ROOTS OR LEGO PIECES?

A BIT MORE NOMENCLATURE REFINEMENT

Hang in there. The Guild series really is coming. But I had another interesting thought that I wanted to share. I think a pretty valuable one. As regular readers know, I’m always on the lookout for incremental improvements in my nomenclature. At their best, well chosen terms not only provide clearer, more precise, and evocative reference to the concept intended for description, but a well chosen term can animate that concept in a way that triggers contemplation of what the concept is actually describing.

Long time readers will be aware that, over the years, in my effort to clarify the individualism of the spatialist-inspired French Enlightenment and its progeny, including managerial liberalism, I’ve piled up a large stack of candidate adjectives: e.g., monadic, atomized, commodified, alienated, isolated, and deracinated. Well, thanks to the contribution of Ernest Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, I think I may have hit upon a term that beautifully captures what all those other adjectives, aligned in various combinations, were aspiring to express. That new entry to my linguistic field is: modular individualism. Gellner, largely I think an apologist for space biased society, invokes the term with a positive inflection. As you might imagine, from the perspective of the temporals, whom I've been theorizing in interest of on this Substack, modular individualism is somewhat less laudable.

The beauty of the term, I think, in considerable part is in its compelling invocation of humans in mass society as the social equivalent of Lego pieces. In a certain sense, a poignant set of competing metaphors for the conflicting social visions of temporals and spatials is whether humans are to be regarded as roots or Lego pieces. We often think of whether humans have roots, but the question is whether humans are roots. As parents, brethren, mentors, colleagues, friends, etc., are they contributing to rooting others in families, tribes, communities, jurisdictional pluralist associations, etc.?

Such a metaphor of rootedness is of course incompatible with the spatialist social vision, which as we’ve seen repeatedly — for instance in the work of Nisbet, Michéa, Grossi, among others — has always emphasized the eradication of intermediary institutions, tradition, and gemeinschaft. In the future, I’ll aspire to the parsimony of replacing the various configurations I’ve previously used, drawn from that mix of partially descriptive adjectives, to focus on (what I find) this far more evocative notion of modular individualism. It elegantly captures the logic of spatialism.

Whether expressed through the imperative of market discipline or monist sovereign social engineering, through the lens of spatialist mass society the individual is a module, pieced together however the rationalist mechanism directs. The heterarchical pluralism of roots, organic growth, culture, natural association, customary law, or gemeinschaft, in which there are strong bonds of family, vocation, class, neighbor, or phenotype, binding people together beyond the instrumentalities of optimized production, are relentlessly erased from space biased society. It is deep in the very logic of spatialism that individuals be reduced to interchangeable parts in a rationalist dream.

Hopefully I’ll be able to weave this new bit of nomenclature into the Guild series. And I promise, no more getting distracted with new ideas. It’s coming. Promptly. So, if you don’t want to miss that, and haven’t yet, please…

Also, if you’re on the newer side around here, and don’t know what I’m talking about with reference to spatialism, temporalism, space biased society, French Enlightenment rationalism, managerial liberalism, and the conflation of markets and social engineering, you probably should read my recent book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars.

And, as ever, if you know others who’d be interested in our discussions around here, please…

Meanwhile: Be seeing you!