[Alisdair] MacIntyre argued that Western civilization had lost its ability to think coherently about moral life. The problem was the Enlightenment, which put individuals in charge of deciding for themselves what was right and wrong. This, MacIntyre thought, rendered moral language meaningless. Try to say that something is “good,” and you end up saying only that it’s “good (to me)”—whatever that means. It becomes impossible to settle moral questions or to enforce moral rules; the best we can do is agree to disagree. Such a world falls into the hands of managers and technocrats, who excel at the perfection of means but lack the tools with which to think deeply about ends. Surviving this new age of darkness might call for the construction of local forms of community, where a realist approach to morality lives on.Joshua Rothman, "Ron Dreher's Monastic Vision." The New Yorker, 5/1/2017.
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That piece also mentions Zygmunt Bauman and liquid modernity; and Václav Benda, which led me to Václav Havel and the parallel polis:
Active resistance is necessary because it is the moral and political indifference of demoralized, self-seeking citizens that normalizes despotic power. According to Havel, true escape from despotism requires 'living in truth,' which means not only refusing all participation in the regime of untruth but also rejecting all false refuge in the 'small pleasures of everyday life.' He insisted that the individual 'be bound to something higher, and capable of sacrificing something, in extreme cases even everything, of his banal, prosperous private life.'
