Land just wrote a thing saying atomization is another thing which is accelerating, not decreasing (which is how I interpret a comment about the "shift of emphasis"), and that to fight it is pointless if not counterproductive.
I read his Jacobite piece, and I just don't think he's talking about atomization! Or rather, he's discussing only one part of a larger social phenomenon. He even goes into the semantic problems with using the word: "As is well understood, ‘atoms’ are not atoms, and ‘elements’ are not elements. Elementary particles – if they exist at all – are at least two (deep) levels further down. Human individuals are certainly no less decomposable." He's writing here about the normalization of rupture, epitomized by monumental events such as the Protestant Reformation. Such moments have been associated with the rise of individualism as a social/ideological value, but they're also increases in social complexity.
The Protestant Reformation didn't annihilate Catholicism, and it didn't escape completely from interactions with the Catholic Church. It simply added a new mode of religious organization into the mix. Niklas Luhmann refers to the splitting and restructuring of society as "functional differentiation," and I would suggest that the Reformation is an example of this phenomenon--it's a macro-scale process by which social systems evolve (and I use that word cautiously--social evolution isn't biological evolution). There are ideological ramifications that manifest at the individual level, but that's not proof that atomization is outpacing large-scale social complexity.
This seems to be a crucial passage:
American history – at the global frontier of atomization – is thickly speckled with elective communities. From the Puritan religious communities of the early colonial period, through to the ‘hippy’ communes of the previous century, and beyond, experiments in communal living under the auspices of radicalized private conscience have sought to ameliorate atomization in the way most consistent with its historical destiny. Such experiments reliably fail, which helps to crank the process forward, but that is not the main thing. What matters most about all of these co-ops, communes, and cults is the semi-formal contractual option that frames them. From the moment of their initiation – or even their conception – they confirm a sovereign atomization, and its reconstruction of the social world on the model of a menu. Dreher’s much-discussed ‘Benedict Option’ is no exception to this. There is no withdrawal from the course of modernity, ‘back’ into community, that does not reinforce the pattern of dissent, schism, and exit from which atomization continually replenishes its momentum. As private conscience directs itself towards escape from the privatization of conscience, it regenerates that which it flees, ever more deeply within itself. Individuation, considered impersonally, likes it when you run.
The passage I put in bold could come right from Luhmann, except Luhmann would say that there is no withdrawal from modernity--period. No attempt to flee modernity back into community (or any other supposed refuge) can ever result in a clean break, schism, or exit. Every schism drags modernity with it--hell, it was the Protestant Reformation that contributed to the acceleration of what we would call modernity in the first place! And a large part of that had to with tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism. Atomization replenishes its momentum only insofar as it replenishes the momentum of the systems that it gives rise to, and in which it participates. This is the standard definition of functional differentiation in sociological systems theory.
Finally, functional differentiation doesn't preclude independence. In fact, it encourages independence, which is what Land seems to be zeroing in on. Systems and subsystems operate both independently and interdependently. That is, processes of differentiation (what Land sees as atomization) do increase independence--they produce new social systems that designate their own codes and operations--but they also increase interdependence, communications, and observation.
I think Land privileges an ideological admiration of individualism at the expense of the inevitable material situations in which various forms of individualism (or atomization) are produced: i.e. as divisions and subdivisions of a formless mass (that we might tentatively call "society") that is increasing in complexity.
