I wanted to talk more about the fourth critical area where Deneen says liberalism has impacted the social fabric most negatively: science and technology. To raise a protest about any sort of technology in today's society in a certain sense proves Deneen's point about our universal adoption of what Pope Francis describes as the "technocratic paradigm". Our conveniences and their use Deneen says are actually determining the course of our lives, rather than we as individuals and groups using technology to further some specified goal. Living spaces and economic arrangements which are fitted to human scale often describe a philosophy known as "agrarianism". Deneen certainly offers the modern globalized society as an example of something in general that erodes human society, and its numerous small intimate human connections. He does approvingly mention Wendell Berry in this regard. He seems to argue that we cannot critically examine the use of a particular good, with the aim of determining its relation to the end, if we have decided that any and every new good or technology is in fact the end we should be pursuing. If we couple this with his definition of liberty functionally as the maximum personal license for every person, we can see why Deneen is so critical of this version of liberty, and even individual rights. As I said before, many of these small intimate connections give us obligations which are not chosen. Therefore, if it is true that liberalism aims to break the bonds of all involuntary relationships and obligations, then it is contrary to any sort of life at a human scale.
The reduction of contemporary sexual ethics to a minimum consent seems to prove Deneen's point that even membership in a family, or the right to form a new one, is purely a matter that is voluntary. Moreover, the reduction of sex to the end of pleasure seems to bolster the point as well. There is nothing so obvious an involuntary obligation as parenthood. In the most contemporaneous debate over sex, personal liberty has one out over the notion that sex has social obligations. That which is social is that which is common, and such was the basis for the state interest in personal sexual matters.
The uncritical adoption of all new science and technology as simply the inevitable price of freedom testifies to Deneen's contention that liberalism is something unnoticed, in the background, like water to a fish, as he says. The saw that the state cannot legislate morality is really the statement, "The state has no authority to remind people of their deeper social obligations, and to enforce them".
The reduction of contemporary sexual ethics to a minimum consent seems to prove Deneen's point that even membership in a family, or the right to form a new one, is purely a matter that is voluntary. Moreover, the reduction of sex to the end of pleasure seems to bolster the point as well. There is nothing so obvious an involuntary obligation as parenthood. In the most contemporaneous debate over sex, personal liberty has one out over the notion that sex has social obligations. That which is social is that which is common, and such was the basis for the state interest in personal sexual matters.
The uncritical adoption of all new science and technology as simply the inevitable price of freedom testifies to Deneen's contention that liberalism is something unnoticed, in the background, like water to a fish, as he says. The saw that the state cannot legislate morality is really the statement, "The state has no authority to remind people of their deeper social obligations, and to enforce them".
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