This is an address I gave last December at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal

The Problem of Modernity

Richard J. Divozzo

[delivered at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal on 12/11/2010]

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ome of you had requested in previous meetings of the Inquisitors that I talk about my book, The Church and the Culture of Modernity, and I hope in these all too brief reflections to satisfy your curiosity.  In view of this special venue at the Russell Kirk Center, rather than introduce my book per se I will instead to try to whet your appetite -- if it needs whetting -- for what the book concerns, viz., the problem of Modernity and indicate why the particular view of the problem I take in my book should be of value to conservatives.  Although I don’t have much to say (directly) about conservatism in the book, the problem of modernity has a philosophical provenance, which I explore, that has produced the cultural, social, and ultimately spiritual disorder that has for so long preoccupied conservatism. The best conservative thought has long understood that religious truth is fundamental to a well-ordered society and that the secularization of society is somehow collateral with or even the cause of its moral decline.  Modern thought is everywhere reified by a thoroughly secularized society. But by and large conservatives have done little better than the drafters of Gaudium et spes, (Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church and the Modern World) in understanding the dangers of modernity and secularization to Christian civilization.  Both have been in important ways swept away by the force of history in spite of that great Catholic conservative, the late W. F. Buckley’s, defiant claim to stand athwart History and shout “Stop!”.   History has a way of making things seem inevitable, and what we think inevitable we have an irresistible urge to submit to as necessary.  Notwithstanding notable exceptions like Dr. Kirk, conservatives have, in my view, taken modernity in stride, submitting to it, without understanding it very well, as an historical necessity like good Hegelians. They have made their peace with it as many in the Church have done.

Modernity is something that conservatism has concerned itself with as fundamental to its social critique.  Conservatism has always, or at least until recent times, argued that tradition is essential to a just order of society. Dr. Kirk, we all know, was constant in his insistence, echoing Christopher Dawson, that the origin of culture is fundamentally religious and, therefore, traditionary. This fact of human society and human nature is why our modern secularized culture is so assiduously and self-consciously anti-religious.  

But Conservatism has, I think, tended to eschew strictly philosophical questions. Its critique of modernity has, in the main, treated only Modernity’s foul and unsightly lesions on the face of modern culture rather than its causes.  To be sure, the symptoms of a disease have to be treated too. But in so far as Conservatism has ever been a coherent political philosophy, it has not primarily concerned itself with the roots of political authority and obligation. Those roots have to do with the existence of divine law and man’s existential relation to it as a rational moral being.  And there, I submit, the whole matter ultimately lay.  I have tried in my book to examine the errors of thought that begot Modernity and identify them as integral to the unconscious habits of thought that make or unmake a civilized culture and which in this case have unmade a specifically Christian culture.  What I have called the culture of modernity is precisely the metastasizing of those errors of thought throughout all of civilized life.  Certainly, for the last hundred years at least it has no longer been only a matter of errors of thought but the destructive cultural habits they have produced.  But because that is so, the errors have become invisible to us. We have forgotten the pedigree of the modern world’s apostasy.  Still more to the point, we have tended to forget that it is apostate, and that all questions of political authority and obligation are ultimately theological. Hence, the importance of Dr. Kirk’s emphasizing that religious belief is at the root of culture.

For this reason, the problem of Modernity can be seen as the problem of the culture of modernity. And this is so, in so far as modern thought has destroyed the religious foundation of the old culture of the west by so thoroughly secularizing it.  It seems to be largely ignored today among conservatives and many Catholics that the old culture of the west was a specifically Christian culture, embarrassed as we are by the very idea of the confessional state.   And what we call “religious freedom” in our modern pluralist liberal democracies has done almost nothing to prevent its destruction.  Religious freedom as supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution is a canard of the liberal mythology. This, I think, is an issue that, again with some notable exceptions, conservatives in America have largely failed to address or even understand until recently (I refer you to Kenneth Craycraft’s excellent book, The Myth of American Religious Freedom).

Conservatives have not themselves been free of the taint of Modernity, intellectually or culturally. We see this in the way conservatives (again, with notable exceptions, like Wilhelm Roepke and Dr. Kirk – I’m thinking of The Humane Economy and Progress for Conservatives respectively) have so uncritically embraced capitalism and its failure to see in it the unsatisfactory nature of Enlightenment premises to a Christian civilization and the fatal affinity of the American founding to those premises. 

