End Times by Kenneth Smith   

16. Modern Civilization I

A. Pico's Dazzling New Myth: Protean Man

The Renaissance (rebirth) of classical culture, in which Pico della Mirandola was a major figure, began the hard work of warming back to life all the insights and values crushed under the medieval Ice Age. Instead of imposing dogmatic a-priorisms from above, thinkers began to wonder again about the inherent and organic order the human world contained in its own right. Absorbed for centuries within the Divine, the human, (but only as cast in a new a priori concept of its own) was indeed to be liberated for an epoch of exploration, experiment and exchange.

Moderns like to trace the paternity of their culture back to the introvertive Descartes and his strict methodology of doubt and analysis, but in truth it was Pico, nearly a century and a half earlier, who first drew the vision of a new world order into focus. This ingenious, eclectic neo-Platonist had a far more programmatic sense than Descartes of what moderns must deny themselves, not just faith or gullibility, but indeed any dependency on an order outside the human. Man must repudiate the authority of both God and Nature, but how and why can he do this? He must spin his world out utterly from his own willful potential, but how, in the face of the two dominant world-powers of Nature and God, can he bear such potency on his own? Man had to derive a world order from his own reason and will, his own all-mastering imagination. The New World Order is not just about some crabbed and claustral sense of internal "certainty" — the dubious Cartesian gospel of infinite methodological doubt, the imperative of critical intellect that all things must be subjected to doubt (de omnibus dubitandum est) but about freedom as well, perfect and entire autonomy: discovery of an inner domain of will where man is both God and Nature to himself, a principle not just a creature. Only secondarily did modernity evolve into an imperialism of the will over nature (over our own inner nature especially, the abyss of all abysses).

Neither revolutionary was very original: even moreso than Descartes, Pico had a magpie mind for bringing bright things back to its nest. His eclecticism expressed the pent-up hunger of a thinker desperate to understand the many perspectives and phenomena denied to the orthodox medieval; but Pico's mentality also displayed the tasteless juxtapositions typical of an era still without its own criteria of what is essential. He began his Oration on the Dignity of Man with the most laudatory exclamations on his subject, that no wonder of the world is "more marvelous than man" (Abdala the Saracen) and "what a great miracle is man" (Hermes Trismegistus). Pico did not cite the most renowned passage on this theme, the chorus from Sophocles' Antigone, perhaps because its author was not exotic enough, but also perhaps because there is something jarring within it:

Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these
Is man, who rides the ocean and takes his way
Through the deeps, through wind-swept valleys of perilous seas
That surge and sway.
He is master of ageless Earth, to his own will bending
The immortal mother of gods by the sweat of his brow,
As year succeeds to year with toil unending
Of mule and plough.

—(E.F. Watling. tr.)

The "greatest wonder" or "most wonderful" is far less adulatory in Greek: deinotaton describes what is most full of awe or causes the greatest apprehension (deinos = the root of "terrible lizard," dino-saur). Man is indeed capable of performing remarkable things, prodigies of nature and history; but only a fool would imagine these must inevitably play out as delightfully as self-infatuated man supposes. In the human species moral character forms a spectrum ranging from the most slavish to the most masterly, most natural to most contrarian. In animals, the capacity to act is organically related to the instinctual controls on what is desirable or worth doing; humans have such controls only insofar as they have cultivated virtues of prudence or wisdom. Among humans it is character and habit that make for the kind of predictability accounted for among animals by their nature or instincts. Without cultivated values and intelligence, man's power of action overwhelms his good sense, his judgment, conscience and previsioning of consequences. Pico was the first writer to strike a distinctively modern keynote of myopic intoxication with man's sheer proficiency and versatility. It is the infinite permutability and plasticity of man's purposes and actions, his subjective liberation or capability of creating or becoming virtually anything whatsoever, that enthralled Pico. This infinitization or arbitrarialization of norms and purposes is not at all (as moderns blithely imagine) man's "natural" or original metaphysical situation; on the contrary, it required neutralizing at the very root all traditional and natural claims on man's judgment and conscience, undoing all that antiquity and medieval thought believed about the factors that make us human.

Pico extolled the "preeminence of human nature," man's uniqueness among all kinds of beings, and remarked that no writer had ever satisfactorily expressed or explained this preeminence. Man is an anomalous being, exceptional beyond his own comprehension of how or why this can be so. All the incongruities and incommensurabilities of the world meet in man as "the marriage hymn of the world." Pico fashioned his own mythos to account for man's singularity. He supposed that the Creator doled out to every creature the powers or properties appropriate to its specific shape of life, but wanted to endow Man with reasons galore to praise His generosity. All other beings had distinctive gifts, the aretai or talents that the Greeks took as the instinctual currency of Nature. Man's distinction would lie not in any particular trait but in his privileged status as the consummation of all potential: "...The Supreme Maker decreed that this creature, to whom He could give nothing wholly his own, should have a share in the particular endowment of every other creature." Man would be a microcosm, a full-spectrum concentration of all powers for action and growth. Other species have simple natures seeded in them from birth; man is a pomegranate containing whole worlds within his "nature," i.e. his remarkably unnatural nature as the "chameleon" of Nature.

