Reflections on the Modern and the Global

Bruce Mazlish, Daniel Hood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138514027
• eBook ISBN: 9781351494229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Over the past five hundred years, historians and other social scientists have perceived an extraordinary occurance: the transition from the Middle Ages, via the Renaissance, to modernity. Equally remarkable has been the transition taking place in the last fifty years from modernity to globalization, a period marked by increasing interdependency and interconnectivity, as evidenced by events such as the advent of the computer. Bruce Mazlish argues that in order to understand ourselves in the world today we need to know more about the nature of both concepts. Mazlish discusses the transition in terms of "reflections." Rather than adding to the enormous amount of archival research that already exists, he instead examines slices of modernity-the way of seeing, the sense of self, for example-as if under a microscope. He sees modernity as strongly marked by its insistence on freedom of political and religious thought and the rights of man (later expanded to include women). Such changes did not happen all at once, but as a gradual development. While some prefer to contemplate the transition from the modern to the global as a continuous, seamless development, Mazlish argues that post-WWII developments are best understood in terms of a break or a "rupture." Illustrating that the process was further accelerated by the computer revolution and the launching of artificial satellites, Mazlish places the events of 1989 in the framework of globalization. He concludes by inquiring further into the significance of the transition from modernity to globalization and its impact upon thought and identity.

1
A Short History of Modernity

The term modernity goes back to the fifth century AD and the time of the Roman Empire, or rather its so-called decline and fall (in fact, of course, it persisted vigorously in the East). This linguistic innovation—moderni in contrast to antique—became a marker of importance, whose true content was to be realized later, well after its birth. What was immediately important was the term’s creation of the ancient, against which the modern could begin to define itself. In fact, of course, what followed after the fifth century was what came to be called the Middle Ages, allowing for the ancient and the modern to pull apart.¹

Thus, as we try to define modernity, it is necessary to recognize that it is from its inception a form of periodization. Although not really codified until the Renaissance, the tripartite division into ancient, medieval, and modern is implicit in its original coinage. Thereafter there are many modifications. Historians speak of early modernity as well as of late modernity; and of course they write about low and high middle ages. What is constant is the attempt to make sense of the past by classifying it into particular periods of time, which each then takes on a life of its own. The periodization can even become an agent, as when we speak of modernity as causing something.

All this is well known, though one often needs a reminder. The literal meaning of modernity is “just now.” It is always, therefore, by definition new. Implicitly, there can be no stasis, no unchanging essence to modernity, unless we consider change and newness as its essence. As one author recently put it, modernity is a “condition of existence whose major feature is acceptance of historical change.” Its adherents, we are told, have a sense of “living in the future.”² Theirs is a new consciousness. In short, modernity is a constantly new and unfolding attitude, defining itself in the course of historical experience, which immediately then goes beyond its own momentary definition as a result of new experience.

Modernity is a social construction, a category by which to view the world and in terms of that view to remake it. To repeat: modernity is not an abstraction, a timeless entity, but an attitude that manifests itself in historical terms. For this reason we must now go beyond the kinds of general statements that I have been making. For most of this book, therefore, I will be engaged with the details of how in key episodes modernity has emerged in the history of the human species. I will not be writing a history of this emergence as such, but rather focusing on crucial features of its development.

Consequently, I will first take up a quintessential episode, the so-called battle of the ancients and the moderns, in the remainder of this present chapter. This encounter in the late seventeenth century marks the full-scale awareness of what is at stake. It will introduce us to our subject.

Then, rather than continuing with a formal history of modernity, its various multiples over time, for example, as a seventeenth-century version that then gives way to variants such as an Enlightenment followed by an industrial modernity—all being holistic constructions made up of the constellation of elements that contemporaries and we ourselves figure out as characteristic of the phenomenon—I will focus on central aspects of the experience. One example is what I will be calling the seeing revolution. Another is the view of the Self. And so on.

In this way, I will try to suggest what is involved in any modernity in terms of a sub-stratum of a developing consciousness and sub-consciousness. Once this is accomplished, I will then turn to globalization, seeking to understand it both as a continuation of modernity and in its own terms. Finally, I will undertake a comparison of modernity and globalization as categories of thought by which we seek to understand and try to order our existence.

(2)

In 1687, Charles Perrault wrote a long poem, Le Siècle de Louis le Grand, immediately followed at the end of the year by Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, with three revised editions between 1688 and 1696–7. These works were the opening salvos in what came to be called the quarrel, or the battle, or the parallel of the ancients and the moderns. Though today most famous for his Tales of Mother Goose, the French author only came to the Tales toward the end of his life. Before that, in addition to his writings such as listed above, he had been involved in the creation of the Academy of Sciences, the restoration of the Academy of Painting, and the founding of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres, of which he was made secretary for life. Clearly a man of many parts, in his defense of modernity, or actually his offense in its name, Perrault was equipped to fight on many fronts.

