What does it mean to be modern? (2)

 In the first part of this series, I quoted Michael Allen Gillespie's definition of modernity: 

...at its core, to think of oneself as modern is to define one's being in terms of time. This is remarkable. In previous ages and other places, people have defined themselves in terms of their land or place, their race or ethnic group, their traditions or their gods, but not explicitly in terms of time...To be modern means to be "new," to be an unprecedented event in the flow of time, a first beginning, something different than anything that has come before, a novel way of being in the world, ultimately not even a form of being but a form of becoming.

To understand oneself as new is also to understand oneself as self-originating, as free and creative in a radical sense, not merely as determined by a tradition or governed by fate or providence. To be modern is to be self-liberating and self-making, and thus not merely to be in a history or tradition but to make history. 

If you see yourself this way as a modern, then logically you will end up cutting yourself off from your own tradition. You will no longer be a culture bearer.

It took some time for this logic to fully work its way through Western culture. You can see it at work in Australia by the 1940s, at least in the corridors of power. It took an even more radical form by the 1960s. For instance, Malcolm Fraser, who was soon to become PM, gave a speech in 1968 criticising the languages on offer at the University of Melbourne. He complained that the university "recognises the following languages - French, German, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, Russian and Japanese" and that "the list as a whole is one belonging to the last century except for one of the languages mentioned."

What he meant is that only the Japanese language was relevant to Australia in the twentieth century. He had no sense of affinity with the Western cultural roots of his own country. He was defining himself, and his nation, in terms of "time," which then allowed him to rupture the culture of his own country, on the grounds of what was "modern" or "new".

It got worse. Fraser did not see himself as a culture bearer, but by the 1990s it was common for it to be denied that there was any culture to be borne. I remember contributing to a debate at the University of Melbourne where the phrase "Australian culture" was mentioned. It led to a quizzical riposte of "What is Australian culture?" as if it were surprising to hear the claim that there was such a thing.

Nor was this just a local phenomenon. At around the same time, I watched an interview on TV with someone from Austria. He too was stumped when asked about culture and replied "What is Austrian culture anyway?". I thought this particularly curious coming from someone living in the heart of Vienna.

Since then the schools have focused in an unrelenting way on presenting Australian history as being a story of oppression and discrimination. It has had the intended effect of disconnecting many people from their own past.

One point to be made here is that for things to change you would need to do something more than just tweak the school curriculum. If the teachers see themselves as moderns, and if this means defining yourself not in terms of land or place, ethny or tradition, but as a continuous "becoming" into something new and self-making, then there will not be a positive account of one's own history. It will always be something to be broken from.

If we are no longer culture bearers then what are we? It strikes me that moderns are tourists. They still need the connection to a living culture, but no longer identify with their own. And so they act like outsiders experiencing the cultures of others. This does not just mean experiencing these cultures when travelling overseas, but in their own countries as well. Perhaps this also contributes to the push in Australia to have Aboriginal culture as the national culture, even though an overwhelming majority are not Aboriginal. This would be odd if we thought of ourselves as culture bearers of our own tradition, but for a modern who does not see themselves this way, but who still wants a connection (as an outsider) to a culture, it makes sense. (Which explains as well why moderns are comfortable with the "welcome to country" ceremonies - they don't see themselves as connected to land, people or tradition, and so don't mind being placed in the position of "guests" and "outsiders" to another culture).

By rejecting the role of culture bearer, the Western individual has lost a significant aspect of his being. As culture bearers, we take the baton from past generations, attempt to live up to their achievements and to pass them on to future generations. This gives us a standard to measure ourselves by, or even to surpass, a mission in the world that requires us to live up to an ideal, and a reason to feel a pride in what we represent. It connects our individual efforts in life to a larger and enduring communal tradition.

So how do we break from modernism? There is a lot that could be said, but I'll focus on just a few points. First, modernism relies on a belief in linear progress - that we are making continual progress toward ever more advanced forms of society. For many people, the main evidence for this is technological progress. We now have smart phones and smart TVs, a growing array of apps and this is held to be proof of progress.

