[xmca] What Chance Morality within liquid modernity

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Tony

I want to reflect further on Zygmunt's notion of "liquid" modernity and the
particular life-strategies he suggests results in a provisional personality
type that is adaptive to this pattern of liquid social relationships.  He
explores 4 distinct strategies for adjusting to the situation of fluid
fragmentary social arrangements. However these 4 strategies share some
values in common.  On page 33 Zygmunt writes,

"All four intertwining and interpenetrating postmodern life strategies have
in common that they tend to render human relations fragmentary ... and
discontinuous... and militate against the construction of lasting networks
of mutual duties and obligations. They all favour and promote a distance
between the individual and the Other and cast the Other primarily as the
object of aesthetic, not moral, evaluation; as a matter of taste, not
responsibility. In the effect, they cast individual autonomy in opposition
to moral (as well as all the other) responsibilities. and remove huge areas
of human interaction, even the most intimate among them, from moral
judgement....  Following the moral impulse means assuming responsibility
for the other which in turn leads to an engagement with the fate of the
other and commitment to his/her welfare. The disengagement and
commitment-avoidance favoured by all four postmodern strategies has a
backlash effect in the shape of the suppression of the moral impulse as
well as disavowal and denigration of moral sentiments"

Zygmunt goes on to suggest that as well as moral disablement there is a
political disablement and an identity disablement that results within
liquid modernity.  However, it is the moral disablement that I wanted to
underline and focus on in relation to the discussion of use and exchange
values being discussed on the other thread.

Larry
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