There is no escaping the fact that ideas have consequences, in that famous phrase we are so fond of repeating. But surely Richard Weaver meant all ideas have consequences.  The ideas that have been most consequential are the profoundest ones, namely the conclusions of modern philosophy with respect to being and knowing, which Weaver himself  (to whose book by that title my own bears some affinity) was careful to examine but which conservatism, preoccupied as it has been with superficies  of  what ails our society, has overlooked. Conservatism has rightly or wrongly avoided this theatre of battle with modernity, but I contend that it is only here that the war will be won or lost. Conservatives have always insisted on right thinking, but have, in the main, not considered what are the philosophical foundations of right thinking.

So what is Modernity and what are its roots? Before answering that question to which there is no very neat crib to keep in your pocket or purse, let’s for a moment consider what it is not. Modernity is not to be identified with everything new, with innovation, with thinking outside the box – if, that is, the “box” is the received “wisdom” of the modern world. Indeed, to think out of the “Box” today, is to be madly and maddeningly innovative. For to the modern world what we old-line conservatives call the great intellectual tradition of the west -- which is profoundly Catholic -- grows increasingly unintelligible and unknown to contemporary man (which, sadly, includes many Catholics -- witness the consternation and obscurantism -- even among Catholic conservatives -- over the economic principles of distributism). 

So, Modernity is not everything that is not the past; it is, however, a rejection of the past.  But to define Modernity even thus is to miss the boat.  It is, again, to treat only a symptom. If you seek to know why it hates and excludes tradition, which is the past’s participation in the present, you will find that its hostility is rooted in its rootlessness, in its rejection of a transcendent authority which itself is a consequence of the rejection of (get ready) metaphysical realism.  A book would scarcely be adequate to fully expound on that statement. It will here have to be enough to say that metaphysical realism is that  philosophical doctrine which teaches that knowledge comes to us by a direct perception of reality and the intellects innate power to abstract from that perception  what things are in themselves. What we do in every moment of consciousness, modern thought has denied. The denial, rarified and abstract as a point of philosophical debate 8 centuries ago, has reticulated through time into every crevice of modern thought and sensibility. It has divorced us from reality.  Reality – contrary to the deepest assumptions of the modern mind -- is not something we make -- or ever could make --but what we receive, what is given.  To misconstrue what the senses tell us about the reality outside our minds is to, say, mistake your car for a boat and then try to “sail” Lake Michigan. Worse still, to reject the very principle that our minds enjoy a direct connection to reality is to misunderstand the world entirely and ourselves principally with the result that we can delude ourselves into thinking that the moving, pulsing thing of flesh and blood in a woman’s womb cannot be human. Ideas indeed have consequences.

And they have deep roots that go back as far as 14th Century scholastic debate over universals and the Franciscan theologian and philosopher, William of Ockham, who, breaking with all tradition (and some say common sense) denied that fundamental tenet of realism, that the mind is adequate to understand reality. Others before him, like Duns Scotus, had come close but it was Ockham who willfully stepped over the edge into a profound skepticism.

While Ockham was by no means a modern skeptic or rationalist, he nevertheless considered many of the theological truths he certainly embraced as philosophically or rationally untenable, like the existence of God and the divine attributes, and the freedom and immortality of man. Yet he had no intention of casting doubt on them as objects of belief.  But Ockham had a very strict and unusually narrow idea of what constitutes a demonstration of the truth of any proposition.   He thought propositions like the immortality of the soul and divine omnipotence could be known only by faith, not by reason. There was no philosophical proof of these propositions that could satisfy him. For him sufficient reason for adequate proof was experience of these things. Ockham did not, as some have supposed, try to cleanse philosophy of its theological contaminants, but considered the realist metaphysics of the 13^th Century as he knew and understood it (which is not very well) as contaminating the purity of the Christian faith and wanted to liberate it.   The whole Greek tradition of metaphysical realism was to his mind alien to Christian theology. It shackled it to something that he thought could destroy belief. There is a stiff-necked empiricism about Ockham’s insistence that philosophical knowledge has to be based on experience.  This same empiricism, which for the devout Franciscan is a clumsy hammer he uses against any possible skepticism, becomes 400 years later the siege gun Hume levels against any possible knowledge so-called that is not empirical. Ockham’s thought is very difficult and in some respects confused (as Etienne Gilson has observed: many have tried to make perfect sense of it and failed). Now, Ockham was not, like Hume, a thoroughgoing empiricist; but it was by his philosophical conclusions from empirical principles that he made his indelible mark on the world of thought and then on the world of action. In my book, I explore in more detail this slide from Ockham’s nominalism toward Hume’s complete skepticism and beyond that to Kant’s answer to Hume.  Here I can give you only the barest sketch.

