The Sequestration of Experience

It is often said that the overriding emphasis of modernity is on control -- the subordination of the world to human dominance. The assertion is surely correct, but put thus baldly it needs considerable elaboration. One thing control means is the subordination of nature to human purposes, organised via the colonising of the future. This process looks at first sight like an extension of `instrumental reason': the application of humanly organised principles of science and technology to the mastery of the natural world. Looked at more closely, however, what we see is the emergence of an internally referential system of knowledge and power. It is in these terms that we should understand the phrase `the end of nature'. There has taken place a marked acceleration and deepening of human control of nature, directly involved with the globalisation of social and economic activity. The `end of nature' means that the natural world has become in large part a `created environment', consisting of humanly structured systems whose motive power and dynamics derive from socially organised knowledge-claims rather than from influences exogenous to human activity.

That nature becomes an internally referential system needs stressing, because the natural environment seems so plainly separate from the universe of social activity. It is perhaps easier to see that social life itself becomes internally referential, along with the mobilising of self-identity. Yet the internal referentiality of modern social life has often been confused with a distinction drawn between `society' and `nature'; and, correspondingly, such referentiality has often been thought of as intrinsic to all social systems, rather than primarily to the institutions of modernity.

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But social systems only become internally referential, on a thoroughgoing basis at any rate, in so far as they become institutionally reflexive and thereby tied to the colonisation of the future. To the degree that social life is organised according to tradition, taken-for-granted habit or pragmatic adjustment to exogenous nature, it lacks that internal referentiality fundamental to modernity's dynamics. Crucial to these processes is the evaporation of morality, particularly in so far as moral outlooks are integrated in a secure way with day-to-day practice. For moral principles run counter to the concept of risk and to the mobilising of dynamics of control. Morality is extrinsic so far as the colonising of the future is concerned.

As distinct from mere habit, tradition always has a `binding', normative character. `Normative' here in turn implies a moral component: in traditional practices, the bindingness of activities expresses precepts about how things should or should not be done. Traditions of behaviour have their own moral endowment, which specifically resists the technical power to introduce something new. The fixity of tradition does not derive from its accumulation of past wisdom; rather, coordination of the past with the present is achieved through adherence to the normative precepts tradition incorporates. As Shils comments:

tradition is thus far more than the statistically frequent recurrence over a succession of generations of similar beliefs, practices, institutions, and works. The recurrence is a result of the normative consequences -- sometimes the normative intention -- of presentation and of the acceptance of the tradition as normative. It is this normative transmission which links the generations of the dead with the generations of the living in the constitution of a society... the dead... are objects of attachment, but what is more significant is that their works and the norms contained in their practices influence the actions of subsequent generations to whom they are unknown. The normative core of tradition is the inertial force which holds society in a given form over time. ¹

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 764