The Dark Side of Modernity

Jeffrey C. Alexander

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745648224, 9780745648217
• eBook ISBN: 9780745665061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, one of the world's leading social theorists presents a critical, alarmed, but also nuanced understanding of the post-traditional world we inhabit today. Jeffrey Alexander writes about modernity as historical time and social condition, but also as ideology and utopia. The idea of modernity embodies the Enlightenment's noble hopes for progress and rationality, but its reality brings great suffering and exposes the destructive impulses that continue to motivate humankind.

Alexander examines how twentieth-century theorists struggled to comprehend the Janus-faced character of modernity, which looks backward and forward at the same time. Weber linked the triumph of worldly asceticism to liberating autonomy but also ruthless domination, describing flights from rationalization as systemic and dangerous. Simmel pointed to the otherness haunting modernity, even as he normalized the stranger. Eisenstadt celebrated Axial Age transcendence, but acknowledged its increasing capacity for barbarity. Parsons heralded American community, but ignored modernity's fragmentations.

Rather than seeking to resolve modernity's contradictions, Alexander argues that social theory should accept its Janus-faced character. It is a dangerous delusion to think that modernity can eliminate evil. Civil inclusion and anti-civil exclusion are intertwined. Alexander enumerates dangerous frictions endemic to modernity, but he also suggests new lines of social amelioration and emotional repair.

1

SOCIAL THEORY BETWEEN PROGRESS AND APOCALYPSE

Social theory is a mental reconstruction of its time, not a reflection but a self-reflection. Art is self-reflection in an iconic and expressive form. Theoretical self-reflection is intellectual and abstract. It leads not to experience and epiphany but to analysis and thought. Social theory cannot induce catharsis, but it can transform understanding. We need social theory if we are going to understand our world. As the great and terrible twentieth century closed and a new one began, this need became even more important.

The thesis of this chapter is that the twentieth century was a unique construction, a historically demarcated world, and that twentieth-century theory is differentiated from earlier theorizing in much the same way. This may be an illusion for future historians to correct. Certainly, neither theory nor history can hope to break out of the self conceptions of their own time. At this point, however, the historical uniqueness of our just completed century seems an empirical fact. It certainly was a social fact, for in this uniqueness most of the participants in that century fervently believed.

To comprehend the underlying motifs of the twentieth century, and eventually its social theory, we must clarify what initially marked the West off from other civilizations, the modern West from earlier periods in its history, and the twentieth century from earlier Western modern societies. This distinguishing notion was “progress” and the possibility of perfection it implied.

All complex societies have had myths about the Golden Age. Only in the West, however, did people seriously begin to think that such a new age might occur in this rather than some other fantastical world. This-worldly conceptions were formulated in Judaism thousands of years ago. If the Jews kept their covenant with God, the Bible promised, God would establish his reign of perfection on earth – what came to be called the millennium. Because Jews were the chosen people, God promised to eventually redeem them. Christianity believed that Christ had been sent to renew this redemptive promise. We have lived in what might be called a millennial civilization ever since.

Yet, Christianity still placed the millennium far off in the distant future. It would certainly not happen in our lifetimes. The lot of human beings on earth, at the present time, could hardly be changed. This religious dualism began to shift with the Reformation, which was much more emphatically this-worldly. Protestants, and especially Calvinists and Puritans, worked hard in this world, with the hope of bringing about the kingdom of God on earth. Such religious belief in the possibility of this-worldly perfection had already received secular sanction in Renaissance humanism, with its earthiness and optimism about improving nature and society. The Enlightenment translated these religious and secular strands of perfectionism into the vocabulary of rational progress. As Becker (1932) suggested in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, Enlightenment thinkers believed in the imminent possibility of a secular golden age.

