# Book report: Chantal Delsol, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late Modernity.
The following is a paraphrase of some of the author’s main ideas. We think of ourselves as having left totalitarianism behind, as having triumphed over it. But we do not realize the extent to which we agree with the ideological assumptions that made totalitarianism possible. We are indignant, for example, regarding the way the Nazis dehumanized the Jews, but we are blind to our own practices of dehumanization. We condemn the condemnation of people as “radically other” while we also engage in othering.
Utopian schemes sow death. We are so slow mentally that we have to see the truth of that statement actually demonstrated before we acknowledge it. Utopian dreaming is premised on the idea that human beings are self-sufficient self-creators. The belief that there are no limits to our ability to refashion the world leads to violence without limits.
Ideologies such as Nazism and Communism sought to break down traditional ties between people, such as family and congregation, where personal virtue was nurtured, to replace those ties with worship of the state that would be enforced through suspicion, threats, and informing on others. The nihilistic culture that we foster today also seeks to break down traditional ties that nurture virtue, though the means used, such as ridicule, sarcasm, and ostracism, are less brutal. It is as if we feel a need to finish the uncompleted work of the ideologies. We call our escape into nothingness “progress.”
We define progress as the sweeping away of all scruples. Scruples are those cultural memories that prod us to defend the dignity of each human being; they are the voice within us that resists the destruction of morality. Our finest eugenicists are sometimes plagued with scruples; they realize that the rational course of action is to eliminate the substandard beings, but they hesitate. After we have “progressed” further as a race they will no longer hesitate. It will go without saying, because it cannot be said, that at that point we will prove ourselves to be the true spiritual heirs of Hitler, the one who burned scruples at the stake. The totalitarian ideologies destroyed traditional moral selfhood and the common world of neighborliness that it made possible. We have decided that we like living in that destroyed world. If anyone seeks to restore the common world that was lost we will brand them as a heretic.
In our world people are afraid to ask deep questions about the meaning of humanness. We withdraw from that activity of questioning that is our true path toward wholeness and transcendence. We think that there is no need for questioning and growing because we are automatically self-sufficient as individuals. We are isolated individuals who enter into relations with others that are either contractual or predatory. We do not want to give or forgive; we do not want to need or suffer; we do not want to recognize that we are finite and fallen or that we are called to live by grace. We think that we are capable of inventing ourselves and of governing ourselves; we presume that we are the God of our own individual world. The utopian dream sought god-like power to achieve the goal of “saving” society. By embracing individualism we think that we have rejected that dream, but we are actually prolonging that nightmare. We seek to be individual demiurges instead of collectivist demiurges. That is our definition of “change.”
We like to think that if a person believes something strongly, with a sense of certainty, then they will become a fanatic who oppresses others. Therefore, the preferable alternative is to not believe anything, to not think, to be vacuous on the inside. We are very good at resisting the temptation of building up beliefs that could structure our lives. Because we have no inner depth or moral backbone, we live in a superficial wasteland of cultural fads and fashions. We are shaped by these social trends because we lack coherent selves, although we never stop bleating about how we enjoy our perfect “freedom” as individuals. Because we are passive we always hold others responsible for what is happening in the world, rather than being responsible ourselves. In truth, to become a real individual requires participating in a coherent culture that can foster our rationality, our growth in personal virtues, and our sense of responsibility for ourselves and others.
People today tend to live in a perpetual present moment, cut off from a meaningful past and a hopeful future. We have fashioned very small, narrow cells for ourselves in which we choose to live cut off from the flow of time and from true community. And then we wonder why our preoccupation with our small selves leaves us so bored.
When we do venture out of our solitary cells, we join collectives of “like-minded” people who share our “identities.” In this way our individual narcissism is lifted up to a social plane where we think that we have “strength in numbers.” It is often the case that these collectives seek to outdo in each other to see who can make the strongest claim to being victims of tyrannical oppressors. These identity collectives arise out of the psychology of the self-sufficient isolated individual who is seeking to reinforce his or her inner convictions. This individual wants to join in a group which consists of mirror images of him or herself. A true subject, on the other hand, a growing person who is open to transcendence, is more open to genuine diversity and pluralism, because he or she is not narrowly self-interested but is seeking to foster a common world in which all can participate. The growing person is drawn in hope by a vision of a better future, rather than trying to defend an idolatry of origins. Collectives often claim that they are able to define their own vision of good and evil, morality and law, in defiance of tradition and of the contemporary need to build a common world with other human beings who do not belong to the collective. A collective may even claim that each individual in the collective is able to define their own view of good and evil as an individual. This reduces human life to an absurd Tower of Babel. It also smuggles in the assumption that since the individual is defining good for themselves then they will always do good and never evil—by definition. Anyone who criticizes the individual who has thus self-interestedly defined their own self as good must be an evil imposer of alien standards.
