End Times by Kenneth Smith   

15. Modernity as a Revolution

I. The Divorce of Abstract and Concrete

Millennia ago the earth seemed as stable underfoot as the heavens overhead. Both seemed to be firmaments that could be taken for granted as absolutes; indeed they were seen as divinities, superordinate powers that impinged on the human world. Today their religious and moral value has changed utterly, and with it also our perception of them or relation to them: the fact that we do not feel the earth's axial, orbital and galactic movements we now discount as merely a trick of our senses, a natural illusion. Not just in physics and astronomy but in all modern disciplines we expect that what we intellectually know will be profoundly divorced from what we feel, and this disjunction has had revolutionary effects in freeing society up not just for revolutions in science and technology but also for commercial predation, totalitarian regimentation, the despoliation of the earth, and ubiquitous campaigns of persuasion, mendacity and manipulation. By means of this divorce or schizoid mentality moderns have let themselves be organized into economic and ideological armies — symptoms of the modern regime or system of powers — while continuing to imagine personally that they are free and fulfilled individuals.

Such premodern natural illusions or intuitivisms may be indeed intrinsic to our human condition and human nature; but the most significant reconditioning work of the modern age has been to disengage or abstract its mentality from these natural tendencies to interpret and to believe in certain ways. It demands a kind of critical or intellectualized distance from those prescientific appearances, truly a thoroughgoing contempt for the natural or intuitive point of view, including conscience, values, sympathy, natural needs. In every field educated or professionalized moderns, under the tutelage of academics as the high priests of the modern worldview, learn to indifferentize themselves toward childish, i.e. unprofitable and naive, ways. Moderns, as moderns, are expected to "know better" than to let themselves be gulled by what is naively accessible to their senses or their subintellectual intuition and "common sense." Modernity is the epoch of a peculiar critical culture, a negativism or nihilism toward all that was taken for granted in past millennia — with respect not just to physics and biology but of course also to culture, art, literature, myth, psychology, philosophy, and all the other concrete modes in which humans have lived and thought. Modernity prides itself on being a domain of "free thinking" because it has disencumbered its denizens of traditional preconceptions, or so it supposes; but its greatest source of irrationalism lies in the reality that its "liberation" and "critical intelligence" have been propagated merely as orthodoxies and ideologies, not as concretely thought-through philosophies or individually digested culture. The abstractivist "truths" by which the modern order conceives the human and natural worlds are ultimately not universally or uniformly spread around but are, rather, jealously guarded strategems among the privileged and worldly wise. Select residues of "faith" and "naivete" — obliviousness to what is actually what in the organizing dynamics of modernity — are preserved as vital to maintaining stable ideological control over mass populations. Only the castes or guilds in which money and power concentrate are inducted into the Machiavellian mysteries of how to exert control over people in the absence of traditional moral, political or religious forms of authority, i.e. how to grow rich and powerful in virtue of other people's illusions and one's own sophistic disillusionment or amoralization. Classic philosophical and religious issues are, needless to say, far more germane to modern life than moderns are conditioned to imagine; but these issues and the intelligence they nurture are also more subversive to modern order, and so are discouraged by an "educational" system whose priorities run quite otherwise.

In the modern world what makes sense or seems to be the case or is meaningful to our senses has been systematically — a priori — discredited. Just as Christians knew that their Savior and their Saints had suffered and died to atone for their sins, so moderns believe that skeptics, experimenters and heretics once took on themselves the costs of doubting that made modern freethinking possible; now we can pass "critical intelligence" along as if it were an inert family heirloom, a mere attitude or presumption that does not require moderns to exercise or cultivate or earn it. Modern life in cultural and ethical terms is a stripped-down or minimalist way of living that has been described by sociocultural historians as "functionalism" or "economism," the triumph of the system of means over autonomous human intelligence, a societal format purged of all reflection and perspectives that detract from efficient productivity and megalomanic profiteering. Moderns, eager to make themselves employable as utensils, at their core have thus become sophisticated simpletons, civilizational and cultural parochials. They need not know any of the details or understand why, but they may sense vaguely that in order to make the eight-lane expressway of modern hyperactivity possible, countless settled and assumed ways of believing had to be blasted out of the way. It is administratively better if moderns know as little about these matters as possible.