He was not without precedents. In 1670, Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin published his Comparaison de la langue et de la poésie française avec la grecque et la latine, which affirmed, as one commentator puts it, “that antiquity had already reached an unsurpassable degree of perfection,” first given it at the moment of creation.³ However, what was missing was invention, which allowed artists to do more than just imitate nature. This, of course, meant that the modern could add something new—an assertion that was itself breathtakingly new in its self-assertion.

In his own writings, Perrault claimed that French literature was superior to Greek and Latin literature. This claim was tied from the beginning to praise of his own time and of his king, Louis XIV. For Perrault, great literary accomplishments are built upon the existence of a great monarch and a great nation. In his Le Siècle de Louis le Grand this note is sounded loud and clear. Thus, Perrault was not only attacking the worship of the ancients, but extolling the power and prestige of the French king. From the beginning, then, the struggle was laden with political meaning.

That meaning, however, is complicated in this early expression of modernity. In speaking of a “century,” Perrault is abandoning the usual dynastic history, and appealing, instead, to the calculating spirit of his time. A century is a hundred years, and acquires a character separate from that even of the king. It has the same impersonality as a meter or other mathematical measurements. It implies that it will be succeeded by other centuries. Thus, the spirit of change is built into this new periodization. It indicates clearly that much time—centuries—has passed since the ancients. On this awareness a sense of superiority can be based.

The irony is that first the ancients had to be rediscovered and reestablished in all their glory. This was the task of the Renaissance, when antiquity was reborn. Only when the greatness and purity of the ancients had been recovered could moderns such as Perrault go on to surpass them. The literature of the ancients had embodied the universal and the unchanging. Now the moderns in their literature, recognizing a worthy antagonist, could argue that in the seventeenth century originality and genius had given birth to something superior to their predecessors. Individual judgment was now valued and brought into play, as the literary innovator proceeded according to his “own lights,” a wonderful forecasting by Perrault of the Enlightenment to come.⁴

In the Parallèle, Perrault coupled advances in technology to those in regard to literature. Building on Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s distinction between imitation and invention, Perrault praised the moderns’ use of the latter as progressing beyond the work of the ancients. The example he offered was that of a mechanical device for fabricating silk stockings. Replacing the skilled workman whose output was distinctly limited, Perrault wrote about the machine: “How many little springs draw the silk fibers toward them, then let them go and take them up again & pull through such-and-such a stitch in an inexplicable fashion, & all this while the laborer who operates the machine understands nothing, knows nothing, nor even thinks about it.”⁵

Perrault’s point was that the ancients did not know of such a machine. We, in hindsight and foresight, can see that Perrault was anticipating Adam Smith and his description of pin manufacturing, the famous example he used in The Wealth of Nations to help explain the division of labor characterizing the new commercial and industrial society. Both men, Perrault and Smith, are also aware that one price for such modernity is dull-witted workers who do not understand the process in which they are engaged. Smith, of course, differs from the author of the Parallèle by having a clear insight into the “inexplicable fashion” by which the machine works. As we also know, this insight was given powerful visual as well as literary representation in the Encyclopedia of the eighteenth century.

With these brief remarks on parts of the contents of Perrault’s writings, I want to step back and make some general remarks about the quarrel taking place. In back of this expression of it, with the term modernity vigorously entering the public domain, we can see previous expressions of the problem. Foremost in the struggle was Francis Bacon, who waged what we now identify as the battle against the ancients, whom he attacked under the label tradition. Without rehearsing his work, we can recognize his trumpeting of modern science—he didn’t use the term modern—over that of the past. He urged his contemporaries to see for themselves, looking at the actual phenomena, rather than seeking truth in the texts of the ancients.

With such “Advancement of Learning” in mind, Bacon also argued for a different perspective on time. We, not those of past times, are the older, and are gifted with greater knowledge and mechanical genius because of that longer experience. The so-called ancients are, in fact, the children of the race, whereas we are the grown-ups. We have science well beyond that of our ancestors, and by following certain rules for acquiring further knowledge—the accumulation of empirical and experimental work—we can expect to expand our advantage.

