Emotions,Body and Self: Critiquing Moral Decline Sociology

Moral Decline Take 1: The Cultural Pessimists

Phillip Reiff (1987[1966]), Christopher Lasch (1979) and Daniel Bell (1976) are key figures in the ‘cultural pessimistic’ tradition of conservative social science. They share a common concern with the weakening of cultural authorities, the concomitant rise of ‘psychological man’ (Rieff, 1987[1966]: 10) and an exaggerated preoccupation with interior life and hedonism as the ultimate values of life. This moral impoverishment of modern culture is evident in Reiff’s (1987[1966]) and Lasch’s (1979) psychoanalytic-based discussions of cultures of ‘therapy’ and ‘narcissism’ and Bell’s (1976) concerns regarding a consumer-based ‘fun morality’.

Reiff (1987[1966]) offers a scathing critique of the anti-authoritarian and ‘anything goes’ moral culture he saw emerging from the ashes of a post-religious 1960s America. For Rieff the shift from the religious authority of the priest to the secular authority of the therapist embodied a wider cultural failure in the West. Working from the ‘anthropological assumption’ that ‘everything is possible to human beings’, Reiff argues that the key to a meaningful personal and communal life is to know what not to do: to have an understanding of what is not allowed and what is impermissible (Woolfolk, 2003: 247). The ‘proper’ role of culture is to instruct through authority figures such as preachers and fathers that ‘repression is truth’ (Eisen and Lewis-Kraus, 2008). Culture’s function is to create a moral order through prohibition and deprivation of desire and passion. As Reiff puts it, ‘the limitation of possibilities was the very design of salvation’ (1987[1966]: 15); or ‘it is no, rather than yes, upon which all culture and inner development of character, depend’ (1990: 284). These motifs of restriction are central to the formation of moral character, orientating individuals outwards to the group and the society rather than inwardly to the self.

For Reiff, the establishment of moral order requires repressive inhibition, where culture establishes and maintains a set of restrictive motives that liberate through control rather than release. The fundamental problem with therapeutic culture in the Reiffian tradition is that it is ‘remissive’ rather than ‘repressive’ (Reiff, 1987[1966]: 121). Therapy society, argues Reiff, denies the prohibitive function of culture and transforms moral problems into analytic issues for the self-actualising and emotional self. Morality becomes a problem to be worked out, talked through and emotionally managed under the guidance of the pseudo authority of the therapist (Wright, 2008: 326). Moral transgressions are transformed from an external faith-guilt complex into internal psychological and emotional issues dealt with in the form of dread and anxiety. A culture rooted in therapeutic modes of thought and practice erodes the moral order by privileging the limitlessness of the id at the detriment of a regulatory and restrictive cultural superego.

Reiff adopts a Freudian model of self and society where moral crisis is premised on weakening cultural authority and inadequate repression of the id in a culture of expressive individualism and self-fulfilment. In other words, vertical forms of cultural authority – a culture’s interdictory ‘thou shalt nots’ – are flattened for the horizontal and pardoning authority of the unregulated and emotionally unbounded self. In a telling sentence on the amoral dangers of sentiment and emotion, Reiff (1987[1966]: 49) writes:

The saving arrangements of Western culture have appeared as symbol systems communicating demands by stoning the sensual with deprivations and were thus operated in a dynamically ambivalent mode. … our culture developed, as its general technique of salvation, assents to moral demands that treated the sensual part of the self as an enemy.

Once more the emotions are taken as a destructive moral force, something to be restrained – ‘stoned with deprivations’ – rather than expressed as a necessary condition for the establishment of normative order. The very hope of a normative order depends in Reiff on a culture’s capacity to act as a bulwark against the realm of the sensual – the realm of bodily instincts, passions and emotions.

A similar model of moral decline is advanced in the social theory of Daniel Bell (1976). Like Reiff, Bell argues that the turn to therapeutic cultures of self-fulfilment have undermined religious forms of orientation and meaning, issuing an unparalleled permissiveness and hedonism. Bell’s basic argument, as outlined in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), is that transformations in modern capitalism created a disjuncture between a productive economy built on an earlier Protestant model of hard work, discipline and delayed gratification and a consumer culture that promoted hedonism, play and instant gratification (1976: 74).

The ‘new capitalism’ opened up a fundamental contradiction between a social structure that required restraint and impulse control and an emerging consumer culture that exalted freedom and self-fulfilment. As Bell (1976: 72) put it: ‘one is to be “straight” by day and a “swinger” by night’. Targeting the development of mass marketing, instalment buying and a pervasive media and popular culture, Bell argued that consumerism was threatening to corrode an older Protestant social reality and its concomitant values of frugality, saving and renunciation of pleasure for a materialistic hedonism and individual happiness. A ‘goodness’ morality was being lost for a ‘fun morality’ (Bell, 1976: 71).

