An age of discontinuity?

 A young Englishwoman expressed her preference for her own national cuisine on social media:

This triggered the following put down:

Nasir, unsurprisingly, describes himself as a "global head of trading". I responded to his comment as follows:

It was perhaps unfair of me to even describe Jess's position as parochial, as she clarified that she happily eats other foods but just prefers her native fare. And, as I shall point out in a future post, there is an important place for parochialism regardless - the turn toward cosmopolitanism and against one's own culture can be traced back to a very unhealthy development within leftism.

For a healthier mindset consider the thought of Elizabeth Fenton, an Englishwoman who travelled to Tasmania in 1828. Her ship was crewed with Arabs and Bengalis and, to her dismay, a Greek who had abandoned his own national culture:

Among this crowd there is, - Oh! sad to write it, - a Greek, a native of Athens, a Moslem now by adopted faith and practice.

Little reckons he of past time; Marathon is no more to him than Mozambique. He would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors.

For Elizabeth Fenton, having this social body ought to grant to this Greek man something much greater than the hedonic experience of eating a certain dish. It grants a certain kind of continuity: a connection to generations past, to their achievements and therefore something to contribute to and to aspire toward. 

Sad to write it, but there are parts of my own home city now which are so diverse that it is difficult to imagine anyone living there having this sense of continuity through time. The lifestyle in these areas, unsurprisingly, is directed toward hedonic experience in the moment, particularly through the array of international eateries. It makes me wonder if this culture of discontinuity is not contributing to the current trend of young women turning away from the idea of motherhood - as this requires us to take on long term commitments, in part, to maintain an ongoing lineage and tradition.

The earliest of the early moderns did not want the culture to descend into this type of hedonic individualism (even if they unwittingly prepared some of the ground for it). Descartes, for instance, was adamant that we must think of ourselves as belonging to larger social entities:

though each of us is a person distinct from others, whose interests are accordingly in some way different from those of the rest of the world, we ought still to think that none of us could subsist alone and that each one of us is really one of the many parts of the universe, and more particularly a part of the earth, the state, the society and the family to which we belong by our domicile, our oath of allegiance and our birth.

Francis Bacon thought that there were two levels of existence. The first was the individual one motivated by an appetite to preserve the inherent good of our own individual being. But he thought as well that there was a second level of existence, propelled by a motion toward contact and connection. Therefore, there was a "double nature of the good":

Here, he argues that there "is formed in every thing a double nature of good": "the one, as every thing is a total or substantive in itself": the other, "as it is a part or member of a greater body".

Put differently, there are two kinds of goods found in material nature: the one, goodness per se, or any given objects intrinsic value; the other, goodness insofar as it belongs, and thus contributes to, a collective reality greater than itself.

The appetite for self-preservation corresponds naturally to the safeguarding of a material body's essential goodness, whereas the appetite of union facilitates a basic level of material conjunction for the purposes both of self-preservation and the greater good. [Francis Bacon on Motion and Power, pp.236-37]

Finally, I'll just make the observation that we do seem to be wired to appreciate continuity. There are parts of Melbourne that were built very finely in the later 1800s and have been reasonably well preserved. When you walk through them you feel a positive connection to the past and to ancestry which then vivifies the experience of place. It's very difficult to impart this from a photo, but this is the type of streetscape I have in mind:

Postscript: One final brief thought. It's interesting that the imagery of "chains" has changed over time. In the older Western tradition, less prone to discontinuity, the imagery of chains was more positive, suggesting a necessary connection between created beings, as in the "Great Chain of Being". In modern times, we have a shift in which the aim is to break chains to achieve liberation. For instance, Rousseau's famous quote is "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains", whilst Marx declared "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains".