Flattened World
Another chapter from Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity. The chapter is entitled The Slide To Subjectivism. He writes at length about the quest for a true self, when there is no horizon of meaning, (no divinely sanctioned king, or gods/God on high authorizing history as having a point, etc..) Perhaps you can get the drift of the chapter. When the traditional sources, the ground-of-being for countless generations that came before us, has been eroded, shown to be a paste-up, what then? Join a majority of your fellows to make choice after choice anticipating the feelings one expects to have? To flip the script, to make my decisions major and minor responding to such bodily states? What is cause and what is effect? The feed-back effect is self-reinforcing, – thus comes the “slide”. According to Taylor life as a project of self-creation is apt to slide into a radical subjectivism. Like a jester we laugh at our own joke, “simply choosing will make everything ok.”
Get where this is pointing…
In a flattened world, where the horizons of meaning become fainter, the ideal of self-determining freedom comes to exercise a more powerful attraction. It seems that significance can be conferred by choice, by making my life an exercise in freedom, even when all other sources fail. Self-determining freedom is in part the default solution of the culture of authenticity, while at the same time it is its bane, since it further intensifies anthropocentrism.
Here in America we’ve been greasing “the slide” for quite some time. A disposition of unbounded consumption, endorsement of “winner takes all” ideal (not a metaphor) has resulted in this society. Quality of life accelerates in decline for a majority.
We are lonely in an atomized society. In a flat world a single thing matters. What do you think that one thing is?
This tune by Rush, Closer To The Heart suggests a way ahead.