In similar reasoning to Reiff’s importance of ‘stoning the sensual with deprivation’, Bell argues that contemporary morality was no longer orientated to ‘what you cannot do’ but what you can do; a morality rooted not in the ‘intrusion’ of the impulses but their very ‘unleashing’. A ‘fun’ morality was the disastrous result of an emerging consumer age which trades in the currency of pleasure, instant gratification and ‘letting go’ at the expense of older Protestant virtues of restraint, renunciation and control. This scenario was driven not only by the emergence of consumer culture but also by the breakdown of religious forms of authority and the fracturing of a system of shared values. Like Reiff, Bell was fearful about what the displacement of religion would mean for the establishment of a moral order that he took to be central to social cohesion.

Reiff’s anxieties about weakening cultural authority are echoed in Bell’s assumptions concerning the role of culture in regulating ‘human nature’. Bell states: ‘human culture is a creation of men, the construction of a world to maintain continuity, to maintain the “un-animal” life’ (1976: 170). It is not surprising to discover that he portrays the fall of religion as a negative shift from a culture of restraint to a culture of release (1976: 14). In Bell’s words: ‘the problem in modern society is that release itself has gone so far as to be without bounds’ with the result that ‘nothing is forbidden, [and] all is to be explored’ (1976: 50). The ‘modern hubris’ is diagnosed as ‘the refusal to accept limits’ (1976: 170). Bell (1976: 171) worried that without a suitable replacement for the sacred and higher orientating structures, individuals would become submerged in a nihilistic void and ‘the shambles of appetite and self-interest and the destruction of the moral circle which engirds mankind’.

Lasch (1979) draws on similar assumptions in his map of the psychic impacts of ‘social crisis’ on ‘private life’. He accounts for the decline of morality in terms of the displacement of religious modes of authority by therapeutic modes of self-fulfilment. According to Lasch (1979: 11), the weakening of institutional and patriarchal forms of authority has had damaging consequences for the organisation and experience of self and identity. The widespread erosion of models of authority like ‘fathers, teachers and preachers’ has created a psychological imbalance between the moderating and punitive ‘ego ideal’ and the aggressive and seething pre-Oedipal ‘superego’. Lasch argues that the ‘ego ideal’ develops later in life from ‘respected models of social conduct’ while the ‘superego’ is formed early in life in relation to instinct-denying parental authorities (1979: 12). In other words, without the internalisation of admired models of authority later in life, the aggressive and sadistic ‘superego’ takes precedence over the restraining ‘ego ideal’. Lasch suggests that the unleashing of the ‘superego’ means we quite literally revert to a childish rage and brutality (1979: 12). Like Reiff and Bell, Lasch is making the case that the absence of traditional forms of authority creates a psychological disequilibrium between controls and releases, between inhibition and gratification, between restraint and impulse.

It is within this social and psychological space that Lasch contends that the moral climate of modern society comes to be defined through the lens of ‘psychic self-improvement’ and ‘an intense preoccupation with the self’ (1979: 25). A ‘narcissistic culture’ attempts to screen the anxiety, depression and sense of personal emptiness that stems from the contradiction between conformity to the rules of social interaction and the absence of authoritative moral expectations. The role of therapy is to alleviate the desperation of personal life through an ethic of ‘self-preservation’ or attendance to the immediate emotional requirements of the self. Lasch suggests ‘mental health’ is ‘the modern equivalent of salvation’ (1979: 13, 27). In the struggle to alleviate anxiety and psychological unrest, we see the development of a ‘culture of narcissism’; that is, a culture pathologically preoccupied with the care and well-being of the self:

Having no hope of improving their lives in any of the ways that matter, people have convinced themselves that what matters is psychic self-improvement: getting in touch with their feelings, eating health food, taking lessons in ballet or belly-dancing, immersing themselves in the wisdom of the East, jogging, learning how to ‘relate’, overcoming the ‘fear of pleasure’. (1979: 4)

The search for self-fulfilment within the private realm of the self, while purported as a refuge from an ‘anarchic social order’, offers little hope of escape in Lasch’s analysis. It is a symptom of the disease rather than a treatment. Here the self disintegrates as it becomes overcome by inner rage, an inability to feel and care for others, to look beyond the present and an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness. The outside world becomes a mirror of the emptiness, rage and uncertainty that absorbs the contemporary self.

