48 Chapter 1 Humankind lacks, especially in the modern Western world, a shared idea of the cosmic order, which is historically a relatively new element brought to the scene by modernity. On the meso-level, social connections fall apart when the problem of individualism or atomism arises—again, especially in the West— and social cohesion suffers from the lack of a sense of connectedness. On the micro-level of the person, another trend of separation is visible when people become alienated from others and even from themselves, meaning that they are uncertain about their identity and about fundamental issues such as the meaning of their existence and of life in general (1). To describe fragmentation as a deep and ongoing separation of what originally belonged together means to describe it, from a theological perspective, as a deepening of the consequences of both sin and brokenness. As the famous Kuyper (2011) quotation that opens this chapter shows, sin’s darkening implies a type of brokenness that is a cause and a consequence of disengagement and disintegration. In a recent study, van Laar (2021) pointed to the combination of sin and relationality: sin indicates every type of brokenness—with God, others, the self and the world. In this description, the layers of the micro-level (the self), the meso-level (others) and the macro-level (the world) become visible, and even a meta-level (God) appears. Although it would be interesting to focus more on the difference between this metaphysical level and the macro-level of the world—and on how, specifically, Taylor’s (1989) cosmic order would fit into it—for now it suffices to distinguish the three levels as different layers upon which the problem of fragmentation manifests. Distinguishing the levels is helpful in describing the stratification of fragmentation. It is not meant to describe different or separate processes. It is, for example, the lack of a common sense of the cosmic order on the macro-level that causes disorientation and disengagement on the meso-level and even alienation from the self on the micro-level. When MacIntyre (2007) described the modern individual as ‘the emotivist self’ (p. 35), he referred to ‘emotivism’ as a central feature of modern culture (p. 61) and society (p. 73), and he established a direct relation between a fading belief in God and a developing belief in ‘managerial effectiveness’ (p. 76). Except for the individual self, no one can determine what is good or evil for an ‘emotivist’. In the ‘emotivist culture’, the traditional pastor, teacher and doctor lose their centrality to the manager, therapist and rich aesthete. The difference is that the latter three have no need to study content in relation to truth and the epistemological question of how we can know truth. Procedures are more important for them, while 1 Hartmut Rosa (2010) connected alienation to both modernity and the process of social acceleration.
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