In bringing out the predictive and controlling intentions of modern discourse about the future, I am not concerned with highlighting the limits of social science or the seriousness of social and environmental problems. These are real enough. But even if we could overcome these obstacles, the crucial debility of the rule of prediction and control would remain, namely, the expatriate quality of public life. We live in self-imposed exile from communal conversation and action. The public square is naked. American politics has lost its soul. The republic has become procedural, and we have become unencumbered selves. Individualism has become cancerous. We live in an age of narcissism and pursue loneliness. These expressions are alarming not because they predict the ruin of the state; prediction and control, for all their liabilities, will continue to provide comfort and stability. Rather, these expressions of distress should disquiet us because they indicate that we have no common life, that what holds us all together is a cold and impersonal design.

—Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992)