Two Faces of Modernity

Enlightenment, good and bad

Was [the] epoch-making break with the classical and Biblical traditions…actually justified, or was it a mistake?

-Michael Anton

A popular anecdote has it that, when the subject of the French Revolution came up in conversation between Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger, Zhou said that it was ‘too early to say’ what its effects had been. Sadly, because it makes the anecdote much less interesting, it seems that, although he did use those words, he was actually referring to the disturbances of 1968. But the apocryphal version remains thought-provoking. Almost 250 years on, we still don’t have sufficient distance from the French Revolution to be able to conduct a clear assessment of its consequences, if we take it in the symbolic sense as one of the main emblems of the passage from pre-modernity to modernity as such. Has modernity - the process of Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution - been a good or bad thing for humanity, overall? Answer: we don’t know yet.

I was reflecting on this matter while listening to a recent interview with John Moynihan, on the Brendan O’Neill show, concerning the subject of growth. I like Moynihan and I like O’Neill; the conversation is entertaining and thought-provoking; the book Moynihan has written, which concerns the subject of the interview, sounds great. But the conversation illustrates nicely the problem we have in understanding what the course of modernity has really been all about. This is because both Moynihan and O’Neill only have a partial conception of that subject, and this leads them to misunderstand its effects and, ultimately, to adopt a futile position - that what we are experiencing in the incipient civilisational decay we see around us is a kind of blip or bump on the road, and what we need is to ‘return’ to Enlightenment values of reason, rationality, progress, and so forth.

This argument is futile because all of the problems which Moynihan identifies (economic stagnation, demographic crisis, a bloated state which gobbles up the productive economy, ever-expanding regulation of society, paternalism, and so on) are in fact themselves consequences of Enlightenment. They are the products of modern government. And this means that they cannot be remedied within the paradigm of modernity, the story of which the Enlightenment was simply a chapter. They will only be remedied, and can only be remedied, through the passage beyond modernity itself. Discussing what we ‘need’ to do is in this sense pointless - except at the level of preparation for the inevitable - because our interest can only really be in what will happen as modernity plays itself out.

To get down to brass tacks: modernity as such is a phenomenon of disenchantment, as Weber famously put it, in the sense that while the medieval mind understood the world as spiritual, the modern age is defined by an understanding of the world as temporal or physical. Because this is the case, of course, modernity has given rise to ‘science’ as we now understand it, and thereby a conceptualisation of the world as something that it is within our power to improve. And - I am putting this very superficially, but not I think misleadingly - the result has been the extraordinary accomplishments of physical improvement that make our lives immeasurably materially better than those of people living in 1450, from electricity to penicillin to mass-produced toilet paper.

But on the other hand, modernity has also been an intellectual and political project, and with the demise of the spiritual understanding of the world has come a corresponding demise of the spiritual understanding of politics. Modernity dictates that there is no (explicitly) theological aspect to government - government’s only concern is the world and our relationship to it. And this has meant that, particularly since the Enlightenment, the political project of modernity has become the achieving of ‘progress’, meaning improvements in the material and moral conditions of mankind - making the world, literally, better.

This has transformed the nature of government, because it has precisely given rise to the task of governing as such. Where the medieval sovereign ideally ruled by giving effect to a system of laws which reflected natural right, modern government ideally rules by improvement. And it has to do this because that is in the end the only way that it can legitimate itself; secular rule definitionally cannot point to God for its justification, and can only thereby point to the world itself and the purported necessity of in some way making it better as reasons why government should exist.

This, as I have previously tried to show, has a necessarily totalising effect. Modern government is always groping towards the complete unity of state of society, because it concieves precisely of the task of government as lying in relation to the world, and therefore accepts no limit on its own purview. It governs, and is always driven to govern more, because it must: this is why it exists. Lacking any spiritual dimension to politics, the exercise simply becomes a matter of demands for the State to do more, and there is no logical or principled end point to that process.

So while people may have an instinct that it would be better it the State did less, and while there may be brief periods where it is made to do very slightly less (as in the UK in the 1980s), because there is no theological or spiritual limitation on the expansion of state authority and the scope of its interests, any objections are always: a) temporary, and b) unprincipled, i.e., having to be made within the framing of modern government and accepting its premises. So, for instance, the argument is almost never made successfully that the State should do less just because on principle it should not do x, y or z; instead the only successful arguments made for limiting State action derive from a claim that doing less is in fact doing more (for instance, by diminishing the role for the State in the economy there will be more growth and hence material improvement). The critique can only take place within modernity’s predicates. And this means such critiques only ever have limited and brief success if at all.

