Progress and Anomie

Anomie as a word is of course linked to French sociologist Emile Durkheim.  Modernity or progress brought with it an idea of self-realisation unconnected with inherited tradition - an atomisation most prevalent in Protestant cultures where individualism was stronger.  Shared norms being lost a consequent ennui, purposelessness and despair would develop.  Durkheim observed suicide was more prevalent in Protestant countries.  Deviance resulting from a lack of shared and cohesive communal values led to increased crime and other forms of disconnection.  Perhaps in contemporary times the most extreme example of the dangers of anomie is the teenaged American gun murderer - the murderous incel.  An individualistic culture where institutions lose authority and values are no longer shared and a sense of being part of a community and tradition have been lost are factors that lead to anomie.  It is furthermore the result of division of labour and rapid social change.  In other words - progress.

Prior to economic and political progress our aspirations were limited and manageable.  We belonged somewhere and had something like a predefined role.  Life was not an individualistic pursuit of my own subjective idea of happiness.  The world of guilds and family trades was replaced by economic and political progress through industrial revolution and division of labour.  As Durkheim put it:  " To pursue a goal which is by definition unattainable is to condemn oneself to a state of perpetual unhappiness."

Worse the idea of self realisation is therefore a myth.  Division of labour turned many into wage slaves and those who "make it" are in spiritual danger of a materialist and passion-driven existence.  

As religion became disorganised and splintered through the Reformation and a consequent sectarianism and spiritual individualism in belief so anomie grew.  Anomie is essentially a lack of social mores, standards or ethics.  These were provided by the Church, as Saint Vincent of Lerins put it:

" That faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all."

As a functionalist Durkheim himself had a reductionist leaning - religion was there for the purposes of social cohesion from his reductive and functionalist perspective.  We do not need to accept this to be able to recognise that social progress leads to disintegration and anomie.

The so-called "Christian Nietzsche", the Russian aristocrat and later monk, Konstanin Leontiev was scathing about the notion of progress.  For  him it could be represented by the metaphor of a body suffering a progressive disease that led to disintegration of the biological form.  In the same way social progress led to the disintegration of the commonwealth into individualism.

Progress can be understood as a social force that detaches us from what is around us - community, below us - our roots, and most significantly, what is above - the divine.  These all hold the body together in a hierarchical coherence that connects us to the higher.  Modernity and progress are on the other hand all about deconstruction and reduction.

The self realisation of the progressive West that we see today leads to misery and despair.  Contrast this with the human being who was part of a spiritual hierarchy of Being.  He understood that while existence was a mystery he had his place and purpose.  He had meaning.

One might contrast the glorification of self realisation of the individual that results from progressive ideas with a more Aristotlean understanding.  Self realisation is unconnected with Aristotle's thoughts on character, virtue or a preordained telos.  Rather as progress breaks apart social, spiritual and historical links, individuals pursue their own subjective idea of fulfilment as subjective happiness and self realisation.

For Aristotle man like any other being had a purpose.  Just as the lyre was made to be played to make music, so a man's preordained purpose was virtue.  Virtue was attained by practice and establishing habits that formed one's character.  This is a totally alien way of thinking for a progressive Westerner, who believes his current and flawed passsions of his character must be fulfilled to achieve self realisation - that is his purpose/he thinks, rather than forming his character by practising virtues that at first might seem unappealing and not suited to his flawed desires.

With Aristotle's virtue ethics we find a formidable and uncompromising answer to anomie.  There are social norms and values that are preordained.  The virtues are known and understood - but we have to work and reform our character to attain them.  One can see how compatible this pagan philosopher's ideas were with the Church emerging a few centuries later into Greece from the Holy Land.  Conforming to the likeness of Christ was the telos of every human made in the image of God and who was striving through the gate of the Incarnation to achieve likeness of God as Saint Irenaeus of Lyons explained.  Later in the Middle Ages Christian Western Europe, in schism with Greek Orthodoxy would rediscover Aristotle and his thought was to be a major influence upon the thinking of Thomas Aquinas.

While progressive seeds of thinking were latent in Scholastism in the West, nonetheless this pursuit of virtue and character was again understood in a Christian sense.  

To pursue character and virtue is a rejection of the very notion of progress.  The progress of Western reductive thinking means breaking up social and religious traditions for the liberation of individual identity with no predetermined telos; just as much as it breaks up longstanding communities for economic progress.

Virtue ethics are in many ways the antidote to anomie.  We should strive for character and thereby achieve the happiness of eudaimonia, rather than subjective self realisations as the existentialists such as atheist Sartre argued.  For this reason Western philosophers, in Britain for example, such as Alasdair Macintyre are rediscovering Aristotle's theories of virtue and character as a way to counteract the harmful and individualistic traits of the Enlightenment paradigm.

