Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Premodern
The group: Medieval society was one of the most loosely organized
societies in history, with authority spread amongst various groups. The
central authority of popes and kings existed mainly in theory. The
occasional pope or king who attempted to exert his central authority was
frustrated by the jealously guarded liberties of the towns, the villages, the
guilds, and the monasteries. All-powerful custom kept power from flowing
to one central centre.
The person: “[in the Middle Ages] man was conscious of himself only as a
member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation….” (Jacob
Burckhard, the greatest historian of the Renaissance) Thus, when asked
“Who are you?”, a person may have replied, “A Vignola from Padua, a stone
carver, and a good Christian.”
The person and the group: A person had many loyalties, including
those due a family, a feudal lord, a guild, a town, a parish. While loyalties
were particular and many, Christianity unified political, intellectual, cultural,
and spiritual life. All believers formed one community. Also, from the late
Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, education was rooted in the
common tradition of classical civilization and stressed what was universally
human.
Modern
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Tocqueville: “that word ‘individualism,’ which we coined for our own
requirements, was unknown to our ancestors, for the good reason that in
their days every individual necessity belonged to a group and no one could
regard himself as an isolated unit.”
Modernity is an attempt to make the part the whole, to write all terms of
human experience in terms of the isolated, autonomous individual.
The defining event of modernity is the Reformation. Three
principals defined the Reformation: the Bible as the only authority,
justification by faith alone, and the priesthood of all believers.
All three serves to substitute the individual for the community. Instead of submitting to
the Church’s explanations of the Bible, the Protestant turned to private interpretation.
Instead of relying on the priesthood and the prayers of the saints and of other members of
the Church, each Protestant now struggled alone for his salvation, not through any form
of intercession but by individual faith in Christ the Savior. Consequently, all believers
were equally thought to be priests. Marin Luther taught that “For whoever comes out of
the water of baptism can boast that he is already a consecrated priest, bishop, and
pope…” In effect, each Protestant became his own Church. Nisbet concluded that “Out of
this atomization of religious corporatism emerged the new man of God, intent upon
salvation through unassisted faith and unmediated personal effect.”
2) The rise of the mercantile states of Italy generated enormous wealth and
focused attention on the good life in this world, away from salvation;
The first modern bank, casa di S. Georgio, was founded at Genoa in 1407. Soon, other
banks, such as the Centurioni at Genoa, the Soranzo at Venice, and the Medici at
Florence, carried on trade in both money and merchandise.
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The goal of modernity: Heaven on Earth—universal, human happiness.
Two conditions are necessary to achieve this goal. Mankind collectively
must become the master and possessor of nature; and, 2) the equality of
conditions must prevail; that is, every person must be released from
tradition, class, family, and local group of every kind. For an individual to
be happy he must rule himself, and also be able to provide physical comfort
and pleasure for himself without extraordinary toil. (The signers of the
Declaration of Independence proclaimed that not only the United States but
all nations should be founded on the unalienable rights of mankind—“life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”)
The nation-state: The other historical theme of modernity is the rise of the
nation-state. We cannot imagine political life without a nation-state and
consequently believe it always existed in different forms. Both universal
individual freedom and the centralization of power in the State are brouth
about by the destruction of the authority of the church, local communities,
guilds, and the family. Centralized political power could not have come into
existence until the autonomy of every social group was destroyed.
Walter Lipmann: “A State is absolute. . . . when it clamis the right to a monopoly of all
the force within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life, to tax, to
establish and dis-establish property, to define crime, too punish disobedience, to control
education, to supervise the family, to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinion.”
Thus, all nation-states are totalitarian.
The citizen is the atom-unit of the State. Disconnected and autonomous, the
citizen experiences an interior emptiness that the State fills with its
messianic destiny that provides a new and final purpose for human life. (To
fulfill a Manifest Destiny, to establish the classless society, or to bring about
the Third Reich.) To achieve its messianic end, the state demands that every
citizen be willing to sacrifice himself. (“Not ours to reason why, but ours to
do and die.”
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Messianic destiny and the rhetoric of individual freedom camouflage the
absolute power of the State. The illusion of mass freedom hides the reality of
absolute power.
Science: The principle the whole is the sum of its parts leads to
materialism, the theory that holds that every object as well as every act in the
universe is either matter, an aspect of matter, or a byproduct of matter.
Arts: Western art of the last few centuries is for the most part a record of
men and women whose lives are predominantly determined by the emotions
and the senses. Such persons see themselves and the world that they live in
as realities that exist in their own right and that exist apart from and
independent of God. (After Sherrard) The self become an endless topic of
study for painters and writers.
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Allied bombing of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and Dresden: 500,000 German
citizens
Hiroshima: 1.35million
Vietnam war: 1.8million
4) The fulfillment of Tocqueville’s predictions:
An innumerable multitude of, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to
procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of
them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his
private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his
fellow citizens, hi is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them,
but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself along. (Italics
added.)