Onetime "natural illusions" have come to be deposed by wholly artificial delusions, the multifarious ideologies that qualify moderns to be considered "rational," that is, utilitarian, self-serving in the face of a mechanized universe that controls virtually all of what they eat, read, think about, want or hope for, are appetized by or fantasize about. It controls them most especially in their delusions of having free choice, of belonging to an essentially "democratic" polity and an economy that exists ultimately for the sake of "satisfied" consumers. The natural illusions to which human beings are liable extend far beyond the issues of the physical sciences, and of course even though more potent, contrived and superordinate ideologies have triumphed over them, those illusions remain in force as generators of psychological energy. Natural illusions have been transfigured into distinctively modern -isms, that is, culturally formatted and interpreted modes of perspectival organisms. Egocentrism and idiotism, materialism, and hundreds of other perspectival and ideological orthodoxies qualify as natural illusions, the microbial flora of our subliminal personality that bloom afresh every generation; these have not been uprooted but merely ignored, paved over, by most moderns, overlooked as the blind spot at the back of their mind's eye. Indeed, these intellectual pathoi or unthought-about liabilities of thinking (presuppositions, preconceptions) are today scrupulously gardened and nourished for the advantages they offer to the powers who organize, steer, and exploit the biases and stupefactions of the Many. In the course of imbibing the particulars that modern education wants to convey to them, students also contract from peers, media, siblings, teachers, parents, etc. attitudinal forms of thinking to which they are quite oblivious. Characteristically, individuals are blind to those attitudes they presently inhabit, and see these things only in the tones and postures of others. Distinctively modern culture is everywhere an opportunistic parasite on those more natural orientations, steering them toward its own purposes and resolutions.

II. Self-mastery, Culture and Skepticism

Ancient mythos-culture taught the nuances and lawfulness of the human condition, how to swim in the floodtide of life: taught humans both to despise their finitude, their rootedness in life and its passions and delusions, and also how to evaluate it and transcend it for the sake of their higher intelligence. Freedom is earned. Striving to rise out of dark and cloying depths, to breathe freely and see clearly, all humans have a fated task of overcoming the raw materials of life and psyche — mastering these lest they be entangled and smothered by them, and their minds be forever darkened. No one utterly escapes the arcane forces of this earth, but with enough effort one can ascend to a circumspect or Olympian overview on them. That esteem for self-won, always-embattled distance — that freedom for the sake of strategizing, of a proper sense of proportion or a well-orchestrated evaluation, the cool head that goes with heights and vistas — is the quintessence of aristocratism. As Greek form is wedded to matter to make an organic union, so its Apollonianism of culture mastered and merged with the Dionysianism of passions.

In man too all things flow, and nature loves to hide. Greek aristocratism sought by its myths, philosophy, drama, and politics to teach the deceptive covert currents of human nature to anyone subject to them — the treacherous undertow of self-delusion, the rapids of emotional intoxication, the Scylla and Charybdis of extremisms. Greek culture also taught relentless struggle against the forces of sedimentation or inertia by which humans eventually get trapped in their self-formed habits, their lethargy — their acquired, cultivated pathos, compounding their natural pathos — of accustomed perspectives and phraseology. The human condition is both freighted with perils and rich with the seeds of cultivated insight. Rather than each individual beginning all over from scratch — "reinventing the wheel" — culture, language, ethics, and religion should enable generation to transmit to generation the quintessential wisdom by which humans have trained themselves to despise what is vicious and illusionistic, and to hone their discriminatory wits for what is valuable and perennial.

For culture is the remarkable human genius for concentrating lives into ideas, for essentializing experience into philosophy, for enabling vicarious and microcosmic learning so that not every individual needs to commit every myopic and self-destructive vice in order to learn firsthand that stupidity is after all stupidity. It is ultimately something tyrannically stupefying to be tastelessly curious, to make stupid experiments in stupidity, to indulge in and finally to immerse oneself in the amniotic liquor of idiotist obtuseness. Culture, for those who appreciate its value and are committed to discipline themselves to see and extract the potential in it, is indeed wisdom in a capsule, the confluent judgments and insights of infinitely many lives available to anyone with the acumen to reach for it, distil it and reanimate it with his own imagination and judgment.

