49 Fragmentation and Subjectification 1 measurable outcomes (in terms of production, effectiveness and popularity) define their success. Taylor (1989) brought the lack of coherent frameworks that orient people’s way of seeing the world (macro-level) into contact with the intrapersonal microlevel. A strong religious framework causes fear, according to him, although this traditional fear for condemnation ‘is quite different from the one where one fears, above all, meaninglessness’ (Taylor, 1989, introduction). ‘The dominance of the latter perhaps defines our age’ (Taylor, 1989, p. 18). Taylor (1989) further described the ‘shift in style of pathology’ this entails. Where psychoanalysts in earlier days mainly treated hysterical people and patients with phobias and fixations, the bulk of complaints nowadays have to do with ‘ego loss’. Taylor (1989) described this alienation from the self as ‘emptiness, flatness, futility, lack of purpose (…) loss of self-esteem’ (p. 19), tying it to a culture in which the ‘loss of horizon’ has become a ‘popularization and generalization’. The problem with fragmentation is that it isolates the focus of attention on just one aspect of what is—and should be considered as—a bigger whole. This is what MacIntyre (2007) and Taylor (1989) in their critique of modernity see as reductionism. MacIntyre (2007) discussed ‘emotivism’s attempted reduction of morality to personal preference’ (p. 20), while Taylor (1989) opposed ‘the reductive thesis’ (p. 27) in favour of his thesis of the frameworks. If a person is more than a physical body, it is a matter of reductionism to expect everything from physical treatment and to remain empty-handed when physical complaints have a mental cause. If a perceived lack of social cohesion is only treated via a summative cognitive approach, or with simply the skills of—say—interculturalism, it is highly probable that society will remain emptyhanded. Instead of being reductionistic, the chosen approach should aim to address the layered problem of fragmentation; however, naturalism, scientific positivism and materialism all seem, as elements of modernity, to endorse a reductionistic approach. The layered, stratified problem of fragmentation suggests that a lack of cohesion—in the form of a lack of connectedness in a super-diverse and, therefore, super-complex world and society—should be countered with an integrative approach that respects and includes fundamental directional and religious diversity. If modern individualism, disintegration, loss of meaning and lack of a fundamental sense of belonging are somehow interconnected, and if they form part of the widely perceived problem of social cohesion, it follows that an approach intended to foster social cohesion and good citizenship should address the issue of moral fragmentation, as wide and complex as it may be. The rapid increase in ethnic and cultural diversity as a consequence of increased
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