The Enlightenment's False Promise
Modernity’s Dissolution of Meaningful Community
A. The Present State
It is a curious problem of modernity that as technological advances increase the individual’s awareness of and connection with more individuals, socio-economic classes, cultures, and even nations beyond the immediate sphere that her natural limitations grant her—the more the individual experiences isolation.1 Not only is the individual connected to more individuals technologically, but so she is philosophically. Modernity’s philosophical anthropology is attested to more and more by the passing of legislation for the sake of the individual.2 And since law is teacher,3 the individual recognizes human dignity in more individuals than she would have as one travels into the recesses of time.4 And yet, while more types of people are encompassed by the individual’s abstract concept of dignity, her own trust of actual individuals and institutions shrinks.5
Move from the individual to the State, and the individual shows herself to be what our Ancient ancestors knew intuitively, but for which modern humanity has had recourse to amnesia: a microcosm.6 From the most reduced part of society to the most complex, the problem re-presents itself. Despite our “progress” in the technology of political procedure, the “balancing” of power among branches, the rise of the importance of efficiency, and the myriad of methods for achieving consensus, our own Federal branches are increasingly gridlocked (Congress),7 incompetent (the Executive),8 or politically compromised (the Supreme Court).9 Whether one believes these judgments to be objectively true, that the American people increasingly feel alienated by and from the government because they believe these judgments to be true is a fact of statistics.10 Individuals are having trust among themselves and institutions eroded, as government officials and institutions show their increased alienation from each other and the public.
B. Competition and Mistrust as the Heart of the American Citizenry
It is of America’s founding legal philosophy that government primarily exists to secure the rights of the individual.11 And yet, as Leviathan’s tentacles have expanded its reach not only by the number of areas of life it touches, but also by the degree to which it reaches, the individual feels less secure.12 13 While the West’s approaches have been varied in attempting to resolve this issue, American politics ultimately tends to the expansion of the State in a manner that usurps the role of intermediary institutions, which, in turn, uproots the individual and erodes community and culture.14 The problem is not the progeny of one party or the other, “left” or “right,”15 but rather, a deeper fundamental option within the system itself for recourse to the state in directly solving problems in lieu of mediating institutions of differing levels.16 A person on the “right” may balk at such an accusation, saying that she is committed to the expansion of liberty for the individual in the private sphere, not the expansion of the State. But the individual is born into, embedded with, and inherits many givens. Of which, only greater power by the state may extract (or “deracinate” as Patrick Deneen aptly terms it) her from the clutches of the unchosen givens.
To find an explicit exposition of this principle’s primacy in our system, one turns to that collection of literature that paved the way for the Constitution and acts as a hermeneutic for its interpretation: The Federalist Papers.17 Federalist no. 10 is of particular importance, not least of which because its author is the author of the Bill of Rights, James Madison.18 But because in it, the Bill of Rights’ author informs us what this new government’s first object will be: protection of “diversity in the faculties of men.”19 A seemingly innocuous phrase (perhaps one even lauded) that lends itself to be understood as a clunky term of art vestured in the idiom of eighteenth-century English prose. Such technicality wedded to the shape of sound constructed by our ears which have been habituated by twenty-first-century politics does not make us flinch. But Madison is presenting a seismic shift in the ontology of political community.
The “diversity in the faculties of men” translates into “our individual pursuits and the outcome of those pursuits—particularly, Madison notes, differences in attainment of property.”20 For individual liberty as conceived to be achieved, the state is granted new powers to secure this uprooted, abstracted condition of individual liberty. And for exactly what purpose will these new government powers be used? To harness the self-interest of its citizens and bolster it so as to act against each other. A political affirmation of Original Sin without the corollary of redeeming grace. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”21 Madison and the Founders saw this ambition as a means of resisting political power arbitrarily concentrated in a particular faction.22 23 But it must be noted that the keystone to achieving this situation is by causing citizens to see themselves and others as competitors in a zero-sum game. You and I are born in a state of war, so says the dogma of the Enlightenment. Its first principle is antagonism and mistrust of motives between the citizens. This is its anthropology.
