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Pill Pod 96 - Malaise of Modernity (Taylor's Version) (Patreon)

Published:
2022-10-07 05:46:04
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Get the book (it's easy and small) or listen to the lectures by Charles Taylor starting here.

Join the discussion and let us know what we should expand on next week!

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Previews only

Comments

Skye Jacobs

[52:00] Doesn’t the pop emphasis on so-called authenticity come from its instrumental role as a signifier that a person could be doing meaningful or important things with themself? It’s common/tempting to evaluate work, creative or otherwise, against a standard of “could someone else have done this?” If someone is supposedly authentic, then they attain a status signifier projecting that they are the type of person who can imbue works with the kind of individuality that could theoretically make it inventive, groundbreaking, or otherwise irreplaceable. All of this taken within a Hegelian framework that regards meaningful work as work “extending from the soul,” and presumed a will to recognition as a core human motivator.

James Foster Evans

The bread is better because of years and years of tradition. There are more craft bakeries in Europe, especially in France, Spain, and Italy.

Guillermo Garrido-Lestache Vidal

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FovIyqov1uA in this video by a youtubee journalist he explains how the US ruined bread (I imagine the same story works for Canada). Basically the culture of industrialization led to always-soft, always-white mass produced bread becoming the standard in the US. This bread has many additives which are illegal in europe.

Guillermo Garrido-Lestache Vidal

Whereas in europe the culture was always to go to the local bakery and hence number of bakeries per capita is way bigger.

Daniel Mehus

Listener from Nashville TN here! I use a bidet by a brand called Veken and it’s made pooping everywhere else pale in comparison. Also Taylor’s diagnoses feel like a reshashing of Kierkegaard’s thoughts on Copenhagen.

Zack Klug

Pills doesn’t have a bidet?! I’ve been imagining his bh all wrong 😑 I feel like Graeber’s three foundational freedoms would be a decent counterpoint to this episode’s version of liberalism.

Waya Dalimber

All this scat talk made me question if this was a Zizek topic again

Gonzalo Pacheco Covili

Come on, guys, we all know who the most famous Canadian intellectual is; nobody said it had to be a good one, or an intellectually sound intellectual

hoppi

Greeting from Berlin - the cash society Did Victor not get into Berghain?

anacidcommie

I'd say in the next episode, focus more on the "malaise" part of the book rather than his solutions to it, because you really can't take solutions for social problems seriously unless you're addressing material conditions in some way. In a way, this is reminding me of Erving Goffman, who came up with interesting theories of the self and social functioning in modernity that can be useful, but they ultimately retain a certain shallowness because there's 0 acknowledgement of the mechanisms of capital. I'm surprised with your take on meaning, Pills, because a major (even though in most, unconscious) psychological issue that is part and parcel of being a postmodern subject is the utter collapse of metanarratives, in a sense of past and the promise of the better future that modernity started out with. Without God and without this, the future and some sort of hope in a better world is gone, and all people are left with is a present where they have no political agency in the functioning of their day to day life. A society living unconsciously with the prospect of a cancelled future at best and a fascist, environmental wasteland at worst can't not have an effect on our collective psyche.

ageOfBumFires

Bidet Gang rise up! First time I was in Turkey I pulled the bidet handle instead of flush and sprayed myself in the face. Japan however reigns supreme: your choice of bidet+seat warmer+LED lightshow 6D shitter experienc or... a hole in the ground old school adidas track suit prayer pose squatty potty. Also, Clothes Line Gang rise up! Lol. Also big in Japan, every apartment has these billion hanger clip devices out on the balconies. I dry my clothes on lines year round in Zone 6, it's possible and pretty easy ☀️

Fiachra O Raghallaigh

So German homes may not have space for a clothes dryer but kitchen taps have sparkling water. Also Germany uses local cards - not visa/master card. Credit cards are not common (because debt = guilt).

