MODERNITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois From Machiavelli to Bellow
By Steven B. Smith
402 pp. Yale University Press. $45.
Making and Unmaking the Bourgeois From Machiavelli to Bellow
By Steven B. Smith
402 pp. Yale University Press. $45.
At an elite gathering of the great and good at Aspen in 2007, shortly before the start of the Great Recession, those in attendance — haute bourgeois all, one assumes — were asked to forecast how the world would look in 2050. According to a reporter who was there, everyone predicted a grim future of “global warming, famine, unending terrorism, . . . a Mad Max movie, only without the style and thrills.”
A similarly dour outlook appears in the closing pages of Steven B. Smith’s learned new work, “Modernity and Its Discontents,” an otherwise genial survey of Western intellectual history from Machiavelli to Saul Bellow. “The narrative of progress is no longer sustainable,” Smith solemnly concludes: “The regime officially dedicated to the pursuit of happiness” — that would be us, the United States — “has found the attainment of happiness an increasingly elusive object of desire.”
The Aspen gathering consisted of venture capitalists and Washington strategists, the kind of people who make predictions based on market conditions and political intelligence. Smith, by contrast, is an expert on Spinoza, Hegel and Leo Strauss. He’s preoccupied not with economic leading indicators, but with a handful of great thinkers.
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Smith is a beloved lecturer at Yale. He’s superb at bringing abstract ideas to life, even if his colloquial style can be jarring on the page (“Here is where the Kantian rubber meets the road”). He’s divided his survey into two parts: The first covers writers he regards as quintessentially “modern” in their attitudes, from Machiavelli to Hegel; the second covers writers more attuned to pessimistic doubts about the modern world, including Rousseau, Tocqueville, Nietzsche and the two 20th-century critics of the Enlightenment that he perhaps most admires, Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss.
For Smith, the “modernity” of his book’s title connotes (among other things) a handful of core convictions: the value of freedom and equality; the importance of being able to think for oneself; the real possibility of universal enlightenment. Like Tocqueville, Smith worries that these liberal convictions, though superficially benign, nevertheless issue in a debased form of life that he associates with “low-minded materialism, moral cowardice and philistinism.” It’s as if an expansion of popular optimism about the future, alongside an amelioration of everyday life for ordinary people, must produce, as its shadow, a supine complacency, conjoined with a lazy form of what-me-worry nihilism — a democracy of dunces.
Allan Bloom made a somewhat similar argument in “The Closing of the American Mind.” Smith happily lacks Bloom’s bile, and is far more catholic in his taste. He includes a series of close readings not just of theoretical texts, but also of fictional works, among them an elegiac essay on “The Leopard,” the historical novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, published in 1958 and later filmed by Visconti. As a good college lecturer must be, Smith is skilled at haute vulgarisation. But like Bloom (and Lampedusa, for that matter), he’s deeply suspicious of the demotic drift of modern culture. “Its goal,” he writes, summing up Leo Strauss’s contemptuous attitude, “is not contemplation but ‘universal enlightenment’ ” — the scare quotes say it all.
As for the relationship of modernity to the bourgeois world adverted to in Smith’s subtitle, the most important recent work on that topic is surely Jerrold Seigel’s “Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France, and Germany Since 1750” (published in 2012, but ignored by Smith). A major work of comparative history, Seigel’s book traces in detail the rise of new networks of commerce, power and culture: Merchants and bankers exploit expanding worldwide trade routes; diplomats and statesmen create new forms of international relations (including the possibility of world wars); while scientists and scholars exchange knowledge and ideas without regard to borders. The result is a great global marshaling of human capacities, for purposes that remain undefined and indefinite.
Seigel reminds us that “modernity” isn’t just a matter of great books. It’s also bound up with a great transformation in human life. Until quite recently, a vast majority of people endured circumscribed lives ruled by customary interactions and the cycle of the seasons. By contrast, in the past two centuries those who have moved to a city and entered into ever more cosmopolitan social relationships have experienced accelerating change. “All that is solid melts into air,” Marx observed, in a phrase that Smith knows well: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”
In response to the changes Marx itemized, and in reaction to the pervasive sense of uneasiness they unleash, new forms of fearful rural populism and religious fundamentalism have arisen, furiously resisting the main currents of social change — one of the paradoxical developments that pass almost unremarked in Smith’s bookish survey. Fanatics of secular perfection join the fray — though again Smith has little to say about them, feeling “the failures of defunct ideologies like Communism and fascism require little comment.”
Pondering these historical patterns, Theodor Adorno, a disenchanted Marxist, once quipped that “no universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the atom bomb.” Smith’s conclusions are similarly gloomy. Yet as the conclave at Aspen shows, such gloom has become a cultural cliché (and, in some elite contexts, an excuse for inaction).
Of course, we have good reason to worry about all kinds of developments, from climate change and soaring inequality to an endless parade of other man-made disasters. Still, given the impressive evidence of continuing technological progress (the steam engine, electricity, the internet, etc.), and given the striking strides made even in the moral sphere, as witness the abolition of slavery and the even more recent (and still incomplete) treatment of women as equal to men in principle and practice, one has to wonder why Smith, like Adorno, seems so certain that “the narrative of progress is no longer sustainable.”
In any case, Smith’s heart is with an urbane liberal like Berlin, for whom, as he aptly says, “modernity is not a problem to be overcome but a challenge to be met.” And he ends his book by arguing that the final words of Saul Bellow’s novel “Mr. Sammler’s Planet” suggest “that underlying all the explanations, intellectual constructions and self-delusions, we can still know a good man when we see one.”
In the same spirit, I would argue that we can, and should, acknowledge improvement when we see it. Our discontents are real, but so is our uneven progress in the past 200 years in reducing poverty, spreading literacy and lengthening the life span for ordinary people around the world. These and other improvements in the human condition suggest that we’ve only just begun to meet the real challenges of modernity, and its radically egalitarian promise of universal enlightenment — without the scare quotes.
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