The nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt spoke of modern times as an "age of brutal simplifiers". Today, the crossed effect of desires for reassuring solidarity amid economic insecurity is to render social life brutally simple: us-against-them coupled with you-are-on-your-own. But I`d insist that we dwell in the condition of "not yet". Modernity`s brutal simplifiers may repress and distort our capacity to live together, but do not, cannot, erase this capacity. As social animals we are capable of cooperating more deeply than the existing social order envisions, for Montaigne`s emblematic, enigmatic cat is lodged in ourselves.
Richard Sennett in Together The Rituals, Pleasures & Politics of Cooperation
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