It’s my strong suspicion that postmodern theorists rarely if ever fall into the trap of rejecting rationalism and the concept of progress entirely. But the fact remains that the bulk of discourse takes place between semi-educated people like myself, who haven’t actually read Foucault or Derrida, but who want to bat about some ideas anyway. This is where you hear comments like:
“Enlightenment ideals gave us the concept of ‘progress’ and with that the foundation and rationalization for modern western imperialism and capitalism. I’d say they do fucking suck”
I’m sure there are very articulate postcolonial theorists who explore this territory with great depth and subtlety, but the above represents the garden variety type of sentiments found in leftist political discourse.
Enlightenment ideals certainly laid some of the foundation and were used to justify western imperialism. The ideological foundations for a successful empire are not coincidental though, and I think that we can apply ‘selfish gene’ thinking here. Enlightenment ideals/modernity/science are like the genes, and the empires are like the organism that carries the genes. Everybody already had the idea of making empires, those empires that embraced ‘science and reason’ were just more effective at doing so.
Methodic doubt and so on are memes with high selection fitness that have literally created the modern world which we now inhabit. Modernity is less an arbitrary cultural movement and more a force of nature. and I think if science and modernity have been appropriated for evil purposes, those evil purposes originate in human ethological impulses and not in the concept of progress itself.
A moralistic narrative:
Enlightenment ideals provided a pretext for stomping all over the rest of the world, therefore they are evil by association with evil people who do wrong
A naturalistic narrative:
Enlightenment ideals had potential for world domination that other ideologies didn’t have, and human power relations necessarily developed in response
I think we can relate the social transition to modernity to the Marxist idea of base and superstructure. When there is a revolution in the means of production like the industrial revolution, the social structures of power that were established on the basis of the previous means of production are superceded. Value judgements on that kind of transition struggle to go beyond Luddism — you may wish that the technology never changed, but it did, and that can’t be undone. The structure of social power will be forever altered.
The same goes for intellectual/social institutions, including enlightenment ideals. Discourse on the nature of progress and the value of modern ideals presupposes that rational argumentation can provide some sort of progressive solution. You may resent modernity because of its close association with the ruling classes, the origins capitalism and Western imperialism, its capacity to exploit the rest of society, and the ways it can justify complacency about social and environmental problems, but you cannot completely escape its influence, and I don’t know if modernity itself is really your target. I don’t think modernity is tarnished by oppressive social structures any more than Einstein’s relativity is tarnished by the use of the atom bomb, or any more than natural selection is faulty because humans evolved enough to wreak havoc on the earth’s ecosystem. Natural forces exist and will act upon the world.
Likewise, most of the ills attributed to modern ideology are not the result of modernity in itself, but the result of social and biological institutions and forces predating modernity. In this sense, the accusations against modernity are that it began only as a seed, growing in a certain place and time, and not an ahistorical blank slate. I can sympathise with people attuned to some sense of global peril seeking scapegoats. For many people, the modern or post-modern era is a terrifying time to be alive, and with good reason. But decrying modernity is like apes slinging shit to spite the tide, it’s an emotive response to something implacable and impersonal. Potentially more futile and self-defeating than the denial and fear of globalisation on the populist right.
DRINNAN 