Leszek Kolakowski (photo: wikimedia)
Just what kind of country is this? What are the basic presuppositions that give shape to our culture? Are there any? Leszek Kolakowski* addresses this question in an essay he wrote more than 20 years ago, Modernity on Endless Trial, a perfect essay for thinking about when you have to sit crunched up in a plane for several hours. It isn’t easy to characterize Kolakowski’s philosophy, as this short piece reprinted by Brad DeLong shows. Based on this from the essay, you might think he was a conservative:
We experience an overwhelming and at the same time humiliating feeling of déjà vu in following and participating in contemporary discussions about the destructive effects of the so-called secularization of Western civilization, the apparently progressive evaporation of our religious legacy, and the sad spectacle of a godless world.
But Kolakowski does not reject secular modernity, how could he? He is a product of it just as we are. He describes what he sees, that modernity has disrupted our culture, displacing the religions that gave us a fixed point of reference but unable to offer a stable replacement:
The explicit orthodoxy consists of patching up. We try to assert our modernity but escape from its effects by various intellectual devices, in order to convince ourselves that meaning can be restored or recovered apart from the traditional religious legacy of mankind….
He thinks that the problem created by modernity is the loss of meaning, leading to a sad and pointless world. We have no universally accepted solutions. Some groups solve the problem by rejecting modernity and trying to maintain or create a space in which they can live out a fantasy of a life subject to the old religion, as in the Taliban’s struggles for Afghanistan, or the American fundamentalist’s desire to create a society within a society where they can live their fantasy of Christianity in a modern society without the unanchored morality necessary for science and technology.
It seems odd to me that it is the conservatives who are most willing to discard traditional American values in the wake of the attack of September 11, and the modernists who are least willing to do so. That may be a sign of the disruptions of modernity, that refuge in a distant past form of culture makes it possible to adopt any form of past cultural norms that might relieve the fear of the unknown.
Criticism of modernity is as old as modernity itself. Kolakowski cites Ortega y Gasset for this idea:
…the collapse of high standards in the arts and humanities as a result of intellectuals being compelled to adjust themselves to the low tastes of the masses.
This is a frightening criticism, if it is true, because it says that there is no way out other than by return to the past. If our best and brightest cannot help us we are lost. I don’t think it’s true. Let’s compare two portraits: Vermeer’s The Lacemaker and Estelle 5 by Peter Stichbury.
The Vermeer is high art. The lace maker is solid, secure in her position in the world, competent, and safe. She speaks to us of the satisfaction that comes from that center, of knowing one’s place in the world and the universe. The Stichbury is fully contemporary. Estelle herself is only barely visible in the portrait, which as Rayne put it, is more an avatar than a person. It is as if she cannot face the world in her own persona, but only through a mask she presents to the world, while her real form is known only to her, if she in fact knows herself.
Avatars live in an artificial society created by their makers working with other participants in the artifice. That seems to me to be a fair description of modernity: we provide the meaning if there is to be meaning, or we find ways of living in the world that do not require meaning.
Cyberspace is really big, and it is perfectly possible for worlds with vastly different systems to coexist without affecting other systems. But imagine if War of the Worlds decided to conquer FarmVille. That too seems to me to be a fair description of modernity, that people with different ideas about things try to convert others by force.
I think that Estelle 5 tells us as much about modernity in its current state as The Lacemaker tells us about Dutch society in 1670. The intellectuals and artists of today can help us to come to grips with our rootless state, by putting it into words and paint and pixels. Once we identify a problem, we can work on solving it.
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*Kolakowski was born in Poland in 1927, lived under the Nazis, and became an ardent Communist. That changed after a visit to Moscow, and he was eventually exiled when his writings became too much for the puppet Polish government. He was influential in the Solidarity Movement from exile. He was awarded the first Library of Congress John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Both Brad DeLong and Christopher Hitchens wrote about him on his death in 2009.
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