News and Society

The Modern Age is considered to have begun with the Enlightenment, when medieval religion's oppressive grip on the human mind was relinquished, and reason was set free. The real crux of modernism is the belief that we can know and understand the universe by applying objective reason to the material world. The knowledge we obtain by this method, called 'science', is Truth. Reason is assumed to be the highest form of mental functioning and is therefore the proper judge of what is True, and consequently it is also the proper judge of what is Good (ethics) and what is Beautiful (aesthetics).

This point of view persists today as the prevalent way of thinking. On the positive side, it has led to magnificent achievements in medicine, technology, industry, agriculture, aeronautics, and communications, to name but a few. On the negative side, it has led to pollution of the environment, weaponry that threatens total annihilation, mindless consumerism, and an empty sense that life on earth is nothing but an insignificant fluke.

Much of the scientific worldview of modernism has been abandoned by recent science, but it remains deeply ingrained in our psyches and continues to affect all aspects of our daily lives. For instance, our fascination with taking things apart, examining and classifying the pieces, and not carefully considering how to put them back together, applies to our relationships with family and community just as much as to the objects of laboratory study. This way of thinking leads to the fragmentation of our social lives, especially today when technological advancements enable us to leave our homes and roots at a moment's notice and resettle in distant parts of the planet by the end of the day, maintaining superficial relationships through phone lines and computers. Thus the coherence of community decays.

Not that freeing oneself from the confines of a stifling environment is a bad thing, or that the pursuit of individual freedom and personal growth is a bad thing. But there is a vital distinction that is often missed between genuine positive freedom and the unsalvageable destruction of meaningful human connections. An inner spiritual state of detachment enables conscious love, but a self-absorbed emotional detachment from other human beings merely causes alienation, not freedom, and is just a sign of the inability to sustain love, commitment, or responsibility. The flowing-process image that describes material objects in a laboratory applies equally well to people in a society: we are connected to each other in a web of mutuality in space and time, and cannot separate from each other any more than a bit of matter can separate from time, space, or its environment. When community no longer nourishes, and it becomes necessary to break communal links, new human relations must be established. Personal freedom grows when the individual is nourished, sustained, and supported by love, when idiosyncrasies are cherished, and communication is warm and plentiful. But freedom corrodes and perishes in the anonymity of standardized mechanical mass culture, where conformity masquerades as equality, and we are free to make whatever life choices we wish to make but have no healthy criteria for making them.

Andrew Cort is the author of "THE AMERICAN PSYCHE IN SEARCH OF ITS SOUL: Freedom, Equality, and the Restoration of Meaning" ( http://www.meaninginamerica.com/ ). He is a strong advocate for the return of Civility, Cooperation, and Maturity to our politics and national life, and so, although he considers himself a Liberal, the Foreword to his book was written by the well-known Conservative author and commentator, George Gilder. Find out more and pick up your Paperback or Kindle today at the above link.

View the original article here