A Million Angry Shards | Commentary

Social Fragmentation in the Western World

The title of this diatribe comes from a post by Paul Kingsnorth which I invoked in the closing of a previous post. Kingsnorth refers to our culture, and ultimately our souls, being splintered into “a million angry shards” by the complete triumph of economic totalitarianism. It’s true, our society is fast becoming a dysfunctional madhouse. We reinforce our increasingly incoherent values with circular reasoning and other forms of paralogic. We seem to have lost the ability to speak intelligibly about tradeoffs. Meaning and purpose are largely a mystery. We see practically no solutions that aren’t technological or bureaucratic. The result is a morally fragmented society that retains an image of morality without the actual content. Suddenly, long held knowledge is considered invalid. Sexual ethics epitomize this incoherence. Contradictions abound not just in sexual ethics, but also in matters of law and economy as well as practically every other human endeavor.

Events of the past year, particularly the global coronavirus pandemic, highlight the incoherence. We could coldly calculate costs of lock downs in terms of GDP, unemployment rates, and the number of hospitalizations or deaths. But we couldn’t speak intelligibly about the value of life, the meaning of a job, or the beauty of sacrifice. That language is lost in this morally fragmented world devoid of any outside meaning. People liberally assert their rights, but somehow fail to see that every right has a corresponding duty.¹ Fights broke out in stores over the last roll of toilet paper while vacated office buildings and schools sat nearby with reams of toilet paper in their supply closets. Where I live, worship services were deemed ‘non-essential’ while liquor stores remained open. In the once Catholic nation of Ireland, receiving the sacraments even became a criminal offense. In California the film industry was considered ‘essential’ and therefore its workers got an exemption from stay-at-home orders. This meant the porn industry could carry on while many small businesses teetered on verge of insolvency. Elective medical procedures were put on hold but the newly invented right to an abortion meant that those procedures had to proceed no matter the consequences. Angela Nagle struggles with the mysterious ethos behind the rules. She notes that if these rules were applied to other areas of life society would stop functioning. “For example,” she says, “we could never drive a car again because that causes road deaths. But the rules seemed to be undergirded by the moral conviction that saving lives is more important than freedom. At the same time, thousands dying of drug-related deaths is morally acceptable as long as it can be done legally because that’s the price of freedom, a thing we value above merely saving lives. Those are the rules. You have to accept both simultaneously and nobody can really understand or explain why.”²

People wondered whether extreme measures to protect the most vulnerable populations justified the steep economic costs of shutting down businesses. There were very real trade offs that needed to be made. But in order to make such choices the things being chosen should be roughly understood. People had very different ideas on what an economy was for; which jobs were essential; and whose life was most worth protecting. The very people with the least economic value, including the elderly and those with compromised health, were clearly the most at risk from the virus. Some believed no measure was too severe to protect the most vulnerable among us. Others said it would be foolish to jeopardize the wealth and life that our grandparents gave us by tanking the economy to prolong lives that were, frankly, already nearing their end. There are other ways of looking at this.³ But that requires a different set of questions. In other words, are people economic units whose returns diminish over time? Or are they priceless repositories of wisdom worthy of honor and protection? What is an economy for anyway? Is it about endless growth? Or is growth a means to some other end? If so, to what end?

Ours is the type of society that embraces technology and bureaucracy and sees virtually no other solutions. Ian McGilchrist likens it to being in a hall of mirrors in which traditional routes of escape through art and religion have been blocked off.

[It’s] an increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness… a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resource there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines – not even very good ones, at that; a world curiously stripped of depth, colour and value… This is not the intelligent, if hard-nosed, view that its espousers comfort themselves by making it out to be; just a sterile fantasy, the product of a lack of imagination, which makes it easier for us to manipulate what we no longer understand. But it is a fantasy that displaces and renders inaccessible the vibrant, living, profoundly creative world that it was our fortune to inherit – until we squandered our inheritance.⁴

In the first part of my exploration of this moral and spiritual crisis I describe the social fragmentation and moral incoherence:

We think of modern society as pluralistic, but Alasdair MacIntyre suggests that ‘fragmented’ is a better term to describe it. MacIntyre uses a hypothetical example involving the natural sciences to illustrate this fragmentation. He asks his readers to imagine that some catastrophe transpires that causes scientists to somehow be blamed. This sparks a public revolt against science. Scientific equipment is smashed, scientific literature is burned, scientists are lynched, and the teaching of science is abolished. Eventually people come to their senses and seek to restore science. But they have forgotten what science is. They retain memory of certain experiments, partial theorems, mangled instruments, and charred pages from articles and books. People study these fragments without any theoretical background. They have students memorize portions of the periodic table that remain and they use terminology like ‘specific weight’ and ‘atomic mass’. They reembody these concepts under the headings of ‘Physics’ and ‘Chemistry’ but, lacking any contextual grounding, the way they apply these concepts is completely arbitrary. Such an element of choice would be rather shocking to our understanding of the natural sciences. So it is with our take on morality today according to MacIntyre.⁵ We possess fragments of a conceptual scheme devoid of any context from which the significance of these fragments is derived. It’s a world that is incoherent. Lives are lived piecemeal instead of whole. The fragments that remain give an illusion of a morality that doesn’t exist. We end up with situations where it’s possible for a drunk driver who kills a woman en route to a legally prescribed abortion to be charged with two counts of vehicular homicide, one for the woman and another for the condemned child in her womb. Like those holding onto an image of science from MacIntyre’s example, we retain an image of morality without the actual content.

