Some Thoughts on Modernity

Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in his "Notes From the Underground"

After all, we don't even know where 'real life' is lived nowadays, or what it is, what name it goes by. Leave us to ourselves, without our books, and at once we get into a muddle and lose our way- we don't know whose side to be on or where to give our allegiance, what to love and what to hate, what to respect, and what to despise. We even find it difficult to be human beings, men with real flesh and blood of our own; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace, and are always striving to be some unprecedented kind of generalized human being. We are born dead, and moreover we have long ceased to be the sons of living fathers; and we become more and more contented with our condition. We are acquiring the taste for it. Soon we shall invent a method of being born from an idea....
[Emphasis added]

Dostoevsky brilliantly recognizes what modernity or life in the modern times has done to man. By mechanizing him as nothing more than an animal or a machine, man has lost not only his humanity, but his entire connection to imagination and myth, tradition, and fundamental institutions including family and community.

Indeed modernity is a term almost impossible to define in what I hope to be a fairly small blog post ;). Historians cite different events that triggered the beginning of modernity. To generalize, I'm understanding modernity as the advent of secular humanism and ideology that coincided with the triumph of empirical science, rational Christianity, and utilitarian and pragmatic philosophy. Roughly speaking, this started with the Enlightenment and culminated in the late 19th century. Modern thinkers include Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Spencer, Dewey, and of course the ultimate modern Karl Marx. These men and others convinced of their own righteousness, attempted to create the world as they would like it. Believing their assumptions about the most fundamental questions of humanity including what is God, what is man, and what is man's place in the order of things to be the most correct, ideologues and other moderns attempted to implement their system to fix the "problems" they identified in the world.

These systems, eventually given names like "Marxism," "Fascism," "Nazism," and "Communism," would have only one end to their schemes. Death--- in the form of 205 million lives lost in the 20th century. The so called "century of progress" is not marked by man's technology, but by the gas chamber, the gulag, and the death camp.

All this because man has misidentified both himself and his God choosing instead to act as "rational" creatures, born of ideas and ideologies. And so modernity, divorcing itself from all that is good, chose to compartmentalize the world into boxes so as to examine all the pieces and create the system that will finally get it right. This confusion of the universal with the particular, shatters the imagination which can no longer see the complexity within each and every man in history-- which is the story of man.

Whether or not we are in an age of post-modernity almost seems irrelevant. The blood of millions upon millions of people, many of them brothers and sisters in Christ, lies almost ignored in a world of chaos, death, and suffering. What does any of this matter to those of us in America, materially blessed and spiritually apathetic to our own ideologies of "liberalism" and "conservatism." The effects of modernism in America have seeped into nearly every aspect of American life- our familes, churches, schools, communities, etc all live and breath the language thoughts and ideas of modernity.

Is there a way to escape this?

Christopher Dawson offers one possible option:
“The only remedy is to be found in that spiritual force by which the humility of God conquers the pride of the evil one. Hence the spiritual reformer cannot expect to have the majority on his side. He must be prepared to stand alone like Ezekiael and Jeremy. He must take as his example St. Augustine besieged by the Vandals at Hippo, or St. Gregory preaching at Rome with the Lombards at the gates. For the true helpers of the world are the poor in spirit, the men who bear the sign of the cross on their foreheads, who refused to be overcome by the triumph of injustice and put their sole trust in the salvation of God.”

In an age of darkness, those like Dawson provide some hope admist a battle that seems all but lost.