What we should be pointing out is that these kind of technologies are just tools. They can be used for beneficial purposes or for harmful ones. For instance, if a young girl has all the latest communications technology, but it just carries junk culture to her, culture that is likely to lead to poor life outcomes, then in what way is the technology a measure of progress? What is more important, surely, is the quality of the culture she inhabits, and whether this culture encourages her to develop along higher, rather than lower, lines, in terms of her commitments, her virtues, her maturity, her wisdom, her relationships. The state of culture does not inevitably advance, it only improves over a period of generations, via much love and self-sacrifice - which is one reason to admire and to be grateful for the positive aspects of culture that we do inherit.

Then there is the issue of eschatology - of the idea of human history culminating in the end days. This is a feature of both pagan (e.g. Ragnarok) and Christian theology. The danger is not with the religious belief, but with its secularisation into a humanistic belief in a linear progress of humanity to some ultimate end point. Linear progress then becomes part of an implicit religion that is difficult to challenge, first because it is an aspect of the overall world picture of moderns through which people try to make sense and meaning of their lives and, second, because it is left implicit and so is absorbed as part of the general culture which means it is less likely to be examined.

This does not mean that a belief in linear progress can't be challenged, but we shouldn't expect easy victories. I think the key steps here are not only to point out that society hasn't progressed in the ways it was expected to, but also to provide an alternative world picture to replace the one that moderns cling to. One task, then, is a recovery of ideas that were once central to Western thought, particularly those that relate to the ordering of self and society toward higher goods.

One final point. I have emphasised the importance of being a culture bearer. Western culture was, until recently, a richly developed, "grand" culture. The next step, however, may not be to uphold the most sophisticated, urbanised aspects of this culture. It may be necessary to re-establish our own cultures and traditions at a smaller scale and at a local level, at least to begin with. To maintain continuity might require a measure of adaptability.

What does it mean to be modern? (Part 1)

What does it mean to be modern? Michael Allen Gillespie, in his work The Theological Origins of Modernity, gives this answer:

...at its core, to think of oneself as modern is to define one's being in terms of time. This is remarkable. In previous ages and other places, people have defined themselves in terms of their land or place, their race or ethnic group, their traditions or their gods, but not explicitly in terms of time...To be modern means to be "new," to be an unprecedented event in the flow of time, a first beginning, something different than anything that has come before, a novel way of being in the world, ultimately not even a form of being but a form of becoming. 

To understand oneself as new is also to understand oneself as self-originating, as free and creative in a radical sense, not merely as determined by a tradition or governed by fate or providence. To be modern is to be self-liberating and self-making, and thus not merely to be in a history or tradition but to make history. To be modern consequently means not merely to define one's being in terms of time but also to define time in terms of one's being, to understand time as the product of human freedom in interaction with the natural world. Being modern at its core is thus something titanic, something Promethean.

This description of modernity helps us to understand why people have such difficulty in breaking cleanly from the modernist project. This project is now something that we live within, and by its nature it has broken with the past as a living tradition, making it difficult to connect to any genuine alternative.

Gillespie goes on to trace the development of the concept of modernity. Modernism, in its current meaning, took some time to emerge. Those who wanted to challenge either the present or the recent past, often did so by looking back to antiquity rather than by embracing "modernity". Gillespie mentions the "quarrel of the ancients and the moderns" that took place in the seventeenth century. When I did some further reading on this I learned that in France the establishment literary figures who supported throne and altar were the ones who considered themselves "moderns". These writers attacked the more radical literary figures who looked back to antiquity. So there was not yet a progressivism in the form that we would recognise.

What is more recognisable are movements like the Italian Futurists of the early 1900s. Below is a sketch by the Italian architect Antonio Sant'Elia that was part of a series called "The New City" (1914).

