Vision
The Vision in Brief
Over the last two centuries, one found in America and in the West more generally a pervasive sense that progress in human affairs was not merely possible but inevitable. As daunting as the problems of prejudice, ignorance, and inhumanity had been, through the careful application of reason alone—autonomous and morally neutral—even these challenges would be met and civilization would evolve to ever-higher levels. Through science, we would expand the frontiers of our knowledge of the natural world and increasingly control over it for human purposes. Through technology, scientific insight would be harnessed to ameliorate the range of burdens that plague human existence. Through empirical reasoning, we would achieve certainty in our moral understanding and build a society free of dogmatism and tyranny. The work would be arduous but, in the end, truth in human understanding and justice in the political order could and would be universally realized.
As we begin the twenty-first century, confidence in the modern project has waned. The achievements of modernity have been powerful to be sure. Science, technology, democratization, and the free market have brought a better quality of life, greater freedom, and astonishing wealth. And yet, all is not well. There is a profound uneasiness that marks our time, a deep sense that something is missing; that we are, in terms of the cultural resources available to us, impoverished. For all its achievements, modernity has been a period of profound contradictions. It has created wealth unimaginable in times past, but it has offered little to fill our yearning for contentment and no clear values to guide the use of that wealth. It has generated extraordinary technological mastery over the material world, but it has also produced interminable ethical confusion and conflict over how it should be used. In national contexts, modernity has generated political stability, but at the cost of a lumbering bureaucratic proceduralism that tends to render political purposes and ideals ineffectual. In a global context, it has enabled unprecedented flows of information and capital, but we are also discovering few shared values, no sense of a common citizenship, no mechanism to wield political authority, and a vast inability to solve the most difficult problems the world faces, including genocide, nuclear proliferation, and global warming. It has empowered us to analyze, question, and imagine everything, but it also seems to have left us, in the words of one historian, with “the capacity to affirm nothing.”
It is not too much to say that the animating visions at the heart of Western culture are increasingly characterized by an exhaustion. We have the ability to spin out ways of thinking and living differently, yet no real assurance that any one of these differences actually makes a real and enduring improvement to the way things presently are. We are beset by uncertainties, no longer sure of our political institutions, our public philosophy, our laws, or our moral direction. At the same time, the old absolutes frighten us, particularly when they appear in violent or coercive form.
These matters are not merely academic but play out with great urgency in everyday life. Indeed, nothing has brought this into sharper focus than the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath. Thus, in this exhaustion, we are losing sight of the human person. The questions, “what does it mean to be human?” and “who is a member of the human community and thus worthy of its benefits and protections?” are, in fact, life and death questions all over the world. We are losing a view of what it means to live a meaningful life and a good life; indeed, a capacity to even pose the question. Not least, the conditions of the late modern world create unprecedented challenges to a just and humane social order. The simple question, “how do we live together with our deepest differences” is the most urgent issue of our time and if we don’t address it with understanding and wisdom, the only outcome will be conflict and violence—locally, nationally, and globally. In an historical moment when courage and hope, moral clarity and high ideals are most needed, what resources do we have, what sources of vitality can we draw upon?
For the most part, our major institutions—including the market, political liberalism, medicine, science, even education and law—either deny or are unable to acknowledge the normative foundations that underpin them. This claim of neutrality cloaks the inescapable moral commitments made in these contexts and puts these commitments off limits to public deliberation. The reality, of course, is that underneath this pose of neutrality is a moral order, a particular understanding of the human being and of the community, which exerts a powerful force within our culture. Thus, we are faced with implicit and inarticulate promises of human flourishing that, in the end, undermine, diminish, and even deny the possibility of human thriving.
In short, it is not that we have lost the ability to desire these goods or care for them—far from it—but, rather, that we have lost coherent ways to think through, discern, or debate them. We have lost an ability to pose the right questions and, as a consequence, nearly every sphere of social life stands bereft.
The world of scholarship is not immune to this impoverishment. In academic life—particularly in the humanities and social sciences—there is a pervasive skepticism toward the very possibility of truths capable of establishing the ennobling ideals of human dignity, standards of decency, codes of personal character, and public moral obligation. What is more, the pursuit of knowledge has been increasingly organized around the demands of market utility. Intellectual work, then, not only fails to adequately address these critical questions but, more often than not, contributes to the confusion surrounding them.
In our day, it is essential to investigate the very nature of the dominant moral order, the explanatory frameworks, guiding metaphors, narrative models, and categories of meaning that animate that order, and the means by which it is legitimated and preserved. Because the power of our culture is found in the ways we take it for granted and see it as “common sense,” it is essential to understand the symbols, ideals, practices, institutions, and material objects of our late modern world and bring into view their moral or normative presuppositions.
So what are we to make of all of this? How do we make sense of our moment in history? How are the deep structures of our culture changing, and how do these changes play out in the public ordering of an increasingly complex and interdependent world? What changes are taking place in the frameworks of meaning by which people make sense of their lives and engage the world around them? And what are the implications of these dynamics for the ideals, institutions, and practices that constitute our global culture? Given the attenuation of that which animated them, are the social achievements and moral goods of modernity sustainable? These questions, we believe, have grave consequences for humankind, and they press urgently upon us.
The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture exists to address these basic questions and, in so doing, take on the most pressing challenges of our time.
The Institute seeks to understand the changing frameworks of meaning and moral order in contemporary America and the world beyond, the frameworks within which individual life, institutional adaptation, and political conflict in our society unfold. With its own foundations in a capacious humanism grounded in the particularities of a variety of traditions, it operates from the assumption that all humans are normatively ordered creatures that seek to flourish. In addressing these matters, the Institute insists that there is no neutral ground and that where questions of meaning and moral order are not asked explicitly, they are answered implicitly—for better or for worse. The Institute’s focus, then, is not on the artifacts but the deep structures of contemporary culture, and on the way transformations at this deeper level take concrete institutional form in the organization of public life and the moral coordinates of people’s personal lives.
Pursued within an interdisciplinary community of scholars in the social sciences and humanities, the Institute conducts theoretical as well as empirically grounded research within major realms of social life and makes that research as widely available as possible. It operates with the recognition that there are fewer and fewer widely shared normative agreements in our society and our world. While the Institute does not offer any comprehensive answer to the question of what the good consists, it does ask what social conditions are necessary for rich conceptions of human well-being and what defects or impediments might exist in specific social environments to the achievement of those conditions.
Times of rapid and dramatic social change are almost always times of confusion and fear and worse. This is true for our own time as well. The challenge facing all people of good will is how to engage the social, cultural, and political complexities of our moment responsibly and effectively. In the end, such engagement will elude us unless we first see clearly and with discernment the nature and dynamic of the deeper transformations taking place.