This new political technology developed to expand the practice of the modern understanding of liberty was designed to liberate us from partial loyalties to particular people and places, and make us into individuals, who, above all, strive to achieve our individual ambitions and desires.24
Americans tend to pride themselves on their competitive spirit.25 We are taught from our earliest days in grade school to interpret our primacy of competition as our seed of superiority.26 We place primacy on the entrepreneurial spirit, but entrepreneurship is used as a euphemism for competition, necessarily implying that the competitive spirit is what is best for the human person to pursue happiness and for society to thrive. Therefore, behind this principle is a definition of human and social flourishing. It is a preferential option for expanding GDP.27 Thus, whatever one’s intention for our political system, practically speaking, the market takes precedence.28 Placing self-interest at the heart of society and fostering competitiveness among citizens centralizes power by eroding community and social trust. Individualism, or loneliness, is wedded with state action and the market to produce careerism and consumerism.29
As the spirit of careerism and consumerism spread over time, eroding real community, the market and the state take on not only greater but lesser roles and more direct prominence in the individual’s life.30 As individuals graft consumerism more deeply into their mechanism for personal realization, they must increasingly turn themselves over to the workplace in order to acquire. This makes less time for real community and friendship.31 Second places expand as first places shrink and third places disappear. When one encounters an issue in which they do not have the immediate means or competence to solve, less people within their community are available to solve their problem, because they too are working more so as to consume more.32 Necessarily, one must look to the market to solve their issue.33 Friendship recedes, impersonal relationships built on the exchange of money advances. Material acquisition and GDP may rise, but social trust and virtuous friendship diminish.
Katherine Hobson, Feeling Lonely? Too Much Time one Social Media May Be Why, NPR (Mar. 6, 2017) https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/06/518362255/feeling-lonely-too-much-time-on-social-media-may-be-why.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations (Dec. 10, 1948). While I understand that this Declaration by the United Nations is not legislation, it is representative of the aggregate trend of Western nation-states passing legislation in harmony with its declarations.
Cathleen Kaveny, Law’s Virtues 1 (2012).
Id.
John Gramlich, Young Americans are less trusting of other people – and key institutions – than their elders, Pew Research (Aug. 6, 2019), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/06/young-americans-are-less-trusting-of-other-people-and-key-institutions-than-their-elders.
Democritus, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels 150 Harvard University Press, Tr. Kathleen Freeman (1948).
Josh Huder, Our Very Unproductive Congress, Georgetown University, https://gai.georgetown.edu/our-very-unproductive-congress.
Simon Heffer, How seven years of Obama created Trump, The Telegraph (Feb. 13, 2016). https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/donald-trump/12154670/How-seven-years-of-Obama-created-Trump.html
Tara Leigh Grove, The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Dilemma, Harvard Law Review (Jun. 1, 2019), https://harvardlawreview.org/2019/06/the-supreme-courts-legitimacy-dilemma.
Americans’ Views of Government: Low Trust, but Some Positive Performance Ratings, Pew Research Center (September 14, 2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/09/14/americans-views-of-government-low-trust-but-some-positive-performance-ratings.
The Declaration of Independence para. 2 (U.S. 1776). “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.”
Mary Madden and Lee Rainie, Americans’ Views About Data Collection and Security, Pew Research (May 20, 2015), https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/05/20/americans-views-about-data-collection-and-security.
Tim Newman, Anxiety in the West: Is it on the rise, Medical News Today (Sept. 5, 2018), https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322877.
Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed 46 (2018). “Individualism and Statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our membership in the state.”
Id. “This deeper cooperation helps to explain how it has happened that contemporary liberal states—whether in Europe or America—have become simultaneously both more statist, with ever more powers and activity vested in central authority, and more individualistic, with people becoming less associated and involved with such mediating institutions as voluntary associations, political parties, churches, communities, even family. For both ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives,’ the state becomes the main driver of individualism, while individualism becomes the main source of expanding power and authority of the state.”
Id
The Federalist No. 10 (James Madison).