ageOfBumFires

Speaking of bidets, this episode triggered a whole stream of conciousness thought diarrhea in me...but I will try to condense this shit into some bullet points for consideration as you continue this topic. 🙏 *The problem of having to first establish the meaning of *meaning,* if one goes after the task intellectually. The apparent audacity that someone is going to be able to locate the pinnacle of meaning, like discovering a new planet or something. It just seems... off. *The alienation of humans via our unique freedom of or enslavement to (depending on perspective) thought. To be the only sentient lifeform (that we know of) that seemingly can *never* be entirely sure whether or not it is acting "correctly" or "naturally," and whether this destination exists, and if it does, if it is predestined or for us to define, whether it is an end or a perpetual means (evolution and impermance would say the latter). An uncertainty made all the more uneasy by observation of what seems to be the absolute certainty of all other forms, whether alive or not, la whole world which seemingly "is exactly as it should be," perfectly and effortlessly, by instinct and code. Whether or not there is actually an order, even if it is order in disorder, or this is our perceptual collective fantasy, could of course be debated, but what does such a debate really do to advance ones heartfelt meaning? *Whether a unifying meaning sought by intellectual thought can lead to the cessation of collective human suffering, or if the necessary path to reach such an ideal non-arbitrary non-relative *meaning* is a non-selective pure awareness of being, in which meaning is extended infinitely, excluding nothing, not even nothing. Each step, each breath, each form, each action, each moment, held as deeply meaningful with full attention and awareness. Not as something intellectually meaningful, as if imbued with some ideology, but meaningful simply by being, and identified as meaningful by touching it's being with undistracted awareness. How can someone find meaning if they are in a perpetual state of distraction or within a certain ideological or intellectual bubble, if they aren't fully present to the ever changing and shifting landscape that *is* right in front of them? Leading to the last and probably most important question... *How to get people to care. Well Pill Podians, maybe we can start with what got each of you to "care"? And building on that...what you all call #1 your meaning, #2 the ideal world which you would find meaningful, like Pills comment about how he kept in the back of his mind while reading "what sort of world is being described or aimed at?" And #3 how you would get people to care about such a world, specifically how you would "handle" those that "prefer not to." *My own view of how to get people to care, and where to find meaning... please know this is clearly based on my own experience, and isn't some decree to be taken on blind faith, but more of a challenge like the challenge of Guatama, to experiment for yourself, and determine the authenticity for yourself in terms of how it affects your own suffering when taken up diligently and authentically: I don't think it's going to be an intellectual exercise, not the latest philosopher king writing his magnum opus. I think you get people to care precisely through *being* unconditional care, through learning to enter and then to maintain constant awareness of being, of looking deeply into everything, absolutely everything that presents itself, and letting the meaning come to you rather than plastering heaps of meaning over one or two things while ignoring all the rest, casting almost the whole of your existance into the peripheral, into the background. I say care instead of love because "love" at this point is just like "meaning," it's lost it's meaning, just another floating signifier used for anything but love. You get others to care by caring for whatever is in your present, not for your ego or image, but as your purpose in life, as your meaning. Authentic, genuine care, that isn't for an audience, and so if witnessed by someone else, produces a clear affect of authenticity that is possible of moving another person to *want* to replicate such care, with themselves, with others. There is nothing intellectual to this care, it is universal, it requires no translation, and it's mostly comprised of creating space, of choosing not to suffocate. It imbues everything with meaning. Life becomes meaning-full, not because you applied some intellectual *under*standing *over* it, but because you allowed life the space it needed to bloom, simply by being aware and attentive of it. I feel the "solution" to getting others to care has to be something that cuts through all limits, whether educational, economic, geographic, language, etc. If it doesn't, it's already lost, because as Pills said, any ideology, no matter how liberal, will in the end have to threaten those that "prefer not to" with violence. This "way" of care doesn't coerce anyone. People make up their minds for themself by seeing something genuine, authentic, free, and desirable. They see someone who is genuinely satisfied. And at root, it just makes sense that if you're looking to get people to care about building a better world, that it should start by making it's end *care* itself. It sounds super simple, almost too simple, but it isn't. Maintaining the awareness needed for this, a habit breaking awareness, an ego breaking awareness, is incredibly difficult. It is the most difficult thing I have ever attempted in my life. It is humbling, it is frustrating, I fail minute to minute in it, but in the brief moments of remembering, or stopping to smell the proverbial roses, it is all that I could ever want or need. I have everything in a momeny I would have otherwise overlooked as "dead time" between on task or thought and another. But despite all my own difficulties...it was incredibly easy for the seed to be planted in me, and this gives me the faith that I also am able to similarly plant it in others. All it took in my case, to get me to truly care, beyond words and with authentic non-differented feeling, was seeing someone else authentically and selflessly care. That was it.

Ben

It may be a bit too off topic but I thought the Habermas stuff on post-secular society was interesting if there was any way to integrate that into the next episode. He also talks about similar themes in the Dialectics of Secularization, which is a short dialogue between him and Pope Benedict XVI

Andrew Ferguson

I think an episode on Christopher Lasch would be incredibly interesting. "Know Your Enemy" had a really good one recently and I would love to hear the Pod's discussion of his work.

Alex B

Paris mid twentieth Century was probably the epicentre of bidet use - coincidence? 🤔

Steve B

At 12:08 Victor asks: what other Canadian intellectuals are there? Don't think he's famous but I'd be interested to get your take on Jan Jagodzinski (Alberta) on creativity, new materialism, "designer capitalism", music, and more. Pretty interesting.

Walker Goff

I'm definitely malaised right now.