Safe, sated and sound, there is a chasm that strikes at the heart of modernity. Revelling in the classics, delving into history, travelling to places whose stories were made centuries ago, we act out our discontent. Throwing ourselves into distraction, indulgence and narrow hyper-focus, we engage with disengagement. Relapsing from the youthful realisation that life will not transcend work, consumption and death, modernity represents the foremost challenge of our generation. In front of so much observable good, we cannot help our mutual sense of dissatisfaction: is this really it?
Whether it is Ford rationally conducting a cost benefit analysis on the value of human life, modern dating becoming a cesspit of infinite choice and sordid individualism or even with the shift from ‘noblesse oblige’ to Elon Musk, modernity has picked apart the carcass but lost the whole. From disruptive technology, existential risk and the dominance of scientific applications we scarcely understand, we cannot help our angst. But equally with specialised lifestyles, enclosed communities, and the purposelessness anomie that attends security, wealth and peace, we again cannot help our angst. Guilted in a gilded age, there is plainly something amiss.
The dissatisfaction before us lies in modernity’s very discordance. Dissociated from ourselves, each other and nature, modernity seduces us with the false, lures us like the siren, and promises us the impossible. Indolent with liberal pluralism, consumptive with materialism, and hardened by Enlightenment rationality, modernity has deprived us of an other, greater world, something both resplendent and beyond ourselves.
By modernity here, I do not just mean the usual concerns of the rat race, escapist pleasure seeking, and the unfulfilled amoral wasteland. I mean the absurd world that we have, in our uniquely human capability, endured and grown accustomed to, whether it be the intra-cultural resentment fuelled by culture wars, the western paradox of progress and poverty being mutual and reinforcing,¹ the renunciation of mutual aid and obligations towards each other in the name of depersonalised competition, the professed primacy of liberty and freedom in our bureaucratic, socialised, and highly administrated State,² the incredible infatuation with billionaires and sycophantic justification of inequality and homelessness,³ and the financialisation of the economy where the rich can no longer point to productive means to justify their wealth.
I mean the rational, cost-benefit calculating and scheming mind, the one that sheds its humanity and cannot see the joy in existence or the centrality of meaning. I mean the questioning, scientific and democratically empowered mind, which arrogantly takes nothing on faith and mounts constant denial: towards itself, the other and to its duties. I mean the grand philosophical mistake of a system, whether modern economics or liberal philosophy, which casts us as atomised individuals, autonomous and independent, born behind a veil of isolation. And above all, I mean the modern failure to replace the death of God, as without secular alternatives to the grand narratives we so willingly expelled, we turn to birth charts, tarot cards and celebrity worship.
Certainly, it is hard to do critique modernity without resorting to the foibles of faith, reactionary bile, Luddite-inspired self-renunciation, legislative overreach or mere nostalgia. Neither is it necessarily original. Since Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451, we have all heard the fears of proliferate comfort, pleasure and distraction. Common this may be, we still act out the critique. We have become new-fangled aestheticists, escaping to Europe every winter to revolt against the elevation of efficiency over beauty. And, crude and base as it may be, our mutual obsession and antipathy towards casual sex represents the allegory of modernity’s crisis: the promise of freedom, the suggestion of pleasure, the hyper-comparisons, the elusive availability, the sexualised other, the transactional exchange, the weighing of optionality, the burgeoning acrimony between genders… all butting up against the ‘successful’, who having grasped what they want — freedom, security, satiation and choice — feel absolutely nothing.
This right here is the crux. No one is winning. We have incentivised an entire generation to lead a life that we know, if they do it well, will never be happy. The rich man envies a richer man, the achiever is riddled with insecurity, the idler and inheritor both fester in self-incurred shame. None find any personal value in their items which millions covet. And for those who are ‘losing’, we in our meritocratic snobbery mete out shame, condescension and, when we are feeling particularly cruel, complete apathy.
What then is the solution? Piecemeal solutions suffer from a failure of true radicalism, i.e. going to the root, as modernism permeates through all, whether economics, politics, philosophy, dating, religion, and more. Instead, modernity’s greatest sin is in fact its very insipidity. Materialism might bring us the next best toy, but without the search for something beyond ourselves, we trivialise the great, lionise the vapid, and romanticise the dreary. Liberty sounds the perfect antidote to feudal, regal and authoritarian diktat, but any true hint of freedom leaves most either running or floundering. And the rationality that so crushed religious folly has left us in a permanent state of self-consciousness, doubt, and ethical indifference. Modernity is the true amnesiac: we have forgotten how to live.
Certainly, there are many starting points, but one antidote to anomie is a restoration of the true polis, in the classical sense. In the search for meaning or something beyond ourselves, we need a collective project, something that liberal materialism in its individualism has long supressed, and this project is primarily political. Some might call it a “Republic”, a collective project, or even a basic ideology. For the pre-moderns/ancients,⁴ such as Aristotle and Plato, politics is not just harm prevention. Nor is just maximising welfare or efficiency. Nor is it merely eliminating obstacles to liberty. The goal of Politics reflects a higher social order, instilling a public purpose of meaning, transcendence and growth.
Whether deploying a new technology, extracting further resources, or marketing an unexplored, risky language model, our institutions and incentives must be geared towards the forbearance of ego, interest and power. When electing or appointing new leaders, they are to be held accountable to higher social goals of collectivity, courage and commitment to the social good. And for those designing social modes and technological models designed to positively solve the problems of social life, the public recapturing of modernity means lending them a hand.
For such a ubiquitous topic, there is no use positing singular prescriptions; the last piece covers some and future pieces will cover more. But there is still an immediate, if not modest, answer to the above: we must transcend our current conception of progress. It is in our very nature to seek grand, unifying visions, but what precisely is the vision of modernity — immediate self-interest, annual reports and shareholder value?
Reevaluating progress means the restoration of our vision, for modernity has deprived us of visionaries for at least the last half century. This means, as the visionaries once did, asking the big questions that cut to the very root of our institutions and culture, rather than a moderate commitment to incremental pragmatism, a ‘bail out what caused our crisis for the sake of avoiding further crises’ attitude.
Modernity must be met with a dawning self-consciousness. Whether that is challenging assumptions, such as prosperity, growth and security justifying themselves, forsaking insidious models of thinking (such as the iron cage of instrumental rationality) or simply thinking beyond the media cycle, the opportunities are endless. Man does not live by bread alone, and it is only by re-appraising this truism that we can finally liberate ourselves and adopt radical solutions that work for all.
[1] Graeber shows how many captured westerners who grew up in Indian tribes returned because they preferred life in a community that prioritises mutual aid, where no member was allowed to be subject to abject misery.
[2] From Kafka to Weber, we can also find this in Graeber. Graeber noted how natives often made incisive criticisms regarding the West and its hierarchy and unfreedom (so much so that Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau often created fictionalised native characters to play the voice of western critique).
[3] The author of Why Nations Fail, Daren Acemoglu, once justified American inequality and homelessness on the grounds they produce more iPhones. One might also wonder why all the ‘great’ critics of inequality are western (other than Eurocentrism) and relatively modern, one would suggest it is due to the climate they responded to.
[4] See Leo Strauss on this point.