Rather than saving the world from skepticism, Ockham’s nominalism (or conceptualism) had the effect of making the slide to it even more slippery by corrupting Scholasticism in the 200 years between him and the “re-discovery” of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas in the 16^th century, who represents the best of scholasticism, which alone, I insist, could defeat skepticism.  A nominalist scholasticism was helpless against this petulant skepticism and made for much doubt and confusion in philosophical circles.

The man who, self-appointed, would rescue us all from doubt was of course Rene Descartes. (With such “friends” who needs enemies.) Rejecting empiricism that Ockham had tortuously combined with his scholastic rationalism or dialectic, Descartes reduced all genuine knowledge to a pure rationalism, to which mathematics was the supreme science.  As we all know, Descartes’ mathematicism, which was to put our knowledge of transcendent reality on the surest possible footing, had the unintended consequence of putting all of extramental reality in doubt by subjectivizing all knowledge by his well-known mind/body dichotomy which eliminated with one stroke the Greek and scholastic conception of the mind as adequate to the understanding reality as received by the senses.  According to the Cartesian dichotomy, the senses tell us nothing we can rely on as knowledge or even leading to knowledge, which can come only through the basic intuitive concepts that inhere in the mind. In other words, the mind has no way of contact with external reality except through its own internal framework. The mind becomes the “ghost in the machine”.

Descartes’ was a powerful mind and his philosophy had tremendous influence, but it could not please all of the people all of the time.  His extreme rationalism did nothing to permanently staunch the flow of belief that was bleeding from the opened veins of European thought. Instead it produced that monster of skepticism, David Hume, who denied on empirical grounds the validity even of the Principle of Causality.  To the extent that any possible meaning that we perceive in nature depends on causality, formal, material, and efficient, -- which is just about all meaning -– we would have, on Hume’s reckoning, to simply accustom ourselves to doubt.

So, from Ockham (who was no evil genius -- just wrong – and rather stubborn) in the 14^th century the trail leads directly to Descartes in the 17^th, who in attempting to eliminate all philosophical skepticism with his thoroughgoing rationalism only deepened it. His rationalism gave way to the equal and opposite reaction of Hume’s

And it was Kant who gave the coup de grace to any answer modern philosophy might provide to the philosophical questions of being and knowing.  Kant’s idealism curiously had the settling effect (at least for a great many), after Hume, of almost contenting us with our inability to know any transcendent reality or, for that matter anything at all objectively.

Kant’ philosophy is the great watershed in modern thought, because his thought seems to encompass all that preceded it and because it seems to settle finally all the worries about metaphysics: he seemed to have rescued God and morality and meaning from the monster skepticism.  But Kant really didn’t solve anything. Like a very good magician, he made the lady disappear (only of course to reappear again somewhere else). Kant is supposed to have settled the problem of metaphysics, but as Oliva Blanchette points out in his Philosophy of Being, he has little to say about being at all.  The one who has made himself judge and jury over the great tradition of metaphysics of almost 2000 years conveniently made sure that tradition could not speak for itself -- let alone with its best arguments. When Stalin treated dissidents this way, they were called “show trials”. As another recent critic has pointed out, it is doubtful that Kant ever read anything of Aristotle, Plato, the mediaeval Christian or Arab or Jewish metaphysicians, which is like basing a critique of western civilization on what one learns from a tour of Grand Rapids. Even if Kant had read thoroughly in the western tradition of metaphysics, evidently he dismissed it as not worth taking seriously.  It would have been very inconvenient for him to have faced the opposing arguments from that tradition (especially St. Thomas’s) in the customary way mediaeval philosophers did. Like many of the early modern philosophers, Kant worked in splendid isolation. 

Kant’s critique of reason was a kind of homage to the physics of Newton. For Kant, real knowledge was only possible by the empirical criteria and scrutiny of physical science. His basic thesis is that the mind cannot get beyond the boundaries of possible experience. But it is well established that the arguments which he brings over and over again to bear in support of his empiricism are themselves a priori ones, that is non-empirical arguments.

Kant’s ethical philosophy is particularly important to Christians and conservatives, who are marked by his influence in many ways. Nietzsche, who called Kant a “catastrophic spider”, thought the Kantian influence on modern Christianity (for which he had only contempt) so deep and pervasive that he compared it to Aristotle’s influence on medieval Christian thought.  If there is one word that denotes the essential nature of modernity it is Autonomy.  Professor Edward Feser (whose books, The Last Superstition and Aquinas and Locke I heartily recommend) has pointed out about Kant’s ethics that the characteristics which the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition attributes to God, that He is “autonomous,” a “self-legislator” (that He follows no law save that which is dictated by His own rational nature) Kant applies to man, because according to Kant, every human being is an end in himself. Our freedom in Kant’s view necessitates our autonomy. Autonomy from what? From any other authority than reason itself. We must, if we are to be free, be self-legislators.  Kant thought, with the rest of the Enlightenment thinkers (I refer you to his Was ist Aufklärung?), that man had finally come of age – grown up – and was ready to be free, to be his own master. That conviction is the foundation of the liberal order that has obtained in Europe and America for 250 years at least.

