Right+Left Wing Critiques of (Post)Modernity
Right+Left Wing Critiques of (Post)Modernity
choosing a politics of hope
Listen to Matt’s appearance on the pod (YouTube, Spotify, Apple) after you read his piece.
“I've been walking forty miles of bad road
If the bible is right, the world will explode
I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can
Some things are too hot to touch
The human mind can only stand so much
You can't win with a losing hand
Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet
Putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling her down the street
People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed…”Bob Dylan, “Things Have Changed”
Reject modernity and embrace “retvrn.” Recommit to Enlightenment and modernization now says the author of Enlightenment Now. Acknowledge that modernity remains an “incomplete” project, halted by the irresolvable irrationalism induced by capitalism, and work to complete it. For decades commentators of very different persuasions have weighed in on the “discourse” of modernity; condemning, embracing, and lamenting as is their inclination. One’s evaluation of modernity obviously has a lot to do with how its conceived. In this short piece, I’ll briefly summarize some of the key ideological takes and discuss their respective strengths and weaknesses. In the conclusion I’ll offer some brief arguments for accepting the progressive view that modernity remains an “incomplete” project. The dissatisfactions that define contemporary politics owe more to a failure to live up to its promises than anything else.
The Right’s Critique of Modernity
The prevailing view is that those on the right reject, or at least are very critical of modernity. This isn’t just true of reactionary Twitter anons talking about the virtues of “retvrn.” Many of the right’s most significant intellectuals have said as much. In his classic Natural Right and History Leo Strauss laments the decline of antiquarian natural law, and their bastardization into liberal “right” and Burkean/Marxist historicism. Sneering at “generous liberals” who viewed the “abandonment of natural right not only with placidity, but with relief” Strauss lampooned that for modern philosophers only “unlimited tolerance is in accord with reason.” This led to a nihilistic relativism and superficial hedonism; life reduced to a “joyless quest for joy.”
In his underrated Postmodernism Rightly Understood the Catholic Peter Lawler rejected the vapid conservative line that everything was going fine until “post-modern neo-Marxism” got in the way. Instead, Lawler insists postmodernity is really a kind of “hypermodernism”—the inexorable endpoint of embracing a modern metaphysics where the world is just matter in motion and only subjective human taste has any more value. On that basis, reality and even the human body are just infinitely plastic mediums upon which we mold our desires and inhabit fluid identities. By contrast Lawler calls for a return to the “realism” of Aristotle and Aquinas, who saw the world as defined by set essences which cannot be deviated from without corrupting mutilation.
And on the extreme end there are those like Heidegger, who also saw modernity as an era of inauthenticity and nihilism. But where Strauss dates the fall to around the 16th or 17th centuries, and Lawler to the decline of medieval scholasticism, for Heidegger the virus was present from very near the beginning of Western culture. Already with Plato making a distinction between “beings” and Being, Western culture ceased to approach the world with open-minded wonder and sought to understand and control it through the application of a rational intelligence. From there, a long process of decay occurred until we got to a modern technological world where the entire earth is conceived as nothing but “standing reserve.” All existence existed to be manipulated for the gratification of inauthentic capitalists and socialists—who as far as Heidegger was concerned in Introduction to Metaphysics were committed to doctrines which were “metaphysically the same.” The allegedly important debates between capitalists and socialist humanists were really just over banal technical questions about how to more efficiently build and distribute better iPads.
One might expect many of these right-critics of modernity to write in a nostalgic vein, and indeed they do. The predominant affect in most right critiques of modernity is one of loss. But interestingly enough, this very emphasis on loss means that most right critics of modernity—even when they want to call themselves conservatives—are often not interested in conserving much about it.
As Corey Robin notes in The Reactionary Mind, for the man on the right who can’t abide by it, the modern present may be felt as an intolerable decline from some past glories. But this means that he adopts the future as his preferred political moment, anticipating not the conservation but the reform or even complete overcoming of the decadence of modernity. In The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschmann rightly chastises progressives for responding to conservative arguments by implying that historical change is all but teleologically inevitable. But this shows that many on the left miss a key point. Plenty of activists on the right not only accept but want change, and welcome its inevitability. After all, change is what is necessary to undo what liberals and progressives have done.
For many conservatives, ameliorating the rot of modernity might mean conserving elements of traditional authorities and hierarchies against the march of liberalism and progressivism. But of course it will also mean rolling back their advance where possible. Ronald Reagan himself liked to cite that the right had it in its power to make the world anew. And for some, like Heidegger, even such small rearguard advances were inadequate. More and even ultra-radical kinds of transformation will be required. In many respects, we live in such a moment where many on the right are aggressive in admitting they don’t want to conserve much of anything. Unsurprisingly, the writings of Weimar “conservative revolutionaries” and right-wing radicals have become disturbingly popular in the United States.