Perfectionism is the belief that the human world can become the mirror of the divine. This possibility has defined the idealized essence of modernity. To be modern is to believe that the masterful transformation of the world is possible, indeed that it is likely.¹ In the course of modernity, this pledge to worldly transformation has been renewed time and time again. No matter what the disaster, the hope and belief in imminent perfection never disappears. Faith in perfection has informed all the great experiments of the modern world, big and small, good and bad, the incessant reformism and the revolutions launched from the left and from the right.²

With the Enlightenment and the growth of secular, scientific thought, the ethos of perfectionism became inseparable from the claims of reason.³ Reason is the self-conscious application of the mind to social and natural phenomena. Through reason, people came to believe, we can master the world. Through this mastery, we can become free and happy. The world can be made a reasonable place. It can be reconstructed. Marx and Hegel produced their own versions of such perfectionism; neither believed in it less fervently than the other.⁴

In the twentieth century this fundamental tenet of modernity was challenged and ultimately changed. The faith in progress was frequently disappointed, and the sense of possibility for perfection diminished. This diminution did not occur in every place and at every moment, of course; in the end, however, it so permeated modern life as to deeply affect its core. Modern became postmodern long before the contemporary period. The experience of the last century came to be seen as a tragic one. The originality of its social theory came from coming to grips with this experience.

The Rational Line: Progress

I do not want to advance this thesis in a polemical or one-sided way. If one does so, the argument becomes myth and caricature, and loses its force. Our understanding of the twentieth century must be more subtle and more complex. To recognize its tragic proportions does not mean to ignore the hopes that it inspired and the real progress it achieved.

From the point of view of the present day, it is possible to look back on that century as a time of wondrous achievement. It is especially possible, and likely, for Americans to do so, but it is not impossible even for Europeans. Doing so reflects the particular historical vantage point of the present day; it also reflects the continuing intensity of the progressivist faith. History can, after all, always be reconstructed in different ways.

If we look back at the beginning of the twentieth century, we can see great hopes. In Germany and in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, large social democratic parties existed, and their progress appeared to many as inexorable. By pledging themselves to control the market and by demanding full voting rights, these parties promised to incorporate the working classes into industrial economies and to democratize the state.⁵

Similar progressive forces seemed to be expanding in other industrialized nations. In England, radical utilitarians and Fabian socialists had increasing access to social, intellectual, and state power, and Marxian socialism itself was becoming a stronger and more militant force. In environments less hospitable to socialism, liberalism was developing a social program of its own. French “solidarism” and American “progressivism” were viewed as prime examples of the successful mitigation of capitalism’s harshest face.

The progressive view of the past century can be sustained by drawing a straight line from these promising developments to the condition of industrial societies today. One can argue that Marxism, liberalism, social democracy, and even democratic conservatism have succeeded in transforming and, indeed, in perfecting modern life.

This rational line can be justified by pointing, for example, to the extraordinary increase in material wealth. Through the rationality of capitalism and industrial production, this affluence has ameliorated the conditions of everyday life throughout most of the class structure of advanced societies. These conditions are not limited, moreover, to consumption in a narrow sense. It is primarily as a result of this material transformation (Hart 1985: 29–49) that deaths in childbirth (for both infants and mothers) have been largely eliminated and that such deadly diseases as tuberculosis have passed from the scene. One may point to the achievements of modern science, both pure and applied, which have contributed to such life-giving disciplines as modern medicine. The series of technological revolutions that have increased material productivity hundreds of times over make Marx’s predictions about the exhaustion of capitalism seem not just antique but almost reactionary. We are in the midst of what has been called the fourth industrial revolution, the transformation of information capacity that began with the transistor and miniaturization and, with the computer chip, digitalization, and the world-wide web, has continued on an unprecedented scale.

The rational line can be further sustained by pointing to the expansion of human rights. T.H. Marshall (1964) drew an evolutionary model of the progress from civil to political to social rights. Over the last 40 years, civil and political rights have been extended to religious and racial groups that had been excluded from Western societies for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. Social rights have been expanded to groups who were considered to be deserving of their unfortunate fates only a century ago – like the physically and mentally disabled. For the first time since the Neolithic revolution ten thousand years ago, women have substantial access to the institutional and cultural centers of society.

These advances may rightly be considered evidence for the advance of reason, and they have been spread to civilizations which did not initially share in the benefits of this-worldly millennial religion. Decolonization extended “European” progress while allowing national aspirations to be freely expressed. Revolution, often the vehicle for decolonization, allowed modernization to spread to less rationalized areas of the world. It, too, can be considered a successful example of the extension of world mastery which has helped perfect life in the modern world.