Together Reiff, Bell and Lasch proffer a pessimistic assessment of the contemporary moral condition. The breakdown of traditional forms of moral and religious authority and the rise of ‘narcissistic’ and ‘therapeutic’ cultures in contemporary social life have little to offer beyond empty and meaningless self-gratification and self-actualisation. Having sacrificed obedience to a higher authority for an intensive focus on the expressive, consuming, and self-actualising self, the modern West is left with amoral, uncaring and ‘narcissistic’ selves (Lasch, 1979). In the end, morality has little hope in a culture in which the individual is allowed to create their ‘own set of rules’, where ‘no’ has disappeared from our moral vocabulary, and where foundational moral laws enforced by religious tradition and higher moral authorities have disappeared.

Moral Decline Take 2: The ‘Communitarians’

‘Communitarian’ authors form a second strand of social theory influential in diagnosing moral decline in contemporary western society. The central premise of communitarianism is that widespread individualism and the decline of community are eroding shared moral life. While the communitarians and the cultural pessimists share a concern about the weakening of religion, traditional authority and the rise of consumerism, the prime mover of contemporary moral loss for communitarian thinkers is the erosion of community life and shared values (Bellah et al., 1996; Etzioni, 1994; MacIntyre, 1985).

If the central concerns of the cultural pessimists are the negative consequences of an expanding therapeutic ethos, the rise of ‘psychological man’ and an increasingly permissive culture, for communitarians it is the lack of a shared moral consensus and a framework for common values driven by weakening community (Bellah et al., 1996; Etzioni, 1994; MacIntyre, 1985). Thus, cultural pessimists focus their critique on the dominance of cultural values of self-improvement, narcissism and hedonism, while communitarians concentrate on the weakening of shared social bonds and values and the negative implications this has for a sense of civic, public and social responsibility.

Etzioni, a prominent US communitarian theorist, asserts that community is ‘the most important sustaining source of moral voice’ (1994: 31). Etzioni writes that ‘human behaviour must be made orderly’ so as to avoid ‘spousal abuse and the abuse and neglect of children; to curb inappropriate sexual urges and aggressive feelings; to encourage people to work and save, and not withdraw from the social realm into mind-altering states’ (2001: 360). The moral order he proposes is fundamentally a social order established in a web of community relations that establish shared meaning and values (1994: 24).

Community, for Etzioni, is the pulse of morality, ensuring individual actions are orientated toward moral ends through membership of collectives constituted by common values. Community, therefore, is constituted by two elements: the first, a web of affective and reinforcing social relations among a group of individuals; and, second, a commitment to a common value system undergirded by a common history and identity (2001: 359). Etzioni argues that these two pillars of community have been eroded in late modernity, meaning we live in an increasing state of moral malaise. Etzioni agrees with Robert Putnam’s (2000) analysis of fraying and weakening social bonds in the contemporary West – people are less likely to bowl together, birdwatch, have dinner together, etc. – but he goes further than Putnam by arguing that these activities are socially important but morally trivial. In other words, they meet the social connection criterion of community but not the moral component. For Etzioni (2001), Putnam’s analysis is ‘sociologically light’ as it overlooks the key question of how new moral cultures can be formed in the modern West.

This leads Etzioni to postulate that even if people started ‘bowling together’ again this does not equate to the restoration of morality. Bowling may have its own interactional order based on rules of etiquette but it lacks any substantial engagement with the ‘big’ moral issues of our time, such as global climate change, rising social inequality, new developments in technology or domestic or international politics. Here Etzioni finds support for his position in an empirical study on four different voluntary organisations by Nina Eliasoph (1988).

Etzioni reads Eliasoph’s study as confirmation that voluntary organisations serve needs for social attachment but are morally trivial. This triviality is captured in Eliasoph’s example of mothers who provide emotional support to each other within voluntary organisations: ‘Mothers discussed with one another difficulties they faced in bringing up their children.’ For Etzioni this meets the criterion of bonds but does not constitute morality. Without the restoration of both legs of community life, Etzioni argues the West faces ‘the danger of moral anarchy’ where common values are finally sold off to fractured and self-interested individuals intent on ‘making it’ (1994: 123; 2001: 361).

