"It strikes me that this desire to maintain unbridgeable differences is a desire for an authoritarian figure. They want a father who draws limits and differences between people and who establishes the law and order, a father who can remove them from their terrifying exposure to chaos or the caprice of events."
In pre-modern societies, either nature or tradition serves as the objective standard to guide human behaviour in matters of morality, sex, parenting, politics and so forth. They provide human life with a solid basis. Neither of them is available in modern society.
Since Kant, we have come to think that standards generally are reflexively determined — there are no objective standards out there. Instead, we create the norms and rules according to which we judge what is true, good and beautiful.
In late capitalist societies, this has gone to an extreme. Everything, starting from one’s identity to how one ought to parent, work, relax or find fulfilment, is experienced as the result of a choice.
What characterises modern society is the felt decline of objective standards and, correlatively, the anxiety of freedom, of, in effect, too much freedom. This explains why recourse is sometimes had to an authoritarian figure. “I don’t have to choose if he chooses in my stead.” Or “he blocks my freedom”. One finds a way in either case to mitigate the anxiety.
At any rate, we can say that a society doesn’t qualify as “modern” unless it undergoes this experience (of the decline of objective standards). This is apparent in the popularity today of conspiracy theories. What they look for is an objective meaning behind the apparently random events of daily life. They look for an agent behind the scenes that explains why things are the way they are.
Here, secret government agencies play a crucial role in the popular imagination. They are the ones we think are responsible for the significant moments and changes in history. Think of the Kennedy assassination. American novelist Don DeLillo says somewhere that secret government agencies are like the priests of ancient times — they know the hidden movements of fate or history.
One of the big differences between the late capitalist society of the 21st century and the industrial capitalist society of the 20th is the permissiveness of the former and the authoritarian and sometimes repressive character of the latter. There is, of course, something disingenuous about calling our society “permissive” because it is saturated with rules. The point is that, in our society, we cannot enjoy life without rules and regulations.
In the past, there was the authoritarian figure, the moral-religious leader of the group, the political leader of the nation, the patriarch in the home. He’d impose prohibitions: no sex before marriage, sex for reproductive purposes only, women wear skirts and men, pants.
Enjoyment was had by breaking the taboos. Pleasure consisted in transgression. The pervert, the man, say, who wore women’s clothes, the gay or lesbian, in this context, the progressive agent — he or she exposed the contingency of the prohibitions and undermined the power of the authoritarian figure.
It is the reverse in our permissive society where we witness the decline of the authoritarian figure and the substitution of rules and regulations for prohibitions. You’re not told what not to do. You’re enjoined to eat, have sex, succeed at work, to be, in short, “your best self”. How? By listening to or reading online the advice of the dietician, the sex therapist, the successful businessman who’s written his umptieth self-help book.
It is not clear in which society there is more control or repression. Is it in the society of the 20th century that is rife with the prohibitions of the authoritarian figure? Or is it in the society of the 21st century where the rules and regulations of so-called experts populate the public domain and spoil the enjoyment of life by turning every pleasure into a duty? For to turn a pleasure into a duty — “eat your ice cream, and you better enjoy it!” — is a sure way of ruining it.
There is finally this other odd thing today. The pervert (the one who breaks with conformity) is not the progressive agent in our permissive society. He or she embodies its common wisdom — everyone knows that gender and sexual identities are fluid and not fixed.
In effect, fluidity is the common experience. It affects all the differences one used to rely on as a guide in life. There are today no clear boundaries between work and leisure, office and home, the private and public space.
The typical gender roles for fathers and mothers, men and women, are also up in the air. These differences seem to have been swallowed up in a vortex of incessant change. There are no objective standards to guide us: we have to make up our own, which is to say, we have to listen to what the so-called experts say.
At the same time, we find among the so-called progressive woke folk a puritanical insistence on unbridgeable differences between ethnicities, gender and sexual differences, and so on. I am talking about the reversed racism that celebrates the authenticity of the exotic other, the authentically African, Chinese, Indian.
It goes without saying that this is a product of the global market — individuals are enjoined to affirm their ethnic (and other) identities by reference to a choice of commodities, clothes, music, foods, movies, and whatever else the market makes available as “authentically African or Chinese or Indian”.
Still, it strikes me that this desire to maintain unbridgeable differences is a desire for an authoritarian figure. They want a father who draws limits and differences between people and who establishes the law and order, a father who can remove them from their terrifying exposure to chaos or the caprice of events. Wherever differences are fixed, there we have order, and there is an agent that establishes it, and what the woke folk want is just that.
What can a progressive agent do in this context? I suspect at least one thing. It is to remind us that the social order and the status quo rest on absolutely nothing at all. We have to resist the temptation of the paranoid person or believer in conspiracy theories by acknowledging that there is no agent behind the scene pulling the strings. The world is a string of random happenings and no more.
Rafael Winkler is a professor of philosophy at the University of Johannesburg.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.