Rethinking modernity and religion (1).

The complex tensions and intersections between rationality as a means to worldly ends and religious belief have been matter for intellectual debate in the West for some time. As Max Weber argued in the early years of the twentieth century, the dominance of an increasingly powerful scientific worldview, the spread of industrial production, and (most of all) the "rationalization" that occurred in the realms of law, economics, and bureaucracy since the seventeenth century could be tied to an "ascetic rationalism" that developed within Western religion itself after Luther, through which European Protestantism periodically tried to purge true religion of all vestiges of archaic magic (182). Weber' s perspective suggests that the intellectual of the twentieth century is above all direct heir to Luther's Reformation and to Voltaire's Age of Reason, and hence to demystifying, humanizing, materialist, and politically leveling impulses, for which a supersensible and hierarchical belief in the sacred was supplanted by d eist or anthropological reduction (as in Feuerbach), if not by outright atheism. While it is obvious that Weber's attitude to all this disenchantment was resolutely ironic, even critical--he famously referred to the modern economic order as an inescapable "iron cage" (181)--he did not imagine that the displacement of "charismatic" authority by more or less permanent social institutions was the prelude to catastrophe. Like Freud, one might say, Weber acknowledged the discontent that secular rationality carried with it, but he did not long for a re-enchanted world.

Many have suggested that the consequences of all this rationality, democracy, and secular disenchantment are far more tragic than Weber allowed. Indeed Nietzsche--who may be numbered among the most influential critics of the Enlightenment's legacy, as it is embodied in the work of Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Kant, Condorcet, the English Utilitarians, the ideals of science and democracy, and so forth--followed a Platonic line of political thought and predicted a rather more disturbing fate for the twentieth century. In the "Peoples and Fatherlands" essay of Beyond Good and Evil [1886]), Nietzsche declared that future Europeans will be "extremely employable," but they will also be in great need of a "master and commander":

While the democratization of Europe leads to the production of a type that is prepared for slavery in the highest sense, in single, exceptional cases the strong human being will have to turn out stronger and richer than perhaps ever before--thanks to the absence of prejudice from his training, thanks to the tremendous manifoldness of practice, art, and mask. I meant to say: the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of tyrants--taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual. (Sec. 242; Nieztsche' s emphasis)

To a large extent, Nietzsche's eerily accurate prophecy set the terms for future debate. The tyrannies of twentieth-century life wound up being every bit as impressive as its rationality. From the Nazi death camps and the Soviet Gulag to the proliferation of totalitarian police states of the right and left, modern experience was nearly overwhelmed by a barbarism all the more chilling for the unfeeling rationality, universality, and technological efficiency enabling it.

Various commentators, in various traditions, pointed to this odd conjunction, perhaps too neatly summed up by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's thesis of a "dialectic of enlightenment"--that is, a confidence in the inexorable progress of humankind's ability to control the forces of nature, via instrumental or scientific reason, that finally assumes blind, mythic, and irrational dimensions. Any questioning of the imperative to dominate nature, Adorno and Horkheimer argued, any desire to maintain substantive values unrelated to, or subversive of, scientific-technological purposes, would henceforth be branded irrational, nostalgic, and irrelevant. The impersonal and ultimately mythic self-regard of modern rationality, and the absence of any concern for truth outside the parameters of technological control, were for Adorno and Horkheimer the intellectual sources of totalitarian regimes in Germany and the USSR, and of the pacification of all critical thinking in America by a mass-produced "culture industry."

At the same time, it is abundantly clear that, right beside the expansion of a disenchanted and scientific world-view, a powerful reaction against the Enlightenment arose within modern European culture. While this reaction can be most obviously traced to radically conservative eighteenth-century thinkers like Joseph de Malstre (simultaneously Papist and mystic Freemason) it can be found equally in a long tradition of pantheists after Spinoza, neo-Kantian metaphysicians after Fichte, natural philosophers after Schelling, neo-Platonists, religious adepts both orthodox and occult, and theorists of mythic or racial Volkscharakter throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of them bearing fairly liberal and humane views, some not. Hence, against the prediction of Nietzsche and the critique of instrumental reason in Adorno and Horkheimer, one finds an opposing point of view, in which twentieth-century barbarism emerges instead as the consequence of irrational, mystical, and religious forces rathe r than an excess of technical reason.

Georg Lukacs, whose early work tended to adopt the Romantic, counter-enlightenment argument against secular reason, came in his later, ponderous (and post-Holocaust) Destruction of Reason to indict the resurgence of the irrational in modem life. He pointed especially to what he called a reactionary "religious atheism" in Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche as the source of modernity's turn away from science. (See, for example, his treatment of the idealist-vitaiist sociology of Georg Simmel, whose work had actually been an important influence on Lukacs up to his epoch-making Marxian essay on "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" of 1922 [Lukacs, 448-49]). Lukacs's critical perspective was vitiated by his profound Marxist blindness to the barbarism of Stalin--Lukacs in this period unfortunately tended to equate science and Soviet Marxism--but many anti-Stalinists and anti-Communists have shared his understanding and rejection of modern irrationality. More recently, it has fallen to Jurgen Habermas to elaborate this perspective, in writings that argue for modernity as an incomplete or unfinished Enlightenment project (see Habermas, "Modernity: An Unfinished Project," and the debate it spawned in d'Entreves and Benhabib). For Habermas, the Enlightenment values of secular science and democratic organization in the social or public sphere were undermined by modernity's return to a "new Paganism" in the realm of culture (see Habermas, Philosophical Discourse). Even Walter Benjamin, an important part of Habermas's own intellectual tradition, becomes problematic in this view, since Benjamin was so obviously influenced by Kaballah and the "religious atheism" that Lukacs had outlined earlier (see Habermas, "Walter Benjamin"). In effect, for Habermas it is the continuation of Romantic motifs, and a "pagan" religious perspective, however eccentric or cultic in form, that provides the key to ...