Who Are We Now?: Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney

Rating:
Summary: The Best Book I've Read in Several Years
Review: Boyle has a capacity to take in the whole of political theory, philosophy, economics, literature, culture, and faith with the deepest insight and with a powerful integration of vision and thoughtfulness. The book has been gestating for many years, but is of timely importance.

In the world of the global marketplace, Boyle maintains, we are all proletarians, 'down to the last yuppie among us.' We are--each and every one of us--consumers and producers, but globalized capitalism pressures us to disregard and forget our place as producers, encouraging us to be mere 'punctual consumers,' unattached to place, to time, to our bodies; solely 'there' as ciphers in the vast exchanges of capital. We thus become slaves to our forgetfulness, while wages, job security and opportunities, and our connectedness to our work and our control over it all diminish. Who said Marx is dead?

But Boyle is no knee-jerk marxist. He masterfully traces the course of modernity and its philosophical blindspots through the political and economic shifts of 19th and 20th century Europe, calling us to an awareness of the moral and religious underpinnings of our meaningful identity as we find it in literature and in daily life--as both producers and consumers. He unapologetically considers himself a 'Christian humanist,' and this perspective affords him a valuable and critical eye toward the dehumanizing effects of globalization, as well as the grounds for hope we may find therein.