Understanding Modernism, A Summary
Modernism: What It Is
Unlike "the Enlightenment" or "Romanticism" this term is used a couple different ways.
a) In its broadest, most general usage it may refer to the world given to us by the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This what you refer to when you think of your own and your "modern" American/Western culture's basic assumptions: secular, democratic republics, civil liberties and equality, a belief that nature is beautiful etc.
b) As an artistic or literary movement it may refer to Modern Art such as Van Gogh or to Modern Literature's emphasis on realism, the individual, and the inner life of the psyche or mind.
c) It’s also useful to think of Modernism as a “condition” rather than an intellectual movement.
The Modern Condition
"The Modern Condition" can be understood as having its philosophical roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, and its historical roots in the Industrial Revolution, Colonialism and the major wars and genocide of the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
As you know, the Enlightenment argued that Rationality and Freedom would save man from himself, and Romanticism argued that Love and Emotion would correct the sterility and “heartlessness” of the Enlightenment, but Modernism is in many ways a critique of the empty or impossible promises of both previous movements: both the Enlightenment and Romanticism offered some excellent ideas, but how many people really took them to heart and/or act upon them? In other words, did they really improve our lot as human beings or did they simply present another set of equally brutal problems?
Thus, Enlightenment works such as Tartuffe and Candide conclude with well balanced, moderate, rational solutions to social problems; in Romantic works such as Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein realizes, albeit too late, that his lack of love has created a monster and destroyed his own family, and the reader is left clearly understanding the nature of the problem and its solution.
But the works of T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad mainly expose the problem and despair over ever finding another solution: they expose the hypocritical “whited sepulchers” of the Enlightenment and mourn the failure of love, and yet they remain too jaded to offer up another easy solution.
In many ways, the Modern Condition is this
willingness to realize and honestly admit to the failure of previous solutions.
Guernica
Why This Despair?
Darwin and The Origin Of The Species
Charles' Darwin's The Origin of the Species (1859)
revolutionized modern culture in a couple of ways:
First, like Kepler, Galileo and Newton, Darwin again proved that science could explain the natural world or universe in ways that religion once had, and when it did it did not confirm but rather disprove the prior religious explanations.
As with Galileo but even more so, Darwin's theory was (and still is) seen as an attack on organized religion itself. This drove (and continues to drive) an even larger wedge between those who turned to science and those who turned to religion as a means of understanding existence, and unlike what Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Jefferson expected, the religious backlash was vehement and continuing.
But more importantly, Darwin's theory not only removed an all knowing "creator" from the picture; it replaced it with chance and random circumstance. Where religion had given us a universe with meaning and order, Darwin gave us one of blind luck and empty blackness: not only were we not at the center of the universe, science suggested, but the universe was endlessly vast and we just another insignificant organism, made in the image of bacteria rather than God.
This scared, and continues to scare, the shit out of us.
Colonialism: Unwillingness of "Enlightened" Western "Civilization" to truly treat all peoples as "equal". See Conrad and Achebe Notes
War:
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – Yeats
The Enlightenment offered the promise of freedom and prosperity: through rationality man would build new, democratic, egalitarian, just, utopias that would harness emerging scientific technologies and deliver man from slavery.
Instead, the 19th and 20th Centuries proved vastly more bloody and brutal than any other in written history. By many estimates, at least 170,000,000 civilians were killed by their own governments during the 20th Century. (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM)
The American Civil War cost the States 618,000 lives. Even loving, Christian, Enlightened Americans proved themselves willing to slaughter one another for the right to enslave others.
World War I caused 9.7 million military and 6.6 million civilian deaths. Modern technology proved itself adaptable to "modern warfare", which proved itself vastly more destructive than "primitive" technologies and methods.
World War II caused 62 million casualties, 37 million of which were civilian. The United States alone killed 500,000 Japanese civilians by firebombing 67 Japanese cities; the first, Tokyo, is estimated to have killed up to 100,000 in one night. ...Enlightenment technology had given us the means of killing each other like never before without, seemingly, giving us the means of not killing each other as we always had. Such power clearly reached its peak with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Holocaust is perhaps the clearest representation or symbol of the failure of Enlightenment and Romantic principles. Under Hitler and the Nazis, the three most "civilized" elements of Western Civilization -- modern "Enlightenment" technology and rationalism, Romanticism, and both Protestant and Catholic Christianity -- teamed up to carry out the most "barbaric" systematic extermination of people, ever.
Under both Mao and Stalin, the relatively “modern”, “rationally” based, utopian Communist states led to the two greatest recorded acts of genocide, ever. (We'll study how Marxism is an outgrowth of both Enlightenment rationality and Rousseau's Romantic philosophy.)
Rational, scientific man, it turned out, had perhaps simply learned how to kill more efficiently. Neither the spread of or end of Christianity seemed to alter mankind's thirst for evil -- in the United States (Civil War) and Western Europe (WWI and WWII) Christians slaughtered each other in larger numbers than ever before, in numbers mimicked in Post-religious-Communist China and Russia.
Freedom, The Primacy of the Individual, and Alienation
The Enlightenment call for greater civic freedoms and the Romantic call for increased individual freedoms further led to a culture of alienation: freed from the social constrictions of the church, Modern man found himself freed from both community and recourse to faith. In other words, in times of need, the Modern man found himself alone. Freed from the constrictions of formal religion, Modern man was freed from the comforts of ritual and forced to figure out life’s existential questions alone. Freed from the village and farm, Modern man was freed from the security of family, common culture and community. The alienation from the natural world bemoaned by the Romantics only deepened as societies increasingly urbanized. Industrialization further alienated Modern man from the product of his own hands.
And so we find Conrad's Enlightened Kurtz not simply armed with reason but armed and dangerous, far from cultural constraints, reaching deep inside only himself for morality, only to find…nothing. Or more aptly: Nothingness.
In Things Fall Apart, Achebe shows us that "enlightening" and "civilizing" foreign cultures really means destroying those cultures so that we may exploit them, and freedom from "barbaric" or "savage", "uncivilized" customs and beliefs leaves men like Okonkwo defeated and left with no defense but violence and brutality.
We find the epic heroes of the classical age replaced with T.S. Eliot's scarecrow "hollow men".
We find Tolstoy's Anna Karenina freed from the constraints of traditional marriage, a truly modern, sexually liberated woman, yet she is also utterly alienated from her children, her church, her community.
Are Marx And Freud "Modern"?
If we look at "Modernism"
this way, as a condition rather than a philosophical movement, it may be helpful
to think of Freudian and Marxist philosophy as in many ways vestiges of the
Enlightenment, as both still hold out hope that scientific rationality can end
human suffering.
However, both Marx and Freud (and Nietzsche) contribute greatly to the growing sense that knowledge is existential and "contaminated" by our subjectivity, emotions and human relationships. This will become the central theme of "Postmodernism" but these seeds were clearly planted and influential in the Modern era.