Collective thinking presumes that the members of the collective are good and outsiders who can be labeled as members of another group (“the Jews!”) are evil. People are not evil because of what they have done but simply because they had the misfortune to be born into the wrong group. In this way individual responsibility is obliterated, both for the members of the collective and for those they are attacking. A true community is rooted in the principle of individual responsibility, that is, in a recognition that all people can make good or bad choices. We have free will. There are not separate sub-species within the human race; there is only one human race made up of persons who are called to live ethically before God and in relation to others.
The totalitarian ideologies have twin goals: recreating human nature according to a utopian dream and personifying evil in some group. The revolutions of 1989 in Europe were seeking to expose the falsity of these ideologies; they were seeking to actually learn the lessons of the twentieth century. We must reject the notion that we can recreate ourselves and society from scratch, ex nihilo. We must love ourselves, our neighbors, and our Creator more than we love the plans, dreams, and ideologies that arise out of our own immature minds. If we understand this, then we will realize that the creation account in Genesis protects human dignity more effectively than any modern forms of “reason” can.
We need to be gardeners, not demiurges, and the chief way we can do that well is in how we raise our children. To nurture and raise a child is to help him or her emerge into the world as a person who is wounded by the tragedy that is the human race, without being overcome and undone by that wound. We need to pass on our love and accumulated wisdom to the next generation so that they have a chance to become authentic subjects who know that they are incomplete beings on a journey toward truth, beauty, and goodness. To be incomplete, to be half-created, is God’s gift to us which evokes our freedom and makes it real. If we reject the ideology of self-sufficiency and live into this freedom, then we have begun to learn the lessons of the twentieth century.
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12 comments:
A friend left me this link, suggesting I might like your copy. Indeed I do. None of which is to suggest to you that I have any points of agreement; but it is nice to red your work here, thoughtful and interesting and well presented.
I'll come back and leave some coherent comment later on details of where I believe you're wrong about the ideas of Modernity and Individualism. I certainly don't argue that I have any right ideas, but I do have some different ones from yours. It's like that with Voegelin, whose ideas on Gnosticism left me complete flabbergasted when I first saw what he was writing, leaving me wondering what on Earth he was on about. Now, however, I am a fan. Not that I agree, but what a thinker!
I'm particularly happy to see you are a Theology professor. Atheist that I am, I had a lengthy debate with Theology students at an ivy-league university. It was devastating to red their commentary. These kids were so corrupted by the education system, i.e. the Theology Dept. itself, that I could have, and did on screen, scream. I'm sure the students never encountered you. I'm glad that I have.
My best, Dag Walker.
Yes, English is my first language. Proofreading is my last resort.
Dag, I will read whatever further comments you have with interest.
I'm relying on my memory, which is none to great, to quote Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, in which he writes, roughly, that man is the ground of his own existence. I take that to mean, if the quotation is more or less right, that Feuerbach means Mankind rather than men, that the collective rather than the communion of individuals, is the ground of God, man-made, a projection of Man's mind.
You write about individualism, which could be, depending on the definition, man as the ground of his own existence, i.e. man is his own demiurge. Obviously man, being a poor planner, is not a mouse, and therefore is not spontaneously generated. Where does man come from? Accident. Thus, man can be his own demiurge insofar as he creates not his existence but his essence. Then, God-like, he controls his existence. Once he is, he can continue to be or not to be by Will. Man as demiurge is a frighten thing, as we see now and know from history. If man is unbound, i.e. has no binding or religion, then he is unaccountable to any power beyond a stronger man. Such a man can, has done, probably will, do as he sees fit. Who can stop him but another man? The all-powerful, self-creating, self-referential demiurge is in his own mind the outer limit of authority; I wonder, though, if this is what we should rightly term "Individualism."
You write of "wholeness and transcendence." It looks good, at least on the face of it, and if we counterpose individualism as its antithesis, then the latter will look bad: the fragmentary, the alienated, the inauthentic. Worse, we might see the individualist, the self-created demiurge, as the uncontrollable and the immoral or amoral atomist trying to stay afloat in a nihilistic soup of a Darwinian struggle, unlimited in his Will to power. We might see wholeness and transcendence as good, especially in comparison to the atomistic man and his more or less unlimited Will. I don't see it that way.
