The Times They are A-Changing

The Slow-Release Poison of Post-Modernism

The question of what changed in society to enable it to develop from mediaevalism to modern economic powerhouses is a fascinating one.  One centrally important change was in the way men thought about the world and their place in it.  Who am I?  Why am I here and alive?  What are my duties and responsibilities?

Medieval man had a set of fairly standard answers to these questions.  Modernist man had a different understanding of life and being, and answered these questions differently.  Post-modern man has a different set of answers again.  The different answers were (and are) all religious in nature. 

The change from medievalism to modernism took place amidst developments in Christian doctrine; those changes in understanding essentially produced what we call the Modern period.

Modernism itself then went through two major developmental stages.  Early modernism was essentially Christian in nature and philosophy: it answered the questions above accordingly.  Later modernism moved away from orthodox Christianity to deistic-atheism, changing its answers to reflect this.  Post-modernism's religion, for its part, is materialistic atheism.  In each of these stages or phases, the questions above have been answered differently. The outcome and results have been very different. 

Charles Taylor documents the post medieval, early modern answers to the questions, who am I? why am I here? and what are my duties and responsibilities?  A major change that moved Europe from mediaevalism to the modern age had to do with "secular" work.  Taylor's is one of the best summaries we have read:

The original importance of people working steadily in a profession came from the fact that they thereby placed themselves in "settled courses", to use the Puritan expression. . . . If ordered life became a demand, not just for a military or spiritual/intellectual elite, but for the mass of ordinary people, then they had to become ordered and serious about what they were doing, and of necessity had to be doing, in life, viz., working in some productive occupation.  A really ordered society requires that one take these economic occupations seriously, and prescribe a discipline for them.  This was the "political" ground.

But in Reformed Christianity, and to a growing extent among Catholics as well, there was a pressing spiritual reason to make this demand, which was the one Weber picked up on.  To put it in the Reformed variant, if we are going to reject the Catholic idea that there are some higher vocations, to the celibate or monastic life, following "counsels of perfection", if one claims that all Christians must be 100 percent Christian, that can only be so in any vocation, then one  must claim that ordinary life, the life that the vast majority cannot help leading, the life of production and family, work and sex, is as hallowed as any other.  Indeed, more so than monastic celibacy, because this is based on the vain and prideful claim to have found a higher way. [Emphasis, ours.]

This is the basis for that sanctification of ordinary life, which I want to claim has had a tremendous formative effect on our civilization, spilling beyond the original religious variant into a myriad secular forms.  It has two facets: it promotes ordinary life, as a site for the highest forms of Christian life; and it also has an anti-elitist thrust: it takes down those allegedly higher modes of existence, whether in the Church (monastic vocations), or in the world (ancient-derived ethics which place contemplation higher than productive existence).  The mighty are cast down from their seats, and the humble meek are exalted.

Both these facets have been formative of modern civilization.  The first is part of the background to the central place given to the economic in our lives, as also for the tremendous importance we put on family life, or "relationships".  The second underlies the fundamental importance of equality in our social and political lives. [Charles Taylor,  A Secular Age (Cambridge, Ma: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007),  p.179.]

The post-modern world is falling apart because these questions are now answered very differently--although just as religiously. 

The Christian answer which stressed the doctrine of a divine calling to serve God in every area of one's life as a holy duty produced the economic powerhouse that we call the Modern period. The post-modern world stresses the ultimate meaninglessness of life.  Consequently the post-modern world is riddled with endless crises of individual identity.  Am I male?  Am I female?  Am I homosexual? Am I black, white, or coloured?  Am I a botched abortion?  And whatever I might be, does it matter--for in the end, there is only the void?

Why work?  Why labour?  Why have children?  None of these things is really intrinsic to my being and identity, which remains fundamentally unknowable.  That is why we have a growing population of middle-aged men, who have never left home, still living with their parents, unemployed, playing computer games in the dark.  These are not the weirdos of the post-modern age, but the saints, the true believers, modern stylites.  

The post-modern world will not last, for its centre cannot hold.  It has no centre, no anchor.  It has no meaningful answer to the fundamental questions of, Who am I? Why am I here? And what are my duties and responsibilities in this life?  It is a "civilization" waiting to be taken over.