End Times
by Kenneth Smith
1. Y2K and the Conflict of Cultures
A PREFACE
Almost all who pass through our abattoirs of higher education get a thorough course in the philosophy of modern society, i.e., no philosophy at all. A meager handful, nagged by a suspicion that "philosophy" once entailed an agile mind and a mastery of vital issues, may wander into a philosophy course where they quickly abandon all hope, confirmed in the dominant academic narrowness, the art of thinking in a vacuum. Perhaps one philosophy course in hundreds engages the issues of deformed rationality, conscience and judgment afflicting modern life. For the modern academic is a civil servant keenly aware of the Invisible Hand that feeds him.
Perhaps three out of 30 philosophy students have lived lives of searching intellect, amassing a scrupulous vocabulary that does not capitulate to the mindless mimicry and unscrutinized equivocations of the Many. How few who absorb philosophy sufficiently to get advanced degrees and teach in it ever review in depth the literature that is not taught; and how few autodidacts ever master the principles that set the tone for entire modes of thinking. In philosophy, the irony is patent: the most elemental issues are the hardest.
Today a shallow and narrow intellectualism — the wretched academic counterfeit of philosophy, a nonnutritional curricular junkfood — argues that any attempt to think about principles is presumptuous and futile. Modern mentality, through these routinized intellectual technicians, has come to rule academia — once a pale emblem of Hellenic liberal education — just as its plagues have corrupted churches and synagogues, the residues of other millennia.
What human beings have conventionally taken as physical "elements" are not necessarily what Nature takes as elements; so too with the rudiments of thinking, understanding and evaluation. What are the essential principles determining the logic of how we think? Certainly for the majority, human intelligence is more plant than animal, a function of the societal matrix it remains rooted in. Human beings in every age and place are symptoms of the culture that nursed them and still bathes their minds. Few learn even to see, much less to master that culture. Even science is a symptom of self-unreflective modernism, skeletalizing, abstracting, disregarding context.
All science and all modern mentality wallow in perspectives or ideologies — -isms — at the same time they discourage intuitive diagnoses of these contortive preconceptual structures. Where culture and philosophy once organized for thinking minds these cells and organs of communal logic, today even professional thinkers — academics, Mensa mandarins, the hireling-mentalities of institutions — are grossly illiterate in these primal figures of thinking, shapes or gestalten that induce the world and ourselves to make a modernly preferred sense. Moderns are sheep led by the nose via these unreflected proclivities to see and think in exclusive ways. In antiquity, philosophy had to war only against those naive doxa or conformist public opinion; in modernity, philosophy confronts unholy alliances of one sophisticated -ism with another, ingenuous blocs of the organized forces and interest-groups of rationalization. Most modern mentalities are the property and pawns of collective historical organisms or idea-systems that make types or idealogues out of many who only imagine themselves individuated.
What, in the domain of ideas, thinking and values, are the ABC's for comprehending what we essentially are and fundamentally take for granted? What are the tones that commingle to make such ideological noise? How we think is governed by the unrecognized perspectival logic of a culture or civilization. What is the essential nucleus of each conflicting civilizational ideology? The primal trunk of each belief-system is treated for its own logic here, to make clearer the sense of the mongrel organism modernity is — or was.
Modern culture is strictly crazed, infiltrated by shards of ancient and medieval culture as well by its own perspectival factions. When we do not think reflectively about the significance or compatibility of these various fragments, they swim freely in and out of our minds like incoherent lenses through which we see a world of conflicting meaning. But when we do evaluate or philosophize about these perspectives — when we try to rise to self-conscious mastery of them — each one excludes and repels the others. Their incoherence militates against our philosophical sanity or whole-mindedness.
Cultures, civilizations, worldviews, ideologies, perspectives, by nature are negative charged to resist whatever challenges their own integrity and authority. Overlaid on top of this dynamic of opposition is a growing self-consciousness of the modern worldview which like all eras has discovered very gradually the actual or concrete implications of its primal logic. As primal logic has become more self-explicit and self-consistent, it has totalitarianized modern society, purging more and more radically the residues of ancient and medieval worldview, impacting not just religion and culture, but education, family, politics, personality-forms, and moral order. In the same way medieval Christianity censored and extirpated the traces of Greek philosophy and democratic values, even to the extremism of the Inquisition, torturing and executing those determined to think for themselves.
