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An Examination of the American Way of Life
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16688 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1989 |
4,050 Words |
| Author
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E.M. Adams
E.M. Adams is Kenan Professor of Philosophy emeritus at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
In recent years there have been a number of studies of life and culture in America and in modern Western civilization. To mention only some that I have found especially helpful: Roberto Unger's Knowledge and Politics (1975); Daniel Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976); Aleksandr Solzhentisyn's "The Exhausted West" (Harvard Magazine July-August 1978); Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1979); Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981); and Robert N. Bellah et al.'s Habits of the Heart (1985). And if you will forgive me, I will add my own Philosophy and the Modern Mind (1975 and 1985).
The troubles in modern life that all of these works point to will not be solved by a balanced budget, tax reform, economic growth, a stronger defense system, or anything of the kind; for these studies claim that the human self is distorted and impoverished in modern Western civilization and that there is a crisis of the human spirit. The flaw, they say, lies not in the failures of modern Western civilization but in the conditions of its success.
What is unique about modern Western civilization is the extent to which it has been shaped by the quest for mastery of the material conditions of human existence. Modern life is driven by the desire of human beings to impose their will upon the world and to exploit it for their own purposes. This culture-generating concern worked a reformation in science and transformed our conception of knowledge and the world. Scientific inquiry was restructured so that scientific knowledge would have, at least in principle, primacy in the manipulation and control of things. In other words, modern science was born when the very framework of intelligibility became geared to technological concerns rather than human identity and inner development.
A Faustian Bargain
The success of science and technology has been phenomenal. The quality of life has been greatly improved in so many ways. It is good to be healthy, to live a long life, to have all the material things we enjoy, and to have access to education and to the cultural resources of the world. No one would want to abolish these magnificent achievements, but there is a darker side to all of this. In conceiving the world and in organizing our lives and society in ways that make all this possible, we have made what many fear was a Faustian bargain.
Our cultural perspective has made science our primary mode of knowledge. The problem is that the
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