Human Natures: Aristoi in Modernity Week 04

Modern culture, diverse as it seems to its inmates, has evoked from critics a remarkable consensus about its characteristic structure of compulsions. It is an era marked by profound contempt for traditional perspectives and principles understood as authority, aristocratism, moral reason, and the self-mastery and self-cultivation once imposed as normative culture. Ours is a civilizational order oblivious to questions of ends, values, principles, purpose, rationale, and morale, and therefore among us education, philosophy, and religion wither as does culture at large; instead we are caught up in tides of amoral-nihilist forms of power, wealth, and technology—that is, the whole system of means, of money and the logic of finance and profit, the apparatus of science and the matrix of machines and systems it has evolved for us—the institutions and methods once chartered to serve us instead predominate over us and dictate how we are to think, to be educated to see, to understand, and to communicate.