Reading Note:
Mock On
29 January 2015
What magic is there about the word “modern” that makes us assume what we think has no effect on what we do? [In 1925, William Jennings] Bryan wrote, “Science has made war so hellish that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.” This being true, how could a cult of war recruit many thousands of intelligent people? And how how can we now, when the fragility of the planet is every day more obvious, be giving ourselves over to an ethos of competition and self-seeking, a sort of socioeconomic snake handling, where faith in a theory makes us contemptuous of very obvious perils? And where does this theory get its seemingly unlimited power over our moral imaginations, when it can rationalize stealing candy from babies — or, a more contemporary illustration, stealing medical care and schooling from babies — as readily as any bolder act? Why does it have the stature of science and the chic of iconoclasm and the vigor of novelty when it is, pace Nietzsche, only mythified, respectablized resentment, with a long dark history?
This passage appears near the end of Marilynne Robinson’s impassioned critique, “Darwinism.” By this point, she has traced a line of selfish, uncompassionate thinking from Malthus, through Nietzsche and Darwin, to Freud, and what stings is the last serious word, “resentment.” Why did these men invest so much energy in the debunking and discrediting of Christian ethics? What was their passion? I meditated on this, guided only by a rule of thumb that I’ve learned from the reading of history. The practical opposite of conspiracy theory, it suggests that whenever something later deemed to be worthwhile is overthrown or destroyed, the revolution against it is waged openly and in the name of something deemed more worthwhile at the time. Hatreds and other “dark histories” have a way of emerging, and asserting control of these coups, once they’re in hand, but initially, the overthrow is designed to bring about an improved dispensation.
This rule of thumb worked principally to rule out any explanation in terms of a “hatred” of Christianity, or of organized religion such as Voltaire espoused. Indeed, aside from Nietzsche, always something of an intemperate madman, the other thinkers, especially Malthus and Darwin, do not “take on” Christian values. Their resentment appears to be aimed at the beneficiaries of Christian charity: the poor, the disabled, the weak — people whom both men regarded as degenerate. Did they hate the poor? But my rule of thumb rules out the prevalence of negative impulses. There must be love of something else. What could this thing be?
When the answer came to me — my provisional answer, anyway — I really did have to laugh, because it was hiding in plain sight, at the very beginning of Robinson’s passage. The cover word is “modern.” The word that it conceals, the word whose place it has taken, and whose meaning it has so completely absorbed that “modern” now means far more than it did fifty years ago, is “progress.”
Progress is what Malthus and Darwin and Nietzsche and Freud embraced. Not the crass progress of enhanced appliances, or even improved health care — definitely not improved health care! The progress that they had in mind was moral. Man, in their view, stood poised to advance by leaps and bounds, to leave familiar traditions behind as his human potential was realized to an extent hitherto undreamed of. But there was a catch! Man would advance only if men, certain undesirable kinds of men, were cleared away, the burden of caring for them and of sharing environmental resources with them eliminated. The poor, the disabled, the weak — the degenerate unworthy.
We don’t talk about progress anymore. The word fell into disrepute even as Ronald Reagan was making a small fortune telling the world that progress was General Electric’s most important product. The fall into disrepute was overdetermined. Weapons of mass destruction, when their existence if not use became familiar, proved to be noxious flowers of progress indeed. At the other end of world-historical importance, GE’s brand of progress took on, during the later Sixties, a sheen of ticky-tacky. (Avocado and harvest gold! What were they thinking?) According to the growing environmental movement, “progress” was just another word for “pollution.” Eventually, the history of the idea of progress, with its run of about three hundred fifty years, was subjected to academic scrutiny, and pronounced spurious.
It is difficult to imagine, now, that anyone ever regarded the music dramas of Richard Wagner as partaking of progress. But not just anyone but everyone did, and for decades after Wagner’s death. Now it is embarrassing to consider such claims. In many ways, the idea of the modern gestated as a way of doing away with that of progress — in so many ways, really, that I could go on for hours about them, if I weren’t aware that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. One way will do. Progress had ever more sharply been considered as a matter of linearity, very much like the evolution of a living creature, but with a now-discredited teleology plugged in, holding that later iterations were always superior, somehow or other, to what came before. (Progress was by no means confined to science and materiality. Consider what Herbert Butterfield called The Whig Interpretation of History.) Modernism introduced chaos and discontinuity, an aesthetic counterpart to quantum theory.
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, it was difficult (for anyone not sacrificed to it) to believe that progress would not produce a demonstrably better world — and who could be against that?
The curious thing is that Progress was opposed by not one but two avatars of Christianity. First and more notoriously, there was the institutional Church, which steadfastly opposed the course of progress, rejecting heliocentricism as heretical and burning, when it could, books and their authors whose titles appeared on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or Index of Forbidden Books (which was still going when I was a boy). Second, however, and far more crucially, was the Christianity of Jesus, centered on the austere rejection of worldly goods whenever they might be given to those needed them more. Jesus would have foreseen, I believe, that the progress envisioned by Malthus and his Enlightenment forebears would denature rather than enhance the humanity of mankind. As indeed it has almost done — we hang by threads far more delicate than our Wi-Fi connections. What prompted the “resentment” of thinkers like Nietzsche was not so much ecclesiastical reaction against progress as it was Christ’s dismissal of progress as immaterial and irrelevant.
I’m no great fan of William Blake, but a famous poems comes powerfully to mind.
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
It is difficult, after what was born at Los Alamos in 1945, not to shudder at the idea of those reflected gems and beams divine.