We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may with premeditation select, these same you may ... possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature.

The "nature" of animals makes them finite; man's makes him to be a universal, infinitizing or expansionary being. The "nature" of animals controls them by assigning definite needs that tyrannize them, driving their actions like an inner goad. Man's "nature" is complexly determinable, not determinate; his distinctively human needs are not the principles that dominate him but the consequence of his determinations of will. Animals'"natures" are their laws of unfreedom, but man's is his principle of self-responsibility. As a creature he was left unfinished, his most vital factors to be self-architected. He alone is a self-specifying being, training himself by culture and education to the mastery animals are already attuned to by instinct. So runs modernity's gospel of radically artificialist humanity, essentially self-driving will. The Greek concept of diversified human natures, the character-types ramified into ancient caste-order, decayed into an intellectualized, Alexandrian pseudoscience of astrology. The superstition or irrationalism that was systematized in this way was an attempt to answer a perplexing but rational question: How and why are human beings conceivably so diverse? Why do eccentricities, neuroses and perspectivisms so proliferate among us? Is there any "science" of rules for interpreting the motives and purposes of humans, rendering them somehow predictable or readable? Pico did not recur to Greek characterology as Aristotle or others knew it, but drew crude analogies from across the spectrum of nature and culture:

Upon man ... God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being: if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there, [having] become one spirit with God ... Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures.

Pico had extravagant concepts of man's potential for promotion: not only is there no such thing in his vision as ultimate defining human nature but neither is there a fated human condition. Humans were encouraged to deify or apotheosize themselves, to shed their humanity with their humility and join divinity in the sacred realms above. Prey to his own rhetoric, Pico was hoist by his own petard. To him man is not merely Protean, a metamorphic being of many guises, but is infinitely transformable down to his essential structures. Nothing is denied man, even the metaphysical rank of God. The Greeks took it as fated that man was an incurable mortal, a member of a race of ephemeroi who at best might hope to be "immortalized" by memorialization for heroism or excellence; Christianity thought a benevolent God might confer "life everlasting" on His good servants and grace them for their faith; but Pico supposed man might indeed become God. Moderns may indeed have ceased to believe in God, even to comprehend what He once truly meant; but that does not mean God has become utterly useless. Some aspects of divinity remain useful for man to arrogate, to flatter and propagandize for himself in his imperialist warfare against nature. So man now takes himself to be the supreme judge, the omnipotent arbiter over his own life. Life and action no longer require compromise with extrahuman powers. The technocomplex of science and economy drives toward usurping God's authority as Creator, rehabilitating a defeated natural order more to man's liking and profiteering.

Countless moderns believe fervently they can do or become "anything," but they remain oblivious to the reasons why this fundamental craving for license was instilled in modern self-understanding in the first place. Their self-obscurity is unfortunate because the civilization that undertook to live out and evolve the logic of that premise is now bankrupt as a culture because of it, and cannot afford any longer for its inmates to gain a subversive philosophical understanding of its way of life. Pico accomplished something prodigious and rhetorically narcotic: even today, he so pumps up the ego of his readers that, under his hypnagogy, they think not at all about the cracks he glosses over or the vicious consequences he paints in a grand flourish as virtues.

For centuries before him, human will had been taken as a "muscle" ingeniously and subtly inserted into the skeleton of the natural order; i.e., another organ within the human organism. Natural order served as a fulcrum on which pivoted the order man made. Humanity and (to us) its innermost dynamic principle of will were locked into analogical and mythical relations to nature; the ancients spun mythoi and the ethos of religion, polity and drama just for the sake of curtailing the hybris of abstracted will, rupturing its delusions. They knew little of abstracted reason save that of the sophists, whose mentality was as obscure and viscous as Oedipus'. To Aristotle, the Logos that sets man apart from animals is the artful or intuitive ability legein or the "gathering" genius to fashion wholes as nature does, whether as houses, sentences, states, or other constructions. Man is an organizer, as Nature itself is an organizing principle, a regime of organicism. To the ancients, man did not have to sever himself from nature to be rational or volitional. Indeed how could he, since nature runs through the very veins of his personality? Pico however seized on a premise to the contrary, the ordinal difference that sets multifarious man apart from naturally simplist animals.