Robert Bellah and colleagues’ (1996) analysis of the moral consequences of the weakening of contemporary community life takes a similar alarmist tone. In a large-scale empirical analysis of the moral understandings of Americans, Bellah et al. (1996: xlii, xxx) conclude that ‘individualism may have grown cancerous’ as our ‘basic sense of solidarity with others’ is undermined and private attachments outweigh public commitments. Bellah et al. (1996: 98), taking a similar line to Reiff, but couched with specific concern over declining community, are critical of a ‘therapeutic contractualism’ which positions the self as the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong, encouraging a belief that ‘each person’s ultimate responsibility [is] to himself or herself alone’ (1996: 129). Further, Bellah et al. suggest that the therapeutic attitude places an unmanageable stress on the individual as they come to endlessly scrutinise and monitor how they are feeling, what they want and where they are going. Bellah et al. argue that this excessive management of inner feelings – how am I feeling, am I in touch with my feelings, am I acting according to my feelings – becomes so ascetic as to be unbearable (1996: 139).

Bellah et al.’s analysis indicates that the key problem with modern individualism is that moral choice proceeds without ‘objectifiable criteria’ of right and wrong and that the ‘self and its feelings become our only moral guide’ (1996: 76). Individualism has become our ‘first language’, which prevents a conception of ‘a larger framework of meaning’ to orient self and community and shared visions of the public good. Brian Palmer, an American businessman, is used as an exemplary figure in the telling of this argument. Brian’s values and life-story – marked by a divorce and a shift from dedication to material success to family and children – is argued to rest on a ‘fragile foundation’ as he is unable to explain why his new life is better than his old one. Brian is taken as testament of modern individualistic culture, ‘suspended in a glorious but terrifying, isolation’ as his values are ‘vague’, no more than ‘personal preferences’ and lack ‘any wider framework of purpose or belief’ (1996: 8, 6). Bellah et al. conclude that only the past republican and biblical traditions can save Americans from the threat of modern individualistic values such as those held by Brian Palmer.

Communitarian philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1985) offers an equally critical reaction to the breakdown of community and the modern recourse to the self. MacIntyre contends that with the weakening of community and the impoverishment of social roles individuals have lost access to a common moral vocabulary (McMylor, 1991: 21). He argues that we only know ourselves in relation to our inherited social roles: as fathers, sisters, teachers, citizens, and members of occupational, clan and nation-based collectives (MacIntyre, 1985: 220). These roles anchor identity, cement social relations and provide a compass that orientates moral life. For MacIntyre (1985: 220), it is the mutual obligations and duties embedded within these role structures that ‘constitute the given of my life, my moral starting point’ (1985: 220). Social roles and the shared goals they articulate within a community are morally loaded, providing the basis of the production of virtues, moral obligations and the sharing of moral stories.

It is within this context that MacIntyre dislikes the social characters he sees as dominant in modern culture: the ‘aesthete’, the ‘manager’ and the ‘therapist’. For MacIntyre, these modern characters are emptied of moral meaning, promoting manipulative means-end relationships but being themselves incapable of determining the moral worth of the ‘ends’ they promote. The ‘aesthete’ relates to others in terms of achieving their own ends, based on the promotion of pleasure and avoidance of boredom while the ‘manager’ and the ‘therapist’ are in the game of achieving ends (one bureaucratic, the other personal) with maximum efficiency but they are silent on the moral content of ‘ends’ (McMylor, 1994: 26).

It is from this impoverished character line-up, MacIntyre argues, that contemporary individuals come to construct an emotivist self. The ‘emotivist’ self – ‘which can be anything’ but ultimately is ‘nothing’ – takes charge of moral decision-making but lacks the essential social and moral building blocks (1985: 32). Like the ‘aesthete’, the ‘manager’ and the ‘therapist’, we lack the means by which to determine the morality of ‘ends’. In a detrimental move for morality, and resembling the cultural pessimists’ stance, the disencumbered self becomes the locus of moral action rather than of virtuous social roles and character. The result is that Westerners bicker and squabble over right and wrong based on arbitrary personal and emotional preferences with no access to a real morality or impersonal criteria with which to settle disputes (Fevre, 2000: 22). Morality still exists in the contemporary present but takes on a severely impoverished form, reduced to the futile deliberations of an emotivist self that lacks narrative and historical meaning. While MacIntyre admits that small moral pockets of community endure in modern life, he distinguishes ‘well-ordered tradition’ from fragmented traditions like our own – the key dimension of a ‘well-ordered tradition’ being that ‘genuine moral consensus’ exists.

