Curating Content To Support Learning About Humanity's Transition

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This content was posted on  1 Jun 23  by   Hanzi Freinacht  on  Facebook Page
Perhaps the question is not one of “class against class”, nor “class or nationality”, nor …

Perhaps the question is not one of “class against class”, nor “class or nationality”, nor even “are class differences justified” — but, rather:

How can class relations be optimized for human thriving?

The question sounds heretical, even to their own writer. It sounds callous, even cruel, and yet strangely naïve at the same time.

To the Modern mind, class was either the fundamental source of ills in society (socialism), a necessary evil (liberalism), or even a strange boon as differences of wealth and power seem necessary for the flowering of arts, palaces, cathedrals, and other aesthetic wonders of civilization (conservatism: we go to the Louvre and Versailles for beauty, not to a grey social-democratic Scandinavian suburb, right?). In more recent and extreme versions, class has been viewed as the sole, fundamental identity of any group (communism), as a dangerous and illusory distraction from our “true” belonging to nations/race/caste (fascism), or, with intersectionality, as one dimension within a larger matrix of unjustifiable inequalities, thus often a category oppressing and silencing demands for social justice between genders, ethnicities, and so forth.

Still, let us linger on this seemingly heretical question for the duration of this article. I have increasingly come to view it as the properly updated question of class — the “metamodern” version of the question of class.

In brief, I should like to first pick apart the very concept of “class” as we habitually approach it, and then reexamine how it can be put back together in a way that brings a new, wider meaning to the term; one that allows for greater agency in the face of inequalities, offering aspirational venues for desirable future societies.

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In times of war, issues of ethnic and national identity overshadow all considerations of class. We are thereby forgetting a crucial…

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