The Left’s Critique of Modernity
The left has its own critiques of modernity and post-modernity, which tend to be more diverse and ambiguous than those on the right. This reflects the longstanding dialectical realization since at least Hegel and Marx that, however bad modernity may be, it has many features which are emancipatory and egalitarian. This dialectical mutifacetedness gives many left critiques greater sophistication and depth than those on the right; the latter of which can border on the tediously monological in their rejections. But the ambivalence of left-critiques of modernity also makes them far less politically efficacious, since their very multifacetedness tends to induce feelings of uncertainty rather than anger and disdain. Say what you will about online rightists preaching “retvrn” but they know what they hate.
The Frankfurt School of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse developed one of the most influential left-critiques of modernity. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer acknowledged the importance of transitioning from a world of superstition to one where “reason” was given at least lip service. The problem was that the form of reason which had become dominant in modernity was not a deep, critical, dialectical reason but a flat instrumental form of rationality. This was largely due to the influence of capitalism, which established a cultural environment where “reason” meant just calculating how best to pursue one’s “ends” rather than ever asking whether the ends themselves were worthy of pursuit. The result was the creation of “one-dimensional” people in Marcuse’s famous phrase; the kind of Eichmann’s who see little difference in calculating how to save money on Amazon or save gas transporting victims to Auschwitz.
On the other front, we have important left-Catholic thinkers like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Taylor argues that the modern world has been characterized by the corrosion of the “sources of the self” which we used to rely upon to understand who we are. One result of this has been the spread of “atomism”—each individual thrown back on themselves and asked to define who they are with limited access to cultural and social resources that could give content to that identity.
However, Taylor is notable in insisting that modernity does constitute a major “ethical” advance over pre-modernity for its dissolution of the various domineering and even social hierarchies that ran from slave societies to the Feudal system. This may have led to feelings of atomization because of the dissolution of authoritative sources of the self. But it is better to be an alienated citizen unsure of who you are than a subordinated subject who knows who she is, and what she is turns out to be a slave or matrimonial property. For Taylor the puzzle of modernity is deepening its ethical advances while offsetting the negative consequences—many of which follow from not living up to modern commitments to treat people as dignified equals.
On the other side of things, MacIntyre is often more radical than Taylor, insisting in After Virtue that we moderns are governed by barbarians. Modern morality, embodied in the ethos of the market, has been reduced down to a form of “emotivism” where principles are selected based purely on their subjective taste. The result has been declining commitments to the common good and a sense of belonging to a community with traditions. But unlike conservatives, MacIntyre isn’t nostalgic for the forms of calcified authority and hierarchy of old. He insists in After Virtue that there is no going backwards to the past, and that any tradition that becomes Burkean is already dead. For MacIntyre, one of the chief thinkers we need to think through this crisis is Marx. In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, he stresses how Marx long ago warned about how the forms of domination and fetishism intrinsic to capitalism would induce selfishness and irrationalism on a global scale. MacIntyre laments that what Marx tried to teach us we’ve had to relearn again and again.
As this brief summary suggests, the attitude of these left thinkers towards modernity is quite different from their reactionary counterparts. The prevailing affect is not one of nostalgic loss or decline. It is instead one of disappointment and frustration; the feeling we live in what Wendy Brown calls “nihilistic times” defined by
assertions of power and desire shorn of concern for accountability to truth, justice, consequences, or futurity, not only ethics. Nihilism is revealed in the careless, even festive, breaking of a social compact with others and with succeeding generations that is manifest in quotidian speech and conduct today, especially but not only on the right.
For Brown, Trump and other demagogues are not a cure to the travails of modernity, but radical symptoms of its worst impulses: authoritarian wannabees for whom truth and falsity have no bearing in the quest to reimpose “order” on the world by reestablishing hierarchies of subordination glamorized by appeals to insular nationalism, ethno-chauvinism, and religious supremacism. Rather than respond to modernity, they embrace its worst impulses of dividing the world into winners and losers and insisting only grants of extraordinary power can ensure one’s people are on the right side of that divide.
A politics of hope
But the response to these nihilistic impulses for the left isn’t to abandon modernity, but in many ways to fulfill its promise. Rather than a pseudo-return to hierarchical modes of existence so dissatisfying modernity was in part defined by revolutions to destroy them, we need to make good the promise of establishing societies where people can truly flourish and commune together as free and equal citizens. This will entail “uncancelling” the future, as Mark Fisher might have put it.
What people call “postmodernity” is modernity shorn of a sense of historical possibility; the sense that there really is no alternative to the status quo of inequality and domination so the only thing to do is ironize it or double down on it like Trump and his cronies. People need hope that a world better than the one we live in is possible: in this case a world where we genuinely do live up to our commitment to liberty, equality, and solidarity for all. In other words, a politics of hope is required, and it’s in a politics of hope that I place my faith.
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