Modern Age - Fall 2016 - 118

MODERN AGE

FALL 2016

A useful way to introduce Esolen's project might be to quote
Flannery O'Connor: "The novelist with Christian concerns will find
in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his
problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural. . . . To the hard of
hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and
startling figures." Life Under Compulsion is a book about human
nature published in the midst of a culture that behaves as if such
a thing doesn't exist. To borrow O'Connor's idiom, in Life Under
Compulsion Esolen shouts at the top of his voice, yet he barely
exaggerates the grotesqueness of the modern condition. His
book demonstrates the painfully obvious: we don't live in a culture fit for free human persons; we furiously pursue a subhuman
life, "life under compulsion."
In its positive dimension, Life Under Compulsion is an invitation
into the world of sanity, the rich perennial wisdom of Western
thought about what it means to be human. In its negative capacity, this book is a withering critique of postmodern culture: the ten
chapters of the book correspond to ten registers by which Esolen demonstrates contemporary culture's disfiguring of human
nature.
The premise of Life Under Compulsion is quite simple, and the
title gives us a clue to the book's main argument. In the Western
Christian tradition, human beings were made to be free, and the
proper exercise of this freedom is pursuing the life of moral goodness. Such a life is characterized by virtue (understood as moderation), and aligning one's life with the natural and divinely revealed
law. Such a life actually makes one happy; in this view, freedom is
not mere license but the ability to cooperate with human nature
to achieve a well and whole existence.
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Modern Age - Fall 2016

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