It is characteristic of the modern West to have “ceased to see the purpose” that should be the foundation of human life

Modernity and Our American Heresies
by Peter Augustine Lawler


America, some of its critics say, has less grounding in tradition than any other nation in history. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger said that the United States and the Soviet Union were metaphysically indistinguishable in their technological orientation, in their understanding of nature as nothing but resources to be exploited. The Canadian philosopher George Grant, influenced by Heidegger, claimed that the United States has wholly given itself over to technology, defining human purpose as nothing more than the acquisition of power. All genuinely political life — and all philosophy, theology, and other forms of contemplation — have disappeared from America. For these not-entirely-friendly foreign critics, the United States is the country mostly wholly in the thrall of the technological “how” at the expense of any reflection on the “why” of humanly worthy purposes.

If, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed, it is characteristic of the modern West to have “ceased to see the purpose” that should be the foundation of human life, it is perhaps in America that the lonely and demoralizing consequences of modern emptiness are most advanced. Beneath our therapeutic happy-talk and technologically optimistic pragmatism, a critic like Solzhenitsyn can hear the howl of existentialism. Americans have “nothing” — nothing but inarticulate anxiety — with which to resist the “something” — the measurable effects — of technological progress.

Fortunately, we have technological remedies for our anxiety. There are, of course, those of the pharmacological variety. But there are also the diversions of the screen — from the smartphone to the laptop, from social media to video games to Internet porn. The complacently honest libertarian Tyler Cowen points to the dark side of our hyper-meritocratic future, where those individuals not clever and competent enough to succeed will lead marginally productive lives, contented by screen-based entertainment and other cheap high-tech diversions made by those at the top. But neither class, in this vision of the future, will include many who will be distinguished by the heart-enlarging traditional virtues of generosity or charity.

The genuinely countercultural philosopher-comedian Louis C.K. denies his daughters smartphones so that they might not find an easy way out of the anxious sadness that overwhelms us all from time to time for no good reason. We are more and more satisfied with the predictable, minimalist emotion that comes from being diverted from both one’s own solitary emptiness — one’s misery without God or without the communal and intimate attachments of a rich relational life — and from the empathy that comes from closeness to others.

The wasteland of emptiness grows in America, most of all, because of our lack of a culture or tradition to keep it in check. Certainly there never was a pre-modern America. Americans have no experience of living in close-knit communities like the medieval village or the classical polis that Alasdair MacIntyre finds indispensable for human flourishing. Although the agrarian localist Wendell Berry sometimes writes about the unsettling of America, he has also written that America — the country or project — was bornunsettled: the Europeans were already modern when they moved to the New World and imposed their liberated will upon the indigenous people.

It is characteristically American not to be able to resist progress, even in order to preserve the way of life — the manners, morals, and virtues — of a particular place. From its foundation, America has existed, in MacIntyre’s memorable phrase, “after virtue.” It is, as Carey McWilliams put it, a “technological republic” in which republican virtue is replaced by the enlightened management of self-interest. McWilliams argued that it was the philosopher John Locke who provided enlightened Americans with the “educational technology” that was “the mirror of the framers’ political principles.” To be a Lockean American is to be distrustful of authority and attachment and “driven by the desire for freedom and mastery.” For these critics, Locke’s theory of the inventive conquest of nature for human convenience is America. Maybe more precisely: It is America’s theory, and it increasingly becomes American practice. What we say — especially if we have the Lockean opinion that words are basically weapons that we use to achieve our practical or technical goals — cannot help but transform what wedo. Much of the history of America has been defined by our inability to limit Locke’s individualistic and technological understanding of who each of us is. That is why, for Heidegger, America represented the way “the wasteland grows” in our technological era.

The wasteland grows, ironically, on the basis of Locke’s technological understanding of what waste is. Prior to the invention of money, according to Locke, wastefulness meant picking more apples than you can eat before they spoil. The injunction not to waste was nothing more or less than a sensible recognition of a natural limit on effective human labor; it kept people from sweating for no good reason, for picking for the sake of picking. But after the invention of money, no apples picked need spoil; they could be traded for little pieces of yellow metal that don’t spoil. Given the Lockean technology-friendly view that just about all real “value” comes from human labor — from improving upon what we are given by nature — “thou shalt not waste” comes to mean that any uncultivated land is wasted. All of nature is to be treated as a resource to be technologically transformed for our convenience. In light of that technological imperative not to waste, it is ironic that the wasteland grows. As America’s critics would put it, everything we are given is degraded or despoiled by the infinite imperatives of our material needs. Nothing in America exists “according to nature” anymore. And everything — as our traditionalist critics argue (following Marx) — has a cash value. But what Marx views in positive ways — he admires the ardor with which capitalism mobilized human labor to overcome natural scarcity — critics like MacIntyre and Heidegger view negatively. They believe, after all, that nature gives us more than fearful misery and the freedom to do something about it; nature, properly understood, is the source of the purposes that make life worth living. For these critics of the American technological way of life, the fundamental fact is not natural scarcity but natural order, and our truthful understanding of what that order is is embedded in traditions and customs of particular places that are laid waste by promiscuous technological innovation.