The virtues Aristotle believed it was the purpose of human life to attain included courage, generosity, justice, temperance and prudence - meaning a sort of practical wisdom.  The pagan philosopher cannot though have the last word, which would lead to a rather dry and restrictive purpose to living.  Orthodox Christian philosopher  Nicholas Berdyaev argued that to attain the likeness of our Divine Maker we were meant to attain freedom, freedom through our creativity.  This is not the Narcissistic self-realisation of the Western progressive, but a striving to participate in the divine through the freedom of being able to create as the imago dei.

Progress, the unquestioned good, has proved to lead to the breaking up of the community and the loss of tradition, virtue and purpose.  It has created a disintegrated world dominated by anomie and deviance.  If people do not simply fall into the trap of ennui, they are in danger of criminality and self-destructive tendencies.  That is the legacy of the Enlightenment.  Post modernism alone did not separate us from our telos, it is just the latest twist since the wrong turn of the Enlightenment and the new secular and individualist age.    

Progress and Power

A key characteristic of those who believe themselves to be progressives and to be on the right side of history is that they are sure they are good.  Progress as a notion though has done away with an idea of a Form of Goodness.  What is good is calculated and made sense of in a strictly temporal way.  Virtue has no real place and God is seen as a primitive idea. 

Progress as a concept is really based upon impoverished metaphysics.  The paradigm is predicated on meaning being reduced to power battles.  What is progress is really a debate as to how best to distribute, award or manage power.  There is no longer an understanding of Man's telos or purpose being participation in the Good through virtue and character, prayer and worship.

Of course some ideas of progress are somewhat unworldly with heterodox ideas of Heaven on Earth.  This in itself can lead to very dangerous places.  A large tendency in progressive thought though is essentially materialist with no focus on the transcendent or the life after death.  Indeed an orientation towards life after death can prove a distraction from the worldly and secular goals of the progressive.  The progressive is in reality a materialist, focused upon building a new Tower of Babel.  Man tries to be God without repentance, but with hubris.

With the English Medieval idea of nominalism we were consequently detached from the Good.  Instead of our telos being participation in The Good, with no universals all that was left was arbitrary power.

A key underlying theme of progressive thought is liberation from oppressive controls of authoritarian and "outdated" power structures.  This idea is revelatory of the underlying assumptions in progressive thought.    That is that history has a linear and benign direction ( a far greater leap of faith than that required by any of the world religions); thereby making anything old necessarily oppressive by definition.  Further, insofar as what came before was by definition benighted, so the freedom achieved is one of not being held back by tradition.  Self expression and self realisation are the inevitable liberation of breaking out of outdated power structures.  Power of course is the only way to make sense of any traditional structure, because higher meanings are discounted.    

We do live in a fallen world and that means that many of the traditions that held us together did fall short and were open to abuse.  The corollary of traditions being compromised by dint of existing in a fallen world is that revolution will also be subject to abuse and corruption, but without any participation in the transcendent that the earlier societies could depend upon to mitigate against abuses.

While Enlightenment thinking looked at inherited social forms to one degree or another as means of control, most powerfully expressed by Marx, but before by Rousseau's chains  - by overthrowing them all that was left was naked power.  

The only question now for Western Man, having cut himself off from the transcendent, was how to manage the raw power that was left.  The European intellectuals chose reductive power and cold abstract theories and rejected the opportunity of participation in the Good.  They rejected the gift of Easter - God becoming Man opening the way to us for men to become gods.  Instead, hubristically, with faith in their own powers of reason, the philosophers made themselves God through a revolutionary power grab, not repentance.  It was the old temptation of the serpent to become like God without God.

This liberation then has really meant negotiating mere and base power.  The only questions left were  who should dominate whom and how much I should be dominated by another?  Should the proletarian class seize power from its oppressor?  Should the strong man seize power?  Should I as an individual have full power over my own life through autonomy.

We think like this because we have cut ourselves off from the possibility of participation in The Good.  We no longer understand that true freedom lies in virtue and worship.  Freedom is to participate in the Good.

That means a kenotic self emptying that gives us access to love and community.  It means freedom from the passions that enslave our souls.

Instead progress has only offered us power over others or power over our own lives.

This reduction of all to power battles has meant inevitably that liberalism too, the great victor of the battles of modernity, has become power hungry.  Liberal societies that prided themselves on their supposedly self emptying granting of freedom of choice, freedom of lifestyle and freedom of speech have also descended into authoritarianism, albeit soft and subtle.  

It is in liberal countries now that speech must be managed and core beliefs about what it means to be human in religious terms must be extirpated from the public square.  Secular liberalism softly, softly is using overweening power.  Unlike the Church when believers got it wrong or failed, this is not a human failing corrupting and tarnishing a transcendent truth.  This is because when you scratch the secular-liberal surface all there actually is in progressive thought is not the Good, the True or the Beautiful, but bare power.  And so liberalism, like its modern ideological cousins, Fascism and Communism, (that seem so different but are really all offspring of post Enlightenment modernity) really boils down to one more interpretation of life as power.  The individual does not participate in a telos of seeking The Good, he is simply an absolutist tyrant in his own life, living an arbitrary existence in a freedom that is really just slavery to the passions.