Sublime

Here the arch-traditionalist Spengler comes into strange alignment with the communist Karl Marx, with his theory of alienation, and the uncategorisable Simone Weil with her reflections on the consequences of rootlessness.

And while traditionalists, taking their cues from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Burke, believed that man was naturally sociable and tended toward consensus, so long as there was the faithful transmission of an ethical tradition, Burnham saw only conflict. This bedrock belief in the “irrational” and violent core of man and the primacy of conflict over

Part of the culture of modernity took shape around various affirmations that there could be individual gratification from emulating the impervious rhythms, efficiency, and dynamism of mechanization. However, what were often ambivalent or merely symbolic compensations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have become a more intensive set of both

traditional gender roles

By 1956, the sociologist William H. Whyte saw a “decline of the Protestant ethic” and the rise of “the organization man,” for whom conformity was prized over initiative.

The possibility of a sense of accomplishment in some end product of one’s work became less and less tenable in large factory conditions.

Robert Bellah signaled this shift in the 1980s with the book Habits of the Heart. In it, his team described the shift away from identities formed in relation with local people and places, and toward a greater individualism that turned away from others across the street, a few doors down, or up a flight of stairs.10

Robert Wright predicted one of its most important consequences. In his essay “Voice of America,” which appeared in the September 13, 1993, issue of the magazine the New Republic, Wright reported on his forays into Usenet, a set of online discussion groups