{David Bentley Hart’s critique of modernity (“Christ and Nothing”), featured in Pascal’s latest post, seems to have struck a nerve with Professor Arguendo, who believes Hart’s views to be hyperbolic, if not risible. The Professor has requested an opportunity to state his case, which follows}
“The problems of human life have not altered very much over the centuries.” (Martha Nussbaum)
“The moral world of moderns is significantly different from that of previous civilizations.” (Charles Taylor)
Arguendo:
The estimable David Bentley Hart disapproves of us, the wretched denizens of modernity. He wrote, in 2003, that the modern West, demoralized and in cultural free fall, suffers from a kind of moral, aesthetic, and spiritual anosognosia, a condition in which the afflicted patients cannot recognize that they are afflicted. Like the Roman soldiers who nailed Jesus to the cross, the decadent men and women of our age can only be pitied, and possibly forgiven, because they (we) know not what they (we) do. To borrow Richard Farina’s phrase, we in the post-Christian West have been down so long, it looks like up to us. We are, Hart says, worse than pagans in our “comfortable nihilism”. The unspoken assumption of our time, according to Hart—I am paraphrasing, of course—is that nothing matters, and what if it did?
At the bottom of Hart’s displeasure is modern freedom. Like any Orthodox theologian, he would acknowledge that freedom was given to us by God, to be used in God’s service, a gift that promptly backfired and has continued backfiring ever since. From Hart’s perspective, however, the basic problem of modern man is not that we misuse our freedom but that we worship it, rather than the God who graciously granted it to us in the first place.
On the other hand, Louis Ruprecht, writing in 1996, suggested a different diagnosis, which was that American philosophical and political thought had been infected with the dread (and highly contagious) virus nostalgia, which, Ruprecht said, “grounded in a misplaced myth of origins and a perverse theory of decadence, is both deeply tempting and greatly misleading. It leads us,” he continued, “to waste our better energies vainly tilting after windmills of our own imagining. By misnaming our problems and by grounding them in a wrong-headed notion of ‘the glory that was,’ we are invited to look for curatives in the wrong places.” An inaccurate diagnosis, in other words, is unlikely to result in effective treatment, much less a cure.
Ruprecht’s book, Afterwords, was an extended meditation on “Hellenism, modernism, and the myth of decadence.” He turned his analytic sights on several prominent anti-modern figures—Nietzsche, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor, in particular—in whose company David Bentley Hart would be right at home. Ruprecht began by noting a “curious paradox: Modern people are, almost by definition, antimodern. They pose the ‘here and now’ as a problem to be solved.” Much antimodern sentiment is motivated by the notion that modernity is “unique” and that it constitutes an unprecedentedly “disenchanted” and “godless” “wasteland”. Sadly, the denizens of modernity are uniquely incapable of coping with or even recognizing the threats: they (we) are “hollow men” (T.S. Eliot), “men without chests” (C.S. Lewis), or men like Walker Percy’s “Lancelot” and “Thomas More,” raging impotently against the dying of the pre-modern light.
This jaundiced view of our modern situation is exacerbated by our rose-colored ignorance about what Peter Laslett called “the world we have lost.” It is not just that we judge our contemporaries too harshly; “Our failure,” according to Ruprecht, “is a failure of historical understanding.” Our complaints about modernity lament our experiences of “fragmentation and confusion,” while our paeans to the pre-modern world assume it possessed a wholeness, a solidarity, and an integrity which never existed; human life has always been fragmented and confused.
Ruprecht cited Charles Taylor’s assertion (in Sources of the Self) that there is a kind of “moral incoherence” about our modern lives; not that we are not moral, but that we can no longer explain why we are. This is the oft-proffered notion that we live today on the “moral capital” of the past, which we appreciate neither for the treasure it is nor for the effort expended by previous generations to accumulate it; we simply spend it. Taylor identified what he called “our ethics of inarticulacy,” which Ruprecht explained: “When asked about our ‘selves,’ when asked about our ‘vision,’ when asked about the ‘good,’ we fall strangely and paralytically silent. We no longer know what to say.” Pre-modern European Christians could fall back on reciting a common creed or the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ whether they understood the meanings or not; today, wanting both to speak for ourselves and to avoid giving offense, we are at a loss.
Modernity, in Taylor’s view, is no more morally corrupt than previous ages; we are simply lost, with no map or guidebook to follow. As Ruprecht paraphrased, “We as a culture are experiencing an identity crisis writ large. Modern culture has taken to the road, looking for we know not what.” While disagreeing with the substance, Ruprecht favorably contrasted Taylor’s sympathetic appraisal of modernity with the acerbic scolding of Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue). “MacIntyre’s,” wrote Ruprecht, “is a far more despairing, and far less kind, account of our modernness, an apocalyptic portrait of our perplexity.” Such a portrait relies for its effect on an imagined past which can be contrasted with the sordid present age; in MacIntyre’s case, he compared us unfavorably to an idealized ancient Greece, the Greece of the Homeric heroes (real or fictional) like Achilles, Ulysses, and Hector. Similarly, he set the chaos of our modern world against the “seamless social world” described (or prescribed) by Aristotle.
Ruprecht, however, rejected both the glorification of the past and the impugning of the present. “MacIntyre’s symptomatology of modern culture is too severe,” he wrote. “There are rich moral resources evident in the topography of the modern self. Life in the post-Enlightenment world, with all its own attendant problems, is free (if not yet free enough) of many of the errors and extremes of antiquity, e.g., religious wars, inquisitions, and intolerance. We are committed to the elimination of human suffering, committed to the ideals of universal human rights—all of which provide tremendous critical leverage against oppression, and all of which were unavailable to the ancient Greeks.”
For Ruprecht, correcting our view of the present is necessary but not sufficient to answer the anti-modern voices. If we misunderstand and romanticize the past, we inevitably fall prey to claims about the “decadence” of modern thought, modern art, and modern behavior. The flawed reality we inhabit will never be able to compete with a whitewashed, airbrushed past. We need, said Ruprecht, “to apply our critical powers to analyzing our prejudices about the past,” and perhaps to be more forgiving towards ourselves and our contemporaries.
Arguendo, and contra David Bentley Hart, there never was a Golden Age from which we have declined; there never was a Garden from which we were banished; there never was anything in our history except what there is now, an uncertain play of forces for good and for evil, and human beings trying their best to keep their difficult balance against the winds and currents they have no choice but to navigate.
That is all we know, and all we need to know.
Decadence in 1907. It's only gotten worse...
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