6) Viktor Frankl and Rolo May found that the chief problem of their
patients was an inner deadness, an “existential vaccum.” Their
patients complained of the meaninglessness of their lives; they
suffered from the twentieth century blues—boredom, aimlessness, and
depression.
10) Therefore, modernity has been a brilliant success and dismal failure.
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1) Modernity reveals that the potentiality of both nature and the human
person are inexhaustible and, furthermore, that unrestrained, intense
human desire can accomplish astonishing things.
2) All attempts to establish Heaven on Earth end in great wars and
personal unhappiness.
3) Modernity has demonstrated that not just any way of life leads to
happiness. Since culture and private choice do not determine what is
a full, happy life, then human nature must.
4) Thus modernity must oppose human nature and that accounts for the
20th century blues – boredom, aimlessness and depression.
John Locke: “Children, I confess, are not born in the full state of equality,
thought they are born to it. Their parents have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over
them, when they come into the world, and for some time there after; but it is a
temporary one. The bonds of this subjection are like the swaddling clothes they
are wrapped in, and supported by, in the weakness of their infancy: age and
reason as they grow up, loosen them, till at length they drop quite off, and leave a
man at his own.
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But the equality that makes me feel so proud of myself also instills
self-hate. Equality says I can be anything. I have learned that I should
be the brightest and the best---adulated by all. But when I compare
myself to others, I see that I am not especially intelligent, talented, or
beautiful. I am average, and someone is always vastly superior to me.
Consequently, I dislike myself because I consider myself deficient.
Thus, the most painful Tocquevillian paradox of a democratic culture
is that it simultaneously intensifies self-love and instills self-hate.
9) Thus, the collapse of modernity reveals that every person has the
capacity to embrace all that is, through loving, knowing, and making.
Happiness results when these specific human activities are done well,
not from physical comfort and pleasure. Lastly, a person’s ultimate
end is beyond this world.
What To Do
Even thought universal happiness has not been achieved, the second goal of
modernity has been achieved. We have been released from the traditional,
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the local communities, and from the family. Each one of us is free; no
person can tell another what to do or think. Unlike the past, when a person’s
words were often formulas and his actions were controlled by the iron reins
of tradition or constrained by rigid institutions, we decide who we are and
determine our own destiny. But do we really?
Every culture lays down habits of thinking and feeling that most of its
members blindly follow. In the modern West, we form the habit of thinking
of ourselves in isolation, and that habit is carried over when we think of
other things. We attempt to understand every whole solely in terms of its
parts. Thus, our principle culturally-given habit of thinking: always begin
with the parts. In addition, the equality of individuals teaches an individual
to rely on personal judgment and to accept as true only what can be proven
by reason and science.
We live under two great lies: 1) I am most genuinely myself when released
from the supernatural, nature, tradition, local groups and family; and 2) I
have determined who I am.
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Consequently, postmoderns must look not to history, not the State, not to
science and technology, not to political or social reforms, but to who we are
by nature.
Instead of looking at only myself, I can see that the persons around me, too,
have been shaped by culture. So, when I drive along the expressway and
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some younge guy in a pickup truck cuts me off, I can smile to myself and
think, “What else should I expect from this poor self-centred jerk, who only
sees himself?” If I feel angry automatically arise within me, when he gives
me an obscene hand gesture, I can laugh and say to myself, “There you go
again. Reacting exactly how you have been trained.” Such laughter erodes
my habitual anger.
To connect to all that is I first must begin to know who I am. I must realize
that, in truth, I am not the centre of the universe; I do not determine the true,
the good and the beautiful; I cannot become anyone I imagine; I do not
define myself; I cannot invent the purpose of my life. I loved myself for
something I was not—the centre of the universe—and I hated myself for
something I was not—an isolated loser.
When I come into contact with my true self, I know that I am a unique and
marvelous being. I am a spiritual being with the capacity to be connected to
all that is through loving, knowing, and making. To experience the core of
my being is joyous; personal tragedies subside in importance. The particular
life I have been given may include a big nose, or abandonment by my
mother when I was two, or a miserable family life, but I see that such events
are not the core of my being. I see that I am not my big red nose, nor am I
my abandonment as a two-year old, nor am I my dysfunctional family.
Before the gifted confirmed my loser status, now we are brothers. All of us
have both older and younger brothers, thoses who need my help and those
whom I need.
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down.” But once I accept who I am, a quietness enters my soul, and I am
content with the particular person I am. I understand that many of the past
wrongs against me I imagined. Bur I cannot genuinely accept who I am
unless I forgive those persons who have wounded me deep in the heart, so I
could not love. Through understanding and forgiveness, I see that it is good
that I am the particular person I am, and I no longer wish to change what
cannot be changed.
When I take myself as the beginning and the end point, my life, no matter
how I lead it, eventually becomes miserable and pointless, and I must begin
to seek a “New Life” beyond that of the isolated, autonomous individual.
My life becomes meaningful when I am a person with and for others. A life
not lived for others is not worth living.
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