Modernism, Postmodernism, and Paul’s Letter to the Romans (chapters 1-8) (1/2)
With some comments on the anti-philosophy of Michel Foucault
Introduction
Many scholars, academics, and worldly wise men have written on the subjects of modern and postmodern culture.
Those are complex and deep topics, and it is possible to write many words about them; however, for the purposes of this essay, it is enough merely to highlight the most significant points. Perhaps in so doing, we may find the truth of that ancient Greek proverb, which says that “Less is more.” That is, by saying less, and by confining ourselves to the bare essentials, we may in the long run say more, than someone else might say in a much longer and weightier analysis.
For the sake of brevity, the discussion of some chapters in Romans, as a complete contrast to false modern thought, will follow next week, God willing.
Modernism
To start with, we may define modernism as the belief that man’s reason alone is sufficient; that there is no need of God or of divine revelation to guide our thinking or behavior. Scientific knowledge, and human logic and philosophy, independent of any idea of God, whether philosophical or religious, will show us the way to ultimate reality and to the good life.
Not only that, but the abandonment of outdated religious superstitions and rules will enable us to create more rational and orderly societies. Since there is no heaven and no afterlife, we will be able to focus our attention where it really belongs – on earth – and the entire human race will benefit.
Now there is, of course, more to modernism than that. All of the advances of science and technology in the last, say four hundred years or more, are significant aspects of modernity. Various aspects of culture also, such as painting, music, architecture and philosophy are also part of modernity. However, at the heart of the modernist project is the belief that there is no God – or, if there is a God, it is a vague, nebulous force about which we can know little or nothing, beyond whatever personal feelings we may have about it. But certainly, any question of a divine revelation, of rules, commands, laws and judgments is out of date and irrelevant.
What is most desirable is freedom – freedom from guilt, from sin, from fear of punishment in an afterlife, and above all, freedom from God. Getting rid of these useless burdens will, the modernists claim, allow us to blossom in our innate goodness like a field full of daises and buttercups.
This movement had its most obvious beginnings in 18th-century France. It was the French philosophes, with roots in the previous century, who most loudly and eloquently argued for independent human reason, liberated from the shackles of outdated religious superstitions. Part of this was driven by their hatred of the often corrupt and lifeless French Catholic Church, which was closely wedded to the oppressive French monarchy. But, in addition to this, there was the same age-old desire to be independent from God that has been found at all times in all cultures.
The possibilities of human reason unchained were revealed in the atrocities and the terrors of the French Revolution, in which overt atheism was a strong component (along with Deism, the abstract belief in a remote and impersonal God). Christianity in the form of the Roman Church was deposed, sinful and fallen human reason was exalted, and society was plunged into years of chaos and war by men relying on reason alone.
Nevertheless, in spite of doubts about the French Revolution, the modernist revolution continued with gathering force through the 19th century – and while much traditional Christianity remained, the beliefs in the sufficiency of human reason, and the fundamental falsehood and irrelevancy of the Christian religion became more widespread. This was particularly true among the social and cultural elites of the day, and certainly by 1900 the forces of secularism were well-established in Western political, legal and educational establishments, as well as in various socialist labor movements – although, as has been said, various degrees of commitment to traditional Christianity were still widespread.
Postmodernism
When it comes to postmodernism, there is some division on this subject. Some argue that there really is no such thing. They claim that much of what we see around us today is not really “postmodern” at all, but merely more extreme developments of modernism.
There is some credibility to that argument, and it is clear that we are now seeing the ripening fruits of well over 100 years of Western culture’s struggles to be independent from God. However, there are several significant differences between modernism and postmodernism. These differences can be easily explained, and are sufficient, in my opinion, to show that there really is a significant degree of difference between the two approaches.
I. First of all, the sense of optimism that characterized classical modernism has been lost. The First World War dealt a staggering blow to the foolish optimism of the dimwitted modernist scientists, intellectuals, and philosophers, the false prophets of secularism and materialism who felt that mankind was becoming wiser and better due to the guidance of liberated human reason, emancipated from God.
This catastrophe was followed in swift succession by the Second World War. For the second time in approximately twenty years, the most technologically advanced societies on the planet (or at least the European part of it) were plunged into a devastating and massively destructive war.
Not only that, but the senselessness of the war, precipitated as it was by the primitive barbarism of Germany, which was once thought to be a civilized country, combined with the horrors of the Holocaust and the many additional atrocities to make the myth of unending human progress and innate human goodness impossible for an intelligent and honest person to sustain.
There are still today some starry-eyed modernists who claim that science and reason without religion will lead us to a more peaceful and a more rational world – but this is clearly only wishful thinking. It is easily refuted not only by two World Wars, but also by the intensifying social, political and economic problems that are now afflicting all of the Western societies. Many people are now more pessimistic about the future, and with good reason.
