism.

Much, if not all of Hill’s work, can be understood as an attempt to standardize the process of becoming such a person.¹³ By clearing the way for the average person to become the ideal—no less through a method purported to be an “exact science” sure to result in success—Hill had a dramatic affect on the direction of subsequent self-help and success literature. The idealization of the millionaire had transformed into an aspiration.¹⁴ And it is in such aspirations that we discover what I have called the “mainline thought” of self-help or success literature, i.e., the idealization of a peculiar kind of person supported by a method intended to help the reader become such a person.¹⁵ This brings me to the modern culture of achievement.

The modern culture of achievement can be considered in at least two ways. First, from a perspective of the wider culture itself, consisting primarily of socioeconomic factors. Second, from the perspective of the literature it produced, and its development over time.

What I have in mind when considering the first way is explained in part by my recent essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations In Context, as well my prior essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World. The former is a somewhat loose historical account, while the latter is concerned with some of the after-effects, or results. There is the general phenomenon that money is necessary to survive, and that the acquisition, use, and consumption of money structures our day to day activity in the form of an end-goal or purpose. The widespread idealization of success takes this a step further, even to the point of becoming an abstraction.¹⁶ Idealization becomes aspiration; the motivation to succeed yields a strong force in the contemporary world. Perhaps even to the point that some of us live to work, instead of working to live. This is closely connected with the endless search for improvement, innovation, efficiency, and economic growth.¹⁷ Despite the mass of accumulated success literature, it is worth noting that many people succeed without ever having read a self-help or success-related book. This is a testament to the power of the wider culture of modern achievement–its rational structures exert a kind of gravitational force, acting both on and through us without our acknowledgment or comprehension. While speaking of the modern economic order, Max Weber wrote “[t]his cosmos today determines the style of life of all individuals born into this grinding mechanism, and not only those directly engaged in economically productive activity. It does so with overwhelming force–and perhaps it will continue to do so until the last ton of fossil fuel has burnt to ashes.”¹⁸

The second way concerns the literature produced by the modern culture of achievement, the early stages of which I have partially chronicled.¹⁹ As noted above, the idealization of success existed independently of self-help or success literature; existing in the wider culture that provided an ideal environment for such literature to appear. We have seen that Napoleon Hill took the common idealization of success a step further, concentrating the abstraction into the image of the ideal person. The so-called ideal person is the structuring idea of the literature produced by the modern culture of achievement, especially what I have called its “mainline thought”. The ideal can take on many forms, such as the millionaire, the rich businessman, the master salesman, the positive thinker, the entrepreneur, the leader, the winner, and so forth. Accompanying the ideal are methods for helping–sometimes guaranteeing–the reader to become such a person.

The publication of The Law of Success and especially Think and Grow Rich ushered in a new age of success publishing. The decades that followed witness the largest growth the genre had ever seen up to that point. Writers such as Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking [1952], et al.), Earl Nightingale (The Strangest Secret [1957], et al.), W. Clement Stone (Success Through A Positive Mental Attitude [1959], et al.), Robert Schuller (Way to the Good Life [1963], et al.), Og Mandino (The Greatest Salesman in the World [1968], et al.), and Charlie “T” Jones (Life is Tremendous [1968]) together form a direct line of descent in the mainline thought that began with Napoleon Hill.²⁰ The environment was prime for writers unconnected with the mainline to throw their hats in the ring. Examples include David J. Swartz (The Magic of Thinking Big [1959], et al.) and Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics [1960], et al.). Dale Carnegie’s writing continued (How to Stop Worrying and Start Living [1948], et al.), helping create the modern genre of human relations or people skills, which steadily grew (Les Giblin, How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People [1956], et al.). And this was only the beginning.