This will take a few installments.
The Gnostic might "think that we are capable of inventing ourselves and of governing ourselves; we presume that we are the God of our own individual world. The utopian dream sought god-like power to achieve the goal of “saving” society. ... We seek to be individual demiurges instead of collectivist demiurges. That is our definition of “change.”
I am in fair agreement with the statement above. But I don't think it's the whole idea. That's why I'm wandering about Feuerbach, with whom I'm not particularly familiar, asking myself if he means Mankind or men being the ground of their own existence. If he means mankind, then we end up with an extension of Rousseau's General Will, which is, to my mind, a quiescent "mass" led by Gnostic vanguards who are attuned to the utopian Agathon. But if he means men, or even if we mean men, then we don't arrive at some Gnostic totalitarianism but at something more like Protestantism, which some might argue is Gnostic. I don't.
Without transcendent authority, then Mankind is the ultimate authority. Or: men are the ultimate authority. If the former, then yes, one might suffer the reified Gnostic visions of the Party. maybe always. If Mankind is god, then his avatar might be Dear Leader. The poligion, or political religion, is God as Whole. Religion becomes a different binding: a fasces. That concerns me-- as an individual.
I get nervous with the idea, moreso the practice, of State as God. I'm less nervous, but still so, about God as God. The latter concerns me because God is not continuously revealed to Mankind in any sensible fashion. Thus, to accept God, one needs Faith. I can live happily with that; but I can't find any comfort in living with the faith one places in God's intermediaries on Earth, i.e. those who are God's authorities here and now. I have even less trust in an Institution of men binding the mass to itself and them. The authority of Revelation is not for me unless and until I receive my individual Revelation; and then, who needs the authority of others anyway? If one needs interpretation, then the Revelation must have been pretty murky, and therefore, pretty much untrustworthy.
"Utopian schemes sow death. ... Utopian dreaming is premised on the idea that human beings are self-sufficient self-creators. The belief that there are no limits to our ability to refashion the world leads to violence without limits."
Again, I'm in general agreement with this; however, it seems fallacious, to me, to assume that this is both inevitable and individualistic. I term these utopianists as Death Hippies. I don't like them, but I don't see this as either/or. Yes, the unbounded Gnostic might well be an evil creature who will not stop and who cannot stop; but I don't see this as inevitable: there are individuals who have no concern for utopian visions of the earthly eschathon. I don't see it following necessarily that the individual must be a Gnostic and a Death Hippie with a violent vision. The Gnostic with a will to power might inevitably be violent and unlimited, but he needn't have such a vision or Will in the first place. The Gnostic who does, well, maybe he is certain to be a Death Hippie.
Some argue, e.g. Fichte, that there are no authentic individuals, that each man is a part of the whole that creates him by making him not Other. For him and them, nurture is nearly all. Schiller writes exactly such, that every individual is a fragment of the whole, which is to say, inauthentic. Von Herder writes more or less the same, as I understand it: that the group identity confers the person's identity; without the whole, the fragmentary is not real, is alien. However one might be bound to the whole, that binding is the person's authentic being. It might be, for example, religion, or it might be poligion. It could be language or race. Today it can be, often is, any number of "identities." If one is not authentic outside one's identity, then one is alien without the whole. I don't buy it. I accept that there are the feral; but this is not the same as authentic "identity" conferred by the culture, for example. Thus, where you post:
"Ideologies such as Nazism and Communism sought to break down traditional ties between people, such as family and congregation, where personal virtue was nurtured, to replace those ties with worship of the state...."
I'm in agreement. But I see any binding as much the same, though different in degree. I'm not disparaging binding altogether, not just for the sake of being against the binding, but because I do value individualism rather than the binding, greater or lesser, of man to man by the authority of man, i.e. men. I might be the oddest man out here because I have no family, and I live in a foreign nation. Family and congregation mean little to me. I'm not really that odd. I accept that some concerns such as tradition are legitimate insofar as one does not need to reinvent the moral wheel every day, that one should not, and must not. I know this without having to be told. Someone, at some time, did have to tell me that. I'm not nearly so smart as I'd like to think. But neither am I so silly I can't figure things out for myself, even if by horrible trials after terrible errors, all to my eventual benefit, if to the harm of unfortunate others who have to endure me in the interim. I, and others, do not need or usually desire the authority of the State in loco parentis. But neither do we need or want the family in loco parentis. Nor any institution. We are individuals. As such, we are not necessarily atomic: we might well be primarily individual and then interdependent. Yes, the poligion is indescribably worse that the religion, as a rule in our time in the West. The current manifestation of the age-old poligion of Islam is as terrible as Communism or Nazi-ism; but a binding of a lesser sort is still a binding of the individual against his own being's right, to my mind, individuation.
