January 20, 2007
A quote from Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006).This is a text that addresses the vulnerability in pur way of life. The text argues that humans, are by nature cultural animals, in that we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture. But our way of life --whatever it is-- is vulnerable in various ways. And we, as participants in that way of life, thereby inherit a vulnerability. Lear says:
We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable (to destruction, devastation and extinction). Events around the world --terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals, and even natural catastrophes--have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name. I suspect that this feeling has provoked the widespread intolerance that we see around us today --from all points on the political spectrum. It is as though, without insistence that our outlook is correct, the outlook itself might collapse. Perhaps if we could give a name to our shared sense of vulnerability, we could find better ways to live with it
Should our way of life break down, that is our problem. Such vulnerability has to do with the possibility of losing the core concepts in terms of which we understand ourselves, the world in which we live, and which give meaning to our lives individually and collectively, and finding ourselves subsequently confronted with the radical possibility of 'happenings' breaking down and becoming meaningless.
Don't we already have a name for that kind of cultural breakdown--the one Nietzsche gave to it. Nihilism? So how should we face the possibility that one's culture might collapse in this sense?
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