There is a dimension of arbitrary choice in all this that would be shocking in almost any other society. Invoking Desmond Fennell’s “The Second American Revolution And The Sense Famine In The West,” Angela Nagle talks about the incoherence in our modern system of values:

The rules lack ‘any supreme value from which subordinate values and their attendant rules derive’⁶ and instead appear in daily life as an undifferentiated collection of do’s, don’ts and do-as-you-likes [Fennell] says, administered by the teaching class in a senseless manner. So for example, the rules say don’t prevent a woman from having an abortion… don’t smoke in an enclosed space… don’t engage in military aggression without the permission of the United Nations.⁷

Nagle suggests this incoherence is perhaps most obvious as it relates to sexual ethics. The rules appear to be, “provided that minors and adults use their reproductive organs separately,” do as you like as long as you have consent. Some transgressions are unforgivable, but they aren’t necessarily what any reasonable person might guess. As Nagle says, “The ethos of the sexual revolution is today simultaneously ultra puritanical and ultra libertine depending on the context, so that the abandonment of your wife and children is now less of a social faux pas than asking someone out on a date at work – you can only get publicly disgraced and fired for the latter.”⁸

It’s now considered perfectly normal for a woman to be trapped in a man’s body, but not a black person in a white body. And yet it’s not clear why certain immutable characteristics like sex and race are considered to be social constructs while other things that seem more fluid like sexuality are considered completely fixed. We’re suddenly supposed to believe that women are not what they have always been. Douglas Murray sums it up, “Everything women and men saw – and knew – until yesterday was a mirage and… our inherited knowledge about our differences (and how to get along) is all invalid knowledge.”⁹

Murray points out that contradictions are everywhere. “It is possible to be sexy without being sexualized.” Women are “the same as men, but different where it’s useful or flattering. We’re told we must do the work to understand marginalized groups. We’re also told we’ll never understand.” Its a puzzle that cannot be solved. As the saying goes “heads I win, tales you loose.” People learn to treat their own bigotry as liberation. They come to believe that a white European male living during a time when women and minorities were oppressed has nothing to say to us today. They fail to see that this isn’t substantively different from prejudiced white Europeans saying there is nothing to learn from non-white cultures.

Economic matters hardly make any more sense. We now have a deficit economy untethered from the constraints of the real economy of scarcity. Governments justify domestic trade restrictions as “protection” while enforcing similar restrictions for the purpose of “sanctioning” another country as if the degree of economic restriction somehow produces an opposite effect. Despite embracing freedom as the fundamental commitment, “in vast swaths of life freedom seems to recede.”¹⁰ The citizenry finds itself powerless before globalizing forces of government, economy, and technology. The same products and entertainment are pumped into every home, always following a familiar formula that aims to colonize our minds. As Patrick Deneen puts it, “We have endless choices of the kind of car to drive but few options over whether we will spend large parts of our lives in soul-deadening boredom within them.”¹¹ We live in a world of abundant choices yet we somehow lack the ability to choose what is best for us. We become dependent on external objects like cars, computers, phones, and the internet but we cannot depend on our neighbor or our employer. The power we gain through these technologies is illusory considering these products increasingly set the conditions for human thought and action far more than most of us realize.

Incoherence is even codified in law. Consider the judicial decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court on the long march from the invented right to an abortion to the discovery of a Constitutional right to gay marriage as described by Carl Trueman. There’s the 1992 Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey decision giving legal status to a mystical definition of personhood that states, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” One can only wonder if serial killers and child molesters have the “right to define their own concept of existence.” Planned Parenthood v. Casey ultimately rested on upholding the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, notwithstanding popular opposition at the time. Then the high court ironically turned around in its 2003 Lawrence v. Texas ruling arguing that popular criticism of anti-sodomy laws was indeed grounds for overturning an earlier precedent.¹² In his dissent Justice Scalia pointed out that this inconsistent approach “exposed Casey’s extraordinary deference to precedent for the result-oriented expedient that it was.” There is a clear pragmatism about these legal decisions in which the “key issue is not philosophical consistency in the interpretation and application of the law, but the therapeutic result that needs to be achieved,” Trueman says. He goes on, “If society needs abortion rights… then the law must be made to yield such results. If society requires the affirmation of certain sexual activities and identities… then the law must be made to yield those results – even if the methods used to achieve these two results are inconsistent with each other and perhaps even antithetical.”¹³ The next significant ruling in the run up to the Obergefell v. Hodges decision establishing the right to gay marriage was the 2013 United States v. Windsor ruling which dismissed the Defense of Marriage Act on grounds that DOMA was rooted in animus against same-sex couples. This ruling essentially ignored the possibility of a rational argument for defining marriage between one man and one woman. Emotivism is used here to dismiss rational arguments on account that they are emotive.¹⁴ Now that the law is subservient to cultural tastes mere sentiment is the only thing barring incest and bestiality.

Despite all the incoherence and ‘senselessness’ that he observed, Desmond Fennel noted one conclusion that follows quite naturally. That is when there ceases to be any sense-making rules to fall back on this causes our hearts and minds, trained by heredity to assess the world through reason, feeling, and intuition, to experience great distress.¹⁵ It is only natural, as Nagle comments, “that we would want to stop reproducing this society altogether by becoming childless and sterile and to commit self-injury and the annihilation of consciousness through drugs, self-harm and suicide even as we simultaneously believe this is the greatest model of life that has ever existed.”¹⁶

Social Fragmentation in the Western World

Share this: