Life in the 21st Century

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” Socrates (470-399BC)

Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) believed that philosophy had to be a practical guide to living, even if it cannot tell you exactly what to do. For him if a philosophy cannot tell us how to live, then it is of no use outside academic life. He believed that the individual must make deliberate decisions about the direction of his life.

To do so, you need to construct a philosophy that can respond to the variety of psychological, economic, social, political and cultural challenges which derive from constant questioning of your identity, ideals and values by you and others.

Such a philosophy requires an understanding of:

1. the dynamic of the socio-economic world you live in with all its uncertainties
2. human nature, with both, its creative and destructive powers
3. power of the mind, its ability to transform values, ideas and ideals into
material force
4. critical thinking and the ability to deconstruct your value system, perceptions, and relationship the world around you
5. your needs, aspirations and abilities in order to (re)shape or (re)adjust your consciousness.

However, this short paper concentrates on point 1 and seeks to highlight some of the characteristics of the world around you today. It will argue that despite the greatest scientific and technological advances humankind has made, our lives are dominated by increasing anxiety and uncertainties for the future.

As an individuals living in a society you are undoubtedly influenced by it: constrained at times and empowered other times in achieving your ideals and needs. There are a variety of invisible structures that come together to create the environment in which you live.

At the first glance, 21st century technology provides you with comfort and peace of mind: your mobile phone allows access to friends and experts where ever you are, whether you are walking back home late at night and not happy with the dark quiet roads you are walking along and want to talk to the closed ones or you car breaks down in the middle of no where and you need someone to help you.

The internet allows you to enrol for a Barnes and Noble university course free of charge and study the subjects you are interested in. Computers and the internet bring you home anything you want from grocery and clothes to actual or virtual sex.

In the 21st century we have more choice than ever: you can give birth when you are 67; you can play squash or swim while you are flying to Australia; and soon by using your body cells, you can have spare parts produced for your ailing and aging bodies.

On the whole most people have more choice, are better fed, more comfortable and live longer in the 21st century.


Uncertainty:

However, if you look at this world carefully, you find a deep sense of uncertainty dominating your life: young people worry about their careers: Can they get a Job? Will they find love and happiness?

Middle-aged people are worried about old age, the future of their children, what happens to them when they are old, will their pension pay for needs in old age? Will they afford to pay for treatment when they fall ill?

And old people become increasingly anxious as they find their distance to the end of life is rapidly narrowing. Their Children or family members scattered across the world, loneliness begins to wear them down. These are very real and psychological concerns.

The most basic concern for people is economic. Without a job you cannot earn a living, without the money you will not have food, shelter, security and freedom.

So, this job, is the key to your survival. But in a world where socio-economic relations are left to the market to shape, you can never be sure how long we will be able to hold on to a job. But the challenge is not only confined to keeping a job. It is the whole value system that has developed overtime as a result of the market approach to the organisation of society, that dominates our lives, dehumanises our existence, and influences our expectations and behaviour.

But how does this happen? Let's look at the concept of market:


Market & the Global Context:

The Market is the place where the owners of Labour & Capital meet: one needs to sell its labour for a living, the other to buy labour in order to produce goods or services that can produce a profit, and the government's job is apparently to ensure fair play.

Note: when labour becomes scarce and expensive, employers substitute it by machines. And as you become older, more experienced or skilled in your job, you become more expensive, and more vulnerable in the market system, because younger, cheaper, more flexible work force is out there to replace you…

At the macro level, you find the search for maximising profit in the global market is the main cause of poverty, slavery, prostitution, hunger, disease + war:

1. Profit-making car-manufacturing plants are closed down in western Europe, their workers made miserable, because it is even more profitable to move operations to eastern Europe where labour is cheaper and production more profitable.

2. 3000 children die per day from Malaria, tuberculosis kills 2m people a year, and only 16% of HIV-positive people in Africa can hope to receive antiretroviral drugs. 15 million people have died of Aids in Africa – more than the highest estimate of the holocaust (11 m).Yet pharmaceutical companies prefer to invest in anti obesity or anti-impotence drugs, because these are more profitable.

3. 36m a year die of hunger. In70 countries, average incomes are less than they were in 1980. Life expectancy in Africa = 46. Daily income of half of Africa’s people = $1.00. 42% of Africa’s population have no access to safe water. Every 60 seconds, 4 people in the developing world die from water-related diseases.

4. In 1960 the richest 20% of the world's population were 30 times better off than the poorest 20%. This figure has now increased to over 70 times wealthier. Every year livestock in rich countries get more money than poor people in the developing countries: the gross national income in Ethiopia is $100 per capita, while the government subsidy for a cow in Japan is $2555. unfair trade rules cost poor countries $700bn p.a.

5. Finally by pursuing unjust aggressive policies in the hope of extending the access to natural resources and markets abroad, our unaccountable governments take death and destruction to other lands, which result in a backlash at home at some stage later. 9/11 and 7/7 have created an environment of fear with which we live our lives helpless everyday. Our governments create even more hostility as they seek to force their ethnocentric values down other nations' throat, particularly when we apply double-standards to practices we preach: leading democracies torture political prisoners in places such as Guantanamo Bay, yet they ask regimes we do not approve of to observe human rights!

These global factors put together have resulted in alienation, rootlessness and a sense of insecurity everywhere. Unfair trade practices, the growing gap between the rich and the poor together with war and destruction result in waves of refugees and immigrants in our societies, some more qualified than we are, making our soci-economic position vulnerable.

But the impact of market is not just socio-economic, it penetrates your value system and shapes your behaviour.

Opportunity:
Whether you are a seller of labour/skill or investor of capital, the choice is yours.

To join capitalism you need to seize an opportunity:

- borrowing from relatives, friends and banks
- working hard and intelligently
- testing your luck
- remember! you need to concentrate on profit-making, you are on your own and self-help is the only instrument available to you
- if fortune smiles, you too may become as rich as Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Warning: freedom to enrich oneself matches in step with freedom to go broke.

The same caveat applies to capitalist freedom to choose vocations: you are free to study art history or medieval Latin, but don't beresentful if you peers who opted for business administration, computer sciences drive better cares and live in bigger houses for the next 40 years. Unless your skills becomes a valuable commodity on the market, it is not of much use. You may be a talented artist, but you will not be recognised by society unless you can sell your art on the market.

Private ownership:

The greatest achievement under capitalism is private ownership: your home, your love, your children, your work are of higher social value if they really belong to you:

- rented accommodation is not valued in the same way as your own house
- marriage is supposed to be the highest level of a romantic relationship
- adopted children are not the same as your own ones

In the long run the logic of market convinces you that life is uncertain, private ownership is a crucial asset, competition, selfishness and individualism are the norms of life and central to your success. These shape your value system and determine your behaviour towards your partner, children, friends, colleagues, and the role of state, with money as the main source for measuring the value of love, friendship, happiness, pleasure, success and failure.

Conclusion:

The global and domestic socio-economic structure of the market influence dynamics of societies we live in, and in turn our psyche and needs. To feel secure we create a small shell in which we can belong to someone and feel secure in. But in a world where nothing is for ever, love, career, happiness… creating stability and security becomes a real challenge.


Reading List:
Patrick Gardiner, Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2002).
Robert Lekachman & Boris Van Loon, Capitalism for Beginners (Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Ltd, 1981).
Jonathan Rutherford, The Art of Life: On Living, Love and Death (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2000).
Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).