Modernity, then, has without doubt brought with it the necessary intellectual and philosophical framing within which great material prosperity was made possible, but it has also always had buried within it the seed of the complete unification of the State and the world. This can be meant quite literally in the form of emerging world government, of course, but it can also be meant much more ‘prosaically’ and mundanely in the coverage of every aspect of human life by State power - from the economy, to health and education, to the family, to sex, and in the end even to the soul; the inner workings of the human mind are by no means off limits to the hubris and ambition of modern government, as the contemporary ‘woke’ movement’s incorporation into the core activities of the State suggest.

In this regard, then, whether people are advocating for Net Zero on the grounds that climate change should be avoided, or advocating against Net Zero on the grounds that it will harm economic growth; whether people are advocating for freedom of speech online or censorship of disinformation and hate speech; whether they are in favour of a free market or command-and-control; whether they want a lower tax burden or more redistribution; whether or not they think transwomen should be allowed to use the women’s toilets; they are in the end always positing the role of the State as governing in the interests of our relationship to the temporal world, and therefore always making a case - often unwittingly - that the State should be governing more wisely in the interests of progress (as they see it) rather than governing less. They are always, that is, making arguments within the frame of modernity and Enlightenment values as such - and they are certainly not sensibly to be understood as ‘returning’ to the Enlightenment as a bulwark against contemporary insanity. The insanity, whatever the individual observer means by that term, is part of the Enlightenment, too.

For a long time humanity has coasted along at least in part on pre-modern fumes, because modernity itself is better understood as a trajectory than a destination - the disenchantment of the world is a long and slow process and is still indeed incomplete. There are plenty of people, even in very secular societies, who are religious, and our institutions are rooted in a fundamentally religious and hence ultimately spiritual understanding about the value of the human individual and its relationship to the divine. These institutions have been thoroughly hollowed out, but will take a long time to fully decay. And for a great deal of modern history too there were technological and economic barriers to the ambition of government; there was only so much that the State in the early industrial age, or even the atomic age, could do.

But we now find ourselves, thanks in particular of course to the invention of the internet and digital technology, arriving at a point at which the courses of the two products of modernity - technological improvement and the totalising tendencies of government - can perfectly dovetail, such that it becomes possible to indeed imagine a kind of total closure or endpoint where State and society, or government and the world, perfectly merge into a complete system of real-time regulation and oversight. This, it seems safe to say, will be catastrophic, for the reasons which Moynihan suggests: it will be the point at which the economy itself grinds to a standstill, because it will be the point at which freedom - upon which economic life rests - ends. But this catastrophe will be the product of Enlightenment itself, and not therefore an aberration which can be avoided through appeal to Enlightenment values - the catastrophe is only to be understood as the very realisation of those values in respect of politics. This is because being Enlightened means to associate the task of government precisely with governing the world - and therefore governing the world in its entirety.

In previous posts (such as here) I have made clear that this means the project of modernity itself cannot last. It leads to a dead end. Modernity will play itself out, because it has to - we are on a trajectory towards a messy confrontation with reality as the project of the government of the world heads towards a climax. This playing-out will have immense drawbacks, because it is indisputably true that the prosperity which we now enjoy was created by the Enlightenment and the intellectual building blocks which gave rise to it through the course of modernity itself. But, in the sense that the playing-out will have to involve a re-enchantment of the world, it holds out the promise of a reconnection with genuine meaning within the broad human experience, and a fuller understanding of what it is to be human as such. To put it very tritely, then, it may be bad for the flesh but good for the soul.

Will this be worth the pain? To come back to Zhou Enlai, there is no real way of telling. We find ourselves, in the end, then, reflecting on something like the wisdom of Solon. In the old story, the rich Lydian king Croesus demanded of Solon that the sage recognise his wealth, power and glory and declare him to be the happiest man in the world. Solon demurred: no man can be declared happy until he is dead. Or, to put it in the ancient Greek - it ain’t over ‘till it’s over. This lesson came in useful to Croesus when, having lost his kingdom, and on the point of being burned to death by the Persians, he was spared by Cyrus after having recounted what he now saw to be the truth of Solon’s words. Cyrus recognised that fortune is fickle: the assessment of a life can only come at the moment before death, once all has been said and all has been done. Will the catastrophe of modernity and the re-enchantment of the world, then, be good or bad for us - better than what came before, or worse? We won’t find out until the end.