Friday 29 March 2013

Terrible TINA

Another snippet from Liquid Modernity, which is one of the best things I have read for a long time. He's actually talking the role of sociology in this section, but I think it applies more widely -
Nothing is less innocent, Bourdieu reminds us, than laissez-faire. Watching human misery with equanimity while placating pangs of conscience with the ritual incantation of the TINA ('there is no alternative') creed, means complicity. Whoever willingly or by default partakes of the cover-up or, worse still, the denial of the human-made, non-inevitable, contingent and alterable nature of the social order, notably of the kind of order responsible for unhappiness, is guilty of immortality - of refusing to help a person in danger.

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