Modern ideology aborts true self-consciousness, its own abstractive false consciousness acting as a contraceptive against concrete or intuitive (existential) thinking. Modern order is singularly threatened in its rationality and truth — as well as its illusions and dementing delusions — by thinking. More thoroughly and systematically than any culture before it, modern order mass-produces slavish mentalities incompetent to think or reason, and punishes and suppresses thinking minds that cannot be trained into subservience to its biases and demands. Modern order thus imperils philosophical intelligence, and its technology and economic power for this coercion are awesome and insidious. Our society has made the control of motivation and interpretation into a practical science. To grasp what the millennium implies, we must first recapitulate our own evolution and momentum.
Crises make us feel more acutely the contingency or risk in how we live and what we take for granted; they make us feel, they puncture the illusion of a controlled world. Crises are scenarios of catastrophe, limit- or extreme situations, repressed nightmares come home to roost.
Moderns, trained by their culture to be void of feeling and to love nothing, love the idea of crises as brief flirtations with apocalyptic chaos. The millennium indeed promises an orgy of crises; that is its morbid fascination. A crisis seems to concentrate the significance of a life or history in one pregnant moment (synechdoche: a part made to stand for the whole), through which one can grasp what is otherwise diffuse. Not by its life but by its dying breath we comprehend almost in a capsule what our age was all about. A crisis (krinein, to judge or discriminate) is such a point of division: the forking of two radically different possibilities such as life or death, courage or cowardice.
And there is no dearth of crises: over a few weeks, the news has cast up the issues of militarist or terrorist rogue-regimes, of collapsing criminal or crony-capitalism in the Third World (and not merely there), of a volatile even hypochondriac stock market here and in Asia (where the Japanese stock market lost more than the entire value of the Russian economy), of the liability of insurrection in bled-white Russia and of the dispersion of black-marketed nuclear material and germ cultures; and of our own decaying urban infrastructure, our toxified environment, our extremized weather-patterns and strained natural resources, our peaking consumer indebtedness, our malcoordinated cybersystems. It is an orgasmic world for alarmists.
The odometer is close to rolling over in our chronometric civilization. Numerologists or other fetishists may be very excited, and religious millenarians may wax ecstatic at the imminence of God's hand, as if any human could know when the Playwright plans to wrap up this farce. But most are nested in routines that so far have given them little reason to care. The daily grind will be there still in 2007.
For the Chinese, Jews, and Arabs who base their calendars otherwise, Y2K is patently an ethnocentric issue, as if a people thought cosmic cataclysm would result from mispronouncing a word. As hyped, Y2K is plainly a conventional issue — artificial or fictitious — in a society no longer astute enough to discriminate such things from actual (natural or historical) issues. The problem of reprogramming clocks in CPUs makes graphic the modern tunnel-vision still customary even in highest-tech. We imprudently tied our systems of mass-coordination to such idiots savants as computers because the modern demand for mass-order knows no alternative. Congruent with our utterly artificialist worldview, we countdown to a rendezvous with a systemic problem entirely our own creation, estimated to cost three billion dollars to fix for the Pentagon alone. The elaborate and expensive modern house of cards — the interlocking systems implicated one in another, each of which is the whole universe to its functionaries — is imperiled by an insectival oversight, the myopic attempt of a previous generation of programmers to save a few bytes of memory. Moderns have inadvertently made the year 2000 a horizon for our systems of order: we suctioned out an abyss on its nether side, an expanse of unprevisioned repercussions. How pinheaded; how modern.
But in spite of such matters, moderns should care about the millenarian issue. They should care for reasons quite obscure to them, reasons of the philosophy of history or the philosophy of civilization in which we are implicated volens nolens. Y2K — more classically, MM, or as precisionists insist, MMI — has real historical import, although not in the terms our media allow. For our mongrel culture, its code of ultimate values or ethos cobbled together from selected religious motifs of two millennia ago and from the moral-political-philosophical forms of two and a half millennia ago, has long suffered recombinant conflicts of at least three primary cultural codes or civilizational languages. Greek aristocratism — now two millennia defunct among ruling societal principles but perennially cogent among individualists — has found itself quite often in strife with Christian plebianism and theocratic authoritarianism, structurally defunct for only half a millennium. Residues of both of these very different ethoi have been in pitched battle against modern scientism and its moral laissez-faire: our educational matrix, our professions, our hospitals and abortion clinics, our legislatures, our entertainment- and information-media, our language — indeed our very minds — are their battleground.
