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The Nature of Western Society A number of sociological theorists

A number of sociological theorists have considered the nature of Western society as it has developed over the last two centuries or so, with particular attention on American society, and have found that this is a society in the process of disintegration. E.M. Adams states that it is clear there is something wrong with the way our society culturally generates and nurtures human beings. The world he describes is a world that is marked by a disjunction between the social values we verbally embrace and the reality by which we live:

Our identity, our rationality, our norms and values, and our social institutions are no longer underwritten by our intellectual vision of humankind and the world.

Robert N. Bellah and his co-authors of Habits of the Heart refer to society as beset by fragmentation, and they see modernity as "the culture of separation." These authors note:

A sense of fragmentariness is as characteristic of high intellectual culture as of popular culture. Starting with science, the most respected and influential part of our high culture, we can see at once that it is not a whole, offering a general interpretation of reality, as theology and philosophy once did, but a collection of disciplines each having little to do with the others.

Adams calls for a reexamination by philosophers of the foundations of our culture to find the basic faults in that foundation and to find a way to achieve coherence in a way that would preserve the culture's life-supporting functions:

There should emerge from such debate a vision of humankind and the world that would underwrite the human enterprise properly defined in humanistic terms.

Of course, Adams also says that the healing of the society must come from within, and the social re-integration of society begins with an examination of the existing situation and a shift in thinking at the societal level:

Like the damaged self, a pathological society needs probing self-examinat...

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The Nature of Western Society A number of sociological theorists. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:20, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708437.html