Pico invented modern identity. He first articulated its demonisms, its ultimate prepossessions; before him arbitrary will erupted and flowered only in the Sophists' cult of licentiousness. What moderns suppose is the quintessence of human nature from time immemorial is in truth Pico's insidious genius. To moderns finitude must be a vice and infinitude a virtue; moderns cannot tolerate the authority of Nature or of Divinity over them, and will destroy anything, the planet, their own lives or minds, to prove they can do with impunity whatever they like. Moderns think nothing can conceivably be higher or more imperative than the release of their free subjectivism as arbitrarial wills; in the guise of "individualism" they have perpetrated a civilizational code or "ethos" of radical self-indulgence, of laissez-faire, and whatever is done in its name is sacrosanct (whereas needs and rights of nature and humanity are merely pathetic shortcomings, disadvantages in the bloodsport of modern economy and politics). Every expression and form of authority have been smashed by moderns as monstrosities redolent of "ancient" and "medieval" ways (terms moderns can use only in revulsion and contempt, all the moreso the less they comprehend what they might even be talking about). Necessarily, because of its basal orthodoxies, modernity had to abolish every inkling of the authoritative perspective on things whether aristocratic or divine, because all authority as such is incompossible with the very notion of licentious or arbitrary will. As moderns are conditioned viscerally to think of "will," either it must be profoundly sovereign and self-authorizing or else not a will at all: fundamentally moderns are anarchist in their premises, inept to see or think discriminatingly about the nuances of difference between conditional liberty and absolutist license. They are "anarchist" not as ancient aristoi were, determined to be stringently self-mastering and self-culturing, but as ancient douloi and banausoi were, too idiotist in their appetites and too mesmerized by materiality to be told anything. In its very concept arbitrarial will must be suprematist, sovereign, viciously competitive to rise above its fellows: it must drive faster, carn and own more, muster the whole regime of materialist goods to prove its uniqueness and superiority and to command the respect of the appetitively or consumptively crippled. This is of course not respect; it is merely envy. Nor is it superiority, but merely the notion mediocre mentalities have of what excellence ought to be. And it certainly is no sort of uniqueness: millions upon millions all across the modern world are infected with the same generic obsession, to assert a delusory self-importance for their impoverished selves by conspicuous consumption of luxuries. Such wills are in no way sovereign over the world; they are purely symptoms of a world-order they cannot begin to master a fortiori, for they cannot even master their own delusions and appetites. The drive of modern personality to modulate itself into dictatorial Ego is identical with the disintegration of community and society, of course: for one ego-center to coexist in parity with another ego-center is (as Sartre has argued) viscerally intolerable. Even within the modern family others must be used, deceived, exploited.

In antiquity, civilization took the form of moral-political communities, "societies" founded on mutual values and basal friendship (societas, socius). Modernity knows only asocial forms of society, masses collectivized by default and individuals alienated from those masses by character (most often, also a kind of default). Moderns are possessed by demonisms that allow them to imagine themselves happy only as billionaire-hermits, sole proprietors of desert islands or fortress-estates. This isolationism or moral solipsism, — an incapacity to believe in the density, complexity or seriousness of others' existence, — expresses itself not just in epidemic privatism and withdrawn consumerism (hoarding, "cocooning") but also in the whole character of modern political-moral mentality as self-interestedness. Modernity is a mode of civilization that has burned out of its personality any actuality of praxis, of education, persuasion, search for insight and culture: "culture" forms of understanding and value deeper than ego is competent to imagine in abstracto is to moderns merely something that other people expect of them, and worst of all those others expect it in their role as "authorities." Culture is thus doubly doomed in modernity. For the same reasons the plight of education in modernity, with all the idiotizing and materialist forces of modern ideology arrayed against it, must be profoundly hopeless. Barely three students out of a class of a hundred may be truly salvageable from the life of banal and consumerist slavishness that awaits the average modern.

There are modernly no such things as non-negotiable or absolute terms of existence drawn from Nature or Divinity; the only absolute is the inner urgency of our cultural fetishism or idolatry of self-designing will. At the core of this self-uncomprehending will lie of course all the vices of idiotia and the unctuous self-delusoriness of sophistic intellect which the Greeks briefly managed to hold back by the dikes of aristocratic values; but among us, most people have not even a suspicion such viruses might be vicious. Moderns love their psychoactive "culture," the narcotic splendor of infinitude as an Olympian ether with which ideological and rhetorical drugs infuse the self. Moderns are not able to divide their stupefied souls against themselves as Greek aristocratism demanded, participating in life and culture with one intuitive eye while they rendered scathing criticism against what they took for granted with the other. Self-mastery is not possible without such self-division. Moderns thus become the simplistic creatures of their own creatures, the pathetic dependents of the systems they have spun and marked with the modern family-scent. Modern writers, artists, musicians, politicians and clergy today tell the soporific masses what they most want to hear, reassure them in the most familiar terms of the lies that make our Many the most docile and manageable herd in history. Whoever thinks it might be fun to rub the herd the wrong way stirs them up a little but only to curry them again the right way, to round things off with another lullaby to soothe and drowse them. Who cannot see how the modern cattleyards work, and how well-rewarded the drovers are and what the ultimate fate of cattle tends to be?

