Optimistic modernism

I listened to a great discussion between a couple of my favorite thinkers. But I can’t help but wonder if there are some things that are being assumed or ignored. The current historical and philosophical moment is the direct child of science and modernity and the enlightenment, and the fact that it is, means there are things that must be accounted for. The fact that the primary source and breeding ground postmodernism has itself been the academy, the academics, the enlightened, is a fact specially worth considering. The smartest people in the room built these theories and packaged them and sold them to the culture at large. Which begs the question, why did it come out of academia, and why does it hold so much appeal and fill such a necessary void for the common man? And what created that void to begin with?

I think one other problem here is the failure to recognize that liberal science itself is not fundamentally, at least for humans, self supporting. Rather, it rests upon a deeper and even more fundamental basis of rational and moral structures that allow humans to make use of the techniques of liberal science. Much of this content was known unconsciously and used both unconsciously and consciously throughout history (any basic study of history reveals that humans have always been just as smart and just as human as us today, often more clever because they had less help to reach their conclusions).

The elucidation of the laws of logic, the formulation of narrative and poetic structure to communicate stories, and the precepts of basic morality, family structure, self-governance, and social governance, were far more radical and foundational steps than anything that has since followed. Those are the basic foundations of a working human mind and life. And in the end, that’s the bedrock of everything else. And pretty much all the major religions had those big things worked out fairly well thousands of years ago.

For all that science since the enlightenment has accomplished (much of which had deep roots in ages of work that came before), it has in many ways not acknowledged or respected or bothered about those most foundational of foundations, seeing itself principally in the role of tipper of the sacred cows and never really pondering what role they might play or value they might have or what coherent and comprehensible and practical and meaningful rational, moral, and social bases it was putting in their place.

The failure of many enlightenment and modernist states, states based on reason and ideology and science rather than archaic religions or creeds, to produce utopia was often read by the common man as an indictment of their value. And even when they didn’t produce genocide or gulags or bloody revolutions, they still produced an excess of ennui and meaninglessness. It’s hard to know what to say about that. You can’t just tell people that they should be happy.

The enlightenment and modernism led straight into existentialism and postmodernism. That wasn’t an accident or an undealtwith holdout of unsophisticated primitivism, these are the direct children and direct result of modernism and the enlightenment. These are their unacknowledged sons and daughters, turning the weapons of their inheritance upon their forefathers.

And I would argue this is just a case of the son doing to his father what his father had done to his. Modernism did the same thing to previous rational structures as what is now being done to it. Having inherited the foundational structures of rationality and moral order from previous belief systems and generations, they turned those tools against their forefathers and declared them oppressors and idiots only seeking their own blind gain, in need of being purged and dispelled and corrected. They paid no respect to what they had inherited, what it had cost, what value it had, or how much of what they had was built upon it. And now the same thing is being done to modernists by their intellectual children. It’s poetic justice, in a way, and part of the tragic cycle of humanity.

There is an unacknowledged debt to the foundational structures of moral and rational stability to which liberal science owes its success. But if you talk to them, they built the whole thing ex nihilo out of darkness and blind ignorance. And then postmodernism do the same thing and the modernists cry foul.

One of the problems we have discovered the further we get in history is that you cannot design a system so perfect that it does not suffer from the problems of relying upon human participation in it. It does no good to have the rational systems of science if you do not have the more foundational systems of truth honesty order, proper and regulated desires, honest motivations, etc upon which to build them. More specifically, it does no good to have the scientific (or political systems) for people to use if you don’t already have the right sort of people to use them.

How you collect data, how you interpret data, what you do with that data, how you apply what you think you’ve learned from it, and all sorts of other terribly important matters are heavily dependent upon that basic human foundation of fundamental belief and practice. And although science is a wonderful technique and a wonderful answer to the questions “What? and”How?” it is not is good at answering questions like “Why?” or “Should?” without appealing some other deeper system of premises and values, which actually have an enormous foundational effect on the “what” and “how” that you produce.

The fact that the majority of postmodern nonsense has been generated in and disseminated through the university system itself should be sufficient proof of this fact, without needing to go further back into previous decades to find all the ways that the techniques of science have been used to promote and enact deeply dangerous an anti-human policies positions beliefs and inventions.