Sant'Elia's vision of the new city has been described as follows:

The city was a backdrop onto which the dynamism of Futurist life is projected. The city had replaced the landscape as the setting for the exciting modern life. Sant'Elia aimed to create a city as an efficient, fast-paced machine. He manipulates light and shape to emphasize the sculptural quality of his projects. Baroque curves and encrustations had been stripped away to reveal the essential lines of forms unprecedented from their simplicity. In the new city, every aspect of life was to be rationalized and centralized into one great powerhouse of energy. The city was not meant to last, and each subsequent generation was expected to build their own city rather than inheriting the architecture of the past.

The Italian Futurists were influential enough to have buildings approved by Mussolini, such as a new train station in Florence completed in 1934:

The heating plant and main controls cabin for this station are considered masterpieces of Futurist architecture (1929):

In Australia you can see modernism extending its influence among the elite in the interwar period. It was not uniformly so in the 1920s, though. Here is part of a speech given by Sir William Irvine, who at that time was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Victoria. In opening a local high school in 1928 he said,

Such schools present the young with opportunities of rising not merely to technical and industrial efficiency, so that they may make more money or higher wages. That is a useful object and may be the aim of the majority who enter this and other schools but there is something higher.”

The more chances given to the rising generation in the way of education, says Sir William, the better for all concerned...It was the aim of education to bring the minds of people into paths of thought leading to vistas of intellectual truth and beauty. Secondary education should be a means of drawing out the creative intellect of the youth of this fair country, in order that their efforts would lead towards the benefit of all, so that their minds might be uplifted above the sordid cares of ordinary life, and so that they might enjoy the priceless heritage of English history. 

Irvine is clearly not interested in the technological alone and he holds the heritage of his own people in high regard - and so is not entirely a modern. But in the 1930s there continued to develop a strongly technocratic spirit in Australia, and it dominated at the highest level politically in the 1940s. After WWII there still existed a pride in the past at the local level, with the formation of local historical societies, the writing of local and family history, the erection of monuments to honour pioneers and so on. But even this changed by the 1990s. By this time there was an intensely focused campaign, particularly in the schools, to reject the past as something oppressive, something that was not to be identified with.

By this point, it was no longer so easy to think of yourself as a bearer of a culture or of a tradition. This was a logical end point of the understanding of what it means to be modern as set out by Michael Allen Gillespie. If we define ourselves as self-originating, not tied to people or place, nor to history, then it is logical to cut our ties to the past and to our own tradition.

We are no longer culture bearers. That has deep implications that I'll discuss in the second part of this series.

Imagine

Over at I blame the patriarchy, Twisty and her friends are discussing the future post-patriarchal society.

What they want is complete individual autonomy, with no-one having any power over anyone else.

It's not surprising that they should choose this goal. It's what liberal moderns generally claim to be aiming at - it's what they understand freedom to mean.

Twisty states ultimate goals more openly than most, and she is a lot more concerned to be politically correct than to be practical. So she writes as a kind of utopian intellectual - and is often "ahead" of her own readers.

It's fascinating to observe. Where exactly does liberal modernism lead to for someone as exacting as Twisty? Is her utopia somewhere that we'd really want to live?

It gets interesting straight away: Twisty begins by telling us that in her post-patriarchal society there would be no culture, including no art:

Lots of the ideas put forth by Shulamith Firestone in The Dialectic of Sex intrigue ... spinster aunts, but none intrigues ... them like this one: that in a post-patriarchal society, culture (inclusive, I am happy to say, of art) will become irrelevant and extrinsic and die a long-overdue death, whereupon humans, freed from the prison of domination, will transmogrify into giant intellects pretty much throbbing with contentment.

So we will be freed from art and culture. Is this a good thing? Only if you share some of the same intellectual starting points as Twisty.