It was perhaps inevitable that over time self-help or success literature produced a subculture of sorts consisting of a group of people characterized by their consumption of self-help and success literature. It does not appear relevant that most of them do not become outstanding successes, or fabulously rich–the reading of such literature has, for this group, become an end in itself. That one of the most practical, utilitarian, and instrumental bodies of thought has for some become an end in itself is not, it seems, without a sense of irony.

Notes:

1. See my essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations in Context.

2. Work was once a means to living, it is now the purpose of living. See also my essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World.

3. The success literature of the mid-twentieth century has not yet been introduced. See also my essay, The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part III.

4. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 5.

5. How this happened is not entirely obvious, but I suspect it to be closely bound up with both the metaphysical nature and the growing necessity of money. A topic to be explored in the future.

6. What appears to have changed is the notion of duty as it was connected to one’s calling. The religious idea was clearly informed by the desire to add to the glory of God through one’s daily work. In this way we can understand success as a necessary consequence, but the end-goal of fulfilling one’s duty in a vocational calling remains the glory of God. The shift that takes place is such that the end-goal of fulfilling one’s duty comes to be replaced by the end-goal of material prosperity–success. The religious impetus has been shed. To be sure, the notion of a vocation or calling is still with us. But although it exists in a way that is for the most part stripped of its formerly religious significance, the religious idea of a God-given task is still present in some areas.

7. The concept of a “paradigm shift” is discussed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

8. We can easily substitute various other terms: inventor, industrialist, executive, sales professional, doctor, lawyer, businessman, politician, entrepreneur, leader, winner, etc. But regardless of the particulars, we are first and foremost to understand such people in terms of attaining the ideal of success by becoming rich.

9. See my essay, The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part III.

10. It is well-known that Napoleon Hill claimed his entire life work was set in motion at the suggestion of the industrialist, Andrew Carnegie. At the beginning of Think and Grow Rich, Hill writes “In every chapter of this book, mention has been made of the money-making secret which has made fortunes for hundreds of exceedingly wealthy men whom I have carefully analyzed over a long period of years. The secret was brought to my attention by Andrew Carnegie, more than a half century ago. […] [H]e asked if I would be willing to spend twenty years or more preparing myself to take it to the world, to men and women who, without the secret, might go through life as failures. I said I would, and with Mr. Carnegie’s cooperation, I have kept my promise.” See Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, A Word from the Author.

11. See Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, A Word from the Author.

12. See Napoleon Hill, The Law of Successhttps://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDPafhWwDfbUKRhSCv31NykC https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDOvy70kjkbWyQBC78OgjhDM

Notes:

1. Cf. Jonathan Schaffer, “On What Grounds What,” in Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, ed. David Manley, David J. Chalmers, and Ryan Wasserman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 347–383.

2. See esp. Charles Kahn, “Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy,” Archiv Für Geschichte Der Philosophie 58, no. 4 (1976): 323–34; Lesley Brown, “Being in the Sophist: A Syntactical Enquiry,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 4 (1986): 49–70; Lesley Brown, “The Verb ‘to Be’ in Greek Philosophy,” in Language, ed. Stephen Everson, Companions to Ancient Thought 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Charles Kahn, The Verb “Be” In Ancient Greek (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003); Charles Kahn, Essays on Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Paul DiRado and Michael Wiitala, “In What Sense Does the One Exist? Existence and Hypostasis in Plotinus,” in Platonic Pathways: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, ed. John F. Finamore and Danielle A. Layne (Gloucestershire, UK: The Prometheus Trust, 2018), 77–92.

3. For instance, propositions, numbers, the Pythagorean theorem, et al.

4. See esp. Plato Sophist 257b-c; Aristotle, Categories 5.3b25-30.

5. This passage is taken from fragment 2 of Parmenides’ poem. The translation is my own. For the Greek text on which it is based, see A. H. Coxon, The Fragments of Parmenides, revised ed. (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2009), 57.

