Pierre Manent, an eminent French political theorist, has a lengthy essay in City Journal in which he meditates on the political forms which both created and are eroded by modernity:
Today in Europe, civic activity is feeble, the religious Word almost inaudible. Yet as we noted at the outset, the modern project continues. Is it merely running on its own inertia, or is the ceaseless quest that I have just described still going on? To answer that question, it may be useful to offer a description of Europe’s present situation concerning the relationship between speech and action.
A frequent criticism of representative democracy or of parliamentary regimes is that they produce lots of talk but are incapable of action. Marx spoke of “parliamentary cretinism,” for example, and Carl Schmitt liked to cite Donoso Cortés’s sarcasms against the bourgeoisie, a clase discutidora—an “argumentative class.” In reality, however, a functioning representative democracy or parliamentary regime constitutes an admirable articulation of actions in relation to speech. During an electoral campaign, everyone proposes all sorts of imaginable actions, both possible and impossible. As soon as the election is over, those who have won the majority undertake to act according to their speech, while the minority, abstaining from action, must satisfy itself with talk in order to prepare for the next election. This transference back and forth of power, or the effective possibility of such transference, is essential to the mechanism.
[But now we] are going forward on thinning ice.
In fact, Manent has a piece in the October issue of this very magazine which might be considered as further discussion of this subject (it explores the notion of cosmopolitanism and what he calls the West’s “false religion of humanity”). So consider this background reading.
September 15th, 2012 | 1:27 am
No, no, and again, no. “Modern” is one of the worst words in the English language. A cursory examination of its etymology will inform you of its relativist, illusionary, deceptive nature. Modernism is the language of Mordor, which I shall not utter here…
Seriously, George Orwell would have a field day with the abuse of language that “modern” embodies. It is nothing more or less than a shell into which all of the retrograde ideologies of the West project their wills-to-power.
“one incontestable point in the perplexities just laid out: that we have wanted, and continue to want, to be modern”
I want no such thing. I want to be a good Christian, I want to be a good husband and father, I want to be rational, logical, efficient… Having studied history though, I want no part in being modern.
I do understand that there may be some irony at work in Manent’s article. I do understand that as a son of provincial outskirts, I may perhaps not be as “up to date” vis-a-vis what “we” are all concerned with.
But allow me to quote Tao Te Ching (there might be some irony at work there too, mightn’t there? … who knows?):
It is better to leave a vessel unfilled, than to attempt to
carry it when it is full. If you keep feeling a point that has been
sharpened, the point cannot long preserve its sharpness.
[and then later on...]
Who can (make) the muddy water (clear)? Let it be still, and it
will gradually become clear. Who can secure the condition of rest?
Let movement go on, and the condition of rest will gradually arise.
(I’m dubious of the author’s claims to distinguish clearly “Western” from other civilizations. Is he quite sure the Han didn’t experience something rather similar to the Greeks? Qin Shi Huang, First Emperor of China, I think mightn’t not have had some “political energy,” mightn’t he?)
And so it is with this bizarre Franco-German (for that is what it is, isn’t it? let’s not pretend that it is truly universal) concept which is called “modern.” Who can ever become modern? No one can, of course, except Freud, and that is the point, isn’t it? (But you can be sure that the French and the Germans were always more modern than the Irish and the Lithuanians.)
Technological progress is certainly something worth striving toward, but clearly that is not what is meant by “modern” in this context, isn’t it? The Tao Te Ching’s “unfilled vessel” mightn’t indeed serve well as a model for philosophicationisms upon political ideology that mightn’t appear in any number of learned journals, mightn’t it not? It mightn’t, mightn’t it? (Not…?)
“[Imperial Rome] seemed to reach the point of gathering together the entire human race” … as much as I enjoyed this type of concept as a high school Latin student, I think China and India would quite disagree, wouldn’t they? Do China and India exist in Manent’s world?
Perhaps modernity is in fact the record of the trauma of European imperialism encountering East Asian imperialism. France and Germany met their match, didn’t they? in India and China? Perhaps the wild relativism of “our” Schopenhauer and Nietzsche is the result of a clear-eyed look at an entire civilization that did everything quite differently? Modernism is Asiaticism? I think it actually might be!
September 15th, 2012 | 5:50 pm
“I want no part in being modern.”
You can say that, but how can you possibly avoid it? As a person living in the 21st century West, you already posses a historical sense and a self-awareness that your ancestors didn’t have, and you live in a manner more disconnected from the natural world than almost everyone in the past (today even a lower middle class American’s life is more materially well-appointed than a Carolingian king and even less tied to the land and production process which gave it to him). You are inevitably a participant in mass society, unless you live in a monastery or something similar, and your view of life (as mine) is above all conditioned by a conception of authority and a radical notion of equality that would have made no sense to most of human history. Heck, even your pronoun of choice belies the fact that you can’t just assert modernity to not exist and call it a day: “I.”
We can begin to grapple with what this means for things like religious faith, institutional endurance, and civilization’s direction (ie, is this state of affairs an advance or a degeneration?), and whether this phenomenon is truly global or peculiar to the West or maybe even “Franco-German.” Or, yes, I suppose we can simply ignore it. But unless you’re prepared to radically upend your existence by renouncing your membership in the nation-state and running into the nearest forest, I think I’ll default to Aristotle: Actions speak louder…
September 16th, 2012 | 2:11 am
The distinction to be made is between modern, that is up-to-date technologically, and modernism, that is an anti-beauty, heretical system of thought. (There is also another question as to whether subaltern [not to mention Asian] culture aren’t actually more modern, even in in sense one, due to more exacting evolutionary pressures. One does have to be more intelligent and situationally aware to survive in Englewood than in Evanston. But then again why do they remain subaltern?)
I’m not about to renounce my American citizenship, and retire to a lake isle of Innisfree (and not only because there are nowadays doubtless numerous EU regulations regarding inhabiting lake isles). I’m a little more sophisticated than that. (But, living in Chicago, not much. We still kill the old way.)
Really what I would want to ask is this: does the concept of “modern” as usually employed by Western Europe actually signify something in accord with authentic human progress? When the English came to Kerry, and when the Communists came to Vilnius, they were modern, undoubtedly, in some sense of the word, yes? And thus my annoyance with the Frenchman’s article: this idea that “we” are always trying to be more and more “modern.”
Again, modernity is not something I strive towards. Do please examine its etymology: it simply means “current.” It does not mean good, or proficient, or beautiful. I strive to be strong, intelligent, pleasant, and useful. I do not strive to be modern.
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