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Globalization - " A global monoculture", Freedom of Speech,…

- - - - meritocracy is a society in which influence (of some sort) is possessed on the basis of merit (whatever that means).
    - - We think by accumulating money or material goods,, something ends up getting filled, but nothing gets filled, so we get into this state of collecting with no end.
  - - - It amounts to the claim that social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors
      - Individualism emphasized uniqueness of personality, not common humanity. This reduces people to animals who just follow their desires. The dignity of being human was lost, and that is the fundamental cause of cultural problems. Morality needs to be built on spiritual value, not instrumental or utilitarian value
    - - Post-modern, atheist world fails to provide an explanation of human nature and purpose
        
        Religion
        
        When one no longer holds the rank religion gave him in the pre-modern world, he loses a sense of human purpose related to and informed by the transcendent.
        
        "the putative reality which transcends everything other than itself but is not transcended by anything other than itself."
        
        The religious life is not designed to make us happy, or safe, or content. It is not designed to make us whole or complete. It is not designed to free us from anxieties and fear. It is designed to save us from ourselves, to make possible human community, to let us see that the greatest force in life is not power or reason, but love.
      - Modernity has no merits of its own - We’ve been in an era of deconstruction, of trying to problematise and tear down every institution we have – that sometimes we forget they can be useful.
      - The later nineteenth century is the age of modernity as an achieved reality, where science and technology, including networks of mass communication and transportation, reshape human perceptions.
        
        heightened by
      - MORALITY
        
        It was the monotheistic faiths that taught us that as individuals we are called upon to make moral choices, even ones that can jeopardize our status and security.
        
        HUMAN NATURE:
        
        We live in a time in which media has commodified emotion. These emotions are often responses to an unjust state of affairs to the experience of oneself being humiliated, or something that one cares about being treated with disdain. As such, Emotions are taken as “rightness.” and are thereby sign of moral seriousness– the idea that if you’re not angry, your simply not paying attention. In a time of a lack of reflectiveness about the nature of the emotions we express and what the expression of those emotions are doing to the conditions of our common life, we need to be more articulate about the emotions that we are so willing to indulge in, more cognizant about the dangers they represent and the moral pitfalls they bear along with them.
        
        AGING
        
        An associated phenomenon that we don't often associate with ageing and the war against ageing seems to be that one of the central human projects of the last 140 years has been to substitute the phenomenon of or the reality of our creatureliness, is the desire to be the products of auto creation, we want to not have our fates our lives defined by what came before us or that into which we were born but we rather want to create ourselves we want to be agents in our own realisation.
        
        There is a prevailing cultural condition that there's an extent to which we intervene in our lives but this kind of wide denial of the conditions of our finitude, to the extent to which we can be our own creations is a deep moral problem. This has become an increasingly pervasive cultural sediment. It's one of the established forms of contempt we see some people as being in control of themselves and other people as being enslaved to themselves or to nature.
        
        The idea that we don't have to be our age permeates western cultures, we express it externally by not wishing to look our age and internally which is the whole phenomenon of not feeling one's age or claiming that one doesn't feel one's age. Both expressions tend to associate age as an aspect of the human condition as something that is not desirous, something that is associated with diminishment and therefore decline with the onset of obsolescent weakness to being a burden on others. These are both various forms of our desire to effectively choose our age, to deny or define the whole ageing process or to say that it's not necessary it's contingent.
        
        The lionisation of youth makes this a desirable move to unanimously choose age almost in one direction, but at the same time people get pilloried for not acting their age. There is an imperative for youth and the person who seeks to reclaim youth when their past it. They move past the point of cultural potency relevance and now they're trying to reclaim it. It’s not that they're refusing to grow into their wisdom, they're trying to claim irrelevant in a power that’s illegitimate for them to claim.
      - Without an answer to the question of what distinguishes human beings in the modern era, the project of ethics becomes the project of authenticity. Expressions such as “discover who you really are,” “invent yourself,” and “reinvent yourself” indicate an overwhelming focus on the individual and an understanding that the self is mutable and subject to constant redefinition.
        
        AUTHENTICITY
    - - neoliberalism” is now generally thought to label the philosophical view that a society’s political and economic institutions should be robustly liberal and capitalist, but supplemented by a constitutionally limited democracy and a modest welfare state.
      - individualism emphasized uniqueness of personality, not common humanity. This reduces people to animals who just follow their desires. The dignity of being human was lost, and that is the fundamental cause of cultural problems. Morality needs to be built on spiritual value, not instrumental or utilitarian value
- - - - Social Norms
        
        DEMOCRACY
        
        Part of the problem of public debate is the fact that we've turned almost all moral concepts into political concepts. So, things are only bad insofar as they're politically bad or politically deleterious or harmful.
        
        Contempt is inimitable to democracy because it compromises the very idea of a common future. It’s saying that because I deprive you of your moral agency that really the common future is not one that I want to imagine with you whilst democracy is all about that common future. All of these moral emotions, that we might want to express, that we might feel in an involuntary way, all of them must preserve something fundamental, and that is the seriousness and the moral reality of our interlocutress. Once we lose that, then we have a public conversation that becomes dysfunctional and something that simply doesn’t work within democracy.
        
        The only genuinely practical way to get a good society is through communal morality, that is, a conception - arrived at by debate and reflection in our best mood of tolerant good sense - of how as a society we can order our affairs in the direction of fairness and decency. Poverty, ignorance, ill-health, disadvantage and crime are not merely evils in themselves, thay waste the community’s resources. Combating them takes imagination and determination, but it also takes capital investment.
        
        The loss of civility means that social feeling has been replaced by defensiveness, with groups circling their wagons around ‘identity’ concepts of nationality, ethnicity and religion, protecting themselves by putting up barriers against others. Civility fosters a society that behaves well towards itself, whose members respect the intrinsic value of the individual and the rights of people different from themselves.
        
        The heart of civic communication, exchange, mutual recognition and open deliberation are the fundamental practises that we engage in to create something like the conditions of a common world – a shared understanding of the way things are, of the problems that beset either us all, or groups to whom we owe particular claims of justice and repair.
- - - - The other issue that has come to light is the increasing prospect of exponential degradation of the character and quality of the internet itself, as the result of the emergence of just so much generative AI produced content. Where not only is there the concern that these technologically mediated spaces will be so flooded with falsehood, with garbage, with junk. Things that don’t have any relationship to the truth whatsoever but interesting bits of plausible sounding word combinations but with no necessary or logical relation to truth. Right to the prospect that future large language learning models, the future data sets that AI will draw on will include material that has been produced by AI itself, and that will have the effect of cannibalising its own substandard content – the technological problem of recursion.