The Problem of Modernity

I'll characterise Modernism after the fashion of Habermas. We are living in Modernity’s shadow, the shadow of the completeness and exhaustion of all forms of life, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who chillingly finds himself bored and sated with heaven as with hell and everything in between. We are at once trapped by the bureaucratisation of all life, to which we can offer no original contribution (Weber's point), and by the stunning emptiness of this bureaucratisation, whose grip is not so firm that it provides a set of values by which we can live as people used to before the 'curse' of rationalism. Modernity is:-

The fleetingness of time and experience (recognition that fashions become outmoded, that one will oneself be outmoded; that history marches on and the past is simply 'left behind');

Revolutionary (rebellious) spirit of the age - we see countless rebellions against the strictures of our civilisation. We see liberal revolutions against the lingering traces of a feudal or aristocratic order (1789-1848); socialist revolutions against capitalism, against property (1848-1917; the latter continues in a rejection of consumerism); nationalist revolutions against the entire discourse of modern life (against capitalism and socialism) (1923-45); bourgeois counterrevolutions against the radical revaluation of modern morality by Fascism and Communism (1939; 1945-1991); uprisings against the social order (May 1968), etc ad nauseum. Every rebellion takes it upon itself to revolutionise and subvert, or to defend and make permanent, the rational order of life.

Longing and yearning – for myth (return to the gods of the blood; Völkisch yearning for unity), for community (Gleichschaltung; yearning for consensus); and the longing for freedom from history or authority (Marxist, anarchist).

Belief that one is in a state of perpetual ‘crisis’;

Overcoming ‘closed’ systems of knowledge and representation – refusal to accept the canon of arts, sciences and morals;

Irony and cynicism;

The ‘sin’ of having too much knowledge to cope with it meaningfully (as in Goethe’s Faust), and its poignant obverse, the torture of not having enough knowledge to solve all of the world’s problems.

If one views Modernity thus denuded, one can look on it like a comedy. This is a cast list of a comedy. I hold no truck with the perpetual revolutionaries; I want to laugh at them. The choice is either to struggle against the inevitable discourse of Modernity or to wait for its collapse, as Nietzsche did (and which Spengler predicted).