In an entirely different modulation, but in the same key, was the voice of René Descartes. Capturing the sense of universality and unity from the ancients and their classics, the French scientist placed that sense in a secular science based on reason. In godlike tones, Descartes argued that by his mind alone, freed from the dross of actual experience, he could construct the universe exactly as God had done. There is no need to rehearse the details of Descartes’s philosophy, which is well known. Here I want only to emphasize how, in an opposite fashion from Bacon, the author of the Discourse on Method preached the same message: there was nothing in the past or the ancients that we couldn’t do as well and better.

With Perrault, the terrain of battle is shifted to literature. It is culture rather than science that gives the palm to the modern (although the scientific in the form of technology is hinted at). As early as the beginning of the seventeenth century—the OED claims 1635 for the first usage; an arbitrary citation I suspect—the term modernity in English is in existence. It reflects the work of writers such as Bacon and Descartes, with their path-breaking assertion of the superiority of present times to those of antiquity. By the end of the century, with Perrault and others like him, the term has taken on a self-reflexivity and a centrality that it had previously not enjoyed. The Parallèle stands for a symbolic shift, one in which the battle is openly joined and a flag sturdily planted. Henceforth for the next three hundred years or so, modernity stands triumphant.

(3)

From the very beginning, of course, there was opposition. In fact, most contemporaries would have thought that the victory belonged to the ancients. Tradition, they would have thought, had emerged triumphant from the contest. Perrault’s opponents, such as Boileau, seemed to have won the contest. In condemning the new literary genre, the novel, which had not existed in antiquity, the traditionalists were also condemning all that was new. There were others on Perrault’s side—foremost among them perhaps being Fontenelle, whose Digression sur les anciens et les modernes also appeared in 1688—but not unexpectedly the old order had more adherents than the new lights.

Yet the future lay with Perrault and his associates. They were creating a public. At first mostly a literary public, or community, it rapidly turned into a public whose opinion on matters political and social outran the original quarrel about literature. A special feature of the new public was the participation of women. They not only read the novels but wrote many of them. Their taste, it was argued, was finer than that of the male sex. In the civilizing process, their gentility wooed men from their uncouth pursuit of power by military means. Thus, the central role of the female became a litmus test for deciding what constituted civilization (a new term introduced in 1756, by the elder Mirabeau).⁶

Women were also more sensitive, it was asserted. The notion of sensibilité carried with it new rules for human relationships and an awareness of the individual self. Such sensibility marked another advantage of the modern over the ancient. It, too, correlated with an advance in science. William Harvey in 1626 announced his discovery of the circulation of the blood. Now there was a medical basis—new—for understanding the heart, and thus human emotions. These were now placed on a more secure and lofty foundation than could be found in antiquity.

Perrault took advantage of this discovery so as to extend its obvious superiority over the ancients to the domain of both sensibility and moral philosophy. As he wrote, “Just as anatomy has discovered in the heart valves, fibers, and movements of which the ancients had no knowledge, in the same manner moral philosophy [la morale] has discovered attractions, aversions, desires, and repulsions unknown to the ancients.”⁷ There is a unity of knowledge, so to speak, a holistic joining of the natural and human sciences (as we would come to call them). Such a unity can be expressed in the device of a century and awarded the palm over earlier centuries, that is, those of antiquity. Hence, it is on many separate fronts, but all part of one overall battle that the moderns can be judged the victors qualitatively, even if most of their contemporaries believed otherwise.

(4)

Yet, the picture above is too simple. As with actual war, friends and foes became indistinct, false redoubts had been stormed, and confusion reigned over the battlefield in Tolstoyean fashion. Indeed, it appears now that the wrong terrain had been fought over by some of the partisans of modernity. It is hard, when all is said and done, to sustain the notion that Aeschylus was truly inferior to Corneille, and Homer a lesser bard than members of the French Academy. As is now recognized, literature is the reflection of a society’s soul, and thus not subject to the strictures of rational progress. Therefore it was the weakest point on which to base an argument for the superiority of the moderns. Nevertheless it was here that the first flag was planted, and the lines of battle first drawn up. And the first victory of the moderns wrongfully recorded.

A more decisive battleground was that of science. Indeed, within a few years of the Parallele and the Digression, the war moved across the Channel and took on, almost by accident, another aspect. This time the essential difference between the ancients ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Short History of Modernity
• 2 A Seeing Revolution: A View of Modernity
• 3 The Self
• 4 The Capitalist Society
• 5 Globalization: A Rupture
• 6 Periodizing Globalization
• 7 Global Importance of 1989
• 8 Globalization Nationalized
• 9 From the Sentiment of Humanity to the Concept of Humanity
• 10 Social Bonding, Globalization, and Humanity*
• Conclusion
• Index