Having swept away the moral and rational orders on which modern liberal society and democracy and freedom and science were built, modernists somehow find themselves shocked to discover those systems now crumbling and a new type of religion arising to fill the vacuum left behind. Because these rational and moral systems are actually more foundational and more fundamental then thier later products of liberal science and society, it is not reasonable to expect them to continue to exist without them. It isn’t reasonable to expect that they can or will continue as they are without requiring something to emerge upon which they can be built.

The needs that these deep systems address are foundational to the human psyche and life, and therefore they are more in need of being filled and more felt as a vacuum in the void and therefore cannot be satisfied merely by the pleasant products liberal societies and science produce. So something must emerge; it is an aspect of humanity that cannot be removed.

You can call it religion, or the religious instinct, if you wish, but whatever it is it is foundational to the operation of the human mind and heart and spirit and a factor upon which all downstream constructions depend. And the simple fact is that those old systems are now crumbling and a new type of religion is arising to fill the vacuum and void left behind. Modernity helped tear the old cathedrals of value down. But the simple fact is that modernity and liberal science have not successfully generated a coherent and meaningful replacement system for filling that need. That’s what caused the turn to existentialism that gave us the rise of postmodernism. Postmodernism is what arose to save us from the existentialism modernism collapsed into.

I think this is also why we suddenly find such strange bedfellows in the fight against postmodernism, such as religious and conservative intellectuals and atheistic and liberal intellectuals. You even get odd hybrids like Douglas Murray that are a bit of both. They had been sold to us as natural opponents, but in their own way both were dependent on a devotion to some concept of truth and order and stability and honesty and proper intention and appropriate behavior and just plain old objective reality.

Call it God if you wish. But it provided a bedrock of thought upon which the edifices of modernity could be built, despite modernity often arguing that it was building them in spite of it. And there was some truth to that claim, but perhaps now we can see that it was not the religion, or God exactly, that was doing the resisting so much as the inevitable way that humans, even in the absence of such a conception of God, behave (as is very well illustrated today). In much the same way some scientists would ask you not to judge the efforts and theories of science itself by what actual people have done with them, I think the same holds true for philosophies and religions. Even just the idea of God did a lot for Western civilization and the Western intellectual mind, whether we acknowledged it or not. The idea was very good, even if what people did with it wasn’t always so great.

To some degree we would wish our theories not to be judged by their products, although at a certain point, especially when they have a practical element, they must be. We don’t want to accept that the ugliness of actual people and what they do with ideas is actually contained in our beautiful ideas themselves. We don’t want to admit that the ugly results of socialist theory might actually be a consequence of the theories themselves, rather than their failure in application. But theories must at least answer somewhat for their real world results, particularly if it can be clearly shown how one leads to the other.

It was the genius of Alexander solzhenitsyn that he laid the blame for the evils of the soviet state, not at the feet of Stalin, but of Lenin, who first conceived them. It wasn’t just the abuse of or distraction from the ideals of communism that produced the gulag, it was the ideals themselves. And I think there is some argument to be made, both from an existential, philosophical, and historical standpoint, that postmodernism is not merely the abuse or contradiction of modernity, but its product.

To be sure, humans do make a mess out of religion as such, just as they do out of ideology as such, and science as such. People can and do make a mess out of everything. The systems can’t exactly prevent that entirely. The question is, does a specific religion or ideology actively promote such ends? Or does it promote ends that we constantly fail to live up to?

That, in particular, is one of the strengths of the Judeo-Christian outlook that supports the process of continual seeking and refinement and challenging that liberal societies and liberal science are built upon, this idea of a standard of the ideal that we seek and desire but are always failing to live up to and falling from and having to realign ourselves to. God is continually calling the Jews to a just state, and they are continually bungling it or forgetting about it or subverting it for their own purposes. And they are continually having to humble themselves, admit the consequences, face the truth, and try again to do better. And God forgives them and accepts them and blesses them for it. That kind of attitude, that kind of people, is a rational and moral foundation upon which actual humans can build a process of seeking and enacting the good and the true.

