Liquid Modernity is Exhausting

A Response to Freya India's Call for Moral Direction

Photo by Artiom Vallat on Unsplash

In an insightful article written last month,

Freya India

argued that we need moral direction, not just personal, arbitrary, ever-shifting boundaries: “we’ve forgotten the word morals and replaced it with boundaries.” Writing from a young, secular perspective, Freya describes the ways “boundaries” are a poor substitute for a robust morality: “Surely there’s an argument for not explaining what loyalty is but quietly looking for it. For not teaching people how to treat you. For leaving it unsaid.” Perhaps at the core of the problem for Freya is that parents have failed to pass on any kind of morality “for fear of imposing” on their children. I would say that there’s a secular progressive logic at work here that says that every child ought to be a blank moral slate which discovers or creates his or her own morality for themselves. It’s all part of our larger vision of expressive individualism and the belief that we are our own and belong to ourselves. So instead of parents passing on a moral system, society instills ones, Freya rightly argues, but the problem is that society has “Values that are ever-changing.”

What Freya insightfully identifies here is anomie, the lack of societal standards or ethics. And it certainly defines our own time. The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman describes it as Liquid Modernity. The idea being that everything is constantly shifting under our feet. Nothing is solid. There are no moral standards, only personal preferences and private YouTube gurus selling us lifestyle options. And what was appropriate to say yesterday is offensive today. What was necessary for equality yesterday (DEI offices!) is no longer necessary today. At one point Freya makes the tremendous observation that insecurity is the rational and natural outcome of living in the inhuman environment we currently inhabit:

It’s funny to me that insecurity—you’re just insecure!—has become the chief insult in the modern world, rather than a fact of it. Yes I’m insecure! There’s nothing secure in this world to hold on to! Show me some shared values, some solid ground, anything to safely attach to. It’s normal to be insecure in a situation that is not secure. Seems to me an entirely natural response to living in a morally ambiguous world, where norms and customs and commitments constantly change.