6. When St. Thomas Aquinas asks “whether God is” (an Deus sit) in Summa Theologica I.Q2.A3, I take him to be asking whether or not there is some one determinate being that “everyone calls God” (quod omnes dicunt Deum; Aquinas ends each of his famous five ways with some variant of this claim). In my view, translating an Deus sit as “whether God exists” is misleading given the binary nature of the modern notion of existence. The translation “whether God is” is both more literal (sit is a form of the verb “to be”) and more accurate.

Over the course of three previous essays, I sketched some of the origins of what I have called “the modern culture of achievement”.¹ What has been missing up to this point in these explorations is a historical understanding of the context in which these origins emerged. The origins of modern success literature (and its corresponding culture) came about at a time when the quest to succeed existed in an almost exclusively–though not entirely–secular way. As Max Weber observed, the “spirit of capitalism” reached a point where it became self-sufficient, no longer requiring the religious impetus which had sparked it.² It was in the rational and methodical reorganization of life, structured around the idea of a vocation or calling, which laid the groundwork for what I have described in the origin story.³ This is what I had in mind, when, speaking of success literature in Part I, I wrote, “the literature in question developed and emerged within a culture that already existed”. It is within the context of the larger whole of socioeconomic history that a deeper and broader understanding of the origins of achievement culture will emerge.⁴

“People do not ‘by nature’ wish to earn more and more money. Instead, they wish simply to live, and to live as they have been accustomed and to earn as much as is required to do so.”⁵ These words are from Max Weber, and at first glance, they may appear dead wrong. Today, we are inclined to think that by nature people do wish to earn more and more money.⁶ But while the crux of the issue here is really the meaning of the phrase “by nature”, Weber’s point is somewhat different. He is describing economic traditionalism,⁷ which refers to “a frame of mind in respect to work” largely adopted in pre-capitalist Europe. According to this frame of mind, work “is viewed as a necessary evil and only one arena of life, no more important than the arenas of leisure, family, and friends. ‘Traditional needs’ are implied: when fulfilled, then work ceases.”⁸ “Wherever modern capitalism began its task of increasing the ‘productivity’ of human work by increasing its intensity, it confronted, in the precapitalist economy, an infinitely obdurate barrier in the form of this definition of work.”⁹ For an economic traditionalist, the question is not “How much can I make?”, but “How much do I need to satisfy my accustomed needs?” This was the economic ethic of not only pre-capitalist but also pre-Protestant, medieval Europe.¹⁰ It was in the wake of the Reformation that we begin to see the breakdown of this approach to the cycles of daily work.

With the rise of Protestantism,¹¹ we see for the first time the articulation of the modern conception of a calling–one’s task as given by God. In this sense, work takes on a uniquely demarcated position in one’s life. As God-given, it becomes a duty, an obligation, imbued with an imperative of success. We should not–can not–fail in a task appointed to us by God Himself.¹² It is not difficult to see how the “fulfillment of duty in vocational callings became viewed as the highest expression that moral activity could assume. Precisely this new notion of the moral worth of devoting oneself to a calling was the unavoidable result of the idea of attaching religious significance to daily work.”¹³ Success in one’s calling was, therefore, a means of self-assurance that one had fulfilled one’s duty, and thereby added to the “glory of God”, but also for some a confirmation of one’s status among the elect–those predestined by God for salvation. “Ironically,” writes Eugene McCarraher, “the rejection of works as a means of salvation entailed a gospel of work”.¹⁴ As I have previously explored, work in the Middle Ages was largely “dominated by agrarian rhythms, free of haste, careless of exactitude, unconcerned by productivity”.¹⁵ Now, for the first time in history, the importance of daily work no longer consisted in the simple maintenance of daily living, but in the theological imperative to succeed in one’s calling.