• Technological Virtues

So critics such as Heidegger, MacIntyre, and Grant see that American liberalism is really a kind of technological nihilism. It is freedom for nothing in particular beyond power and control. Sometimes they turn to Alexis de Tocqueville to remind us that this nihilism is really a feature of American democracy, though Tocqueville is really not quite so pessimistic as they are. Tocqueville explains that the Americans practice the Cartesian method without having ever read a word of Descartes. That modern method, the foundation of the technological view of the world, is doubt. All I really know is that I am, and so the only point of life — the only use of my freedom — is to keep me from not not-being for as long as possible. The only kind of science that survives methodical doubt is that which improves the comfort and security of particular individuals, of me. The proud desire to know for its own sake is less worthwhile because it is unproductive.

The Cartesian method is the democratic method, which is why the modern Americans could have discovered it without reading Descartes. It is all about doubting personal authority. If I defer to your word, then I let you rule me. That is true of all personal authority — from princes to priests to parents and even or especially the personal God. Nobody is better than me, and so nobody knows better than me. I methodically doubt my way to that democratic opinion. I have no reason to privilege anyone’s opinion over my own.

Of course, this Cartesian position of doubt is not quite the nihilism that America’s critics decry. But it does pose some problems for our democracy. According to this Cartesian-democratic doubt, nobody is better than me, but I am no better than anyone else. So I have no personal content — no point of view by which to privilege my opinion over the opinions of others. As Tocqueville observes, I especially have no point of view by which to resist public opinion, which appears to be determined by no one in particular. It is undemocratic to defer to some person, but it seems perfectly democratic, in a way, for all persons to defer equally to some impersonal force. That goes not only for public opinion, but for other impersonal forces such as “History,” and of course “technology.” I know I’m not nothing, but I lack what it takes, all by myself, to fill myself up with something. And so I’m carried along by impersonal forces I have no right to resist, especially if, as in the case of technology, the impersonal forces aim to keep me, as a person, around as long as possible.

Technology is both impersonal, insofar as it cannot distinguish one person from other, and highly personal, insofar as it is about sustaining the lives of people by controlling the impersonal nature that would otherwise be a constant threat to us. But seeing personal life as nothing other than gaining the power and control necessary to sustain life against an indifferent and hostile nature is what leads to America’s technological and democratic nihilism. It is nihilistic because it empties personal life of the relational context — which includes dogmatic personal authority — in which it can find real content, a point of view, or spirit of resistance. That’s the way it makes good sense to say American democracy is, in principle, “after virtue.” The democrat does not know who he is (beyond not not-being) or what he is supposed to do.

If there is any kind of American virtue, it is nothing more than being as attentive as possible to health and safety. The traditional virtues of chastity and gentlemanliness, with all their complex demands governing and shaping the relationships between the sexes, are replaced with the much simpler virtue of “safe sex” — which means not only sensibly avoiding the infectious diseases that might cut short our lives, but also avoiding the babies that might cut short our lives as free individuals, unfettered by relationships with noisy little dependents. But while sex has become much simpler, the worries we have about avoiding “risk factors” have been multiplying every day, as scientists tell us more and more about how everything from cheeseburgers to spending too much time in the sun (or too little!) could threaten our health and even end up killing us years down the road. At least in principle, most Americans are likely sympathetic to the transhumanist dream of a world in which all the risk factors have gone away, in which all sex is safe, and in which we would not have to be concerned with generating replacements because no one would need to be replaced.

The emotional result of the American’s interpersonal isolation is what Tocqueville named individualism, the indifference that flows from the mistaken judgment that love and hate are more trouble than they’re worth. If you want to see a display of contemporary American individualism, watch a rerun ofSeinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm or even the Charlie Sheen version of Two and a Half Men. Healthy men have hearts so contracted that they don’t have what it takes emotionally (they’re fine physically) to reproduce. We also recognize American men and women described as emptied of content by democratic or anti-relational doubt in Allan Bloom’s classic The Closing of the American Mind. Those “flat souled” or erotically lame sophisticated Americans are unmoved by either love or death; they are nothing more, it seems, than technological beings: clever and competent, specialists and survivalists.

• Religion to the Rescue ...
• Capitalist Christianity ...
• Building Better Than They Knew ...
• Puritan Contributions ...
• Lockean Contributions ...
• Technology and Our Homelessness ...
• Is Balance Sustainable? ...

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