Twisty is assuming that there is nothing of inherent worth that artists might communicate to others; nothing that is objectively beautiful or uplifting or profound. There is just one will (the artist) forcing itself on other wills (the audience), thereby infringing the rules of autonomy. For Twisty, art is a,

ponderous, self-absorbed, interpretation, or anti-interpretation (whatever!), of reality, with an audience manipulated by a creator

For Twisty, art only exists because the patriarchal system encourages power differentials. When patriarchy is brought down, art will lose its place and purpose in society.

How far out of kilter is Twisty in stating such a view? She's not as far distant from mainstream modernism as you might think. Modern art is based partly on the idea that anything can be art - even a big pile of junk. But if everything is art, then art loses significant meaning - it effectively ceases to exist as a distinct entity.

The idea seems to be: there is no art, only things. (Though there is still a preference for things that shock or confront or disconcert.)

But art and culture are not the only oppressions Twisty wants to liberate us from. She reminds us that in Firestone's "golden age" of self-determination there would be:

the “disappearance of cultural sex, age, and race distinction and of the psychology of power.”

So no age distinctions. This means abolishing childhood:

Certainly we couldn’t, at this point in human evolution, just start turning the kids loose in the world. It is unthinkable that they should not spend their idyllic first years in thrall to one or two adults who will educate (socialize) them according to the adults’ personal “values,” meaning, of course, the DNA necessary to replicate patriarchy. This indoctrination period is known as “raising” children, and differs from raising tomatoes chiefly in that tomatoes are given quite a bit more freedom to be themselves.

The problem with being a child, reasons Twisty, is that you are not completely autonomous - and therefore not free. Your parents have power over you and influence you and therefore you don't have complete freedom to be yourself. Childhood too must be considered a patriarchal construct designed to uphold power differentials.

So youngsters should just be left free to do as they like:

Say, for example, that because of changes engendered by the feminist revolution, kids wouldn’t need to be raised at all. They could flit about the countryside according to whim, just like anybody else. Why not?

They wouldn’t be kidnaped or raped or sold into sex slavery because, remember? dominance and submission is a thing of the past. They wouldn’t be run over by cars, because future-topia vehicles are accident-proof. They won’t skip school because there isn’t any school to skip. They won’t join roving gangs of thugs because crime doesn’t exist, either.

The kids would choose the people they wish to hang out with, which people may or may not include their biological parents. The parents would be relieved of their neurotic, self-absorbed obsession with their own offspring, the kids would be free from enslavement as low-status sub-beings in a nuclear family to which they belong only as an accident of birth.

Here, clearly, a dash of utopianism is required to make the theory work.

And how do Twisty's readers respond? Kate tries to rescue art as follows:

Everyone would be an artist and everyone a musician. If something needs fixing, everyone would try and if one excelled ... they wouldn’t carry it around on their chest like a badge to market and to demand “respect” because respect would not be something to be demanded, everyone would have it, everyone would get it because they exist and that’s all there is; existence, the beauty of existence in all things as they are.

No one would give a damn about what one person said over another about what was ‘good’ or ‘great’ because well, no one’s opinion or version of events is any more important than the others.

Of course with this kind of fluidity with reality, I’d imagine there wouldn’t be a lot of “progress” as we know it, but then who cares? What’s the rush? Does a dog or a cat rush to find the answer to why they can’t sit at a table and eat with fork and spoon? No, they accept what is and are happy ...

In fact, I’ll bet people wouldn’t really have names beyond whatever one determined they might want to be called, but certainly there wouldn’t be “Mary’s child” anymore as each child has an identity of their own that they decide. If said child decides to be called “stick of wood” and then changes later to be called “George” who cares? Its what they want and that’s that.

Everyone would have respect because they exist; nobody's version of events is more important than another's; we determine our own identity according to what we want.

Which is to say: there are no objective standards, just my own will to do what I want. This is where liberal modernism has brought Kate.

Rob in Madison seems to have signed onto the wrong program:

I don’t want to manipulate anything. I take pictures of trees, mostly, because I love them. Then, occasionally, I send prints of them to friends. Is this an exercise of power?

