A New Communitarian Vision

The modern world has long seemed cold and detached to me, and it’s not getting any better.

What our postmodern liberal society has failed to realise is how excessive individualism has led increasingly more people to become isolated and self-serving cells in an impersonal market society, which leads to the disintegration of the social fabric.

This makes us less invested in others and our fellow human beings, it decreases social capital, and also makes us less connected to our cultural heritage and the sense of solidarity and community that comes from civic membership and contribution in a larger society than yourself.

It hurts civic contribution and volunteering in civil society by having people glued to their screens, and also less interested in engaging with other people around them, because it’s less immediately gratifying and more difficult to appreciate meaningful social interactions that grant us the deep human well-being of being around others.

Instead, we just stay in our own selective networks and exclusive social groups.

We become increasingly coldly acting in our own self-interest, more egotistical, and more uncaring of those who are not in our own immediate circle, and sometimes not even them, due to the selective, indecent, and detached cult of postmodern busyness.

This kind or social isolation makes us look after our own wants and needs first, as if we were free-standing individuals liberated from society in a Rousseauan hyperbole of being chained by society, but at heart we’re socially constituted beings.

In MacIntyre’s twofold concept of the self, the voluntarist conception of the self, centred around the will of the individual, has deracinated us from the narrative conception of the self around our shared history, culture, and identity, the very bedrock of society, which has been reduced to conforming to a set of abstract, faceless values.

Not that there is anything wrong with our common values, such as democracy, equality, or freedom of speech, but I would argue that such liberties and values are essentially empty without an overarching historical lineage and cultural trappings which imbue them with stability of purpose, meaning, and coherence.

Would our freedoms truly give us a sense of belonging and common identity without the European tradition of religious toleration stemming from the Age of Reason, or our Romantic notions from the 19th century? I would say no: without a sense of deeper temporal grounding, we remain lost in rootless universality.

We need to embrace human rights and the liberal tradition, but not at the expense of distinct civilisations and cultures around the world. We should follow Charles Taylor’s recommendation that our interpretations of human rights should be culturally mediated by the values and traditions of each given culture.

Without this sense of having a holistic whole greater than ourselves which is cultivated by a purposeful past, we would have no cultural legacy or great role models to venerate and emulate, and we would lack the necessary orientation of our values after a common sociocultural yardstick within our respective societies.

In fact, this cultural malaise is already dominant in Western societies, and beyond them as well.

What would a moral compass be if not just mediated universally, but also within one’s culturally particular background? Deficient and with no greater roots or sense of belonging.

Rather, we must embrace our families, neighbourhoods, voluntary associations, and other social institutions which foster meaning in our lives through community, mutuality, convention, tradition, and social improvement.

We should look to develop and take care of our respective societies so that they remain recognisable to us, while not disregarding important societal developments and contemporary currents altogether which make culture develop continuously.

When people lack the warm, kind, and nurturing bonds of a greater community, they make their own ones, sometimes out of alienation, in the worst case leading to phenomena such as incels and femcels.

The profound search for a mission and purpose in life has led some Westerners to take up arms and join the cause of Islamic or far right-wing terrorism, partly because, as abhorrent as that seems to us, it provides a metaphysical sense of guidance and orientation which Western culture has lost.

God is often said to be dead, but the rise of New Age religions, Pentecostalism, superstition, and new religiosity points towards the same need as well: the search for meaning.

The solution is to embrace our heritage and where we come from, both Christian culture and the deeper Pagan roots of Europe, as well as to employ useful theoretical frameworks such as the communitarian critique of liberalism, classical republican ideals, and civic humanism.

Other useful thinkers in this line of thought would be such figures as Alain de Benoist, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Amitai Etzioni, Martin Heidegger, and Alexander Dugin.

So what do we believe in?

Through a newfound sense of belief in a culturally substantiated humanist tradition (Europeans feeling connected to its Renaissance roots) and humanist efforts, it stands to reason that there is a new kind of progress worth looking up to, grounded in who we are and where we come from.

The same holds true for other respective civilisations and cultures, which must follow their own paths. A veritable respect for our diverse and multicultural world would be to embrace our unique heritage at a certain “polite distance”, as Žižek once said.

This is needed to overcome the faceless hyper-consumerist anonymity of the directionless postmodern man.

Instead we must embrace a more articulated and qualitative sense of individualism with a profound traditional dimension and real belonging, as situated within a wider society thriving on social cooperation.