The Crisis of Modernity
by augusto del noce
translated by carlo lancellotti
mcgill-queens, 336 pages, $110
There is no greater ideologue, nor any more earnest in his self-delusion, than the pragmatist who thinks he is free of ideology. Our liberal elite is full of people whose unshakeable confidence in their own correctness relieves them of the burden of self-knowledge. Yet pragmatism is the milieu in which we all now live, move, and have our being, the horizon beyond which we cannot see. To apprehend this, we need the perspective of an outsider.
This perspective comes to us in The Crisis of Modernity, a posthumous collection of essays composed between 1968 and 1989 by the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce. Del Noce was remarkably prescient, anticipating the eventuality of same-sex marriage when such things were barely whispered among the avant-garde. He was perhaps the first to grasp that we live in a technological society dominated by scientism and eroticism. Each disdains the natural order, reducing the environment and the human body to mere instruments. Del Noce’s metaphysical assessment of scientism and the sexual revolution provides a much-needed corrective to the American tendency to treat these problems discretely, and in the latter case, moralistically, but his real genius lies in recognizing the political form that these great changes assumed.