I want to say just a few words on the very large and difficult subject of Kant’s influence on natural law theory which had a profound influence on conservative thought not just progressive liberal thought.  This influence is largely due, I think, to Kant’s pervasive influence on contemporary Christian thought, Catholic and Protestant.  It has been somewhat puckishly said that “we are all Kantians now”.  It is easy to see this to be largely true in the unconscious Kantianism that characterizes nearly all public moral and political discourse (“conservative” and liberal) in modern western societies.   The natural law theory of most conservatives has been disoriented toward the freedom, rights, and dignity of the human person. I say “disoriented” because it has been the foundation of Christian thought until Kant that our freedom and dignity derives from our fulfillment of the allegiance we owe to God as His creatures in the order of justice. That is, the fulfillment of our nature as given.  It has been understood through most of the Christian centuries that He has ordered us naturally to Himself as the Supreme Good in a hierarchical order of goods from the lowest of the mundane to the Beatific Vision.  This is not to exclude the gratuity of supernatural grace, but only to emphasize that our nature is ordered to Himself by His creative act and thus to His Divine Law, which in our existential experience we know by reason and experience as the natural law.  The natural law as an emphasis in conservative thought withered on the vine, because it would have its natural law theory acceptable in a pluralist public orthodoxy that does not recognize divine authority deluded as it is by Kant’s idealism an his ethics that guarantee of our autonomy. According to the liberal orthodoxy, the orthodoxy of autonomy or self-legislation, our moral obligation begins with a rational assessment of the good without any acknowledgement that every good necessarily has its source – its existence -- in God, the Highest Good Who is Being itself. It was by this mistake, that  much ink was spilled and time wasted by conservatives in their opposition to abortion on a natural rights basis, supposing that such a profound moral and intellectual problem could be solved by a right reading of the constitution or by its amendment!

Alasdair Macintyre has reminded us that liberalism has no use for philosophical debates but to resolve its moral conflicts automatically resorts to the legal system. The result of this inherent proclivity of liberalism is of course a fierce legal activism which conservatives have always deplored, expressing its grave misgivings with judicial review, elitism, and the anti-democratic exercise of “raw judicial power”.  Liberalism has made the overweening courts do the duty of a supreme moral authority, what in a confessional polity would be the Church.  But conservatives have opposed judicial activism with the obverse mistake of judicial positivism. Instead of infusing an alien  (and destructive) ethic into their reading of the constitution like their activist counterparts, “conservative” jurists, like Scalia, Bork, and the late Rehnquist have conducted their constitutional jurisprudence as “strict constructionists” refusing to “impose” any ethical norms from the bench.  But as the Professor of Jurisprudence (Amherst) Hadley Arkes has convincingly argued (some of us did not need convincing) in his book, Constitutional Illusions, constitutional adjudication necessarily involves moral reasoning. Few conservatives have understood the Constitution as anything more than a procedural document.  And while it is certainly that, the constitution certainly implies an ethical view of man and the state, even a theological one. There should be no denying the truth that any operative idea of political authority and obligation or of liberty and natural rights ineluctably involves a theologically grounded ethos of human nature and purpose.  The constitution does not give meaning to its own controlling concepts such as life, liberty, rights equality, equal protection, etc. These morally-loaded concepts Arkes calls “principles of right and wrong that do not depend for their authority on their mention in the Constitution.”   Any meaning of these terms is understood only in an ethos that already obtains in social order.  And if the prevailing orthodoxy of the society is so profoundly disordered from reality, as is apparent all round us, then to make a legal positivist use of the Constitution as protection against the ravages of advanced liberalism is like protecting ourselves from the flood by hiding behind a dike that is cracking up.