I grant that, steeped as everything is in patriarchy, art will serve as one of its conduits; but, jeez: can’t we still make things of beauty without exercising dominance/submission? I don’t even want to dominate myself. I just love my lens.

Rob hasn't grasped yet that for his modernist friends it makes little sense to talk about making "things of beauty". There's just what I happen to like. Everything has much the same status.

Yttik, too, may find herself changing camps one day:

But I think of mothers nurturing children as an example of a potential positive example of a hierarchy.

So do I. But liberal moderns take autonomy to be the overriding good. How then can a liberal modern accept, in principle, the idea of a positive hierarchy? This would mean accepting that there are other positive goods to be held in balance with that of autonomy.

Lexie explains Firestone's position on babies and childhood as follows,

As for babies, I think the idea here is not that a woman gives birth (or in Firestone’s world, a child is born through technological invention that circumvents the need for a female gestator) and the infant is left lying on the ground to fend for itself. The idea is more that no one “owns” the baby. There is no official parent or guardian. The idea being that the baby is cared for by the community, to which time when its not. The child, who of course, needs less and less care as they get older, would decide for themselves when to move on, who to get guidance from, what they need most. The child would have full rights of self-determination.

Women are no longer to be "female gestators" as there will be artificial wombs. There is to be no official parent, but instead communal care. The child would decide who to live with, in order to guarantee its full rights to self-determination - its freedom - or what a modern like Lexie understands to be freedom.

Sean pipes in with this view of the post-patriarchy:

Making something, whether utilitarian or not, would not be called “art.” It would just be something. Doing something would not be called a “crime.” It would just be an action. Children wouldn’t be forced into the role of submission, and if they needed help with something, they could seek it out of their own free-will, like everyone else does. And remember, “age” is gone, too, so it’s not as if the children are being separated into some vacuum. The distinction between parent and child, adult and child, wouldn’t exist, so neither would the anxieties related to it.

There is no art, there are just things. Everything just is. There is no crime, there are just people doing things. There are just our subjective preferences, which we follow as we will. This, for Sean, is what freedom means.

Twisty then pops up again with this view of motherhood:

Women, however, particularly women with children, don’t have access to the full menu of choices. In our culture “motherhood” is a kind of prison ...

As for freedom from biology ... there can be little argument against the notion that females bear a disproportionate burden, biology-wise ... That women have to do the pregnancy is not a “cultural construct.” What Firestone and others have postulated is that until women are liberated from this burden, their personal autonomy will always be compromised, not just by the state or some dude laying claim to their uteruses, but by the actual physiological process of hosting a parasite for nine months.

Well, she doesn't beat around the bush. For Twisty, motherhood is a prison depriving women of full autonomy, and women need to be liberated from pregnancy, which is simply the hosting of a parasite for nine months.

Conclusions? Utopian thoughts about maximising autonomy only serve to prove how inadequate the whole project is. It is not a true freedom to be liberated from art and culture, or from childhood and motherhood - even if this does, logically, increase our individual autonomy.

Auster on modernity

Lawrence Auster is in good form here in discussing modernity, modernism and traditionalism:

To repeat and sum up: modernity consists of the increasing articulation of society in terms of the individual, the equal freedom of all individuals, and the increasingly efficient and embracing technical organization of life to meet every human need. Modernism consists in making modern society, organized according to these principles, our principal authority and guide in spiritual, philosophical, and cultural matters.

Traditionalism consists of consciously resisting and counterbalancing these desolating trends.

So, for example, a priest who makes the eternal message of the Gospels and salvation the main thing, and not the attitudes and concerns of modern society, is a traditionalist. A country that takes its historic nationhood seriously and makes an effort to conform such values as non-discrimination and economic efficiency to it, rather than conforming it to those values, is traditionalist. A movie maker who situates his characters within an existing society and a transcendent moral framework, rather than portraying his characters as disconnected bundles of desire and aggression in a Brownian universe of clashing egos, is a traditionalist.

