Dissense

You’ve got to hand it to Mr. McArthur—it’s quite a feat to use an individualist argument to indict modern society for its lack of care for the whole. It’s doubly impressive to make such an argument in precisely the ‘disenchanted’ vocabulary of modernity that Weber was talking about.

All this talk of rational calculation of utility is, after all, a product of a thoroughly modern view of man as rational actor—a view that replaced both the ancient view of man as a product of the gods and the city and the Christian view of man as ensouled earthly likeness to the one God. It was the rationalism and un-theistic view of post-Enlightenment modernity that ushered in the possibility of approaching a question of common courtesy like holding open a door for one’s neighbor in the terms of behavioral social science.

Isn’t enduring some “disutility,” as Mr. McArthur puts it, a necessary condition of care for the whole? In other words, it is precisely the modern orientation towards autonomy and solipsistic utility-maximization that plagues us—and that plagues the analysis of “Open the Door Yourself.” Tocqueville was quite prescient in this regard, when he spoke of the retreat to our individual spheres of “private pleasure” in lieu of a more public-spirited republican engagement.

To speak of all rules (‘bureaucratic’ or otherwise) in terms of either good for the end they produce and rationally defensible, or observed out of mind-numbing obedience assumes without question the modern individualistic orientation. That is, it accepts unequivocally the triumph of man’s reason over all else and discounts the inherently messy relationship that must always exist between mores, rules, tradition, rationality, and civic virtue. Far from being a sign of the bureaucratization of modern life, the courtesy-as-social-norm displayed in door-holding is a sign of republican health, not malaise.