Conservatism has been a great champion of natural law often in the name of natural rights (which is not the same thing – unbenounced to many conservative soi-disant spokesmen).  But natural law is a toothless lion, a dead letter, when divorced in conception (as it can never be in reality) from the divine law from which it draws any reality. So divorced, it becomes a thing which, while perhaps “written on our hearts”, has paradoxically no known or knowable author. An orphaned natural law becomes (as it has been for the last 200 years) the plaything of our subjectivism and our rationalism (the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Kant’s practical reason).  As if either reason or will were indefectible.  The rights orientation to natural law is the wrong. Moral obligation is antecedent to moral rights: I have a right to a doctor’s medical attention when I am seriously ill, only because a doctor first has an obligation to heal whenever possible. It is not the other way around ontologically.  If the law did not oblige the doctor, then no “right” to his attention would exist. Allow me to quote the French political philosopher, Pierre Manent (I refer you to his City of Man): “Severed from being, the notion of human rights by itself lacks ontological density. It will irresistibly conquer the political and moral realms since, available and unattached, it can easily be tied to the various experiences of man that all appear capable of being looked at in these terms. . . . [T]here is nothing under the sun . . . that is not susceptible of becoming the occasion and matter of a human right.”

Having insisted that the natural law is founded on the divine law, I am not implying that the natural law is something imposed on us by God, like Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the Tablets inscribed by the Hand of God.  That the natural law derives from God, we may be sure. But it is not something we receive extrinsically from divine legislation. Rather it is our nature. In the same way that God made trees to act in a certain way so  did He make man, who then acts – broadly speaking -- according to the inherent propensities of his nature. Hence, the importance of culture and its interaction with the religious nature of man.  For that nature should be naturally expressed in culture in so far as culture expresses – or will, if permitted -- our basic human propensities. The culture of Modernity expresses not the religious nature of man but rather its exclusion, given the grand illusion of modernity that man has no such nature, in fact, that he has no nature – no essential purpose –at all. No civilization founded on such an illusion can long endure.

According to the Aristotelian tradition of metaphysical realism, as adapted and taught by St. Thomas, the Common Doctor of the Church, the nature of a thing is its  form of its existence – what makes it what it is, dog , cat, man --  and thus it is its modus essendi, the way in which it exists. But as we do not make up the finalities or purposes of our existence but act according to a nature, which subsists in an entire order of being, a hierarchy at the summit of which is God Himself, the law of our being is given us, but not extrinsically. The natural law is, rather, the dynamic propensities of our nature as God ordained it, which is, as Frederick Wilhelmsen beautifully phrased it, “an unfolding of treasures written initially like promises within the scroll of being” (here I’ll refer you to his excellent book, Christianity and Political Philosophy).  But man is that privileged being who is not compelled to follow the dictates of his nature.   

To follow the dictates of our nature would mean, as Frederick Wilhelmsen put it, actively “signing” our culture with the marks of the Christian faith, – an application, I might venture to suggest, of Dr. Kirk’s “moral imagination”.  It follows then that for a people to make its religious belief conspicuous is inevitable in a truly free society. It follows in turn that a society that whose essential pluralism so excludes from its public orthodoxy the recognition of transcendent  authority and transcendent reality is not a truly free society. 

Thus, the Church’s relation to Modernity and modern civilization is crucial for conservatives. Because she is presence on earth of Him by Whom all existence came into being, and Who is Light of the world. It should be clear from the Church’s persistence as an intellectual after 2000 years that the idea of Christ as Lumen Gentium is not a mere sentiment to be tucked away for religious uses but no good in politics and economics.  But the Church and her tradition should be important to conservatism’s view of the problem of modernity, from a purely human consideration a well, that the Catholic Church is the last and supreme institution in this world that stands athwart Modernity and truly understands it. Yet even she, to the extent that she is a human institution, has been infected by the contagion of Modernity and many among her members even and especially in those who govern the Church have been benighted by it. The trouble this has brought on us has been incalculable.  A part of my book explores this infection of Catholic theology by modern thought, the effects of which have all but destroyed Catholic tradition.

If (and the question is, of course, purely hypothetical) the Church should lose her way – as conservatism seems to have lost its way – then the intellectual tradition she has fostered and protected and which even so has languished this last century would wither and she with it.   But we have it on good Authority that this will not happen. Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean many minds and hearts won’t continue to be lost to a rational apprehension of the good, and, as a consequence, many souls lost. Nor does the divine assurance mean that our civilization won’t fall to ruin as all civilizations must do for they are mortal like human beings that make them.  But the intellectual errors that have produced the culture of modernity are a poison and having drunk deeply of it the west is dying an unnatural death. The alternative to saving it – if it can be saved – is not pretty. We know what happens when civilizational order breaks down. The terrible 4^th, 5^th, 8^th and 9^th centuries were witness to it. And cultural conservatives have been fond of saying since the 1960s that our own era is witnessing the “barbarians at the gates”. Unfortunately, the barbarians are now ruling us. We have no longer the luxury of being “conservative”.  For there is little left to conserve. Our task is rather to restore. And if we take up that task, let us be taught – indeed formed as well informed by-- by the great Catholic tradition by which our great civilization was nurtured.

Thank you