Steve Watson

Modernity and the Malcontents

Reading Gross & Levitt, Higher Superstition, concerning ‘The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science.’

• Science is one of the characteristics and triumphs of the West, so it is an irresistible target for those who find the moral burden of their own civilisation unbearable. Science is therefore attacked as being morally culpable in some way, and also somehow false. I suspect that the falsehood accusation – strained as it always is – is merely a subconsciously motivated necessary consequence of the moral condemnation. One can’t condemn as wrong (morally) that which is right (actually.) The authors locate this as a natural development of the oppositional tendencies that characterized youth culture of the 60s with its rejection of middle class (bourgeois!) morality and convention and all the culture that it valued and even a fascination with non-Western modes of thought. Hence the rejection of standards in literature or art generally, the rise and dominance of ‘Theory,’ relativism (of course,) the degradation of pop music and of popular culture generally, the sexual revolution, the faddish attraction to Zen, yoga, drugs, and so on.

• They make the point that Science or Reason has been contested since the Romantic period at least – the Enlightenment was challenged almost at birth – by Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, etc. who thought that Reason provided an insufficient vision of human possibility; it was closed and finite where they wanted openness and infinity, objective where they wanted subjectivity to reign, prose in place of poetry.

Reading Graña, Modernity and Its Discontents on the social position of the man of letters in XIX^th C France

• The literary man was detached from the patronage system of the ancien regime and required to make his way in the market. In the patronage system there had been a standard of taste and expectations to be satisfied known to both the artist and the patron – and the patron often had a sophistication that could appreciate the artist’s best efforts. The mass market had no such commonality or expectation of parity of understanding. The artist was therefore required to be original and to appeal to the masses. This situation was further stressed by the new mass audience of literate middle-class readers, and the overproduction of a lettered élite who aspired to a literary career rather than a dull business of a professional career. So many young men being desirous of a career for which abnormality (transgression) was required and for which there were few opportunities, was a systematic generator of dissatisfaction – a dissatisfaction that became embedded in the literati culture and was not appeased even by success!
  • The necessity of originality also contributed to a cult of individualism, and of inspired genius, making the artist something like a shaman – which is also necessarily destructive of norms.

• He mentions two ‘traps’ for the sociologist: failing to properly connect social context to art-object content in one’s theory and treating ideas as things acting independently of their containers. He gives examples of each
  • Sartre[1] claimed that the artist had mentally joined the aristocratic class but was actually bourgeois. With the fall of that aristocracy, they should have returned to the bourgeoisie for support, but they did not because the productive bourgeoisie would not accept the artist’s aristocratic ideal of a non-productive art. Graña points out that the aristocratic ideal favoured in literature was not the Classical leisured class but the warlike Mediaeval class. I don’t think this is a particularly striking criticism. Almost any sort of content can be used as a class marker – it doesn’t have to be a simple mirror of the class-image.

  • (p. 44) “According to Berdyaev,[2] the endemic sense of spiritual crisis in our world comes from the confluence of modern scientism and individualism and the rejection of the once-universal cosmology and morality of Aquinas and Dante.” That’s interestingly close to my own hypothesis.Graña says that B makes the essential point that there is now no objective model for the creative act, though I’m not so sure how that’s relevant. Also, he says B’s theory proves too much because he treats rationalism and individualism as correlated/conjoined forces whereas we know the Romantics could reject the former and not the latter. However, I think this is only a criticism of B’s particular treatment of the hypothesis, so I’d be interested to see what B actually uses the hypothesis to explain and what causal routes he proposes for it.

[1] J-P Sartre (tr. M Turnell) (1950) Baudelaire Paris : Gallimard

[2] N Berdyaev (1938) Solitude and Society London: Geoffrey Bless, Centenary Press