Posts Tagged ‘mass society’

I was glad to see that Simone Biles was able to compete again in the Olympics and win a bronze medal on the balance beam.  She is an outstanding gymnast who has advanced the sport/art with new moves and a high level of execution.  Unfortunately, because of her very public withdrawal from some of the events for reasons of “mental health,” she has been subjected to some extremely harsh criticism.

The reactions both of her critics and defenders have been mostly superficial. What happened to Simone Biles is the result of the confluence of four currents in modern American society: the role of sports, the financial impact of sponsors, the ubiquitous presence of social media and its baleful influence on the self, which was already trapped in the hopelessly contradictory reality of mass society and the exaltation of its individual expression. Read the rest of this entry »

I often feel that the modern world has gone mad, but I must admit that I was caught off guard when I discovered in the eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid (1710-1796) an epistemological source of our condition.  The madness of the modern world is its solipsistic undercurrents, which leave us feeling painfully alone. Read the rest of this entry »

            Ray Bradbury’s famous novel Fahrenheit 451 is a story about a society in which books are illegal and the job of firemen is to burn books.  It has often been misunderstood as a protest against government censorship because it was published in 1953 during the height of the anti-Communist movement in the United States led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House on Un-American Activities Committee.  This superficial political reading of Fahrenheit 451 misses the depth of Bradbury’s critique of modern mass society, its technology and its false view of the nature of happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

            The strong, visceral horror at the slaughter of little children in Newtown, Connecticut is universally felt in America.  This natural human reaction has led to serious questions about gun control, mental health and security.  Without a doubt these concerns are justifiable, but they fail to address a fundamental question: What is it about modern society that has produced a series of these types of mass murders that are unprecedented in human history? Read the rest of this entry »