Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Titel: The Ethics of Authenticity and the Human Good: Beyond Left and Richt in Politics

Stichwort: Enstsprechung: Struktur des Guten - Zivilisation; industrielle Revolution; Herrschaft des partikulären Gutes; Versklavung; Krise der Zeit = Krise der Authetizität; Globalisierung; Folgen

Kurzinhalt: The world-wide trends prevailing today have taught us that technological efficiency in multiplying particular goods can tend toward the elimination of cultural, personal, and religious values. Then two distortions follow: ...

Textausschnitt: 24a Finally, with the discovery of technologies for controlling the motor power of fire, the industrial revolution transforms cities and the planet itself. Production and monetary exchange, in their two interacting cycles of capital formation (that is, the production of goods for producers) and consumer goods production are differentiated more dramatically and expressed in the booms and slumps of business cycles. There are massive increases in productivity, heightened urbanization, and concentrations of power and economic inequalities never before dreamed of in history.

24b In this historic unfolding, the great promise for cultural community based on such tremendous potential for cultural surplus has remained fulfilled only ambiguously. Although an unheard of leisure from the necessities of non-liberal labor is made possible by higher standards of living, the new distinction between labor and capital has favored the overwhelming growth of technocracy, and the degeneration of true leisure. Politically, the same contrast between promise and achievement is suggested in Ferdinand Braudel's distinction (in his economic history of the 16th and 17th centuries) between 'market' economies exemplified by the subterranean exchange economies that are coeval with commerce in a context of small-scale agriculture, small businesses, and small industries in cities of typically no more than 10,000 people; and 'capitalist' economies based on the fateful alliance between economic and political power at the summit of the social classes for the sake of a kind of gigantic 'success,' in which guardian moral syndromes are mixed up with commercial moral syndromes in disastrous ways.1 In Braudel's sense of 'capitalist' (in which the term is not specified functionally in terms of capital formation although it includes this function), this kind of top-heavy, power-driven economy becomes dominant in countries that are capitalist, socialist, or under so-called mixed economies; it reigns supreme over both public and private sectors, nationally and transnationally; and it currently parades under the heading of 'globalization.' At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, it gravitates against genuine entrepreneurial freedom in the name of vertical managerial control exercised in bureaucratic modes at the same time as it spawns the world-wide duality of high-paying, skilled jobs for the relatively few highly educated and the unskilled, low-wage jobs for the masses.2 (Fs) (notabene)

25a Now according to the normative intelligibility of the human good, particular goods are to be subordinated to goods of order, and goods of order are to be subordinated to terminal values. For this to happen coherently, though, the integral scale of values (ranging from vital to religious) needs to be preserved intact by a sufficient number of authentic people. The world-wide trends prevailing today have taught us that technological efficiency in multiplying particular goods can tend toward the elimination of cultural, personal, and religious values. Then two distortions follow: first, values come to be equated with needs and desires on the level of appetite; and second, social goods of order come to be conceived as efficient means to the satisfaction of self-interested covetousness. (Fs) (notabene)

26a It follows that the end of human living is conceived as an unlimited and disoriented satisfaction of needs and capacities disguised as freedom. This results in the reversal of the normative ordering of civil society: economy is subordinated to technology, and polity to economy. The triumph of technocracy means the organization of human living in terms of the competing egoisms of individuals and groups. Paradoxically, the great potential for freedom made possible by technical innovations and the enormous formation of capital in the second half of the 20th century can enslave liberty inasmuch as the chances for unauthenticity are heightened. Why? Because in the measure that "one's decisions have their principal motives, not in the values at stake but in a calculus of pleasures and pains, one is failing in self-transcendence, in authentic human existence, in the origination of value in oneself and one's society."3 This is why the modern crisis of the common good is ultimately a crisis of authenticity. (E08; 03.02.2008)