Cynical Reason

To me it’s historically unmatched. I’ve never read or heard of a period like this and I’ve read about many historical periods. But not one in which you can talk to young people the way you can at the college level today and find out that they believe nothing, want nothing, hope nothing, expect nothing, dream nothing, desire nothing. Push them far enough and they’ll say “yeah, I’ve got to get a job. I spent a lot of money at Duke”. That’s not what I’m talking about here. They hope nothing. Expect nothing. Dream nothing. Desire nothing. And it is a fair question to ask whether a society that produces this reaction in its young is worthy of existence at all. It really is. It’s worth asking that. Whether it’s worth being here at all

In 1993 Rick Roderick talks about the students he met while teaching at Duke university. As he goes on to say, these are the youth he met at a site of great privilege… what of youth elsewhere? More to the point, what of the society which works to produce the conditions within this (postmodern) reason manifests itself. What I take Roderick to essentially be saying here is that late capitalism has begun to produce the last men of whom Nietzsche wrote a century earlier. Of course this is ultimately an empirical thesis and one that can only be investigated from a standpoint which takes human concerns seriously. Otherwise the possibility of understanding their debasement and loss is foreclosed from the start.

The Individualistic Ethos of the 19th Century

I just came across an extremely interesting passage in Richard Sennett’s book Authority,

The panoptican, New Lanark, the Waltham Mills, the Saint-Simonian workshops were all conceived against the grain of the individualistic economic ethos of the 19th century. All these paternal experiments attempted to create a community. In the case of the industrial experiments, these versions of in loco parentis attempted to protect the conditions of work from the dominating influence of the market rate for wages, an influence which woujld determine, if left to itself, who would belong to the workshop, how decisions would be made, and the like. The criticism which hardheaded people, therefore, made of these early versions of paternalism was that they were costly, idealistic frills.

This points to the great paradox of the VIctorian era, the moral idealism that pervades Victorian society yet lay behind some of its worst Dickensian excesses, as well as the way that liberal individualism came to legitimate and entrench the individualistic economic ethos Sennett talks about, ultimately transforming it into modern liberal capitalism: a strange ethical beast which decries as inimical to human freedom those things its predecessors condemned solely as “costly, idealistic frills”. It is certainly correct in its opposition to the Victorian workhouses (etc) but underlying it is a critique of moralised institutions in principle rather than the horrific excesses of particular institutions. This bifurcation of social life into the public realm of procedural rules governing the private pursuit of individual moral goods leaves critical engagements with institutions morally toothless, as appeals to what are seen (tacitly or otherwise) as ultimately private and arbitrary moral concerns are dismissed as irrelevant – as opposed to necessarily wrong or unjust – to the management of modern institutions; leaving a normative space for the sort of cold instrumental economic logic that led to the condemnation of moralising Victorian institutions as costly frills and underlies the excesses of modern capitalism.