Communitarian thought is expressly critical of any move to the self and individual as a potential source of morality. For Etzioni, Bellah and MacIntyre, a modern culture postulating the uniqueness and authenticity of the individual can only result in a diminishing care for others and a self-defeating culture of self-fulfilment. Morality cannot be left to a de-socialised and emotional self guided only by the ends of its ‘own personal wants and inner impulses’ (Bellah et al., 1996: 77). The proper place of morality is not self-interested or emotionally irrational individuals but ‘agreed-upon standards of right and wrong’ or ‘basic settled values’ formed and transmitted by community and social roles (Bellah et al., 1996: 140; Etzioni, 1994: 25; MacIntyre, 1985). Any focus on interior and emotional life – of ‘finding oneself’ or listening to ‘moral feelings’ – can only lead to an empty morality and a pervading sense of meaninglessness (Bellah et al., 1996: 163).

Communitarians argue that the social foundations of morality need to be shored up across the spheres of education, family, community, religion and politics. Etzioni (1994: 256–7) argues that remoralisation needs to start with the family where parents can enact their ‘educational-moral duties’. His model of family is hosted by two parents who, rather than being consumed with career achievement, focus on ‘moral education and character formation’. Similarly, Bellah et al.’s (1996: 152) hope for the reconstruction of moral life lies in the restoration of religious, civic, familial and educational-based ‘communities of memory’ which orientate and sustain us beyond the pursuit of individual fulfilment. For MacIntyre, the resuscitation of past narratives of heroism and Aristotelian forms of virtue within institutions such as charities, voluntary organisations, churches, schools and universities open possibilities for the rational re-establishment of morality. The virtues sustained in community life offer a retrieval of moral life ‘through the new dark ages which are already upon us’ (1985: 263). In sum, it is only through a return to the past that communitarians believe we can come to ‘know that it does make a difference who we are and how we treat one another’ (Bellah et al., 1996: 282).

Critique 1: Society as ‘Morality-Silencing’ Force

Morality is unequivocally top-down in the cultural pessimistic and communitarian accounts of moral decline, focused as they are on the negative moral consequences of weakening tradition, religious authority and community. Morality must be rooted in higher authoritative structures that preside over and regulate the inherently egoistic and appetitive individual. Morality must come from something higher than the self; the self cannot be a source of morality. It is only through authoritative social structures that moral commitments and sentiments can be harnessed, endorsed and affirmed (Smart, 1999: 168).

For both cultural pessimists and communitarian thinkers, community and religion are the proper origins of morality. A central issue with this position is it ignores how ‘society-cum-religion’ can operate, as Bauman (1989: 174) defines it, as a ‘morality-silencing’ force. This critique is particularly relevant to the communitarian agenda of Bellah, Etzioni and MacIntyre. The communitarians preclude the possibility that community, that revered site of moral production, could itself be a source of immorality. A parallel argument can be made regarding the overly optimist reading that the cultural pessimists and the communitarians share concerning organised religion as a positive moral force. An obvious point is that religion arguably ‘tears’ as it much as it ‘binds’. It fragments and punctures societies, groups and the individual body as much as it anoints and sacralises. This is not to castigate or pigeon-hole religion as a poisoning and irrational force – as provocateurs such as Richard Dawkins (2006) and Christopher Hitchens (2007) do – but to point out a glaring hole in decline accounts of morality and to offer a more ambivalent reading of religion.

Bauman offers a powerful critique of the communitarian agenda. Bauman’s central concern is that society, community and religion ‘expropriate’ individual moral responsibility for commands from above and actively exclude alternative moral voices – he worries that the promise of togetherness and mutual understanding is sold for the cost of freedom, autonomy and a promised release from the ‘torments of moral responsibility’ (1995: 278). The nub of Bauman’s critique is that analyses focused on the achievement of morality outside the self in ‘community’, ‘society’, ‘religion’ or ‘tradition’, endorse conformity and rule-following, sapping individual moral freedom and promoting intolerance of moral difference.

The value of Bauman’s position is that it forces communitarianism to come to terms with the construction of Otherness as a corollary of a shared moral community and to ask what this means for relations to others outside one’s own preference – one’s own child, family, community or ‘neo-tribe’ (Maffesoli, 1996). Bauman’s question to the communitarians is what happens to those outside the social role, the community, the tribe, or the nation? For example, if virtues, as MacIntyre (1985) suggests, are defined relative to community goals, what happens to individuals or groups who do not share the communal position (Hall, 1991: 102)? Bauman’s answer is that they are branded as strangers, dangerous threats to the shared values and beliefs that hold the community together – or as outsiders who provoke nothing but ‘indifference’ from the ‘we’ (Tester, 1997).

