[Buddha-l] The Malaise of Modernity

[Richard Hayes]

In Canada they have a very quaint custom of allowing intellectuals to
speak on the radio. The Canadian Broadcast Corporation has a series
known as The Massey Lectures (named after the family of the famous
Canadian actor, Raymond Massey, who played Abraham Lincoln), which
appear annually on a CBC radio program called Ideas. In 1991 the Massey
Lectures were given by a Canadian political philosopher named Charles
Taylor.

Taylor's Massey lectures were entitled "The Malaise of Modernity." In
them he explored three themes that, he argued, lead to a deep sense of
unhappiness in modern society. The three themes he spotted were 1)
individualism, 2) instrumental reasoning and 3) powerlessness, the
perceived loss of a sense of having control over what matters in life. 

Individualism, he claimed, has resulted in an increased focus on self,
which almost any philosopher would argue is a prescription for
discontent. 

Instrumental reasoning, as Taylor uses the term, is a kind of
rationality in which we draw on calculations of data with the hopes of
determining the most efficient means to a given end. The focus on data,
and the closely related focus on technological solutions, not only
"disenchant" life but almost always oversimplify questions so that the
solutions to problems reached turn out not to be practical solutions at
all. (Taylor's prime examples are medical and psychological research.) 

The focus on individualism and instrumental reasoning, he claims, have
contributed to a kind of pseudo-democracy in which people believe that
they are allowed to express their views and that their views will be
heeded but where in fact most decisions are made by data-driven experts
who pay very little real attention to what anyone actually thinks or
feels. (The third point is quite a bit more subtle than that, but I
think I have more or less captured the gist of his claim.) Taylor is
influence by Alexis de Toqueville, who predicted that American democracy
was headed toward a form of what he called soft despotism, a culture in
which a mild and apparently benevolent government will create an
illusion of power being with the people, when in fact power will be in
the hands of those with money and the resultant ability to manipulate
public opinion.

When I first read Taylor's lectures (eventually published as a book), I
involuntarily uttered the mantra "Bingo!" Nothing that I have witnessed
in American since that time have convinced me that Taylor was wrong in
his analysis. Moreover, for a few years I used "The Malaise of
Modernity" in my Buddhist philosophy courses; now I used various
writings by David Loy, who says much the same sort of thing.

-- 
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico