Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the self draws its substance from three basic sources: family, community, and craft. Connections to each of these sources are now either strained or lost to the modern self.
First, the family is besieged not only by the plague of divorce and the huge increase in single-parent households generally but by the stresses and strains of life that exact their toll on the marriages that do manage to survive in the modernized world. Families that function together, and that do so with a set of common moral values, are becoming an endangered species. The significance of this change in the context of our discussion is that families have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is breaking down. The new generation is inheriting a set of values and expectations that is so thin and pale as to be quite unsatisfying. Hungry for additional tutoring in the meaning of life, the young are turning first to the larger culture. Then, unsatisfied with the ambiguous and contradictory moral messages imparted by the popular media, they are turning inward in their search for signals about the meaning of life.
Second, modernization is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless, bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new freedom from various parochialisms is in some sense exhilarating, but it does not come without a price. Those who belong everywhere can also be said to belong nowhere; they have been emancipated from the small town only to become anonymous, unconnected in our large world. Where the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost.
Third, the self's connection to craft has also been seriously diminished by modernization, leaving many people perpetually dissatisfied with their work. In some case, machines have severed the link between the worker and the work. In other cases, layers of bureaucracy have severed personal links between ideas and products. In still other cases, the kind of work that is required by modernized societies is inherently undignified or boring, and the old virtue of taking pride in one's work becomes harder and harder to realize.
First, the family is besieged not only by the plague of divorce and the huge increase in single-parent households generally but by the stresses and strains of life that exact their toll on the marriages that do manage to survive in the modernized world. Families that function together, and that do so with a set of common moral values, are becoming an endangered species. The significance of this change in the context of our discussion is that families have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is breaking down. The new generation is inheriting a set of values and expectations that is so thin and pale as to be quite unsatisfying. Hungry for additional tutoring in the meaning of life, the young are turning first to the larger culture. Then, unsatisfied with the ambiguous and contradictory moral messages imparted by the popular media, they are turning inward in their search for signals about the meaning of life.
Second, modernization is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless, bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new freedom from various parochialisms is in some sense exhilarating, but it does not come without a price. Those who belong everywhere can also be said to belong nowhere; they have been emancipated from the small town only to become anonymous, unconnected in our large world. Where the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost.
Third, the self's connection to craft has also been seriously diminished by modernization, leaving many people perpetually dissatisfied with their work. In some case, machines have severed the link between the worker and the work. In other cases, layers of bureaucracy have severed personal links between ideas and products. In still other cases, the kind of work that is required by modernized societies is inherently undignified or boring, and the old virtue of taking pride in one's work becomes harder and harder to realize.
- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland:
The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.
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