{"id":924,"date":"2026-10-09T12:40:40","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T12:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/?p=924"},"modified":"2026-10-09T13:05:56","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T13:05:56","slug":"modernity-and-the-malcontents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2026\/10\/09\/modernity-and-the-malcontents\/","title":{"rendered":"Modernity and the Malcontents"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Reading Gross &amp; Levitt,<em> Higher Superstition<\/em>, concerning \u2018The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">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 <em>false<\/em>. I suspect that the falsehood accusation \u2013 strained as it always is \u2013 is merely a subconsciously motivated necessary consequence of the moral condemnation. One can\u2019t 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 \u2018Theory,\u2019 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.\n<p><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">They make the point that Science or Reason has been contested since the Romantic period at least \u2013 the Enlightenment was challenged almost at birth \u2013 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.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Reading Gra\u00f1a, <em>Modernity and Its Discontents<\/em> on the social position of the man of letters in XIX<sup>th<\/sup> C France<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The literary man was detached from the patronage system of the <em>ancien regime<\/em> 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 \u2013 and the patron often had a sophistication that could appreciate the artist\u2019s 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 \u00e9lite 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 \u2013 a dissatisfaction that became embedded in the literati culture and was not appeased even by success!\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">The necessity of originality also contributed to a cult of individualism, and of inspired genius, making the artist something like a shaman \u2013 which is also necessarily destructive of norms.\n<p><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">He mentions two \u2018traps\u2019 for the sociologist: failing to properly connect social context to art-object content in one\u2019s theory and treating ideas as things acting independently of their containers. He gives examples of each\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Sartre<\/span><a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a><span style=\"color: #000000;\"> claimed that the artist had mentally joined the aristocratic class but was a<em>ctually<\/em> 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\u2019s aristocratic ideal of a non-productive art. Gra\u00f1a points out that the aristocratic ideal favoured in literature was not the Classical leisured class but the warlike Mediaeval class. I don\u2019t think this is a particularly striking criticism. Almost any sort of content can be used as a class marker \u2013 it doesn\u2019t have to be a simple mirror of the class-image.\n<p><\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #000000;\">(p. 44) \u201cAccording to Berdyaev<\/span>,<a href=\"#_ftn2\" name=\"_ftnref2\">[2]<\/a> <span style=\"color: #000000;\">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.\u201d That\u2019s interestingly close to<\/span> <a href=\"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2026\/07\/10\/thoughts-on-our-troubled-souls\/\">my own hypothesis<\/a>.<span style=\"color: #000000;\">Gra\u00f1a says that B makes the essential point that there is now no objective model for the creative act, though I\u2019m not so sure how that\u2019s relevant. Also, he says B\u2019s 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\u2019s particular treatment of the hypothesis, so I\u2019d be interested to see what B actually uses the hypothesis to explain and what causal routes he proposes for it.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">[1]<\/a> <span style=\"color: #000000;\">J-P Sartre (tr. M Turnell) (1950) <em>Baudelaire<\/em> Paris\u00a0: Gallimard<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref2\" name=\"_ftn2\">[2]<\/a> <span style=\"color: #000000;\">N Berdyaev (1938) <em>Solitude and Society <\/em>London: Geoffrey Bless, Centenary Press<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reading Gross &amp; Levitt, Higher Superstition, concerning \u2018The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science.\u2019 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, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-sociology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=924"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":935,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/924\/revisions\/935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}