On these grounds, it may be argued that the twentieth century was a time of progress, that this is not only a plausible view but also a valid one. There are not only many Americans and Europeans arguing this view today, but articulate leaders in India, China, Brazil, and Japan as well. The twentieth century was a good and sensible world. Yes, evil and irrationality still exist, but their origins are outside of us. They stem from traditionalism and antimodernity, with religious fanatics in Arab countries, with tribal hostilities in Africa, with nationalist antagonism in Russia and Israel. Closer to home, they arise in impoverished groups who have not had the access to modernity that education and material comfort provide. When we walk through our modern lives, organizing our lifeworlds with good sense and a modicum of comfort, it seems only reasonable to think that reason has prevailed.

The Dream of Reason

The reality of this social interpretation of the twentieth century is underscored by the fact that it has produced a line of intellectual reasoning, of social theory, that goes along with it. I will call this the dream of reason. It is the image of rationally perfected life in thought, but not of course a reflection of “real,” material life alone. Because life is itself filled with ideas, the perfected life is filled also with ideas about perfection. The reasonable life of today can be traced back to the dream of a this-worldly millennium that began thousands of years ago. The millennial dream is religious, the dream of reason post-religious. Still, the dream of reason operates with the metaphysical props of faith exemplified in Hegel two centuries ago.

We can see the dream of reason most distinctly by pointing to four spheres of modern thought: philosophy, psychology, art, and social engineering.

The most characteristic school of twentieth-century philosophy must surely be logical positivism, which believed that any thought worth thinking could be reduced to rational and eventually mathematical propositions. Philosophy from this perspective would be little more than a truth language, a code that would state the conditions for knowing. In this form, philosophy would allow language and thought to transparently reflect the external world. Words are induced from things that actually exist (Wittgenstein 1922). Thought is a rational induction from this reality. Philosophy must hone the relationship between words and things. Metaphysics will be abolished forthwith. Pragmatism framed this philosophical understanding in an American form.

We should not be so blinded by the surreal dimension of modern art that we fail to see that much of aesthetic modernism is consistent with this rationalizing view. There is a clear movement in modernity which argues that art should be sparse, minimal, flat, rational, and “true.” It should not be fictive but direct, not personal but objective. The great exemplifications are architecture and prose. At the origin of modern architecture was the aesthetic dictum that form should follow function. Those who created this style (Pevsner 1977) actually believed their buildings represented not fictive design but followed inevitably from the shape of engineering and rational efficiency. While this self-understanding may be false – engineering and efficiency do not have an implicit design – the International Style was of a decidedly rationalist bent, emphasizing straight lines, angles, and flat surfaces (Le Corbusier 1986 [1931]).

A similar demand for directness, simplicity, objectivity and efficiency characterizes twentieth-century prose. According to the model of science, modern prose language should aim to be transparent vis-à-vis its subject matter and denuded of “style” as such, as that notion was exemplified, for example, in Renaissance speech and writing (Lanham 1976). Connotation and ambiguity are pruned from articles and books. In the English language, Hemingway blazed this trail, with his short, flat, journalistic sentences. Time magazine made this style the mass language of its day.

In psychology, two contradictory movements reflected this sense of the ultimate reasonableness of the world. According to Piaget’s (1972) developmental psychology, adult persons have developed the capacity for universalistic cognition and rule-oriented morality. These capacities emerge from processes inherent in the life process. Individuals become rational because of realistic experiences. Faced with the growing complexity of reality, they act pragmatically and develop new modes of reasoning through trial and error. Behaviorism also saw individuals as acting in straightforwardly rational ways. Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner argued that people are formed not by subjective fantasy but by their environments, that they are molded into whatever they are pushed into being. Like pigeons and well-trained dogs, human beings are rational in a narrow and efficient sense. If we know their past conditioning, we can make predictions about how they will act in the future.

Theories about the possibility of rational planning were reinforced by developmental and behavioristic psychology, but they also constituted an intellectual movement in their own right. Such thought originates in the nineteenth century as a species of secular perfectionism, with people like Saint-Simon, Bentham, and Marx. It became dominant in the twentieth century, elaborated by democratic socialist theorists of the welfare state like Marshall (1964) and Mannheim (1940) and by technocratic communist theorists as well. The belief was that the world can be subjected to rational control, that the whole ball of wax can be molded by reason into a desirable shape. Rawls (1971) is the greatest English-speaking proponent of this faith in perfection through reason. Habermas (1984) elaborated the same faith in a more pragmatic and linguistic idiom.