Id.
Id. “The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government.”
Deneen, supra note 14, at 101.
The Federalist No. 51 (James Madison).
The Federalist No. 10 (James Madison).
Deneen, supra note 14, at 101. “One of the ways modern republicanism was intended to combat the ancient problem of political faction was not by commending public spiritedness but by fostering a ‘mistrust of motives’ that would result from the large expanse of the republic, constantly changing political dynamics, the encouragement of ‘pluralism’ and expansion of diversity as a default preference, and thus the shifting commitments of the citizenry.”
Id at 102.
Laura Silver, Where Americans and Europeans agree – and differ – in the values they see as important, Pew Research Center (Oct. 16, 2019), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/16/where-americans-and-europeans-agree-and-differ-in-the-values-they-see-as-important.
Mike Gonzalez & Jonathan Butcher, Restore the Teaching of American Exceptionalism in the Classroom, The Heritage Foundation (Aug. 28, 2020), https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/restore-the-teaching-american-exceptionalism-the-classroom. Gonzalez and Butcher point to a quote of Edmund Burke for what is at the heart of American Exceptionalism. “Protestants, and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion … . All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement of the principle of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion … . The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants highest of all… . Even that stream of foreigners which has been constantly flowing into these colonies has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.” The exceptionalism of dissent is thus a concept of the self that is not merely distinct from the wider community, but utterly separate from it.
Cf. the “preferential option for the poor” offered by Catholic Social Doctrine. Gaudium et Spes, no. 90; Centesimus Annus, no. 57 (1991); Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine, no. 182-184; Evangelii Gaudium, no. 199.
See Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation 235-297 (2012). “Within the legal frameworks of contemporary Western states one can buy whatever one wishes according to one’s preferences, one can buy as much as one likes within one’s means (including the means extended by credit), and when shopping and buying one is not obliged to heed the needs of anyone else. One is not free to live in a different kind of country in North America or Europe, because only this kind exists. Every Westerner lives in a society pervaded by consumerism and its twin, post-Fordist capitalism, in which the vast majority of the manufactured items for sale are made by poor laborers working for low wages in faraway countries. To be sure, individuals are not compelled to make central to their lives the prevailing consumerist cycle of acquire, discard, repeat now makes up the default fabric of Western life in the early twenty-first century, regardless of how assesses it and whether or not one resists it, because ‘the conditions under whih choices are made are not themselves a matter of choice.’”
Stephen Marche, Is Facebook Making us Lonely?, The Atlantic (May 2012), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/308930. “And yet, despite its deleterious effect on health, loneliness is one of the first things ordinary Americans spend their money achieving. With money, you flee the cramped city to a house in the suburbs, or if you can afford it, a McMansion in the exurbs, inevitably spending more time in your car. Loneliness is at the American core, a by-product of a long-standing national appetite for independence.”
Id.
Brandon McGinley, The Prodigal Church 86. On the recession of “third places” in the individual and community’s life: “Sociologists call these community assets ‘third places,’ where the ‘first place’ is the home and the ‘second place’ the workplace. Third places provide a neutral space for community members to meet and socialize; a buffer between domestic life and the dominion of the marketplace, bringing us out of our shells into a community defined by cooperation rather than competition…
“The decline of the third place has observed by social scientists and cultural critics for at least a generation now. At the same time, the first place has also receded as family life has become increasingly fragmented. Widespread divorce rends both households and inter-generational bonds, and young people are delaying marriage, often in perpetuity, preferring to live alone or in temporary cohabitation. The second place has taken the initiative against its competitors (market ideology can conceive of human relationships in terms of zero-sum competition) and filled the vacuum: Our prevailing ethic of work emphasizes rivalry and efficiency and profit, and it has colonized not just our time but our space.”
A window into this phenomenon which is increasingly ubiquitous in the sectors of the individual’s life may be glanced at through the relationship between confidants and psychologist. “In one survey the mean size of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004, Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to and 20 percent had only one confidant. In the face of this social is integration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers… . [I]n the late ‘40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.”
Id.