Not even collectively are humans omnipotent: their settlements are defeated by floods, droughts, storms, pestilence, not to mention demoralization, addiction, crime, organized greed or corruption. Along the Mississippi floodplain or California coastline, families have been ruined only to insist on returning: not only are the ravages of nature uncontrollable by us, but so are our own habits, appetites and culturally ingrained notions of our entitlements and preferences. Moderns have not mastered all the forces in the world; even those factors most intimate to them, — their sexual urges, trained ideologies, and so-called "values" have become as implacable to them as the earth itself. Even where the socially ecocidal destructiveness of massive profit has been unmasked, billionaires and corporations cannot cease doing what they have done for ages. To find even one such as George Soros who could turn the market-mania off like a lightswitch is truly striking. It is not actual omnipotence that the modern complex has imbued humans with, of course; it is merely a subjective compulsion to see oneself and one's world in a peculiar way. Moderns suffer from an induced craving, a campaign to defy natural order, to react with blind hostility against being told they cannot. The truth is, this incoherence is quintessentially modern, we can organize political will and technology >only for the sake of what is unprecedented, virtually "impossible."Only what can prove our near-omnipotence can fire up our ambition. Lacking the discriminating intelligence that philosophy and culture alone make possible, moderns cannot differentiate this compulsiveness, in truth an unfreedom, the very opposite of a form of mastery, from "freedom." Such self-obtuseness makes humans manipulable en masse by rhetoric. No dementia is too incoherent to be fervently believed; it only has to be married to an appropriately slavish mentality. Without culture man's "ideas" are mere manias, blind and irrational as any instinct.

The Greeks understood well kairos, the critical or most apt time to do or say what must be done or said. But most moderns never wake up to moral urgencies, the obligatory issues and decisiveness of life. For moderns neither God nor Nature exists, there can be no Judgment Day or even Seedtime and Harvest within the personality: moderns have a license to sleep their way through life, to avoid forever every unsavory and discomforting kind of realization, to extend adolescence, childhood or even infancy indefinitely. Moderns imagine themselves infinitely rich with possibilities but in actuality are impoverished procrastinators, lacking the very ignition, the fire of values, which is the existential piquancy of life. What moderns call "life," their miserable efforts at "staying alive" is the pathetic withering of the true energies of life. Wilde's insight grows truer with every new wave of modernization: what is tragic is not that men die but that something dies within them and still they have to live on. Yes, we know life is short and issues deserve our attention; but later, later, when we might really be up to it. Kierkegaard described this self-seduction aptly in The Sickness Unto Death, how on first impulse we see what ought to be done, but then think we will let this dish cool a bit, until the will wonders how it likes this imposition on its freedom; until the obligation becomes one more item in the world disposable for our desires.

The letter of how moderns routinely "live" triumphs thus over the spirit of essential and natural personality, mendacity over authenticity. Supposing themselves to have been "liberated," moderns have merely been evacuated of every meaningful value by which they might direct their lives toward substantial fulfillment and activity. Their "liberation" is merely their freedom to be addicted to having the market do for them what they can no longer do for their own selves, acquire understanding, communicate, imagine, feel satisfied or normal, get sexually gratified. An army of uniformly inertialized and conditioned modern minds accommodates every displeasing contrarian insight to its accultured preconceptions, which reassure it that this passivity is "life," this indifference is "individuality" and "freedom," this cloying closed room is the "only possible" domain of "all conceivable values." Around Pico's innovation, the infinitude of a non-natural will that has been made radically vacuous or abstracted, and thereby paralyzed, the incommensurabilities of the modern worldview revolve. Its sharply defined but extravagant dream of a prerogative of untrammeled freedom, expressing the essence of absolutized Ego, is imbedded in the mechanized reality of a heteronomously controlled mass to whose pathos vast industries of stimulants, depressants, euphorics, and escapist fantasies have to minister. Orwell is correct: in a way that must seem paradoxical to the superficialized modern mentality, the distinctively modern freedom is truly one and the same with its distinctively systematized slavery. Every purportedly "democratic" election stirs to prominence again the ludicrous self-incoherence of ideologized slave-minds who could not think at all if they weren't fed clichés and a party line. Moderns believe they have an infinitude of free options but have once again had a "forced choice" thrust upon them by an engineered system of subjective controls.