When Socrates came along to blow the sophists away, they were a bunch of very modern (or postmodern) fellows. Thoroughly skeptical and mercenary, happy to argue any viewpoint for a bit of advantage. Not really believing in much of anything, they had seen through all arguments and truths. Bias and advantage were all there was. So why not learn to sieze the advantage? That is not the sort of foundation you could build the modern university on. No, it was only by establishing the call of his god, the daimon that demands wisdom, the honest pursuit of a real, stable, order and truth greater than our persona and its interests, that you lay the foundation upon which Plato and Aristotle could build the academy. The prophets came before the schools. Because we didn’t just need a certain kind of system, we needed a certain kind of people. People who shared a vision.

As Lukianov says, the postmodern ideology is completely in contradiction with the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy. Anyone who has spent time in a decent church would recognize a lot in the principles of CBT. They’re nascent (or perhaps deeply encoded) in the principles of religious self-examination. You can pull them out of the system they’re embedded in, and for some people that might help to clarify them and establish their value independent of your estimation of the system and everything going on in it. But

It is much easier to imagine in today’s world that everything is socially constructed because we today in our society can construct so much. We can build whole worlds around ourselves and live within them. Worlds of our own invention and construction and creativity. We can be what we want to be. We can be gods. To some degree.

The internet may be the forum that takes this ability to create our own world according to our own inclinations the furthest, but it is not the first. To a certain degree that’s what all products of human effort, all societies and structures are. We made what we wished. But we have always been somewhat limited by the primary level of reality, by the world as it is. The world of technology has taken us further and further from that world into the world of our own invention, and the digital realm has taken us the farther than anything else. And if you can invest entirely into that realm and make it your true home, it is the least limited space.

And yet it is still limited. And we are terribly offended when we return to the real world and find it to be not as the digital one we had created, with our avatar of ourselves as we have wished to make it, in a tidy bubble of agreement, in a place of personal security from which we can wield power and thrown barbs without consequence. It is terribly unjust and ugly that the world is not as the world we had made for ourselves. And so we want to bring the order and control and freedom (for ourselves) of our digital world back to the real world. We want to reshape it and make it confirm to our invented rules and structures. We want life to be as we imagine and wish it to be.

This is both our greatest power, as humans, and our greatest danger. Our ability to conceive and create with our minds. To alter the world. To create new possibilities. It has allowed us to create things that nothing else on earth could hope to equal, to exist in ways and in places that would have been undreamed of until we dreamt them. We are like little gods, able to imagine and to make it come into being, able to create a place to inhabit that is as we wished to make it. The problems arise when one of two things happen. Either we fail to respect and comprehend our power and divinity, or we fail to respect and comprehend our limitation.

We have to ask ourselves, what are the major basic questions that a system of knowledge and action must answer? What are its essential functions? They’re simple but difficult things. How to find a mate and maintain a relationship. How to make friends. How to treat your parents and children. How to get up and work each day. How to remain grateful while striving to better your situation. How to survive tragedy and suffering. How to face mortality with dignity and courage.

Even the most primitive ideologies have means built into them to help people do the truly basic tasks, like facing death with dignity. Even the most basic can answer questions about who we are and our place in the universe, what work we should set our hands to, what to love and what to fear. Modern systems largely dismiss every answer provided to all of these questions and say “work it out for yourself”. And most people find that profoundly unhelpful.

It’s a bit liberating, too, perhaps. At first. And you’ve got lots of nice things to keep you busy like jet skis and smartphones and streaming services and quick service restaurants and Snapchat. But on some level, all those distractions and powerful means for controlling your circumstances aren’t very useful or helpful if you don’t know what you’re using them for or what they’re helping you toward. “Me, being happy,” is a nice answer, but historically has proved a little vacuous. Certainly it’s better than being unhappy, suffering, bored, in danger, or in difficulty.

But the more we make the world like a video game, where we can be and do whatever we want in the world we’ve built, with no interference of real world consequences, the more we immerse ourselves in those comforting structures and create algorhythms to automatically feed us what we want, the more necessary it becomes to our psychic survival as we lose our ability to cope with any world that isn’t as centered around pleasing us as that one, the more trite and shallow it all seems.

Have you ever tried playing a video game where you’ve suspended the rules with some cheat codes? It’s fun for a while, being able to do anything. But eventually, when you realize you can’t be hurt, you can’t lose, you always get what you want, there’s not really much reason left to play. There are no limitations, no uncertainties, no challenge, no meaning. There’s nothing to be done. It’s all a foregone conclusion, a mindless repetition. There is a bit of mindless fun in it, but not the sort of fun that requires a human mind.