Sublime

What values and practices can hold people together as the institutions in which they live fragment?

dismantling institutions they could produce communities: face-to-face relations of trust and solidarity, relations constantly negotiated and renewed, a communal realm in which people became sensitive to one another's needs.

Here is where culture enters the picture. I mean“culture” in its anthropological rather than artisticsense. What values and practices can hold people to-gether as the institutions in which they live fragment? My generation suffered from a want of imagination inanswering this question, in advancing the virtues ofsmall-scale community. Co

Americans of the middling sort I've interviewed in the past decade have tended to accept structural change with resignation,

Mastery and competence are dramatically devalued at the expense of what Sennett calls “cooperation,” presumably unintentionally echoing Whyte’s far more blatant derision in using this word, but which we are happy to characterize more bluntly as manipulation.

Mastery and competence are dramatically devalued at the expense of what Sennett calls “cooperation,” presumably unintentionally echoing Whyte’s far more blatant derision in using this word, but which we are happy to characterize more bluntly as manipulation.

people have a general tendency to stick with their current situation.