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And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?
-William Blake, Jerusalem, 1810
As long as we’ve had modernity, we’ve had the critique of modernity. I’ve realized that many of these critiques have tread over the same ground; they’ve been drinking from the same well of discontent and malaise for centuries. There’s something like an intellectual tradition of resistance to the conditions of modernity, and reading older examples of this tradition can be uncanny. Its shocking just how poignant and contemporary some social criticism and philosophy reads, despite being published over 200 years ago. There is a startling consistency in a certain vein of thinking that continues to have relevance. I’ll try to draw out this connection here and raise some questions that follow.
From the moment we began to try, explicitly at least, to organize our societies along purely rational lines, we’ve recognized the flaws in doing so: that the modern world was leaving something missing. Of course there wasn’t one moment, obviously, but I think the French Revolution is as good a starting point as any.
During the French Revolution, what began as a promising experiment in the ascendant rational society ended in chaos and protracted state conflict. The German Romantics, the group historian Andrea Wulf calls the Jena Set, were acutely aware of the failings of rationality as the sole guidepost for humanity. This came from their awareness of the French Revolution’s failures: the not-yet-named Terreur and the French armies literally encroaching on the patron sovereigns these thinkers relied upon for income and support. So they wrote about it:
If the community of state measures man by his function, only asking of its citizens memory, or the intelligence of a craftsman, or mechanical skill, we cannot be surprised that other faculties of the mind are neglected, for the exclusive culture of the one that brings in honor and profit. Such is the necessary result of an organization that is indifferent about character, only looking to acquirements, whilst in other cases it tolerates the thickest darkness, to favor a spirit of law and order…it is rarely a recommendation in the eye of a state to have a capacity superior to your employment, or one of those noble intellectual cravings of a man of talent which content in rivalry with the duties of his office.
-Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter VI, 1793
After diagnosing the failures of his contemporary politics, Schiller writes in these letters arguing for, among other things, the need to synthesize reason and intuition, to embrace what he calls our play drive, and to develop a repoeticized society that allows for the flourishing of individuals as free people. The Romantics wanted to ameliorate these frustrations through the aesthetic, or to steal the words from the Partially Examined Life podcast, they sought to “vindicate the aesthetic as our mode of accessing the infinite.” They offered art - an inadequate term for capturing Romantic thought in general but sufficient for my argument here - as that missing thing which might mend our collective humanity.
The Romantic critique still applies today, I find, in our 21st century context. It can feel like our society is a slave to reason; a society that witnesses the search for policy solutions to mass shootings rather than bothering to investigate the pathology that motivates them. A society with an ethic that suggests artists might prefentially “get a real job” rather than pursue their passions. A neater example is the neglect of the aesthetic through the decline of the humanities in our universities.
And noticing this missing something, and offering solutions for what it might be, has persisted for over 200 years. As I say, it’s something of a tradition. Everywhere we find thinkers suggesting that the way we currently organize ourselves leaves something wanting; we are fractured, incomplete, frustratingly unfulfilled and incurious or incapable of alternatives. Marx’s critique of capitalism developed the concept of the alienation of labor - that through mass society and capitalism we are somehow meaningfully separated from our homes, our humanity, and our selves. In other words, the missing something was ownership. Kierkegaard described the problems of his age in terms of stifling conformity; we struggle to orient and define ourselves in a social milieu driven by worldly goods and recognition, and are thus thrust into despair. He famously wrote that “truth is subjectivity,” which is reminiscent of the imperatives earlier forwarded by the Romantics. Rather than looking to the aesthetic for salvation, Kierkegaard suggested it was merely a starting point, and that what individuals were truly lacking was faith.
Perhaps the most famous example comes from Nietzsche. Many will be familiar with his madman’s proclamation that God is dead; but his monologue surrounding this claim is elucidating in its context:
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling?
The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves?
What holy games, indeed? I like this quote because it captures the arbitrary exultation of our society: the most recognized and celebrated figures are generally entertainers, the ones who deliver the most value to us personally, en masse. Absent firmer ground, we’ve organized ourselves by pursuing, through rational means, the indulgence of our own desires. Thus the natural flow of status is towards those who excell in these games which are ultimately untethered and meaningless outside of our immediate, and often unexamined, selves.
These above ideas were expressed in a continuation of the original “something missing” critique. Huxley wrote about modernity teaching people to love their servitude through satisfying their desires. Missing was any kind of filter or shield against the dominance of the whimsical, superficial, and transient desires in favor of genuine, thick desires that grant agency, individuality, and freedom. His contemporary Orwell knew without a sociopolitics that fully recognized our humanity, and allowed for the free use of language and exercise of thought, we would embrace the “thickest darkness to favor a spirit of law and order.”
This acknowledgement of something missing remains current and relevant: that we’re somehow interacting with great forces beyond our understanding and being repressed from dissent, comprehension, or resistance. The Hippies are a great example of disenchantment with what one might call the Machine Age, and they put into practice. In 1996, David Foster Wallace warned of the perils of addiction to entertainment and empty, arbitrary worship in Infinite Jest. Office Space came out in 1999. So did Fight Club.
-Working jobs we hate, to buy shit we don’t need.
If I’m being uncharitable to myself, I might dismiss all the above as mere idle pontification and removed from the everyday, material concerns of “real people.” And fair enough. But the fact is that these critiques arose precisely because we, as humans, began to fulfill and satisfy our material needs in a more comprehensive manner. That we are able to escape the demands of finding our next meal, or chopping enough wood for winter, or determining if that water is safe to drink, allows us to transcend our base requirements - we can climb up Maslow’s hierarchy. Pretending like we don’t have that ability is what keeps us trapped and loving our servitude. Its what prevents us from enjoying our predicted 15-hour workweeks and all their attendant freedom of leisure.
People are still writing about this now: I tried to build on some of this work in this essay. The question this all raises for me is, why does this critique persist? Indeed, if its art we are missing, or agency, or a counterbalance to reason in sensuous synthesis, have we simply not been convinced? And if we have been, why aren’t we able to put this into practice?
I have some ideas which I may explore in future essays.
Did this essay ring true to you? Am I dead wrong on my 19th century intellectual history? What do you think we’re missing, if anything? Please comment and tell me what you think. Thank you.