Normatively, in terms of what we ultimately respect and try to conform to, we are a polyglot-order stitched together from diverse sources like Dr. Frankenstein's science project: if we want a religious conscience, we obviously have to get it elsewhere than the worldview of modern science. If we want philosophical self-mastery and scruples about what we permit or oblige ourselves to believe, we obviously have to get these elsewhere than fideist and gregarious Christianity. Little wonder moderns are so destitute of philosophical intelligence: the sheer interference-noise of these incommensurable principles of "order" must be deafening if not maddening. "We are digging the pit of Babel," wrote Kafka: our heads are full of flotsam and jetsam because neither in a religious nor in a philosophical sense do we esteem the value of profound self-coherence. It is a building boom, a rush-hour in Babel — all the more fanatically, to drown out unsettling questions. We are swept up in a culture of busi-ness and in the pathetic lifestyles and mentalities that symptomize it. Not for nothing are moderns philosophically confused and intellectually self-distracted, to the point of making philosophy incomprehensible to them.
Modern society has known in the past great turbulence as the confluence of these cultural tributaries. We were indeed far healthier when we were more heterogeneous, moreso than now when scientism and economism have damped down our scope of self-comprehension: we have become more perfectly, more narrowly and more stupidly, modern — more myopic, politically orthodox (and manipulable), artificial, and provincial. Actual conflicts among these orders or cultural lineages and their core-paradigms are of course still present and potent, but our educational system and media deny moderns more and more stringently the resources for rising above our own eccentricities to a flexible and fluent understanding. Academia has become a factory complicitously shaping minds to be streamlined tools, not rich repositories of culture. Our naive proclivity to take problems, issues, crises, and perspectives "simply" — just as they "seem" to our selective intellects, cleanly excising them out of context — betrays us time and time again: as the Greeks and their heirs comprehended, nothing is ever truly understood in abstracto. "The truth is the whole," the orchestrated organic system into which component organisms have grown together on their own: so grasped Hegel in a famously contra-modern precept. The modern selectivity or abstractivism is a methodology and worldview primitively at odds with the truth of how nature, history, society, and personality essentially exist and evolve.
Teaching classical civilization and the history of philosophy for over a quarter of a century, I grew more and more suspicious of the modern self-congratulation. How can we imagine our way of life is the most perfect marriage of traditions that rose out of Athens and Jerusalem? We exemplify Hellenic values about as well as we practice Christian virtues: how ludicrous (as Nietzsche realized) for academics to pose as exemplars of Greek synthetic intelligence — and how absurd for parochial Christians, bereft of philosophical or aristocratic scruples and afflicted with their own know-nothing culture, to imagine they are competent to understand themselves or their manipulators. A canny — subtle and cosmopolitan — Christian is as scarce as a principled politician. Little wonder that mendacity and hypocrisy abound among putatively Christian societies as hardly anywhere else in the world. Ours is such a laminated civilization, one whose adhesives have grown brittle and opaque and whose disparate materials have long since split and warped apart. On modernity's meager gruel, how can we grow strong enough to see the withered limbs and fragile crutches we lean upon?
If we are the dual heirs to these premodern bounties, where is the actual patrimony? How ineptly we grasp the significance of the Athenian format for organizing life — "economy," "polity," "philosophy," — was argued demonstratively not just by Nietzsche and Arendt but by Hegel and Marx as well. What we are pleased to call Christianity, as Kierkegaard uncompromisingly showed, has more to do with the kiss of Judas than the truths of Jesus. And most profoundly, how can we imagine our shallow and mechanical educational curricula have successfully married what are inherently conflicting archetypes for reading the meaning of human existence? The ancient world saw burgeoning Christianity as the demented and pathetic contrivance of chaotic slave-minds; and Christianity saw that ancient culture and its philosophic ethos as the hybristic and impious sin of pride. Modern culture — science, capitalism, academicism, bureaucratism — fought wars along two fronts to divorce its own "secularity" and "enlightenment" from traditional values. Is there any evidence a civilization has ever subsumed another gracefully and rationally? Is it not transparent that these strategic "mergers" of one ethos with another are rather pogroms and Inquisitions, purges meant to suffocate intransigent spirits?
We have not resolved these warring principles; we have not even grasped their polemical preconceptions. We have "reconciled" nothing but rhetoric, by verbalist placebos that make a rootless people imagine itself the epochal fulfillment of the very march of human life across history. By no stretch of the imagination is modernity that. It is the Gobi Desert of cultures, whose pathetic creatures have adapted to subsisting on spiritual pittances. Our commercial culture and mercenary politics haven't a milliliter of moral truth between them, and our educational system is even more barren. In nihilist modernity, the very notion that human existence ought, for its own health and discipline, to be organized around values and principles of coherence is an industrial secret. Moderns expect scientifically to "discover" a life-purpose from without; or they expect Christianity to be steered by the Invisible and Inaudible; or they expect materialistically to capitulate to fluctuating tides of market-demand. Modernity has mass-produced the most perfect assemblage of soulishly and rationally hollow human beings, of personalities no longer natural slaves but rather scientifically cultivated slaves, alien to the very concept and language of values, conscience, moral obligation, scruples or other autonomous inner drives. Only moderns' failure to conduct searching conversation with one another prevents them from finding out how vacuous and cliché-ridden their fellows are, of what junk-food they have fashioned their mental sinews. Der Mensch ist, was er ißt — moderns are still what they eat, but what they eat makes them too stupid to grasp this metabolic reality.