There is a degree of elitism in the communitarian assumption that we need to create communities to sustain morality through the current ‘dark ages’, dismissing ‘managers’, ‘bureaucrats’ or ‘therapists’ as the ‘barbarians’ who have ‘been governing us for some time’ (MacIntyre, 1985: 245). This same elitism is evident in how Bellah et al. (1996: 8) dismiss the morality evoked by Brian Palmer. Despite describing Brian as showing ‘tenderness and admiration’ for his wife, ‘genuine devotion’ for his children and a ‘resilient self-confidence’, these moralities are dismissed seemingly because they lack foundation in biblical or republican traditions.

Bauman articulates how an emphasis on community goals may not only exclude alternative moral voices but also endorse crusades of exclusion and intolerance based on the defence of sameness (1991: 234–5). The obsessive search for communal moral foundations in the face of moral uncertainty can promote fundamentalist positions, which emancipate individuals from freedom and ambivalence but promote an intractable intolerance of difference and ambiguity. As a consequence, Bauman encourages an acceptance of moral contingency and uncertainty rather than a desperate attempt to shore up moral ambivalence in the false safety of moral islands of sameness.

Bauman’s challenge to communitarianism takes on a particular significance in light of the pluralisation and fragmentation of community in contemporary life. This begs the question of whether Etzioni, Bellah and MacIntyre’s analyses are offering anything more than a nostalgic wish to return to a time when moral certainty was possible. These theorists place hope in education, family, civic and religious traditions to ensure the proper instruction of morality, but we must ask what moral precepts and rules are to be taught in a social world marked by diverse communities, diverse values and the fracturing of any over-arching community (Smart, 1999: 158). The practical implementation of communitarianism stems from an authoritarian moral project which imposes a homogenised model of community, and excludes or castigates those who do not fit the moral mould. The West’s history of colonisation and dispossession of ‘those not like us’ gives testament to the dangers of this kind of communitarian position.

Critique 2: Emotions, Body and Feeling as Morally Generative

The second key issue with decline accounts is that the self, emotions and the sensual body are regarded as inimical to morality. In both decline traditions, the function of society is to restrain the body and the instincts for the purposes of creating moral order. In the absence of the sanctifying structures of society, religion and community, the unregulated body, the self and its passions are always ‘profane’ and never ‘sacred’. Reiff, Bell and Lasch, for instance, in the first camp of moral decline, assume that culture should be built on the restriction of aggressive and sensual impulses – a prohibitive culture that must treat ‘the sensual part of the self as an enemy’ (Reiff, 1987[1966]: 49) or otherwise be left to ‘the shambles of appetite and self-interest’ (Bell, 1976: 171). The essence of moral decline in conditions of late modernity is diagnosed as a push toward the emotional and bodily self without externally imposed limitation.

Similar concerns are explicit in the communitarian camp. MacIntyre’s ‘emotivist’ self, Bellah’s fears over the ‘self and its feelings’ and Etzioni’s worries about ‘sexual urges’ and ‘aggressive feelings’ all give testimony to a pessimistic view of the individual. The self and the emotions are morally untrustworthy, if not destructive, needing to be tutored in the communitarian foundations of family, school and community life. Etzioni’s use of Eliasoph’s study, mentioned earlier, is instructive here. Etzioni ignores how mothers offering each other emotional support within voluntary organisations could constitute an act of morality. If actions do not stem from a common value system rooted in community then they do not make the moral grade according to Etzioni.

The problem with the ‘cultural pessimists’ and ‘communitarians’ is that the individual is curtailed into a sort of Freudian realm of anti-social instincts and desires at the expense of seeing the positive social and moral dimensions of feeling, emotion and embodiment. They rule out the possibility that emotions and embodied feeling can be morally generative and performative: how emotions might morally ‘do things’ (Ahmed, 2000). Both bodies of thought dismiss the possibility of individual embodied emotion – moral feeling – as a source of moral action. They disregard the increasing importance of emotional agency and ‘emotional reflexivity’ to the formation of self, subjectivity and the very production of social and moral life in de-traditionalised conditions (Holmes, 2010).

The critique of a culture of self and emotion that is central to decline accounts reveals a masculine bias in which moral loss is theorised as the outcome of the demise of masculine authority figures – the priest, the father, and the virtuous hero – who embody rationality and objective reasoning over a feminine or therapeutic ethos of care, subjectivity, listening and emotion (Elliott and Lemert, 2006: 70; Wright, 2008: 327). These theories rest on Freudian assumptions that personality and character are formed in masculine and rational relations of separation, repression and authority through the father, rather than relations of bodily connection and emotional identification with the mother (Irigaray, 1991: 31; Wright, 2008: 328).