"The nihilistic culture that we foster today also seeks to break down traditional ties that nurture virtue, though the means used, such as ridicule, sarcasm, and ostracism, are less brutal. It is as if we feel a need to finish the uncompleted work of the ideologies. We call our escape into nothingness 'progress.' ”
It could well be true that the individual today in Modernity is nihilistic because he's not bound to the poligion by force, or to the religion by choice, if he has such; but that is not a necessary condition of the individual. There's more to the individual's possible life than religious communion or fascistic identity /nihilistic suicide. I suggest that there is individuality, however interdependent, i.e. constricted, it might be. "A" man might be the ground of his own existence if he is. That doesn't argue we think we're created ex nihilo. It argues that we individuate over time, maybe. We probably could if we wanted to. We can also say that abandonment of the binding we had, e.g. to society and family and so on, is a nihilistic flight into destruction. But-- No. It only could be. The sane man could also be, otherwise, the ground of his own existence. He won't be a demiurge, he won't create his own world or that of others, he will only be the creator of his own life, i.e. an individual.
If you don't find this tedious or ridiculous, I'll try to continue next day.
There is a problem with "individualism," if we reduce it to nihilistic hedonism, to atomism, to the gratuitous pursuit of our own desires, those latter changing from day to day as they might, along with our "morals." If we are "up t here" in hubris, and if we are shallowly informed Nietzscheans, then we might well think of progress in our individual lives as the sweeping away of all constraints and morals and scruples.
"We define progress as the sweeping away of all scruples. Scruples are those cultural memories that prod us to defend the dignity of each human being; they are the voice within us that resists the destruction of morality."
If we miss the main points, maybe it doesn't matter so much. If we somehow get through life without a moral code from on high that tells us not to commit murder, and then we do not commit murder simply because within us we think it evil, then maybe we're still OK. Most of us have to be rigorously trained to be killers or other such type monsters. If we come out of life without being demonic, then maybe e have some inner being that isn't so bad. But, without a moral code, without scruples, with nothing but our own charm and intelligence to save us from sin, that's a lot harder. I like C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters:
"It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away form the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-- the gentle slope, soft under foot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts."
For the average man, it is the small things that he might not notice that will destroy him. He might not notice, but others will, and others will say. Will the hearing man listen?
I think Anthony Burgess begins each chapter of A Clockwork Orange with the prison chaplain asking the reader: "What's it going to be then, eh?" After Alex is subjected to the Ludovico Treatment, he cannot commit a crime without physical revulsion. He is a slave to orthopraxy or else. He's not Human, not even a bad human. He's a machine that can't work according to its nature and function, all evil. That's prudent; and immoral. Alex is collectivized, bound, as it were. He has no scruples, he just can't act badly. So long as others do small things as evil in their won way but not so noticeable, then where is the difference in sin, though maybe not comparable in general effect? We can force people into scrupulous behaviour, maybe, by enforcing societal norms on them, but we haven't done much of worth. We impose orthopraxy. If no one cares about the small things, then sinners go free, after a fashion. And if one tells them and they don't listen or don't care, then such is the price of living. Better that than stripping a man of his individual will to be sinful.
"Our finest eugenicists are sometimes plagued with scruples; they realize that the rational course of action is to eliminate the substandard beings, but they hesitate. After we have “progressed” further as a race they will no longer hesitate. It will go without saying, because it cannot be said, that at that point we will prove ourselves to be the true spiritual heirs of Hitler, the one who burned scruples at the stake. The totalitarian ideologies destroyed traditional moral selfhood and the common world of neighborliness that it made possible. We have decided that we like living in that destroyed world. If anyone seeks to restore the common world that was lost we will brand them as a heretic.
