originally published 7/1/2008
Political theorist Patrick Deneen converses about the implicit assumptions undergirding modern Western political sensibilities, assumptions regarding the nature of humans stemming from Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. In contrast to their view of human beings as essentially isolated and independent individuals using the natural environment for subjective chosen ends, Aristotelian political thinkers understood the end or finality of human beings as being inextricably natural and cultural, in accord with and dependent on nature, including other human beings. The modern divorce of human beings from the rest of the creation — the natural world — has implications for how we treat the natural world and understand our own independence. Deneen is the author of “Wendell Berry and the Alternative Tradition in Political Thought,” an essay in Wendell Berry: Life and Work (The University Press of Kentucky, 2007).
Patrick Deneen continues his conversation with Ken Myers and focuses on Wendell Berry’s observations of the consequences of democratic individualism and specialization. Berry and Deneen worry about the modern tendency to elevate specialization in many spheres of life to the point where the general whole suffers from fragmentation and incoherence; divisions of labor, people, and academic disciplines, while allowing a kind of tremendous mechanical efficiency, tend to harm the enterprises of building community, knowledge and economies, enterprises which require a coherent, organic vision to flourish. When the parts lose sight of the whole, the whole suffers and the parts lose meaning.
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