Traditionalism is a counter-movement to what appear to be overwhelming and irresistible forces. But since those forces, notwithstanding their spectacular achievements, are leading progressively to the dissolution of all human connection to the past and to the transcendent, and indeed to the dissolution of the human itself, they cannot be as irresistible as they seem. That is the faith and the conviction on which traditionalism is based.

Shakespeare

I make no claim to be a Shakespeare scholar. Even so, I think a case can be made that Shakespeare was opposed to a key aspect of what has become the modern liberal philosophy.

One piece of evidence was discussed recently by Lawrence Auster. It’s a quote from the play King Lear, in which Albany speaks harshly of the evil daughter of Lear, Goneril, with the words:

O Goneril!
You are not worth the dust which the rude wind
Blows in your face. I fear your disposition:
That nature, which contemns [scorns] its origin,
Cannot be border’d certain in itself;
She that herself will sliver and disbranch
From her material sap, perforce must wither
And come to deadly use.

This runs directly against the grain of modern liberalism. A key idea of liberalism is that we are made truly human when we choose who we are through our own individual will and reason. Therefore, liberals prize the idea of an individual “freedom” in which there are no limits to our individual will. For liberals, individuals are free when they are not impeded in their will by an inborn nature, or by tradition, or by inherited identities.

Albany, though, does not praise Goneril for having liberated herself from her unchosen nature. Instead, he condemns such a project as likely to lead to vicious outcomes. He talks of a person who chooses to “sliver and disbranch from her material sap” as withering – which is a similar thought to the more modern conservative view that people who are made rootless suffer a loss from being denatured.

[All of which reminds me of the fate of Alice James, sister of the famous novelist Henry. She did not relish her spinsterhood as a freedom from a “biological destiny” as liberals might have it, but confessed that it could not be “anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone, to have no one to care and ‘do for’ daily is not only a sorrow, but a sterilizing process”. When she spent time with her brothers, she was happy to lose her “floating particle sense”.]

There is another passage from Shakespeare which appears to run directly counter to the liberal concept of freedom from an inherited nature. The quote is from the play Coriolanus. In this play, Coriolanus is unjustly expelled from Rome and so allies himself with Rome’s enemy to seek revenge. However, just prior to his attack on the city, his Roman family visits him to plead with him to call off the attack.

At first, Coriolanus tries to ignore their pleas. He tries to brace himself by telling himself that,

I’ll never
Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand
As if a man were author of himself
And knew no other kin. (5.3. 34-37)

Shakespeare here uses language which is very familiar to modern liberalism. The idea of being self-authored, or of writing your own script, is part of the terminology of our own times.

But Shakespeare does not intend us to sympathise with this attitude. It is clear from the text that natural bonds and loyalties, including the ties of kinship and patriotism, are rightly felt to be stronger than the merely personal will or desires (for revenge in this case) of an atomised individual.

Coriolanus, for instance, at the sight of his wife, is reminded of the “bond and privilege” of nature; at the sight of his son he declares that “my young boy / Hath an aspect of intercession which / Great Nature cries ‘Deny Not’”.

One writer on Shakespeare, Anthony Law, has summarised this passage from Shakespeare as follows:

Coriolanus most explicitly embodies the modernist desire for total autonomy ... Shakespeare has him deny his family and his country in the face of three generations of that family – mother, wife, and son – who beg him not to destroy Rome ...

Since the nineteenth century, the word “instinct” has had a particular scientific meaning, but for Coriolanus it means to be bound by an unselfconscious inward stain or tincture to the obligations of family, culture, citizenship, and tradition. Now Coriolanus will throw off all these instinctive restraints. He will become the “author of himself,” forget all other ties, and act from unnameable internal principles, which we now recognize as the underlying axioms of autonomous individualism.

In Shakespeare’s play the forces of autonomous individualism lose out. Coriolanus is reminded of his natural loyalties and brokers a peace. His nobility is restored. Unfortunately, in England and across the West, there was a radically different outcome and one, I think it is safe to say, which would not have pleased our most famous playwright.