II. A second distinguishing characteristic of postmodernism is the increasing loss of confidence in science and in the scientific establishment. True, many people still assume today that scientific knowledge is the only real knowledge, and are thankful for all of the blessings of convenience, ease of life, pleasure and entertainment that applied science (technology) has given us. However, science has lost considerable prestige. Some reasons for this are:
II.A. The technological applications of science have had some very negative aspects. These include not only the greatly increased destructiveness of modern wars, and the spectacle of scientists diligently devoting themselves to the creation of more and more new weapons in obedience to their masters in the government. We also have to consider damage to the environment (which is significant, even if we reject the hysterical exaggerations of global warming, or global cooling, or some nebulous climate change). Then there are transgender medical procedures, medical science used to dispose of unwanted babies, foods full of chemicals, and unhealthy modern lifestyles, to name a few more.
II.B. Moreover, the applications of science have given government vastly greater powers of surveillance and control, so that bureaucrats and officials and experts can now examine and regulate more and more of our lives – and the worst is yet to come (if I am not mistaken).
II.C. Also, it has become more and more evident that scientists and public health officials are not completely impartial, detached, and logical thinking machines. They too are human beings, with their own agendas. These agendas, often less than public and open, may include fame, wealth, power, corporate, or even totalitarian political aspirations.
To put it another way, scientists have the same sin problem that afflicts the rest of the human race. As a result, they can be corrupt, greedy, selfish, heartless, incompetent, cruel, and narrow-minded, just like ordinary human beings. This is because they are mere mortals after all, and all of their scientific knowledge has not made them more wise, more compassionate, more loving, and more humane. Recent events in the COVID catastrophe give ample evidence of this.
II. D. Science has completely failed to deliver on its promise to discover the ultimate nature of reality. The deeper down or the farther out the scientists go, the more new levels of endless complexity they discover.
Unlocking the basic structure of the atom has led to deeper mysteries which baffle the finest minds our secular educational systems can produce. Looking outward has led us farther into the mysteries of space, yet each new discovery only opens up new vistas.
This failure of science also extends to the human personality. Human consciousness remains unique in the cosmos, and our capacity to love, hate, think, create, feel, and our needs for justice, commitment, truth and goodness remain closed to scientific explanation.
Those who assert that human consciousness is only a matter of biology and chemistry are just making assertions without facts or evidence, based solely on their wishful hope that there is no higher spiritual dimension to existence. And, of course, Darwinism fails completely as an explanation of the human mind, no matter how many purely imaginary scenarios they might present to explain how the human race might have come about.
So, we have two significant aspects of postmodernism: (I) the loss of faith in progress, and (II) the loss of faith in science. A third and final aspect of postmodernism is (III) nothing less than the collapse of reason itself.
Michel Foucault
To clarify this highly complex subject, I would like for the sake of simplicity to focus on a single post-modern philosopher – the Frenchman, Michel Foucault. Parenthetically, postmodernists have been humorously referred to as “pomos,” but that has not caught on as it has negative connotations.
Anyway, getting back to Foucault, I use him as an illustration of the collapse of reason into vice, depravity, and contorted pseudo-philosophies, but don’t mean to imply that a vast cultural and intellectual movement as diverse as postmodernism can be reduced to the ideas of a single individual. Nevertheless, I do feel that some of the ideas of Foucault’s philosophy are highly significant – although I shouldn’t call his ideas “philosophy,” which comes from the Greek for “love of wisdom.” I should rather call his ideas “misosophy,” meaning “hatred of wisdom,” replacing phileo, the Greek verb for “love,” with miseo, the Greek verb for “hate.”
For my information on Foucault I have, I admit, relied on a single source: The Passion of Michel Foucault, by James Miller (New York: Anchor Books, 1994). Naturally if I were to write a pretentious and involved “scholarly” study of Foucault, I would need to read some of his own works, as well as some reputable studies by serious students of Foucault’s misosophy. However, I feel this source is adequate for my purposes.
For one thing, Miller has deep respect for Foucault. He describes the object of his study as a “revolutionary,” and a ‘deeply serious” thinker. He speaks of Foucault’s “dazzling” mind and his vast influence, and states that his ideas have entered the mainstream of our culture. On p.13 of chapter 1 (“The Death of the Author”), Miller says:
At the time of his death on June 25, 1984, at the age of fifty-seven, Michel Foucault was perhaps the single most famous intellectual in the world. His books, essays, and interviews had been translated into sixteen languages. Social critics treated his work as a touchstone . . . In France, he was regarded as a kind of national treasure. After his death, the prime minister issued a memorial tribute. Le Monde, Libération, and Le Figaro all bannered the news on page one.
So, Miller is favorably inclined to Foucault, and Miller’s book has been highly praised by critics. It is a serious study, and for the few key points I want to emphasize, I believe it is accurate. If not, I welcome correction. By the way, I should further confess that I did not even read the whole book. I read only the preface, and the first three chapters up to page ninety-four.