There is a certain kind of logical structure contained in the concept of a calling, which appears to have had dramatic effects on the development of capitalism. The continual striving for success was, as stated above, built-in to one’s vocation or calling. But the concept of success also entails an imperative of its own: improvement or innovation. In other words, the continual striving for success in a calling entails, as a logical extension, the means of continual improvement or innovation. This is clearly the case in modern business enterprises. Furthermore, it seems to be confirmed in Puritanism, especially in England, where the “use of land for the profitable production of commodities” was “divinely commanded”.¹⁶ Improvement literature was developed by many Puritan ministers throughout the 17th century in England, though it must be emphasized that the basis for this literature was strongly religious. William Spurstowe’s The Spiritual Chymist (1677), Edward Bury’s The Husbandman’s Companion (1677), John Flavel’s Husbandry Spiritualized (1669) and Navigation Spiritualized (1671), and William Bagshaw’s Trading Spiritualized (1696), are all examples.¹⁷ The quest for improvement was closely bound up with the quest for profit, which provided a concrete measurement for it. This may help explain the Puritan’s “indomitable and lucrative faith in the imperative of profit. […] The same God who ordained the world’s wonders and marvels made the market for pecuniary glory. Contrary to the oft-reiterated claim that Puritans separated the religious and economic realms, the saints affirmed that profit-making followed the grain of the universe.”¹⁸ In his Christian Directory, Richard Baxter writes “if God shew you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way”–without “wrong to your soul or to any other”–then “if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.” Improvement–religiously sanctioned, and quantified in the form of profit–thus became a theological imperative existing within the context of the continual striving for success in a calling. “Formed in the crucible of improvement, the Puritan doctrine of calling was the first covenant theology of capitalism.”¹⁹

Add to these considerations the concept of what Weber calls “this-worldly asceticism” and you have a good bulk of his main thesis behind you. In contrast to the monastic asceticism of the Middle Ages–which was largely confined to the cloister–this-worldy, or “Protestant asceticism fought with fury against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions and constricted consumption, especially of luxury goods. On the other hand, it had the psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods from the constraints of the traditional economic ethic. In the process, ascetic Protestantism shattered the bonds restricting all striving for gain–not only by legalizing profit but also by perceiving it as desired by God. The struggle against the desires of the flesh and the attachment to external goods was not, as the Puritans explicitly attest, a struggle against acquisition; rather, it challenged the irrational use of possessions. That which remained so familiar to feudal sensibilities–a high regard for the external display of luxury consumption–was condemned by the Puritans as a deification of human wants and desires. According to them, God wanted a rational and utilitarian use of wealth on behalf of the basic needs of the person and the community. […] Moreover, if we now combine the strictures against consumption with this unchaining of the striving for wealth, a certain external result now becomes visible: the formation of capital through asceticism’s compulsive saving. The restrictions that opposed the consumption of wealth indeed had their productive use, for profit and gain became used as investment capital.”²⁰ In this way, the continual striving for success in one’s vocation or calling had the effect of nothing less than a rational, methodical, reorganization of human life.

As wealth increased, so too did the secularizing effects of it. John Wesley–the founder of Methodism–was keenly aware of this when he wrote, “I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists now in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase their possession of material goods. Hence, they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. We ought not to prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich.”²¹ Thus, motives which began as religious became increasingly secularized. “As the paroxysms of the search for God’s kingdom gradually dissolved into the dispassionate virtues of the vocational calling and the religious roots of the movement slowly withered, a utilitarian orientation to the world took hold.”²²

Over the course of centuries–centuries of continued work, improvement, profit, accumulation, investment, reinvestment, scientific-, industrial-, and technological-revolutions, and many others–the human world was added to, expanded upon, and finally, transformed. “For to the extent that asceticism moved out of the monastic cell and was carried over into the life of work in a vocational calling, and then commenced to rule over this-worldly morality, it helped to do its part to build the mighty cosmos of the modern economic order. […] To the extent that asceticism undertook to transform and influence the world, the world’s material goods acquired an increasing and, in the end, inescapable power over people–as never before in history. […] And the idea of an ‘obligation to search for and then accept a vocational calling’ now wanders around in our lives as the ghost of beliefs no longer anchored in the substance of religion. […] The Puritan wanted to be a person with a vocational calling; we must be.”²³

