The removal of individual agency has indeed eroded social obligations yet the left likes to explain anti-social behaviour by social conditions. Theft is 'caused' by poverty, inequality, or 'systemic racism' (despite the Sewell report) and therefore excusable. But to say that, as Guardian columnists like to do, is to invoke a morality nonetheless. Injustice must be fought as the highest moral good whatever form the 'resistance' takes irrespective of any harm it causes. This is not the absence of morality but a perverted simplification. Capitalism, private ownership, and profit are bad. Attacking that in any form has become good. It would seem that the moral purpose offered by this normative sociology (Nozick's hilarious "study of causes as they ought to be") allows impoverished lives (impoverished by poor education and a degraded culture) to be meaningful. It seems we all share a need for a sense of purpose in life and the Guardian et al supply an easy ready made one to fill the vaccum in the lives of the impressionable and gullible young.
Having children, as the comedian Simon Evans once remarked, is to run an underfunded correctional facilty. Family life, how we raise and socialise little savages, matters greatly as does education. Telling young children, as schools now do, that they are in a historically sinful society, one whose norms and values are nothing to be proud of, must be contributing to the breakdown of family life - at home and in the wider family that is the nation's society. If you can change gender on a whim, as primary schoold children are told, then nothing is fixed or rooted least of all any kind of guilt.
I'm a retired mathematician and not a sociologist (which is probably obvious) and so grateful for Frank's substack helping understand some of the forces at work in the world around me. I hereby confess that at university my girlfriend was a very articulate marxist studying sociology! The impression she made on me (at the time) ceased once I graduated, but she did take me to my first ever demo. I was not persuaded intellectually but I did notice the moral fervour that underpinned the marxists I socialised with and I never escaped an unease about that. That unease has not left me.
I have been thinking about this. I freely admit that I probably fall into the religiously mentally ill.. but I would live no other way. Facing life without my Saviour and friend and all that goes with it would be so difficult and meaningless. Watching my son dying of a failed liver because of his alcoholism and the therapeutic lies he was told in Rehab would be impossible without my faith in our Creator God and His Son and the power of the Holy Spirit.
The removal of individual agency has indeed eroded social obligations yet the left likes to explain anti-social behaviour by social conditions. Theft is 'caused' by poverty, inequality, or 'systemic racism' (despite the Sewell report) and therefore excusable. But to say that, as Guardian columnists like to do, is to invoke a morality nonetheless. Injustice must be fought as the highest moral good whatever form the 'resistance' takes irrespective of any harm it causes. This is not the absence of morality but a perverted simplification. Capitalism, private ownership, and profit are bad. Attacking that in any form has become good. It would seem that the moral purpose offered by this normative sociology (Nozick's hilarious "study of causes as they ought to be") allows impoverished lives (impoverished by poor education and a degraded culture) to be meaningful. It seems we all share a need for a sense of purpose in life and the Guardian et al supply an easy ready made one to fill the vaccum in the lives of the impressionable and gullible young.
Having children, as the comedian Simon Evans once remarked, is to run an underfunded correctional facilty. Family life, how we raise and socialise little savages, matters greatly as does education. Telling young children, as schools now do, that they are in a historically sinful society, one whose norms and values are nothing to be proud of, must be contributing to the breakdown of family life - at home and in the wider family that is the nation's society. If you can change gender on a whim, as primary schoold children are told, then nothing is fixed or rooted least of all any kind of guilt.
I'm a retired mathematician and not a sociologist (which is probably obvious) and so grateful for Frank's substack helping understand some of the forces at work in the world around me. I hereby confess that at university my girlfriend was a very articulate marxist studying sociology! The impression she made on me (at the time) ceased once I graduated, but she did take me to my first ever demo. I was not persuaded intellectually but I did notice the moral fervour that underpinned the marxists I socialised with and I never escaped an unease about that. That unease has not left me.
I have been thinking about this. I freely admit that I probably fall into the religiously mentally ill.. but I would live no other way. Facing life without my Saviour and friend and all that goes with it would be so difficult and meaningless. Watching my son dying of a failed liver because of his alcoholism and the therapeutic lies he was told in Rehab would be impossible without my faith in our Creator God and His Son and the power of the Holy Spirit.