The reason for this is, that Foucault led a notoriously immoral lifestyle. This is not a matter of gossip, but is a well-publicized fact of his life, which he referred to in his own writings. Not wanting to get into that, I read as far as I could safely get, removed the first ninety-four pages for future reference, and threw the rest away unread. So, this is not a book review, but a highlighting of some obvious and well-known aspects of Foucault’s thought. He really does explain a lot of what we see today.
The second chapter, dealing with the subject’s birth and childhood, has a very substantive overview of the intellectual culture of that day. It has many references to such famous and not-so-famous philosophers as Sartre, Heidegger, Hegel, Marx, Kant, Freud, Althusser, Heidegger, Beckett, and of course Nietzsche, among others. These were all greater or lesser luminaries of modern European secularism in the 1940s and 50s, when Foucault was a young man (he was born in 1926).
Many of these writers had some sort of influence in Foucault, as he studied and agreed with or reacted against them. We can look briefly at just two of them: Jean Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche. While Foucault did not slavishly imitate them, and was different from them in many ways, Miller asserts that even as Foucault varied from them or disagreed with them, they influenced him profoundly and helped to determine the course of his thought.
Sartre, as an atheist, believed that life was absurd and had no meaning, other than whatever meaning we managed to give it ourselves. Miller quotes him as saying that “the destiny of man is placed within himself,” and that the foundation for “absolute truth” is found in “one’s immediate sense of self” [p. 43]. This emphasis on the self is a necessary outcome of atheism, and was an essential factor in Foucault’s work.
Nietzsche was also a well-known atheist. He denied the existence of higher moral or spiritual laws to which we were subject, and said “It is the free man’s task to live for himself, without regard for others” [p. 68]. This is nothing but selfishness, a sure recipe for loneliness, misery and failure, all of which Nietzsche knew well.
Reasoning logically from the illogical starting point of atheism, Nietzsche claimed that we were in the world by accident, and that part of our goal in life was to untangle the riddle of the human personality, and to discover our true inner self, to become what we really are. This was accomplished by the assertion of self, without regard to traditional moral constraints or norms – even to extremes of criminal violence if necessary.
Coming out of this sort of intellectual background, Foucault wrestled with the problem of understanding who and what he really was. How can we most truly exist, and be what we really are, free from the control and discipline of society that only regiments us and stifles us? These questions were essential to Sartre, Nietzsche, Foucault and everyone else who tries to make sense of the human personality in a world without God.
Like Nietzsche and Sartre, and many others of course, Foucault felt that truth was found in the self, and it could only be uncovered by asserting the self, by following one’s passions and desires – all of this without any statutes or rules or structure. “Fixed roadmaps of reality” such as those supplied by religion or philosophy were rejected. Truth itself was often seen as nothing but word games people used to advance their own private agendas. With no moral compass and no idea of good, the desire for inner freedom led to denial of and revolt against the family, against society and tradition, in search of a new religion of man in which we could confer order and meaning to the world.
Even sin, vice and evil could be acceptable and good, if the practice of them helped us to liberate our inner self, and Foucault wrote about this in some depth in his search for complete freedom. This is very intimately related to Nietzschean philosophy, as he stated that the Christian virtues were all false, artificial and unnatural, whereas primitive pre-Christian paganism, including war, plunder, murder and debauchery, encouraged healthy and natural emotions that should not be repressed.
Miller stated that these and other ideas of Foucault “played a key role in stimulating debates about gender identity,” and also have “given a sense of direction to a great many gay activists in the United Sates and Europe” [p.18]. The idea that criminals do not need to be punished is also related to Foucault’s ideas of freedom from social control without any moral guidelines or compass.
Foucault also believed that indulging the pleasures of the body were part of the search for truth, that happiness required the satisfaction of desire, and that sexual activity of many different sorts was an essential part of human spirituality and fulfilment.
Foucault himself was obsessed with death and madness. His dreams “often seethe with cruelty and destruction,” Miller wrote [78]. In various thinkers, not only Foucault, the human mind, “probing beyond the limits of reason . . . discovers that ‘Being’ and ‘the nothing,’ life and death, are ‘the Same.’ ” [Miller’s words, p. 81].
This is merely to scratch the surface of the twisted pseudo-philosophy of a dark, perverted and miserable man, who in his search for authenticity and freedom, was completely lost and groping in darkness.
He was one who, like Nietzsche, called good evil and evil good; who called vice and depravity “freedom” and who called morality and decency “oppression.” Such attitudes are at the root of so many of our social evils today – not that Nietzsche, Foucault, Sartre and others are to blame for singlehandedly causing this. Rather, it flows naturally out of the denial of God.
"Modernists" who have faced no serious challenges in life tend to think of themselves as God. They make their own rules and define the universe as whatever they like. I hardly consider them modernists, as quantum science seems to confirm the existence of a Creator. Since God is all-powerful, it is in His power to stop the many wars now underway, On the other hand, He allowed the Holocaust and the slavery of Jews for centuries. He may just sit back and watch. Post-modernists, I suspect are post-apocalyptic in their beliefs.
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