Thus we find the modern concept of “success”, conceived as the end-goal or purpose of life, is a secular conception that evolved from the historically religious concept of a calling.²⁴ Each of these developments is illustrative of a growing hegemony of instrumental rationality, what I have called the “instrumental stance“, or what Jacques Ellul called “technique”. On the scale of business enterprise, this rationality can be seen playing out in phenomena as diverse as scientific management, Fordism, or even McDonaldization.²⁵ On an individual level, it is clearly embodied in the success literature I have explored so far. Indeed, the development of success literature was its logical extension.

Notes:

1. See my essays, The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part I; Part II; and Part III.

2. Those who are unfamiliar with the work of Weber may be surprised by this. That the roots of a this-world success orientation; the methodical organization of life structured around the idea of a vocation or a calling; the accumulation of capital itself–that each of which respectively derive from a specifically Protestant understanding of the world–would likely not be our first guess. There are, of course, debates about Weber’s thesis. But I have found no reason to be persuaded that Weber is incorrect in his analysis. I believe disagreements concerning the veracity of his position involve a mistake of using the same terminology to explain different phenomena. There are certainly some good questions posed to those following Weber, but I believe they are answerable and do not cast doubt on his main points. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

3. By “origin story” I refer to the tripartite string of essays concerned with the beginnings of the modern culture of achievement. See my essays, The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part I; Part II; and Part III.

4. In these considerations, I have mostly been influenced by Max Weber, Eugene McCarraher, Charles Taylor, and Jacques Ellul.

5. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 2.

6. Ironically, we think this because it is built into the structure of the human world that we have been born into. We are thus accustomed to the idea of “always wanting more and more money”. The permeation of our society by the use of money makes this impulse extremely hard to resist.

7. The subject of economic traditionalism was briefly touched upon in my essay, A Sketch of The Workaday World.

8. Quoted from the Glossary to Stephen Kalberg’s translation of Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism with Other Writings on the Rise of the West.

9. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 2.

10. It should be noted that exceptions always exist. What I am talking about here is that generally, and for the most part, this was the ethic the common people lived by during the Middle Ages. The Catholic ethic was closely bound up with that of the traditional ethic. The Catholic was not burdened by a quest to confirm his place among the elect, nor was he bound by the duty to succeed in a calling as the highest praise or aspiration of human life.

11. See, for example, the theological developments Weber cites by Lutherans, Calvinists, Pietists, Methodists, Baptists, Quakers, and others. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Puritanism yielded the strongest influence in America. Alexis de Tocqueville went so far as to observe that the “passions that move Americans most deeply are commercial rather than political.” The uniquely American expression of ascetic Protestantism is Mormonism, which due to reasons of brevity, I will set aside for the time being.

12. Failure would, perhaps, be a sign of damnation; of one’s not being a member of the elect, and thus not numbered among God’s chosen and saved. This line of thought is particularly relevant in Calvinism.

13. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Chapter 3.

14. See Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon. Emphasis in original.

15. See Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ageshttps://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDOiQSY21wHtcRKeetMRuZbW https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/fa2NDwdQtDPpDOY_OGHwBgp41t9tiERU

In taking a brief respite from my most recent string of essays, I wish to consider the subject of philosophy. Specifically its definition, but also its relationship to utility or what I have called instrumentality. With the turn of the modern epoch, the common understanding of philosophy has been transformed. Once the province of wisdom, it has metamorphosized into a creature of specialized knowledge–one that is increasingly called into question. In both the academic sphere and the common world of everyday life, philosophy is questioned on the basis of its utility or instrumentality.¹ And such questioning is paradigmatic of the modern frame. But philosophy cannot be so easily cast aside; its defense is deeper and more profound than many would-be critics realize. The French philosopher Etienne Gilson perhaps said it best when he wrote: “Philosophy always buries its undertakers.”² Along with Gilson, my understanding of philosophy here has been shaped most by Josef Pieper, and to a certain extent by William Vallicella.³

