Quotes 8

"Contrary to these conceptions, what has been happening in the West, I believe, is a widening disjunction between the social structure (the economy, technology, and occupational system) and the culture (the symbolic expression of meanings), each of which is ruled by a different axial principle. The social structure is rooted in functional rationality and efficiency, the culture in the antinomian justification of the enhancement of the self.

The sources of each impulse are quite different. The life-style of the social structure was shaped by the principle of calculation, the rationalization of work and of time, and a linear sense of progress. All of this derived, fundamentally, from the effort to master nature and technics, to substitute wholly new rhythms of life for those bound to the regularities of the season and the diminishing returns of the soil. Technical mastery was in turn fused with a character structure which accepted the idea of delayed gratification, of compulsive dedication to work, of frugality and sobriety, and which was sanctified by the morality of service to God and the proof of self-worth through the idea of respectability. To this extent, bourgeoisie society of the nineteenth century was an integrated whole (?) in which culture, character structure, and economy were infused by a single value system. This was the civilisation of capitalism at its apogee.

Ironically, all these was undermined by capitalism itself. Through mass production and mass consumption, it destroyed the Protestant ethic by zealously promoting a hedonistic way of life. By the middle of the twentieth century capitalism sought to justify (?) itself not by work or property but by the status badges of material possession and the promotion of pleasure. The rising standard of living and the relaxation of morals became ends in themselves as the definition of personal freedom.

The result has been a disjunction within the social structure itself.In the organization of production and work, the system demands provident behaviour, industriousness and self-control, dedication to a career and success. In the realm of consumption, it fosters the attitude of carpe diem, prodigality and display, and the compulsive search for play. But in both realms the system is completely mundane, for any transcendent ethic has vanished.

If the modern social structure - based as it is on technics and metrics - is a distinctively new kind of social organization in human history, then contemporary culture, in its concern with the self, combines the deepest wellsprings of human impulse with the modern antipathy to bourgeoisie society.

The antinomian dimension of culture has been a recurrent feature of human society, in which the dialectic of restraint and release was played out originally in religion and then in the secular moral order itself. The antinomian attitude, in fact, is the repeated effort of the self to reach out beyond: the attain some form of ecstasy (ex-stasis, the leaving of the body), to become self-infinitizing or idolatrous; to assert immortality or omnipotence. It source is the finitude of creaturehood and the denial by the self of the reality of death. It is the radical "I" asserting its imperishable survival against imperious fate...What in the nineteenth century was private and hermetic has become, in the 20th century effulgence of modernism, public and ideological. Contemporary culture, with the victory of modernism, has become anti-institutional and antinomian. Few writers "defend" society or institutions against the "imperial self". The older artistic imagination, however wild, was constrained by the shaping discipline of art. The new sensibility breaks down all genres and denies that there is any distinction between art and life. Art was formerly an experience; now all experience is to be turned into art."

Daniel Bell