Massesamfunnet

A bench from The Old Town or Gamlebyen of Fredrikstad, Norway, in August 2024. Stock-bilde | Adobe Stock

Also, the tendency of modern life—especially since the 60s, with their apotheosis of mass market “youth culture“ and their abolition of tradition and the transcendent as legitimate authorities—has made a great many people losers in more comprehensive ways. Everyday experience, and even statistics, show that more and more people have lost their families, their religion, a stable livelihood, and a settled place in society. Such tendencies have their defenders, since fewer ties and loyalties make people freer and more autonomous—how, for example, can women be equal if they have family ties? And they have the implicit support of people who run things, since the changes make labor markets more flexible and otherwise reduce resistance to change—that is, to ordinary people doing what they’re told. - James Kalb

- Tradition: A Guide for Better Living

It’s not hard to see why it should. People do not in fact invent their own ways of life. They’re too social, and the world is too complicated. So the disintegration of inherited culture, with its acceptance of natural human goods, in an industrialized, commercialized, networked, and bureaucratized society means people live by careerism, consumerism, pop culture, and propaganda, supplemented by the advice of therapeutic professionals. - James Kalb

 

To take that view seriously is to emphasize goals that appeal to pretty much all of us simply because we are human: health, knowledge, friendship, family life, aesthetic experience, responsible participation in society, peace of mind, and a sense that our life makes sense, and we are at home in a world that can be sensibly understood as a home.

Such things don’t come up in public discussion today except as occasional asides, and when they do they’re mostly lumped into “work-life balance.” The idea seems to be that career comes first, because that’s the fundamental and serious part of life, but it’s also good to make space for leisure-time activities like having children. That approach is, of course, irrational. We work to live, not live to work, so we need to be able to discuss, with each other and in public, what the “life” part of the work-life balance should look like. That’s especially true since basic human goals can’t be picked out separately like items from a menu. Life is a structure, not an agglomeration of separate pieces, so more than anything we need patterns of life that connect and forward basic human goods throughout life’s changes.

To put it another way, we need to take into account human nature, which means that we need to recognize natural human goods and the natural law principles of conduct that promote them systematically. But how do we do that when life is so complicated, subtle, and difficult? Much needs to be said, but to start we need a tradition of how to live that has developed to deal with life and its goods as a whole. That can only be one that has grown out of the lives of many people over generations and become a lasting and comprehensive culture. Without that process of development a way of life won’t reflect more than a little of what has to get sorted out in the mix. - James Kalb