In a previous essay I touched upon what I called the classical conception of philosophy, which more or less reflects my own understanding of the subject. To reiterate, philosophy is the love of wisdom. Wisdom is necessarily that which is true–that which corresponds to reality, to the way things are. What is loved is also sought; we seek, search, and long for that which we love.⁴ Therefore, philosophy is an aspiration of the human heart and mind; a quest for that which is true; and it may be engaged in by anyone.⁵ It is the groping hand of humanity to apprehend reality itself. As such, philosophy draws upon all sources of life and existence, of experience and fact.⁶ Nothing less than the totality of being is grist for philosophy’s mill.⁷ The net is wide, and the ocean deep.

The beginning of philosophy–and this is no less true of poetry–is wonder.⁸ In wonder we encounter something that shocks us, stops us, causes us to pause, reflect, reexamine. In so doing, we transcend the daily cycle of instrumental activity. We step beyond the confines of mechanism and toil. To philosophize is to leave the workaday world behind, the world of means/end rationalism and utilitarian calculation; the world of economics and planning, efficiency and profit. It is to shed the world embodied by the instrumental stance and enter the world of the non-instrumental. The end or telos of philosophy–truth, wisdom, reality–is an end in itself. Philosophy is therefore, strictly speaking, useless. But therein lies its beauty and nobility. Therein lies its glory. What, after all, is the use of the sublime? Philosophy may bake no bread, but nor does man “live by bread alone”.⁹

Again, this is more or less the classical picture of philosophy that the West has inherited from the ancient Greeks. It is from this original and fundamental sense of philosophy that other senses of philosophy derive. The academic sense of philosophy as a field of specialized knowledge is no exception. With the rise of the printing press, the university, and the resulting formation of an educated class, the scope and body of knowledge increased. One result of this was specialization and the development of independent bodies of thought. Natural science, mathematics, political science, psychology, and others, were all once contained within the activity of philosophy. Now they exist as independent¹⁰ specialized fields more or less cut off from the understanding of the general public or non-specialist. Today, we find professional philosophers specializing in a given area of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, and so on. This has created a situation where it becomes possible to “do philosophy” in a way that has become detached from its original meaning as the love of wisdom. To philosophize on the one hand, and to teach, or even study philosophy on the other hand, are distinct and separable activities. Academics can teach or conduct research in such a way that the activity exists entirely within the confines of a specialized and closed domain of knowledge, posing or attempting to resolve problems with no view to the wider scope of reality. This, in fact, is the view of many people today when they think of philosophy and philosophers themselves.

For this reason perhaps, philosophy–as part of the humanities–has sometimes been questioned by the wider academic community,¹¹ as well as the general public. Much of this questioning is rooted in philosophy’s utility or lack thereof. What do philosophers do? What do they make? How many jobs are available? The focus of governments and universities on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a case in point.¹² Each of these fields is a paradigm example of usefulness and instrumentality, both in themselves and in the wider view as a benefit to society as a whole.¹³

Notwithstanding the connection to the ivory tower analogy, philosophy as specialized knowledge can be seen as an instrumental activity. One can, in fact, do it for a living. Professional philosophers go to work and return home in much the same way as factory workers or government employees. They teach or conduct research, and collect a paycheck. This does not preclude them from practicing philosophy in its original sense as the love of wisdom, but it does not require it either. In this way, humanity’s oldest aspiration in the disinterested pursuit of knowledge has been co-opted by the modern frame of instrumental rationality.

In a world increasingly characterized by utility and instrumentality the classical conception of philosophy must seem nearly unintelligible. The activity is unintelligible because the modern frame itself is structured in such a way that the criterion of what is good is what is useful; what is useless, is worthless. It is difficult to overemphasize the implications of the instrumental stance, particularly since the instrumental stance–like the modern frame itself–cannot recognize what is beyond or outside its purview. Everything must in some way be brought to bear upon its approach to the world. The instrumentalism of modernity is, therefore, totalitarian.

