CHAPTER 2
ABANDONMENT OF THE QUEST — A PATH WITH NO HEART
With the seventeenth century begins the incredible spectaculum of modernity — both fascinating and nauseating, grandiose and vulgar, exhilarating and depressing, tragic and grotesque — with its apocalyptic enthusiasm for building new worlds that will be old tomorrow, at the expense of old worlds that were new yesterday; with its destructive wars and revolutions spaced by temporary stabilizations on ever lower levels of spiritual and intellectual order through natural law, enlightened self-interest, a balance of powers, a balance of profits, the survival of the fittest, and the fear of atomic annihilation in a fit of fitness; with its ideological dogmas piled on top of the ecclesiastic and sectarian ones and its resistant skepticism that throws them all equally on the garbage heap of opinion; with its great systems built upon untenable premises and its shrewd suspicions that the premises are indeed untenable and therefore must never be rationally discussed; with the result, in our time, of having unified mankind into a global madhouse bursting with stupendous vitality.
— ERIC VOEGELIN, Published Essays, 1966–1985
It has no doubt been worth the metaphysical barbarism of a few centuries to possess modern science.
— E. A. BURTT, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science
The Western Revolutions
All the defining institutions of modernity emerged out of western Europe beginning in the sixteenth century as a thousand years of feudalism collapsed and three revolutionary movements converged. Traditionally, historians deal separately with the Protestant Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the commercial revolution. But taking them together we can see how each changed the common cultural and intellectual context in ways that reinforced the most revolutionary ideas of the other two to produce a civilizational shift. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these ideas solidified into the “metaphysics of modernity,” the philosophical underpinnings for global industrial capitalism. It provided the framework for approaching the search for the best way to live, which eventually produced the political philosophy of classical Liberalism. This was most clearly expressed by the writings of the defining Liberal thinkers — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Adam Smith — who together offered a compelling vision of the good life and the just society that remains the default ideology of modernity. Liberalism remains the primary philosophical justification for our dominant institutions and values: free-market capitalism, minimal representational government, the rights and freedoms of the individual, industrial mass production, and a culture of unlimited material consumption.*
The Liberal vision inspired a wave of democratic revolutions, including, most notably, the American Revolution, which culminated in the drafting of the Constitution of the United States. The founding fathers of the American republic represented the creative elite of the new revolutionary philosophy. The delegates from the colonies who met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft the Constitution were exemplars of a triumphant middle class: predominantly successful businessmen, lawyers, and farmers; Protestant, property owning, and imbued with the promise of the new mechanistic science. The country was vast and blessed with great natural wealth. Victory in the War of Independence eliminated the British colonial presence and, with it, the need for the victorious revolutionaries to accommodate an old guard. In this sense, the American Revolution was less a revolution than a war of national liberation against a foreign occupation. Since American Liberals, unlike those in Europe, never had to compromise with the residues of feudal opposition, their vision remained unalloyed. This produced a country so politically homogenous that its revolutionary ideology became almost invisible.1 The result was that America emerged into the twentieth century as a unified economic and military giant, showing in stark relief all the greatness and the flaws of this quintessentially modern, Western paradigm of the good life.
In Civilization, his lively and penetrating comparative history of the rise of Western civilization, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson identifies what he calls six “killer apps” (using unintentionally sinister cyber-slang) for the institutions that most distinguished the West from “the Rest” and that are most responsible for its dramatic rise to global dominance.2 All the apps were products of the three revolutions of modernity. They are: competition based on a degree of decentralization of political and economic life; science; property rights; medicine, as an application of science; the consumer society; and the work ethic. They were applied aggressively and inventively in the four hundred years between 1500 and 1900 to transform the position of the West from relative insignificance to comprehensive domination of the global population and economy.3 Western dominance is now in question, says Ferguson, because this quintessentially Western package has become global. “The Chinese have got capitalism. The Iranians have got science. The Russians have got democracy. The Africans are (slowly) getting modern medicine. And the Turks have got the consumer society.”4
Ferguson keeps the faith that the Western formula still offers human societies the best available set of institutions: “the ones most likely to unleash the individual human creativity capable of solving the problems the twenty-first century faces.”5 His concluding recommendations for the West to retain its edge are surprisingly timid: educational reform, perhaps reinstituting “formal knowledge” and “rote-learning” and reading the classics. He lists his “great books” — the King James Bible, Newton’s Principia, Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, the complete works of William Shakespeare, and so on.
But Ferguson’s Civilization operates like most conventional historical analyses, within the time frame of the past 5,500 years of written history. To grasp the larger significance of the crisis of Liberalism, we need to invoke the perspective of big history, within which civilization itself is a very recent event on an evolving earth. From this perspective, the world of industrial capitalism, ushered in by Liberalism, can be seen as dramatically intensifying some of the most conspicuous, defining aspects of civilization: division of labor, hierarchies of wealth and power, specialization in knowledge, and application of instrumental rationality to the mastery of nature and its conversion into wealth. This civilizational trajectory has reached a dead end. The Liberal narrative is exhausted and its institutional forms in their present state are undermining the very conditions necessary for civilization to flourish. The time for a radically more life-affirming vision arrived.
The “big history” perspective helps us see how some of the killer apps are becoming truly deadly. The metaphysics of modernity had a contradictory effect on the truth quest. Liberalism originally supported the truth quest in a number of crucial respects: it liberated the individual from ossified feudal structures and clarified and systematized the scientific method. It also made possible an explosive increase in the human population and our immense achievements in science, art, and the material quality of life. On the other hand, Liberalism’s emphasis on an instrumental, mathematical rationality, minimal government, and the invisible hand of the free market effectively eliminated the need for the individual to consider the good of the whole. So here we have a stark irony: Liberalism emerged from the pursuit of the truth quest but its consequences undermined the very quest responsible for its truth. The result is an increasingly corrupt political culture based on self-interest and avarice, while our policies and institutions are leading us to civilizational collapse.
The challenge for our age, in essence, is to advance, deepen, and in a sense complete the Liberal revolution by bringing to bear the larger perspective. This will involve recovering some of the oldest traditional wisdom that Liberalism rejected and then integrating it with some of the newest.
