Crisis

To all of us, I believe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Roman Empire is like a mirror in which we see reflected the brutal, vulgar, powerful yet despairing image of our technological civilization, an imperium which now covers the entire globe, for all nations, capitalist, socialist, and communist, are united in their worship of mass, technique and temporal power. What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash but that … it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope.

--W.H.Auden.

Interesting book on Tawney, E.P. and Polanyi. The idea that they were responding to a social crisis, trying to steer a middle path between market individualism and state collectivism/totalitarianism, a conflict or crisis that would devour so many in the 20th c.  Underlying it all, you suspect, the attempt to recover the notion that we are, at heart, social beings. And for Tawney, it appears, this was connected to the (Christian) idea of personhood. But that idea couldn't float in our secular times and so the moral and spiritual critiques of capitalism turned to economic ones (distribution) or environmental ones (climate change a constraint on growth).

Then there's Alan Jacobs's book (just acquired) on the response of Maritain, Auden and Weil to the nihilism of the second world war and technology.

Earlier, there was Keynes and the social welfare consensus to patch up the ravages the economic system inflicted on people in the Great Depression.

Now, it would appear that we're living through another crisis (or the same prolonged one), a new dark age perhaps. And what is the response? Well, there's been a tremendous amount of soul searching but part of the problem is that there aren't really any public intellectuals who could hold the public's attention in our fragmented, distracted times. Part of the problem, though, is that there are so many different voices raising the alarm. Maybe Piketty has got some people thinking. Dunno. 

As always, the issue is a complex one with many different dimensions to it. What, Tawney would ask, is at the root of the problem? Maybe that's the question that's not being asked? Yes, lots of writing on anxiety and fear; on the looming climate catastrophe; on the dangers of technology and the internet; on the crisis of education, the crisis of masculinity; the end of the book, the end of creativity; the spreading of neoliberalism's tentacles into the very fabric of our social being (human capital, social capital, cultural capital); the threat to democracy by the 1%; and the rise of the far-right and populists in so many countries.

How liberalism failed. When and how capitalism failed. Economic oligarchy and the impossibility of democracy. The sixth extinction kind of thing. Artificial intelligence and the end of the specifically human ways of interacting, speaking; the loss of a sense of place; the demise of civility and conversation.  

Are these all just the same unresolved conflicts being played out in our century? It's hard to not think that that's the case.