Our first eugenist, in the modern sense, is Francis Galton. He was all scruples. Rather than boldly go and openly leer at African women, he stood far back and measured their forms and calculated their beauty by number. His scruples demanded of him that he restore the English population to an average mean of Nobility. He didn't advocate killing off the lower classes, as did some of his followers, he merely wanted them to stop breeding and reproducing themselves as a favour to themselves, their would-be worthless off-spring, and to the world in general. He didn't clamour to kill them, he suggested they take up eugenics as a religious duty. Pearson and Davenport, too, were scrupulous men, concerned about the world and its people. Unfortunately, these people didn't particularly hesitate. At Cold Spring Harbour, N.Y. they did terrible work against the people's right to life and liberty: they helped sterilize 60,000 people in the early part of the 20th century in the United States. They were individuals; but they worked and acted as collectivists, even if as-if the elite of the collective on behalf of the collective. Thankfully, the individual American of the period was mostly outraged by their efforts. Twenty-nine states had some kind of eugenic laws; but such laws were not popular or well-known to the public. Cf. Black; Kevles; et al. That is because men are individuals free to dissent. The individual is not invested in the feeble-mindedness of the masses. To the individual it doesn't matter if, as according to Margaret Sanger, 70 percent of the American population is feeble-minded, i.e. life unworthy of life. The individual is untroubled by the collective intelligence of the masses. He, if he is the ground of his own existence, is not beholden to the collective for anything beyond his general right as a citizen to life and the pursuit of his own happiness, which he should pay for with his service to the nation if he's any kind of man at all. (I confess to failure there.) The man who can stand against the religion of Eugenics and say it is evil is the individual who has no debts to the institution. Such a man might well be anti-social; an individualist; a man who has no truck with the Spartan eugenic programme updated and modernized for the collective. He might be a man with "no scruples" or attachments to the traditional morality of tossing babies into the wilderness. That was neighbourly. It was the norm. I don't see this as individualistic Gnosticism but as Gnostic collectivism. Chesterton writes of it as anarchy:
"Anarchy is that condition of mind or methods in which you cannot stop yourself. It is the loss of that self-control which can return to the normal. It is not anarchy because men are permitted to begin uproar, extravagance, experiment, peril. It is anarchy when people cannot _end_ these things. It is not anarchy in the home if the whole family sits up all night on New Year's Eve. It is anarchy in the home if members of the family sit up later and later for months afterwards. It was not anarchy in the Roman villa when, during the Saturnalia, the slaves turned masters or the masters slaves. It was (from the slave-owners' point of view) anarchy if, after the Saturnalia, the slaves continued to behave in a Saturnalian manner; but it is historically evident that they did not. It is not anarchy to have a picnic; but it is anarchy to lose all memory of mealtimes. It would, I think, be anarchy if (as is the disgusting suggestion of some) we all took what we liked off the sideboard. That is the way swine would eat if swine had sideboards; they have no immovable feasts; they are uncommonly progressive, are swine. It is this inability to return within rational limits after a legitimate extravagance that is the really dangerous disorder. The modern world is like Niagara. It is magnificent, but it is not strong. It is as weak as water--like Niagara. The objection to a cataract is not that it is deafening or dangerous or even destructive; it is that it cannot stop. Now it is plain that this sort of chaos can possess the powers that rule a society as easily as the society so ruled. And in modern England it is the powers that rule who are chiefly possessed by it--who are truly possessed by devils. The phrase, in its sound old psychological sense, is not too strong. The State has suddenly and quietly gone mad. It is talking nonsense; and it can't stop."
I see our problem today as not a rampant abandonment of traditional morality but as a return to it, to neo-feudalist rule by priests/experts who rule as philosopher kings and treat the masses as farm animals. Those prudent animals who act orthopraxically are well-fed. The individualist might well starve. That would be a free choice of a free man, however hard. The individual, looking at himself and the world, will have to accept himself as flawed and often mistaken in his efforts; and then, leaping blindly in a fit of fideism, he will act or not accordingly. t do so would mean he at least considers himself the ground of his own existence. I call this Progess, and I see it as a direct result of a market economy, i.e. as the end of the non-money economy. Capitalism, not to be confused as it is so often with corporatism, is freedom that cannot occur without the individual. It is Modernity. That is Progress. The previous matter of economic relations was collectivist, not individualist. The former, a reactionary longing, is what created the Nazi movement. The eugenics of the Nazis was collectivist. Today we have our own strident collectivist rulers imposing a Velvet Fascism. It's not Modernity, it is neo-feudalism, a return to the past, this post-modernism.
I'll halt here for now, a funeral tomorrow for an atheist, a bitter man who died angry, calling me to bed for an early morning and a long day.
Dag, It would be good if your comments were more focused and concise.
If you want to do some reading I would suggest Kenneth Burke, Eric Voegelin, Rene Girard, and Kierkegaard. Reading them in that order would provide a trajectory from philosophy to theology that would paint a broad background for understanding Chantal Delsol's perspective.
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