Belinda wrote: ↑Fri Nov 05, 2021 1:05 pmI regret that I did not sufficiently endorse AJ's point about the inertia of social reality, a point with which I do agree.
"Inertia is the tendency of an object to continue in the state of rest or of uniform motion. The object resists any change in its state of motion or rest."
Perhaps it will serve us to examine this issue more closely. I want to recall here your notion of
dynamism. And I also want to recall LaceWing's belief that (I have to paraphrase which is, of course, interpretation applied) when you or I present a set idea, or attempt to define a 'truth', that it is always possible that a) there is something *more* beyond that and thus what is true cannot be considered to be absolutely true, and b) to ponder on this 'something more', and to become open to seeing things in 'new ways', is some part of the dynamism and evolution of which you speak.
I am interested in defining certain aspects of our present time and our present situation. But simultaneously, and this has gone on for years now, instead of forging forward into territories of the ever-opening, the ever-new, the ever-shifting, the ever-evolving, I made a choice when I read certain conservative philosophers (Richard Weaver was definitely one) to consider the notion of The Eternal Constant. It is a Platonic Idea obviously that the mutability and constant-shifting nature of Reality is contradicted or opposed by something that must be eternally constant. So Being is opposed to Becoming.
So therefore, if someone proposes moving back toward things that are constant -- I use the terms of cultural renovation, renewal, re-grounding -- the idea is that there are things which are eternal and constant, and that upon those *things* (ideas, beliefs, feelings, understandings) it is possible
to build. Because, logically, you cannot build on an ever-changing, no-constant, ever-shifting ground. Yet we live, obviously, in a mutable world.
So what is it that is the Constant Thing that is sought after?
But let's examine the notion of 'anomie' more closely. Let us consider what happens in the psychology of a person when, say, all the stable ground under that person has been undermined (let's take the example to the extreme). So then there is nothing solid to be *believed in*. Everything that very recently was 'solid' now becomes un-solid. Everything is doubted. At the same time the social hierarchies, and the hierarchies within knowledge, within institutions, within valuation, are confronted and doubted. The very idea of 'authority' is brought into question. And then -- it proceeds logically, doesn't it? -- the notion of 'metaphysical solidities' must necessarily also be undermined.
It seems to me that once we have noticed what is happening, if indeed we can gain the perspective to actually see it, we can then recognize that we have been acted upon by idea-forces which have, consciously though perhaps also incidentally, acted upon us in a deliberate effort to undermine the solidities within us. Now why does this happen? Or put another way what is the function or the utility of undermining the solidities on which the individual depended (or depends)?
I think the answer is to render that individual malleable. The culture of propaganda needs to do this, but so does the related social science of advertising and public relations. The role of advertising is, in a way, to weaken the individual's argument against buying the given article. The individual -- the strong and resilient individual -- is the object that must be defeated and overcome by the sophistry and rhetoric of the advertising effort, isn't that right?
Political propaganda and even of course (or perhaps especially) the distortions of religious indoctrination (as for example in the mega-churches where 'conversions' are sought through dubious means and the individual is also undermined and overcome)(as opposed to spiritual processes that transform the individual in ways we recognize as positive and necessary -- as 'good' -- which come about through social and cultural paideia).
Moving very quickly and jerkily forward -- what sort of individual remains in our present? Disjointed, separated, atomized, uncertain, in constant existential doubt, non-believing because all is 'relative' and one thing is just as valid as any other thing, we see persons whose biological sex (which must be seen as a primary solidity) cannot even be believed in any longer. So the individual, according to the narrative I attempt to present here, is thus removed from the possibility of having a foundation! No foundation remains. Not within her- or himself, not in the political world, not in the sociological world, but primarily not in the *world* of
being. That individual has been knocked off his foundation -- and knocked off, so it is said, in the name of what is true! (That there are no solidities, that there should not exist hierarchies, that all values are relative, that one 'belief' is equal to any other belief and all must be accepted as equal and perhaps (somehow) equally entertained.
Now what happens to that individual? I would say that that individual 'goes crazy'. Becomes susceptible to 'hysteria'. Becomes, literally, ungrounded within her- and himself, unable to find a 'constant home'. It is within this sort of social and cultural situation that people become *suggestible* to all sorts of different ideas. Or is it more feelings?
So in my view the object of 'seeking solidities' (within Occidental paideia, my preferred term), and also within a solid spiritual/philosophical practice that is as profoundly related to our own "Occidental traditions", is not a false-object, though it may be an endeavor involving reaction -- reaction against the too-much-shifting of a world that has become unmoored.
We have to face, in my view, that the process I describe (of return, of seeking solidities, of rejecting radical trends) is similar to, say, the Interwar Period (the 1920s and 1930s) in which fascistic trends manifested themselves. Fascism is 'reactive' and, I think, usually involves similar notions of return to what is solid, return to what can be believed in, and return to what people can agree on as 'sane living'.
But it becomes highly contaminated, and ultra-dangerous, when the focus becomes the State or when the State takes over the 'reaction-process'. But consider that a well-disciplined spiritual life is, in its way, a form of self-chosen reaction. Taking oneself in hand, disciplining oneself, is sort of 'self-fascism'.
The object of 'recovery of the self' however is something uniquely personal and interior. It leads or should lead to a well-grounded individual capable of seeing and acting properly, maturely, civically, responsibly, but also to a person with the capacity and the interest in acting ethically.
-- more in-depth insight, downloaded in an instant.