Blog Archive

Fascinating article from Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn at Spiked: The age of manipulation. In it she discusses two books:

Sociologist Philip Rieff’s path-breaking book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, attributed the rise of the twentieth-century cult of personal liberation to a long-term shift from a religious to a therapeutic worldview – the former based on faith and revelation and the latter on boundless self-gratification.

and

Philosopher Alisdair McIntyre suggests in his book After Virtue that the social chaos we see around us resulted from the shattering in the eighteenth century of the coherent system of moral understanding that originated with Aristotle. What was torpedoed in modern notions of the self, McIntyre thinks, was the notion of a ‘telos’, the idea that the point of individual existence was a well-lived life – a life devoted to a transcendent good.

Her discussion makes me want to look into these works further, as the conclusion seem dead on:

Faith in such a transcendent good, because it cannot be justified by reason alone, appears to modern thinkers as relativistic, so we believe instead in an ‘emotivist’ worldview in which all claims of truth are based on what an individual feels at any given time. The dominant sensibility – that touted by those who believe in tolerance and diversity as ends in themselves – teaches that everything is relative and subjective, and rules out shared standards of judgment in conduct, morals, aesthetics or achievement.

It might seem that this is a recipe for social harmony and justice. But in fact, McIntyre shows that the absence of a coherent set of moral standards that transcends any one individual’s emotional claims obscures the fundamental difference between ‘manipulative and non-manipulative social relations’. If uninhibited emotional expression and subjectively defined wants are all that legitimately guide us, we begin to see others as instruments in our quest or obstacles to be pushed aside.

Food for thought . . .