Bauman (1993, 1995), Ahmed (2000) and Irigaray (1991) are useful here in moving beyond decline assumptions, thinking through questions of morality in relation to emotion, feelings and bodies. Central to Bauman’s (1993: 67) postmodern ethics is emotion and feeling – ‘acting out of affections’ – as key strategies of moral action enacted within relations of unconditional responsibility to the Other (Bauman, 1993: 67; 1995: 62). Rather than morality being based in conformity to ‘heteronomous rules’, emotions are seen as central drivers of moral choice prompted by the authority of ‘face’. Morality is not a social construction beaten down by society, tradition or community or the rational operation of universal laws but a matter of moral feelings commanded in infinite responsibility to the Other (Bauman, 1995: 62).

While Bauman is helpful in directing the discussion of morality toward the positive role of emotions, Ahmed and Irigaray can help extend Bauman by operationalising ‘how’ emotions work within ethical encounters, integrating the body within an ethics of Otherness. Bauman may consider moral feeling as a contemporary substitute for modernist ethical rule-following but Ahmed ‘particularises’ how the emotions work within concrete embodied encounters, while Irigaray introduces the sexed body as a site of moral and spiritual reverence. For Ahmed, emotions are ‘relational’, moving ‘toward’ and ‘away’ from particular bodies and objects (2004a: 8). Emotions are not just ‘psychological dispositions’ but are ‘performative’; ‘they do things’ (Ahmed, 2004b: 26, 27, 32). Emotions act as vehicles of demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, inscribed and played out on the surfaces of bodies. Irigaray, on the other hand, brings the body directly into ethical encounter. Writing through the female body (Rose, 2003: 54), Irigaray uses metaphors of ‘angels’, ‘mucosity’ and ‘lips’ to engender a ‘carnal ethics’ where bodies unfold toward each other; where wonder, joy, touch and corporeality create a mutual space for communion in difference. The body is a site of spiritual and moral energy constituted not in the absolute realm of God but through sexuality, desire and the flesh (Irigaray, 1991: 175). This is an ethics, as Irigaray (1991: 180) writes, that ‘crosses the boundary of the skin into the mucous membranes of the body’.

Ahmed and Irigaray not only underscore emotional embodiment as morally significant outside decline accounts but also push a Baumanian ethics beyond an abstracted and infinite Other. In Ahmed and Irigaray, emotions and bodies are given ethical power as moral responsibility is constituted in a system of emotional response, receptivity, speaking and communication occurring through and within embodied relations (Ahmed, 2000: 147). Unlike Bauman’s view, the Other is not someone distant and abstract, always out of reach and a cause of anxiety, but one rooted in emotional exchange, communication and thus joy and pleasure.

Critique 3: Self-improvement and Authenticity as Cultural Values

In addition to castigating emotions and the body as morally destructive, the cultural pessimist and communitarian diagnoses of the moral present deny how therapeutic and self-fulfilment cultures expressed in cultural values of personal authenticity or ‘being true to the self’ could be morally productive (Taylor, 1992). Decline accounts read private concern for self-fulfilment over public commitment as narcissistic or self-orientated rather than other-directed. This position seems based on an old split between ‘private’ and ‘public’, ignoring how ‘de-differentiating’ tendencies of globalisation, individualisation and pervasive media and communication culture have upset a traditional distinction between public rationality and a private arena of emotions (Elliott and Lemert, 2006: 70). The distinction implies that any move to the private sphere is evidence of increased self-absorption and egoism.

This can be seen first in the analysis of therapy and, second, in relation to practices of self-improvement. Theorists like Reiff, Lasch, Bellah and MacIntyre seem to always read the therapeutic self as amoral. While not denying the possibility for narcissism, it is equally important to recognise how contemporary therapeutic and confessional cultures, such as talk-shows, reality TV and blogging, can place an accent on questions of emotion, suffering and ‘moral makeover’ – on becoming a ‘better’ person (Elliott and Lemert, 2006: 124). Wright (2008: 333, 2006), for instance, pointing to cultural developments such as the advent of telephone counselling, the Australian Royal Commission on Human Relationships and revelation of abuse in the Catholic church, argues that therapy culture with its focus on the sanctity of the self, interpersonal relationships and the emotional realm opens up consideration of caring relations and social justice. Wright (2006) suggests that the therapeutic privileging of the emotional and the intimate can have a substantive social and political consequence as it promotes openness about abuse, distress and suffering. Therapy culture can have emancipatory, care and justice consequences both at the individual and collective levels as it provides ‘a language and legitimacy to claims of oppression, abuse and violence’ otherwise not seen (2006: 309).

