Modernity and Other Failed Gods :...

The intellectual air is filled with talk about our having entered a period of history called “postmodern.” “Modern” literally means “just now,” and it is not clear how we can live in a time that is after just now. Just now is where, quite inescapably, we all live. Whether we are looking backward or forward, we are looking just now. Yet “modern” has taken on many other meanings in the last 200 years or so. It signifies a world that has been rationalized, specialized and secularized. The modern world view is premised upon the individual, the autonomous self, who is related by calculation and contract to other autonomous selves in a universe that is very much like a machine in which technique is king. God and the gods have fled, human community is the stuff of nostalgia and we are left all alone in what Max Weber called a “disenchanted garden.”

The two books under review are further evidence that we are coming to like modernity less and less. While yielding undoubted benefits that we would not surrender, modernity has not delivered on its promise of progress toward a more humane and rational world. This presumably most enlightened of centuries has witnessed more terror and slaughter than any other five centuries combined. And even when we are not killing one another, genuine community eludes us. The world is in pieces. Knowing more and more about less and less, we have achieved control over means at the price of their meaning. As Yeats famously observed, “The center does not hold.” So reads the indictment against modernity. And so do we arrive at what Julian Hartt describes as a “yearning for the wholeness of being.”

“The Critique of Modernity” contains three lectures given at the University of Virginia. They will be of considerable interest to readers who have a fair grasp of contemporary philosophical and theological arguments. Julian Hartt distracts attention from his argument by repeatedly distancing himself from fundamentalists who want to go back to that old-time religion. His indulgence in fashionable “fundie-bashing” seems quite unnecessary since it is unlikely that anybody would expect to find a fundamentalist occupying a distinguished chair of religious studies at the University of Virginia.

More rewarding is his treatment of the difference between covenant and contract in the ordering of society. Modernity is composed of contracts designed according to the calculation and competition of individual interests. But contracts are the enemy of genuine community. Community requires a covenant that bespeaks common purpose, even a sense of destiny. Since no one covenant can carry the hopes of a large and pluralistic society, perhaps the best we can work for is a community of communities, each pursuing its distinctive covenant. The argument is not new, but Hartt propounds it persuasively and with frequent elegance.

Ray Hart of the University of Montana offers an argument based upon a “conjunction of ontology and semiotics.” Anybody who needs to ask what that means should not be reading this lecture. There are instructively charming moments in which Hart explores the linguistic roots of terms such as religion, but his basic point seems to be that we should submerge ourselves in nature. With Henry David Thoreau, Hart asserts that “if you go far enough west it becomes east.” We should, he suggests, be preparing ourselves for a future of “nature without humankind.” Perhaps he is right, but the extinction of the species does seem a rather extreme solution to our problems with modernity. One is reminded of George Santayana’s dictum that “modernism is suicide,” a judgment invoked by Robert Scharlemann in what is by far the most rewarding of the three essays. Regrettably, it will also be the most intimidating for the philosophical novice. Drawing heavily from theoretical physics, the “dialectical” theology of Karl Barth and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Scharlemann contends that modernity is the product of a “triple oblivion.” We have forgotten the idea of Being, the self as I (who am not God), and the divine as God (who is not I). The argument is a tour de force that generously repays the effort it demands.

“The Other God That Failed” is of an entirely different genre, but the subject is the same. With engaging brilliance, Jerry Muller tells the story of German intellectuals in the Weimar Republic who were also disillusioned with modernity and possessed by a “yearning for the wholeness of being.” His title, of course, recalls the 1949 volume “The God That Failed,” in which Arthur Koestler and others recounted their disillusionment with Marxism. The rejection of modernity in its political form of liberal democracy, Muller convincingly shows, can produce the radical politics of both the left and the right. In either case, the political alternative to modernity becomes a substitute religion, resulting in a god that inevitably fails. The events traced by Muller lend support to the words of T. S. Eliot, “If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

Muller builds his story around the figure of Hans Freyer, a leading sociologist who in the early 1930s called for a “revolution from the right” and thus prepared the way for National Socialism (Muller rightly insists that both noun and adjective are important). Herbert Marcuse, later the guru of 1960s radicalism in this country, greatly admired Freyer’s work. More important than left or right was their shared enmity toward liberal democracy. The student movement of that time, abetted by the spinelessness of the professoriate, handed over the German universities to Adolf Hitler and the “wave of the future” that Freyer and many others would soon come to regret. Muller takes the story through the postwar period in which Freyer and his colleagues tried to sort out the lessons to be learned from their grievous errors. Among the chief lessons that most of them seemed to have learned is that, as Winston Churchill noted, democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.

This brief account cannot begin to do justice to Muller’s narrative and the analysis that he draws from it. “The Other God That Failed” deserves a lasting place among cautionary tales that illumine the dangers of looking to politics for an answer to our “yearning for the wholeness of being.”