What classicist Gilbert Murray wrote before WWI about the modern genius for routinization and mechanical mentality is still astute:
...The strong governments and orderly societies of modern Europe have made it infinitely easier for men of no particular virtue to live a decent life, infinitely easier also for men of no particular reasoning power or scientific knowledge to have a more or less scientific or sane view of the world.
Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Arendt were far less sanguine about a system that increasingly does the work of thinking for its mediocritized inmates. Typically modern functionalism says it all comes to the same whether individuals make themselves rational as individuals, or whether they are made rational by their institutions. Mass culture, mass markets, mass politics, mass education, all give evidence otherwise. It is (as I will argue later) also a typically modern dysfunction to be inept to look at the intrinsic or natural and intuitive powers of individuals. All else we look at abstractively; our own selves we know as augmented by peers, colleagues, courses, information media, and software packages. What are moderns in and of themselves, what is that vacuity of principles and values that should order their intelligence and priorities for them? Life in the absence of values is drift, depression, pathos, relentless moral ordeal: but from this realization moderns are well-shielded by the nihilist riches of the sciences of diversion and motivation. Every decade modernity marks the rise of younger and younger suicides and homicides; but the genius of our scientific "culture" is expressed by the proliferate use of commodities and narcotics to minister to life-crises on which facile modern culture offers no purchase. The same dysfunctional system of strategies for "better living" that caused the crisis in morale and self-mastery can thus profit from the sale of palliatives against it. A growth-industry and paradigmatic illustration of the predatory character of our "culture."
The Greeks comprehended what neither Christianity nor modernity has fully taken to heart: a civilization must be a form of discipline, but that discipline like any form has to be appropriate to the matter it is trying to harness. Ballet is contraindicated for the obese; thinking is not a fit pastime for the verbally impoverished; dealing with the public is not suitable for the intemperate. The Greek worldview respected organicism, the righteous fit of the matter (hyle or "timber") out of which something is fashioned and the form or role it is asked to play, just as an actor has to be well-cast for a part by a director with connoisseurial intuition. By no political alchemy is a nation traditionally subservient to a despot or padron going to elicit ex nihilo the motives and discipline requisite for democratic life and culture, no matter how much it may hate the vicious illiberalism it suffers under. A code of laws or constitution must reflect a people's profound sense of its own ethnic virtues and vices — a generic system of laws, such as the U.S.'s has clearly no morally binding force: fits all, fits none. Our laws merely facilitate the rationalizations of nihilists adept in circumventing those laws. We must know the inward chemistry of character — the intrinsic nature of humans — to know in what regimes or cultures they can be emplaced. But modernity has no such sense of concreteness, of an organic fit of form and matter: nowhere is this more patent than in what passes for religion, philosophy, art, and education among us — the manipulation in abstracto of ideas and languages, of Newspeak and psychobabble inept to serve as myth, medicine or revelation.
Christianity dismissed as irrational and rebellious the given or natural nature of man, and superimposed instead a higher spiritual essence demanding a more stringent code of self-denial (asceticism) than Greek aristocratism ever aspired to. Modern order believes it has transcended the spiritual as well as the natural — although it comprehends neither of these principles as their originator-cultures did — and with the aid of environing institutions has trained human beings to act "rationally" in spite of themselves. Is this a higher or a lower mode of behavior? Is modern culture, whose religion is economics and the sciences of persuasion and manipulation, progressive or regressive — expansive or reductive, liberating or enslaving, anabolic or catabolic? Moderns are trained to follow an emaciated "rationality" Weber called "this-worldly asceticism," the controlling mystiques of capitalism, consumerism, psychologism, and their sibling-ideologies that require their adherents to repudiate all that seems naturally or intuitively good.
By this displacement — intuitive or concrete values being now substituted by artificial and mechanical-functional ends that require (indeed tolerate) no self-culture or profundity — has the modern system proven itself truly practical and farsighted, or merely myopically ingenious in deluding itself about its own primal rationality? Are we in the busi-ness of edifying ourselves, building up a culture or civilization — or of parasitizing off of ancestral resources we are content to drain and decompose, conscripting them to barbaric purposes about which we refuse to be enlightened? Crises pose such ultimate tests.