Blind loyalty to capitalism or challenging it through the ekklesia?
When free-market forces submerge significant components of ethics and morals, the role of the modern public sphere is submerged - we become much too reliant on markets. Taylor (2011) explains the dilemmas which confront humanity when humanity becomes disengaged from the environment. He is not offering arguments for a definitive conception of community and environmental belonging, but instead alerting humanity to the dangers when we operate in closed world systems. These systems are detached from meaning and the cosmos. The point of this for SEAR is that if we operate only within closed world systems our reform frameworks are unlikely to be successful. Taylor continues:
[T]his is, as it were, a condition which arises even in a disenchanted world: we are unprotected; now not from demons and spirits, but from suffering and evil as we sense it in a raging world. There are unguarded moments when we feel the immense weight of suffering, when we are dragged down by it, or pulled down into despair. Being in contact with war, or famine, or massacre, or pestilence, will press this on us. But beyond suffering there is evil; for instance, the infliction of suffering, the cruelty, fanaticism, joy or laughter at the suffering of the victims. And then, what is worse, the sinking into brutality, the insensible brute violence of the criminal. It’s almost like a nightmare. One wants to be protected, separated from this. But it can creep under your guard and assail you, even in a disenchanted world.
(Taylor, 2007a, p. 661)
When humanity operates solely within an imminent frame - the closed world systems of modernity - humanity tends to ignore Nature as a source of the self and the power of language; in the case of SEAR, both are submerged under a high-tide of business-based solutions. No longer can people protect themselves from predilection for more neoliberal procedure; that is, humanity’s aesthetic and moral resources become more limited. Again, it is worth mentioning the view of truth between ourselves and the entities judged because there always intervenes mind and language. It is for this reason that interpreters, inspired by matters of significance such as Nature, draw on the unquiet critics of modernity from romanticism to existentialism. The overall philosophical point reveals a spectre of potential meaninglessness when neoliberal oligarchs and their bureaucratic technologies guide our systems through the business case.
On this, Taylor says that in late modernity ‘we are left with a view of human life which is empty, cannot aspire commitment, offers nothing worthwhile, cannot answer the craving for goals we can dedicate ourselves to’ (Taylor, 2007a, p. 717). Human happiness can only inspire ‘us when we have to fight against the forces which are destroying it; but once realised, it will inspire nothing but ennui, a cosmic yawn’ (Taylor, 2007a, pp. 717-718).
