Nonreligious Usage
In his study of late-20th-century western society the historian Eric Hobsbawm stated that there was a new fusion of demotic and antinomian characteristics that made the period distinct, and appeared to be likely to extend into the future. For him there is now a readiness by the mass of people to have little sense of obligation to obey any set of rules that they consider arbitrary, or even just constraining, whatever its source. This may be facilitated by one or more of several changes. These include the tendency to live outside settled communities, the growth of enough wealth for most people to have a wide choice of styles of living and a popularised assumption that individual freedom is an unqualified good.
George Orwell was a frequent user of antinomian in a secular (and always approving) sense. In his 1940 essay on Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale”, the word appears several times, including one in which he calls A. E. Housman a writer in "a blasphemous, antinomian, ‘cynical’ strain", meaning defiant of arbitrary societal rules.
Read more about this topic: Antinomianism
Famous quotes containing the word usage:
“Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates—but pages
Might be filled up, as vainly as before,
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore!
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)