Modernity’s Crisis
There’s a current sense abroad that the great engine of modernity and progress is coming to a grinding halt. Many seem to feel that their glass is half empty, and that what’s left is mostly the dregs.
Several explanations have been suggested for this increasingly sour mood. In sum, the narrative goes, a veritable tsunami of rapid and radical changes is washing over the global social system . It has such powerful impetus that it appears to many to be inevitable, like a force of nature to which people must adapt, but over which they have little control.
More specifically, and first on many lists, cultural change is cited as a major issue. The globalisation of business and technology has resulted in increased mobility of people, capital, and ideas. Traditional beliefs, values, and norms of behaviour are challenged. People arrive in ‘our’ country with different religious and family values to our own, and they will persist in treasuring them. And the mobility is in the other direction as well. Those who would have been ‘pillars of the community’ in a previous generation are now ‘citizens of the world’, cosmopolitans rather than locals,1 and far more prosperous than their parents would ever have considered possible. Their glass is considerably more than half full. Moreover, social media have made it next to impossible to socialise many young people into current societal institutions, as myriad corporations and groups proselytise and compete for their attention on the internet.
Changes in the financial system have had equally unsettling results. Speculation has replaced investment as the dominant method of increasing capital, with risky financial instruments magnifying the probability of sudden recession. Capital can be moved with ease, so that businesses and industries are transported to new locations which offer lower labour costs. The consequent loss of jobs, and the destruction of local industry-based communities, hits hard. And above all, the owners and executives of corporations become richer in terms of wealth and income, even during recessions, while at best the income of ordinary employees is remaining static. Indeed, for a considerable proportion, it has been declining in real terms.2 Insecurity, hostility, or alienation are the likely results of this growing inequality, together with many more tangible damaging outcomes.3
A specific recent collaboration of business and technology has had a uniquely powerful impact, of which we are only gradually becoming aware. Shoshana Zuboff has called it ‘Surveillance Capitalism’.4 She argues that we are mistaken in believing that we are extracting information from digital media. On the contrary, its owners are extracting information from us, about ourselves. They then sell it on to third parties, who in their turn use it to sell things to us, influence our voting intentions, and generally predict and control our behaviour. Surveillance capitalism is largely unregulated, and furthermore is conducted without our knowledge and consent. Its activities, when we realise their secrecy and extent, certainly add to our general sense of loss of agency. Here are people who apparently know a lot more about us than we do ourselves, and what’s more, we didn’t know that they knew it.
Mistrust also features powerfully in the political arena, as the ideals of liberal representative democracy are becoming tarnished.5 The motive of public service in representing the interests of the electorate is now seldom attributed to politicians. Rather, personal ambition, financial gain, and party advantage are assumed to be their dominant motives. A variety of reasons may be adduced for this loss of trust. These include the increase in parliamentary lobbying by commercial and other interests, and also, ironically, greater accountability and transparency. The latter has resulted in very public scandals, such as corrupt expense claims and the abuse of power for purposes of sexual gratification or bullying. Both traditional and social media have contributed to the increased personalisation of politics, and a corresponding decrease in attention to policies and their consequences.
Developments in the nature of work and employment have likewise increased uncertainty and insecurity. Artificial intelligence is now capable of more effective decision-making than human beings in a variety of occupations, including those previously considered to require professional expertise.6 What is more, AI can learn rapidly and effectively from its own experience. The resulting replacement of many technical and administrative jobs has ‘hollowed out’ organisations, so that much of the work that remains is unskilled and contracted out. The legal and psychological contracts of organisations with employees are often temporary and precarious, with zero-hours contracts as the ultimate in unpredictability and insecurity. Add to these developments the long-term trend towards service occupations and away from manufacturing, and the threat to traditional occupational identities is clear.
The recent dominance of liberal free market ideology has involved a trend towards privatisation of service provision,7 particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. The consequent decay of the public sector has now reached crisis point for many services, including health, social care, housing, law enforcement, local government, and education. In the United Kingdom, the recent decimation of social services for the unemployed and disabled in the name of austerity justifiably aroused indignation, especially in those personally affected. However, the crisis in more widely used services has now also affected the lives of the vast majority of citizens for the worse. This especially disturbs them when the services in question are crucial for those for whom they feel responsible—their children and their aged parents. They will have noticed that taxes which could have funded improvements in public services have been cut primarily for the better off, who are more likely to be able and willing to pay for these services. The result has been not only been personal distress and hardship but also damage to the social infrastructure which enables people to meet and form relationships.
The final and most fundamental change of all is our increasingly headlong rush towards climate disaster8 which threatens massive social disruption and hardship, and ultimately human and natural extinction. Scientific evidence, personal experience, public demonstrations, and extensive media coverage have forced this issue to the forefront of people’s consciousness. Rising awareness of a common fate and concern for subsequent generations leads to an impatience with leaders and institutions who are failing to address this existential issue.
All these changes bring uncertainty about the future, and hence feelings of anxiety and insecurity. Some of them involve the loss of traditional identities. Others lead to feelings of unfairness, as people compare their own situation with that of others. In most cases, there is a lack of agency: most feel they have no influence whatever on changes which affect them individually. Such a social climate is highly likely to lead to the development of social movements in reaction. Two such movements have dominated the recent past and the immediate present: populism and fundamentalism, the subjects of this book.
Book Outline
The first chapter describes the book’s approach, first from a social scientific perspective and then acknowledging my personal beliefs and values which inevitably influence the argument. In Chap. 3 various social scientific perspectives on populism and fundamentalism are briefly outlined, before a psychological approach is proposed. In Chap. 4, I look at the various approaches people adopt in deciding who they are, their concept of their selves. The recent cultural emphasis on creating and developing one’s own self, in authoring one’s own story, overlooks the importance of social relations in determining who we think we are. Our self-co...