Hellenic aristocratism just like its Gods has an archetypally contemptuous attitude; it looks down on all that is lower, dull, dense, inert, all attitudes devoid of grandeur and excellence because they are always the fools of the moment. Raw appetites are a natural narcotic, both for Hellenism and for Christianity; stupid humans not only want what they want but want to be told what they want to hear, and in their self-stupefactions they are endlessly ineducable and reiterative, like a dog with a frisbee. Appetites are the masters to which natural slaves are in the first place slaves, the chains by which human masters in the second place take control over those who cannot control themselves. The Greeks believed that a society endowed by nature with sufficient aristic personalities could humanize and civilize the condition of slaves and drones — as indeed Athens was world-renowned for, dressing and treating slaves no different from free — but to "abolish" slavery one must abolish slavishness, and no society has such power. Those who can set themselves apart, in such degree as they can, should labor morally and culturally to escape from the brutish self-opacity that makes man the most suffering — most self-afflicted —

Christian spiritualism like Hellenic aristocratism sought to put barriers between righteous souls and the primitivism of crude human nature. Christianity's message of salvation is significantly different not in how it sees the human condition but in the remedy for it: the human species can be saved from itself in spite of itself, in spite of being immired in soul-poisoning pathos and an imperial world-order that understands not just how to take advantage of that pathos but how indeed to make an ironclad system of it, like the fitted stones in a battlement. Not some, not a few, but all can be saved; and not by their own efforts but on the contrary, by their utmost declaration before God of their moral and spiritual bankruptcy. So believed Christianity. The Greeks knew appetitivism was a form of hybris and a vice or pathos, and so was egocentrism or idiotism, even in someone otherwise an aristocrat. But Christianity declared aristocratism itself a hybris in toto, finite man attempting to do for himself what only God's radiant powers could do.

When Christianity taught humans to despise and transcend their lower and self-strangulating selves, however, it meant the life of politics and culture as well, the entire vita activa of praxis, the self-cultivation for the sake of which all ancient aristic souls lived. That was the potent message of "taking no thought for the morrow," of "letting God provide": a spiritual life was one lived in faith and trust. The ancient world had known finite and rather remote Gods, who "take care of those who take care of themselves," that is to say, who respect the natural impulse toward autonomy and competence as nature has implanted it in every kind of creature; this world-order runs itself according to its own natural justice and does not require the intervention of higher rationality. But Christianity's God was immense and intimate and meant to crowd in upon every human's most inward deliberation and concern. From radical self-responsibility — the vital precept of being made in imago Dei — this religion had turned around to espousing childlike innocence, the gentleness of the lamb whose very life is placed in the hands of a shepherd; this religion recommended a naive release from the cares and fears through which this world dominates its inmates. Against the ancient matrix of culture, meant to draw humans up to their maximal autarkia or competence for self-rule, Christianity initially reared a new mode of domination which was primarily moral rather than political. But it also propagated a system of coordinated and symphonic "culture" of sorts, an "ethos" that taught passivity and acceptance, profound, self-complacent and even soporific optimism about a world whose God was its Cosmocrator, the ruler of the world, the pilot at its helm. The triumph of Christian culture was complete when its very concept of life and reality made it thoroughly incredible that such a thing as injustice, evil and undeserved suffering might exist at all. God is benevolent and omnipotent; His regime is sovereign. His power unchallenged; so this can only be the "best of all possible worlds." Q.E.D. The inference drawn from God's all-masterful reign: to doubt or question it must be sinful and evil. Culture has then become merely swaddling clothes for mankind, a tight binding meant to reassure a newborn that it was still in the womb — meant to convey the pointlessness of struggle, the fatality of being fastbound.

The hope of radically enclosing all thinking and understanding within the framework of medieval theology was dashed by the most extreme developments in that theology itself, the extremist Christian sense of the ultimacy or infinite remoteness of God that refuted at last any prospect of human competence for knowing or grasping the essence of God. The Church's authority, like any form of authority, was at its peak when it did not have to do work or overcome resistance, i.e. when it did not need to be employed: when doubt was precluded a priori, when shame at even having questions was paramount. But the more authority must labor to quell insurgency, the more ineffective its methods and indeed the more brutal its motives are revealed to be. Doubt does breed insidious and subversive possibilities, but the desperate and vile measures of a supposedly spiritual paternalism to maintain control over human affairs prove to be that authority's own worst enemy. Against the conflagration of heretics and the open military suppression of devout groups such as the Cathars, the self-righteous official rhetoric of the worldly-all-too-worldly Church looked thinner and more pathetic the oftener it was resorted to. A deluded apparatus eventually disabused others of its illusions, even if it remained unfree to see and move past them. The whole medieval epoch, its order no longer informed by the energy of its founding values, began to feel like a moldy suit that needed to be sloughed off.