On the importance of being 'anti-social' in the era of social criticism

It may be supposed that it is madness to situate one's social relationships secondarily in relation to thought as primary, and normality is the reverse. Thus, schizos and the autistic are thought to live in their minds, and not affiliate like normal people with whoever is around them.

Imagine two schools. In one, children learn about how to live a good life in the social world on the basis of things they study and learn in written texts. In the other, they learn ideas only on the basis of social relationships, acquaintance with and facility in which are primary.

The first can never be achieved in entirety, but was the ideal of education in the West for more than 20 centuries. Philosophical ethics is based on the intuition that this is the normal case. And what is the other possibility but that denigrated in Plato's allegory of the Cave? But the second possibility is that of modern schooling and social life, especially in today's America.

Thus, the two classes of persons are the gregarious and the intelligent. And the gregarious seem always to be the winning party. This can be called: democracy.

In this world, the highest ethical norm is normality itself, which is understood not as being in accordance with a norm qua idea, as in Plato, but as being like most of the people around you. That normality itself is the norm is of course also perfectly nihilistic, but it is the nihilism proper to a capitalist democracy.

The need for intelligent responses and social reassurance get easily confused in our social media world as all statements are considered interesting if they interest anyone, and everyone is expected to be constantly "communicating." In such conditions, negative experience appears at once as loneliness and boredom.

To be interesting, then, will be for a thing or person to get attention from others.

The problem with this scheme is evidenced in the growing numbers of people judged dysfunctional and subject to reparative social controls, but also in the growing interest in all of the arts, and the enormous number of people today who want to be artists of some kind. Pessimistic social observers often overlook this trend. It is in itself a very positive one.

It is unfortunate that our society is so resolutely business-oriented and practical, and there is little general theoretical discourse commonly taught and available to enable people without specialized training in this to talk in interesting ways about art. Young Americans may love pop music groups and certain films or television shows, but discussion of them rarely connects in any thoughtful way with the very kinds of social criticism that in one form or another motivate so many of the artists.

Art as the modern world knows it would not exist without social alienation and its correlate, social criticism. That is its principle function in society today. Would that our schools taught people ways of talking and thinking about such criticism, even in the context of thinking mostly practically about art.

The paradigmatic forms of modern social criticism shifted from theater to the novel. Theater problematizes individuals in relation to other people and their social involvements; the novel problematizes the experience of socially alienated individuals and the society itself from their point of view. It makes it possible to see as problematic the way that things appear and are arranged or mise-en-scène. Cinema continues the tradition of the novel more than that of theater, despite its typical dependence on theatrical writing and staging. For the same reason, the modern world gave rise to the new science of sociology, and in Europe, outside of England, philosophy became centrally concerned with social problems and theory, from a standpoint that was critical of it. In these ways, the modern bourgeois-republican revolutions did not go far enough, their project remaining uncompleted.