Lastly, I will touch upon the questioning of philosophy from some in the scientific community. As is well-known, natural science seeks a comprehensive understanding or knowledge of reality. The goal of philosophy is the same. But the methods of the natural sciences are rooted in empiricism, while philosophical methods are more basic or fundamental. This puts the question of knowledge front and center: Is knowledge derived from philosophy actually knowledge or simply a masquerade? If the methods of the natural sciences are the only reliable method to attain knowledge, then either philosophy should play a role submissive to the natural sciences, or acknowledge its status as outmoded. This view is sometimes called scientism–the view that science is the only reliable source of knowledge.¹⁴

A basic philosophical response to scientism is that it is self-refuting. The view that “science is the only reliable source of knowledge” is not a scientific but a philosophical proposition, thereby vindicating philosophy. To go slightly deeper, all scientific inquiry presupposes philosophical assumptions and presuppositions.¹⁵ The empiricism presupposed by the natural sciences–the view that knowledge is derived from sense-experience–is itself a philosophical viewpoint, and thus requires a philosophical defense. It is not my intention here to disparage the natural sciences; scientific knowledge is indeed knowledge. But it is not exhaustive of knowledge in the way that some have argued; indeed it presupposes a theoretical structure that is not itself scientific, but philosophical. It is in light of such debates that we can better understand Etienne Gilson’s dictum that philosophy always buries its undertakers.

Still–I have not, nor would I–argue that philosophy is the only reliable source of knowledge (or wisdom). It is rather, the love of such things; the continual striving to understand and comprehend reality itself. “For to love wisdom is also to love science, and prudence; it is to seek peace in the inner accord of each mind with itself and in the mutual accord of all minds.”¹⁶ William Vallicella observed that philosophy always resurrects its dead.¹⁷ What he is talking about is that even the oldest philosophers who have long turned to dust have a voice; their writing reverberates throughout the ages still. None has triumphed with finality, yet nor have they been defeated with complete and absolute certainty. Classically conceived, philosophy is not a doctrine or body of knowledge. Philosophy is a lover, whose glimpse of the beloved is more pleasing and sweet than an exact knowledge of other things.¹⁸

Notes:

1. As previously mentioned, much of what today is classified under the natural sciences was once within the province of philosophy. As time passes we see scientific knowledge becoming more and more specialized, developing subdisciplines and subcategories. Thus, as one popular view would have it, over time philosophy’s subject matter is confined to less and less, until one day it will be entirely eclipsed by the natural sciences.

2. See Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Part Four. Gilson’s point is this: The history of philosophy is littered with proclamations of its imminent death and futility, but yet is always followed by its revival and resurrection. To the consternation of many, philosophy always seems to have the last word. In more everyday terms, I would add the following: One cannot condemn or criticize philosophy without engaging in the activity itself, thereby validating it by implication or presupposition.

3. See Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience; Josef Pieper, Leisure The Basis of Culture, In Defense of Philosophy, and Only The Lover Sings. See also his excellent essay, “The Philosophical Act”. William F. Vallicella is a retired American philosopher who maintains the blog Maverick Philosopher. Each of these writers have been influenced by both ancient Greek and medieval thought.

4. Plato goes so far as to identify philosophy with Eros. In many ways our longing for knowledge or truth is beyond our control–it is built in to our nature, as it were–and in this way the Platonic comparison between the philosopher and the lover is not without basis. Although Plato’s conception of eros transcends the merely physical and mortal, reaching toward the ideal (or Form) of beauty itself, the identification can also be made with the more common understanding of the word as sexual (erotic) desire. Both conceptions appear to be bound up with the longing for the eternal and immortal. See Plato, Symposium