The Vision of Decline: The Prophecy of Georges Sorel

With few exceptions, these rationalist and optimistic streams of thought, no matter how brilliant and enlightening, did not represent the greatest and most original achievements of twentieth-century social theory. One reason is that they did not represent something really new; they were extensions of the perfectionist thinking of earlier days. But there was another, more important reason. In its rationalist form, twentieth-century social theory could not fulfill its self-reflective task. It could not tell people the essential things they needed to know about the new kind of society in which they lived.

A straight line between the hopes of the turn-of-the-century period and the achievements of the present day cannot be drawn. There is, rather, a tortuous path (Hughes 1966). If the newly dawning century embodied fulsome hopes for a social reform, it was also known as the fin-de-siècle and the “age of anxiety.” The dream of reason continued to inspire twentieth-century thought, but it was the nightmare of reason that captured the most profound theoretical imaginations of the age.

As an entrée into this darker side of modernity, we might look briefly at the thought of Georges Sorel, the French revolutionary syndicalist, who published his original and disturbing Reflections on Violence in 1908. Earlier I referred to the large socialist workers’ parties as carriers for the ideas, forces, and often the reality of progress in that turn-of-the-century period. Sorel conceived of himself as speaking for a very different segment of the community of dispossessed. He insists (1950 [1908]: 66) that there remained large groups of workers, small employers of labor, and farmers – as well as such intellectuals as himself – who bitterly opposed modernity and saw little hope for social progress within its rationalizing frame. These groups provided a constituency for a more extreme left, one cut off from the progressive and ameliorating groups of the socialist center. As Sorel explains, “Parliamentary Socialism does not mingle with the main body of the parties of the extreme left” (ibid. 67).

These unmingling parties were revolutionaries. In one sense, of course, their ideal was not all that dissimilar from the reformers’. They, too, wanted a perfect society ordered by reason. They were certain, however, that such a society could not be institutionalized in the present phase of social life. Reason had become an other-worldly ideal that could be realized only through violent world transformation. Sorel denigrates “the trash of Parliamentary literature.” He despises progressives and has no patience for democratic politics. Such appeals to reason, he writes, are “confused”; they serve “to hide the terrible fear” that marks the inevitable tension between social classes. If socialism is to succeed, it must become revolutionary. Rather than appealing to the rationality of the middle and upper classes, socialists must try to make them afraid: “The workers have no money but they have at their disposal a much more efficacious means of action: they can inspire fear.” If the bourgeoisie are afraid, Sorel argues, they will become even more repressive. This is all to the good. It unmasks the real, antiprogressive face of society, and will inspire the proletariat to be revolutionary in turn.

Sorel believes that socialism must turn away from social and political reform and toward the program of the general strike. As a collective act of deliberate violence, the general strike will inspire fear and usher in cataclysmic revolution. Associating such violence with the very group that, according to the rational line, embodies reason – the proletariat – Sorel has posed the fateful dichotomy of twentieth-century life. He has opposed violence to reason and equated progress with violence and force. Fifty years later, Sartre (1976 [1968]) would take up violence in much the same way, promulgating it as a means of a liberating debourgeoisifi...

Table of contents

• COVER
• DEDICATION
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• EPIGRAPH
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 SOCIAL THEORY BETWEEN PROGRESS AND APOCALYPSE
• 2 AUTONOMY AND DOMINATION: WEBER’S CAGE
• 3 BARBARISM AND MODERNITY: EISENSTADT’S REGRET
• 4 INTEGRATION AND JUSTICE: PARSONS’ UTOPIA
• 5 DESPISING OTHERS: SIMMEL’S STRANGER
• 6 MEANING EVIL
• 7 DE-CIVILIZING THE CIVIL SPHERE
• 8 PSYCHOTHERAPY AS CENTRAL INSTITUTION
• 9 THE FRICTIONS OF MODERNITY AND THEIR POSSIBLE REPAIR
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX