Sequestration from extrinsic nature

In each of the respects discussed above, therefore, we can trace out an expanding process of moral sequestration. The major domains of life, including those which seem on the face of things to be more `biological' than social, come to be brought under the sway of the dual impulsion of self-referentiality and reflexivity. Existential questions become institutionally repressed at the same time as new fields of opportunity are created for social activity

-- 165 --

and for personal development. The sequestration of experience is in some part the contrived outcome of a culture in which moral and aesthetic domains are held to be dissolved by the expansion of technical knowledge. In some considerable degree, however, it is also the unintended outcome of the endemic structuring processes of modernity, whose internally referential systems lose contact with extrinsic criteria.

We have to add to the processes thus far mentioned the development of the created environment. It has become a commonplace to assert that the core outlooks of modernity treat nature as instrumental, the means to realise human purposes. The locus classicus of such a view, it is said, is in none other than Marx himself. The supposed radical critic of modern social life turns out to conform to some of its most deeply ingrained characteristics. The indictment is surely valid. Marx was a critic of capitalism, which he saw as essentially an irrational means of organising modern industry; but he saw the expansion of the productive forces as the very key to a rewarding future for humankind. There are some passages, particularly in Marx's early writings, which suggest a rather more subtle view of nature and its relationship to human aspirations. Yet on the whole the thrust of Marx's account is an instrumental one, and in this respect Marx is more in accord with the dominant line of thinking in Western intellectual thought and culture than critical of it.

However, it is not enough to leave matters there. What is at issue is not just that, with the coming of modernity, human beings treat nature as an inert set of forces to be harnessed to human ends, since this still carries the implication that nature is a separate domain from that of human society. As was emphasised earlier, the development of the created environment -- or, another phrase for the same thing, the socialisation of nature -- cuts much more deeply than this. Nature begins `to come to an end' in the sense that the natural world is increasingly ordered according to the internally reflexive systems of modernity. In conditions of modernity, people live in artificial environments in a double sense. First, because of the spread of the built environment, in which the vast majority of the population dwell, human habitats become separate from nature, now represented only in the form of the `countryside' or `wilderness'. Second, in a profound

-- 166 --

sense, nature literally ceases to exist as naturally occurring events become more and more pulled into systems determined by socialised influences.

So far as the first of these factors is concerned, we can say that human life becomes sequestered from nature in so far as it unfolds in humanly created locales. In the city, `nature' still survives as carefully conserved areas of greenery, but for the most part these are artificially constructed: in the form of parks, recreational areas and so forth. Gardens are dug, trees are tended and house plants cultivated; but these are all plainly parts of the created environment, and are only `natural' in so far as they depend on organic processes rather than on human manufacture alone. The modern city is by far the most extensively and intensively artificial series of settings for human activity that has ever existed. A visit to the countryside or a trek to the wilderness may satisfy a desire to be close to `nature', but `nature' here is also socially coordinated and tamed. The notion of a `wilderness' is a concept which came into prominence during the early period of modern social development. Specifically, it once meant an area of the natural world as yet unexplored by, and unknown to, those from the modern West. Wildernesses now, however, are mostly simply areas where, for one reason or another, cultivation or habitation cannot effectively be maintained, or are simply areas set aside directly for recreational purposes.

In the second sense, nature becomes sequestered from human involvement in an even more fundamental way. Nature is increasingly subject to human intervention, and thereby loses its very character as an extrinsic source of reference. Sequestration from nature in this guise is more subtle, yet more pervasive than in the first sense mentioned. For nature -- the alternation of the days and seasons, the impact of climatic conditions -- still seems to be `there': the necessary external environment of human activities, no matter how instrumentally orientated they might be. Yet this feeling is specious. Becoming socialised, nature is drawn into the colonisation of the future and into the partly unpredictable arenas of risk created by modern institutions in all areas subject to their sway.

What is the impact of the sequestration of experience? This is a problem I shall expand upon in subsequent chapters, and only a few general remarks are needed at this point. Such sequestration

-- 167 --

is the condition of the establishing of large tracts of relative security in day-to-day life in conditions of modernity. Its effect, which as we have seen should be regarded largely as an unintended consequence of the development of modern institutions, is to repress a cluster of basic moral and existential components of human life that are, as it were, squeezed to the sidelines.

The institutional repression which moral sequestration signals is not, however, a psychological repression: it does not depend on the internalisation of ever more strict forms of conscience, in the manner suggested by Freud. On the contrary, to repeat, mechanisms of shame, linked to the `open' nature of self-identity, come in some substantial part to replace those of guilt.

The development of relatively secure environments of day-to-day life is of central importance to the maintenance of feelings of ontological security. Ontological security, in other words, is sustained primarily through routine itself. Although daily existence is in many ways more controlled and predictable in modern social conditions by comparison with the generality of premodern cultures, the framework of ontological security becomes fragile. The protective cocoon depends more and more on the coherence of routines themselves, as they are ordered within the reflexive project of the self. Wide areas of day-to-day life, ordered via abstract systems, are secure in Max Weber's sense of providing `calculable' environment of action. Yet the very routines that provide such security mostly lack moral meaning and can either come to be experienced as `empty' practices, or alternatively can seem to be overwhelming. When routines, for whatever reason, become radically disrupted, or where someone specifically sets out to achieve a greater reflexive control over her or his self-identity, existential crises are likely to occur. An individual might feel particularly bereft at fateful moments, because at such moments moral and existential dilemmas present themselves in pressing form. The individual, faces a return of the repressed, as it were, but is likely to lack the psychic and social resources to cope with the issues thus posed.

As with other processes of modern social development, it would be wrong to understand the sequestration of experience as all-enveloping and homogeneous, which it is not. It is internally complicated, throws up contradictions, and also generates possibilities of reappropriation. Sequestration, we must stress, is not a

-- 168 --

once-and-for-all phenomenon, and it does not represent a set of frictionless boundaries. The site of oppression, its exclusionary characteristics normally carry connotations of hierarchical differentiation and inequality. The frontiers of sequestered experience are faultlines, full of tensions and poorly mastered forces; or, to shift the metaphor, they are battlegrounds, sometimes of a directly social character, but often within the psychological field of the self.

We also have to consider the impact of mediated experience. Contact with death and serious illness may be rare, except on the part of specialised professionals, but in respect of mediated experience it is very common. Fictional literature and documentary presentations are full of materials portraying violence, sexuality and death. Familiarity with settings of such activities, as a result of the wide-ranging influence of media of various kinds, may in fact often be greater than in pre-modern social conditions. Many popular art forms are essentially morality tales, in which narratives are spun and a moral order assembled. Plainly these fictional worlds in some part supplant those of day-to-day life.

-- 169 --

Yet, through mediated language and imagery, individuals also have access to experiences ranging in diversity and distance far beyond anything they could achieve in the absence of such mediations. Existential sensibilities therefore do not simply become attenuated and lost; to some extent they may even be enriched as new fields of experience are opened up.

On the whole it is surely the case that mediated experience furthers sequestration rather than helps to overcome it. A fascination with `fictional realism', such as soap operas for instance, expresses a concern with the lapsed moralities of everyday life. But such preoccupations tend to confirm the separation of day-to-day activity from the externalities in which they were once embedded. Where individuals are brought face to face with existential demands -- as at fateful moments -- they are likely to experience both shock and reality inversion. Reality inversion, indeed, may often be a functional psychological reaction which alleviates the anxieties that surge through at such junctures -- an unconscious neutralising device.

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 705