In many ways, the world seems to be crumbling apart today. I’m not just talking about the physical problems occurring to our planet as a result of climate change. I’m also talking about the fundamental connections between humans. Somehow the moralities that we have developed to maintain social bondedness and social harmony within and between communities are not doing their job.
The fraying of the social contract is most visible in the growing amount of violence within certain countries. Murders and robberies are quite evident in these places. People are afraid of walking down the street for fear of getting mugged. Even in broad daylight. Much of the time, the violence is carried out with no apparent reason. People drive by in cars and start firing at complete strangers.
The fraying of the social contract is also quite apparent in government. The ascent of right-wing authoritarian populist parties in so many democracies is really scary. These parties want to crush the democratic principles on which the political foundations of these countries are based. Paradoxically, they want to destroy democracy in the deluded belief they are actually saving it. They justify fighting democratic forces in the belief that the democratic forces who are their adversaries are themselves supporting evil conspiracies like QAnon. These beliefs pull them out of their numbness and help them to feel alive.
Then there are all the scams occurring on the Internet. All the schemes of people trying to serendipitously and illegally take money from Internet users. There is all the cyberviolence that occurs. People threatening and making fun of others they don’t like. The cyberviolence can become so intense that victims can kill themselves as a result. As a related category, there is the embarrassment that comes to women who discover that there are nude pictures of them that were given to boyfriends and that are now available for all to see on the Internet. Much of this cyberviolence is perpetrated by people who are very numb from their interactions with modern technology and who see these abrasive immoral actions as vehicles through which they can pull themselves out of their numbness.
The divorce rate keeps going up among those who are willing to make the commitment of marriage. Among those who don’t, many are content to maintain their sexual connections on the level of online websites where they can temporarily hook up and then disappear. Others are fine with just living together in situations where people don’t have to worry about messy legal disengagements. In general, people in modern technological society seem to have great difficulty maintaining strong committed romantic relationships, whether within the boundaries of marriage or outside of it, because they are too numb today to sustain strong emotional bonds. Even though, on one level, they may want to sustain such bonds, they are so numb that they are incapable of absorbing the organic stimulation, both physical and emotional, that they so desperately need in order to be able to do so.
Within work situations, there is a great deal of ambiguity in terms of how people are supposed to relate to one another. In particular, both employer and worker have an expectation that the relationship can be terminated fairly quickly today. Workers can quit suddenly if they find a more satisfying work situation or better pay, and employers can be very demanding in terms of both quality and quantity of work required. Any deviation from what is required in today’s unstable economic situation can result in workers being let go or quitting. In other words, there seems to be little loyalty between employer and worker. The relationship seems to be fragile and contingent at best. The tenuousness of this relationship has been exacerbated in many types of employment by the physical distance between employer and worker and office and worker that has been made possible as a result of zoom. In working from home, is the freedom to work on one’s own schedule more important or the effects of social isolation in determining what is a better work situation.
The situations enumerated here are just some of the many situations that exemplify the lack of social cohesion in modern technological society. And traditional moralities just seem to be unable to deal with situations built on numbness and weak human connection. So perhaps now is the time to reexamine these traditional moralities, which are based on keeping peace and harmony through calming things down through mediation and where the good life is one where people try to live with others through interactions that are as frictionless as possible. This mediation and frictionless living have been increasingly made possible by all the technological advances that have been introduced into human life in recent centuries. But as the possibility of a certain type of moral living has been made increasingly available as a result of technological change, people have developed increasingly disturbing psychological problems from the numbness. And this, in turn leads to all kinds of anti-social acting out so that people can pull themselves out of the numbness. So, the more people strive today to be good in the sense of leading mediated frictionless lives, the more they rebel and start acting bad in order to feel alive. We need to start developing rules of gentle guidance to help people to break away from the mediation and the frictionless living without exploding apart in really bad actions in the traditional sense. With our transformed living situations, we need different kinds of moral guidance from the past. Guidance that affirms and strengthens a healthy kind of primary experience. So that people can live moral and feel alive at the same time.