Justice Anthony Kennedy didn’t invent the shift from community to autonomy, but in 1992 he articulated it more crisply than anyone else: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
In this sentence, which became famous as the “mystery of life” passage, there is no sense that individuals are embedded in a social order. There is no acknowledgment of the parts of ourselves that we don’t choose but inherit — family, race, social roles, historical legacies of oppression, our bodies, the habits that are handed down to us by our common culture.
There’s no we. We are all monads who walk around with our own individual opinions about existence, meaning and the universe. Each person is a self-created choosing individual, pursuing individual desires. There is no sense that we are part of a common flow connecting the past, present and future; instead, each of us creates our own worldview anew.
I zeroed in on precisely this aspect of Kennedy’s idea in my section on anthropology in the Why The Battle series–
‘Now if you have stayed with me in this admittedly very broad brush survey, we come to the climactic moment, in of all places a 1992 Supreme Court decision entitled Casey versus Planned Parenthood. Justice Anthony Kennedy in that ruling said this which I am also going to read twice because of its importance: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of
human life…”
It is hard fully to put into words what a revolution is involved in going from the ancient world’s way of knowing to this new way, where we are no longer bowling alone, we are virtual bowling at home alone. We in the 21st century have nothing less than the free right to define everything, including the universe and the mystery of life itself.’
https://www.dioceseofsc.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Why-the-Battle_Talk-4-Anthropology.pdf
https://www.dioceseofsc.org/teaching-resources/why-the-battle-different-god-and-gospel/