This blog post examines the structural reasons why the vague anxiety and indifference dominating modern society blur the threats to values individuals face and prevent them from formulating their concerns at all.
What are the major issues for the public in this era, and what are the core concerns for private individuals? To formulate these issues and concerns, we must ask which of the values we cherish are threatened or supported by the defining trends of this era. Whether threatened or supported, we must question what unique structural contradictions lie behind them.
When people cherish a set of values and feel they are not threatened, they experience well-being. Conversely, when people cherish the same values but feel they are threatened, they experience crisis as personal anguish or public contention. If all their values appear threatened, they feel the totalizing threat of panic.
But suppose people are entirely unaware of cherished values while simultaneously feeling no threat whatsoever. This is the experience of indifference. If this experience seems to pertain to all of people’s values, it leads to apathy. Finally, consider a situation where people are not consciously aware of any cherished values but perceive a significant threat. This is the experience of anxiety and restlessness; if it is completely total, it becomes an inexplicable, extreme anxiety.
Today’s era is still one of anxiety and indifference, where the operation of reason and the activity of sensibility have not yet been sufficiently formalized. In individual life, instead of worries defined by values and threats, one more often experiences the misfortune of vague anxiety; in public life, instead of clear issues, a confusing sense that something is amiss becomes more pronounced. Statements about what values are threatened and what factors threaten them are absent; simply put, everything remains undetermined. Consequently, this situation cannot even be formalized as a problem for the social sciences.
In the 1930s, few questioned that the economic problems of the time existed both as personal anxieties and as economic issues. In discussions of the ‘crisis of capitalism,’ Marx’s views and various unapproved reformulations of his work were widely used as the dominant approach to the problem, and some people came to understand their personal anxieties from this perspective. It was clear what values were under threat, everyone respected those values, and the structural contradictions threatening them also seemed evident. People experienced both elements extensively and profoundly. That was truly a political era.
Yet since World War II, the values under threat are not widely recognized as values, nor is the sense of threat even felt. Most private anxieties pass without being formalized, and even numerous public anxieties and decisions of immense structural importance fail to become public issues. For those who accept inherent values like reason and freedom, the anxiety itself is the concern, and indifference itself is the issue. And precisely these conditions of anxiety and indifference are the defining characteristics of the 1950s.
Because all this is such a pronounced feature, some observers interpret the problem itself as having changed. We often hear the assertion that the problems, or even the crises, of the 1950s no longer reside in the external realm of the economy, but have now shifted to concerns related to the quality of personal life. But the very question is whether there is anything left that can be called ‘personal life’. Comic books, not child labor; mass leisure, not poverty, have become central concerns. Not only private anxieties but also numerous significant public issues are described through the lens of ‘psychopathology,’ appearing as a pitiful attempt to evade the major issues and anxieties of modern society.
Such statements are often confined to Western societies, particularly American society, and consequently rest on a localized and narrow concern that ignores two-thirds of the world’s population. Furthermore, this perspective is problematic in that it arbitrarily separates the individual’s life from the vast institutions within which that life is actually lived and which profoundly influence it.
Therefore, the most crucial political and intellectual task for social scientists is to clearly identify the elements of anxiety and indifference pervasive in our era. This, I believe, is the core demand placed upon social scientists by those engaged in other cultural fields, and it is why social science becomes the common denominator of the cultural-historical era of modernity, and why sociological imagination becomes the most essential mental quality for us all.
