the long now

The cultural revolution they [the market and moral individualists] helped to inspire was a revolution against history, memory, and shared identity: tailor-made for the history-less new elites of money and celebrity.

--David Marquand.

The human need for identity, for some enduring structure or framework of background understanding against which we can trace the outlines of our own fleeting lives is never admitted to or, if so, then grudgingly seen in a negative light: autonomy demands the deliverance of the unencumbered self. 'Free from'..drum roll...the state, religion, the family, community, gender roles, professional identity. Make of that what you will.

One of the manifestations of narcissism is the abandonment of any concern with previous or future generations.

Of course, Marquand is not saying that it is only a cultural shift; no picture would be complete without taking into account technology and market economies that speed up our lives, making things and ways of being obsolete and therefore something to be readily discarded (as well as economic theory which is ahistorical). Add to that heady mixture the role of art and artists in producing "the shock of the new", and the trends in economic thought as it moved away from the central idea of needs and a determinate view of human nature (or the common good) and you get some idea of how difficult it will be to establish any form of resistance, let alone bring about a reversal of the dominance of the market in our lives. 

And, of course, the dominant ideas of private property, the role of contract, only further the notion that what counts is "my space" and my little domain of choice and private/privative good. 

And so we veer, unstably, from one extreme to the other: the self is either the centre of the world or it is nothing, a shadowy dream amidst a world that, too, is something that is destined to pass. And if that is true, then why bother? The utmost freedom or the indifference of someone who realizes they are trapped in a system, a matrix not of their making. Are we really at heart just modern-day gnostics?

~

Haven't read Oakley's book, or any of Wootton's work-but she is mentioned in Marquand and does seem like an utterly fascinating character. In particular, am keen to take a look at her Lament for Economics-a critique, I believe, of neo-classical economics.