Morality in an Age of Contingency

Abstract

Let me begin this essay with a note of caution or perhaps an 'all clear' sign: it will not be a jeremiad. I will not lament a process of ongoing fragmentation, of the loss of all values in our time, of the disappearance of community or trust or commitment or the social significance of character formation. Such jeremiads are so common in current debates about values and morality that they constitute a rhetorical genre of their own both in the social sciences and in cultural criticism. They can be found in conservative as well as in progressive versions. The mere fact of their being a genre of their own can already sensitize us to the schematizations and narrative restrictions imposed by this genre. When the American historian Thomas Bender searched American historiography to locate the exact date of the triumph of individualism and materialism over the ideals of Puritan community life, he discovered that such a claim has been made for practically all points in time since 1650. Desperately he asked: 'How many times can community collapse in America?' (1978: 46). Similarly, we should ask ourselves when the time before the alleged contemporary fragmentation of society is said to have been and whether we really do justice to contemporary changes if we constantly force them into the framework of loss and decline. In the first part of this essay I exemplify the problem I have with these pessimistic diagnoses by analysing one of the most influential sociological contributions to this genre in the past few years. In the second part, I sketch an alternative to this type of interpretation before developing a few thoughts in the concluding section about the problem areas for successful value-transmission today. The 'influential diagnosis' I have in mind is Richard Sennett's book The Corrosion of Character, published in 1998. Its title is a clear sign that it belongs to the genre of diagnoses of decline. The author intends to describe a process of corrosion, namely of decay, decomposition, disintegration. What is it that according to Sennett is undergoing such a decomposition today? It is the human character of human beings a phenomenon he defines in terms of the permanent structure of a personality in its emotional and other dimensions. Human character, he writes, 'is expressed by loyalty and mutual commitment, or through the pursuit of long-term goals, or by the practice of delayed gratifications for the sake of a future end' (1998: 10). The formation of characters is said to be fundamentally threatened today by an epochal change in capitalism, for which Sennett uses the term 'flexibilization' (1998: 10):