A similar argument can be made concerning the one-dimensional readings of practices of self-fulfilment and self-improvement advanced in theories of ‘narcissism’. For example, do Lasch’s (1979: 4) examples of the turn to ‘the wisdom of the east’ or ‘eating health food’ have to be read as indices of a meaningless and narcissistic moral impoverishment? Could these practices not be re-interpreted as self-originating acts of ethics – as acts of personal authenticity that morally recognise the Other (Taylor, 1992)? The yoga practitioner teaches their disciples that ‘everything is connected’, how nature, humans and the environment form an integral whole which places ‘us’ as ‘species’ in multiple relationships of responsibility to both self and others. Does the ‘wisdom of the East’, captured for example in the recent growth of Buddhism in the West (Phillips and Aarons, 2007), not centre on an ethics of minimising suffering for self and others?

Further, why read eating ‘health food’ as simply self-indulgent? Recent research in the area of food and the ethics of consumption shows how the growth of fair-trade and cruelty-free products, the slow food movement, practices of ‘buycotting’ and vegetarianism can figure in new forms of lifestyle politics, engender new modes of ethical citizenship and encourage a virtuous ‘politics of the self’ (Lewis, 2008; Littler, 2005). What decline theories overlook is how cultures of therapy and self-fulfilment can be constructed within a more positive frame of ethical regard for others. If social theory moves outside restrictive decline assumptions concerning the self and values of self-development, this gives room to orientate to a more affirming view of the moral self rather than the disparaging one constructed by the ‘cultural pessimists’ and the ‘communitarians’.

Charles Taylor (1992) provides a useful framework for analysing how contemporary values of authenticity and self-improvement can be understood outside decline assumptions. Taylor, like Bauman, is optimistic about the possibilities of a culture built on the creative potential and freedom of the moral self. Taylor (1992: 81; 2007) suggests that the ethical ideal of authenticity – wrapped in notions of self-discovery, self-fulfilment and personal improvement – now plays a central role in modern western culture.

Rather than diagnosing the search for personal authenticity as an expression of narcissism or hedonism, as in the decline theories of Reiff, Lasch or Bell, Taylor (1992: 11) constructs what he calls a ‘work of retrieval’ which mediates between the ‘straight boosters’ and the ‘outright knockers’. Taylor turns to the moral possibilities of a contemporary ideal of authenticity built on the principle of ‘being true to yourself’ (1992: 26). This is a moral mode that rests in the moral ideal of ‘being true to my own originality’, which is ‘something only I can articulate’ (Taylor, 1992: 29).

Taylor (1992: 74) contends that ‘at its best’ authenticity as a contemporary ideal ‘allows a richer model of existence’. Rather than destroying it point-blank for its weaknesses, Taylor sets as his task to raise the bar of the ideal, arguing that we should raise the practice to the level of the ideal, an ‘ideal’ which in its higher forms calls upon people to adopt a self-responsible form of life that engenders people to be ‘true to themselves’ within relations of responsibility to others. The key to achieving this is a tempered version of authenticity that acknowledges its ‘constitutive tensions’ (1992: 71). This is a reconstructed ideal that balances the creative, original and non-conformist dimensions of authenticity – the artistic aspects – with external signifiers, points of reference outside the self and relations with others.

Taylor acknowledges that authenticity is inevitably a concept of freedom but he warns of an unfettered self-determining freedom that ignores wider ‘horizons of significance’ and the fundamentally dialogical dimensions of human life. He suggests that it is only through others and ‘horizons of significance’ such as history, nature, charity, citizenship and God that we come to know and recognise ourselves in meaningful ways (1992: 45–8; 68). Taylor argues that the individual choosing and feeling self is absurd taken in isolation from others (1992: 36, 39).

The self makes no sense in separation. Identity and feelings can only make sense when connected and justified in relation to pre-existing horizons of importance, meaning and relationship. Accordingly, Taylor warns of the dangers of celebrating choice for choice’s sake: there is a need for external conditions in which we can assume that some decisions and evaluations are judged to be inferior or superior to others. Not all choice and decisions can float with the same gravity or worth. This would lead to a trivial relativism where no choice, no evaluation or course of action would have more significance or importance than any other. Authenticity as an ideal for guiding moral practice therefore must connect to something beyond and exterior to the self (1992: 40). Like the poet, the musician or the artist, moral creation is personal and intensely subjective but it is still connected to a social self; personal sensibility finds significance in the construction of a world independent of self-choice and feeling (1992: 89). The value of Taylor is that he recovers the moral self and practices of self-improvement from the straight-out negatively of decline theory but does not trivialise morality to a sort of unfettered self-determining and disencumbered freedom.