Modernity began with the notion that the ancient understanding of history as a repeating cycle of birth, growth, and decline no longer held sway. The modern belief in progress, which Steven B. Smith describes as “a surrogate for religious faith” (p. 350), eventuates in the rise of an administrative state manned by a “new priesthood” of social scientists who exploit the power of science and technology to satisfy citizens’ ever-growing wants through an ever-growing economy.
The central thesis of Modernity and Its Discontents is that the progressive pursuit of power and prosperity leaves us moderns—or at least the most worthy among us—bemoaning the shiftless mediocrity that results from a value-free life. To this end, Smith addresses the contributions of thinkers who believed that the Enlightenment quest to maximize happiness for equal, autonomous individuals tends to degenerate into a world of Nietzschean last men engaged in unfettered commodity fetishism. Absent the commitment to higher standards and their accompanying virtues, the modern individual—notwithstanding all the equality, power, and prosperity he or she can withstand—becomes a cowardly, hypocritical, social-climbing philistine occupying a “barren landscape of cultural impoverishment and moral and spiritual decline” (p. xii).
The book surveys this well-trod path of degeneration. Its strongest chapter celebrates Isaiah Berlin, who demanded that liberalism not only protect individual liberty but also acknowledge and sustain the fundamental diversity of human life. Berlin looked to the thought of Vico and Herder, among others, to leaven the liberalism of Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Mill, and other advocates of individual choice. Smith acknowledges that Berlin’s stark contrast between Enlightenment monism and Counter-Enlightenment pluralism takes more than a few liberties with history, and that the monolithic structure Berlin makes of the Enlightenment is something of a straw man fit to be toppled. Still, Berlin argued convincingly for the benefit of embracing values pluralism and safeguarding negative liberty against group or state oppression.
There is a catch, however. Negative liberty remains one value among many. Pushing it too far undermines the pursuit of other cherished goods, such as justice. Thus, Berlin espouses a “tragic liberalism” that acknowledges “ineradicable conflicts between goods” with no “single formula for reconciling these competing values into a higher synthesis” (p. 277). In turn, enduring values—whether those of justice, liberty, security, or solidarity—are not really individual achievements. They are products of a life deeply lived within a tradition of thought and practice. Embodying these values privileges cultural embeddedness over individual preference. Berlin insists that our celebration of a deep diversity of values does not negate the responsibility of “choosing between absolute claims” regarding our most fundamental allegiances. To abdicate this responsibility may leave one comfortably ensconced in a life of power and plenty. But it is a philistine, hypocritical, cowardly life.
Smith holds that modernity, as exemplified by the Enlightenment and contemporary social sciences, considers “human nature as constant over time, responding to one or a very few number of variables” (p. 12). This allows him to contrast modernity to Counter-Enlightenment thinkers who celebrate the uniqueness of national cultures. But Smith also observes that the principal beneficiaries of the Enlightenment have been the “totalitarian democracies” of the twentieth century whose social engineering drew its inspiration from “Enlightenment conceptions of the plasticity of human nature” (p. 14). Either human nature is uniform and unvarying (p. 12) or thoroughly plastic (p. 14). It is hard to see how modernity can be castigated for holding each of these views at the same time.
In turn, Smith both praises and chides the bourgeois person who hankers for philistine comforts but, as an expression of its strong autonomy, also exhibits the qualities of “generosity, courage, nobility, love of fame and self-assertion that together constituted a new morality for the individual. . . . These are traits of character that arose initially in the early modern period and are uniquely attached to the constitutional democracies of the West [and] have come to be most fully identified with the American way of life” (p. x). I will not take issue with the notion that modernity has been most fully developed and expressed in America (p. 352). Right or wrong, it is a common enough assertion. But I do not see how Smith can maintain that the aforementioned traits first arose some five hundred years ago, are uniquely bourgeois, or are exclusive to Western democracies. These are, after all, long-standing if not common human qualities. One only need read Homer’s Illiad or Odyssey to find numerous examples of the celebration of the heroic traits of courage, nobility, love of fame, self-assertion, and generosity expressed as hospitality or magnanimity.
Modernity and Its Discontents is an uneasy mix: part morality play with a grand historical vista, part erudite literary exegeses. An insightful chapter investigates whether Hobbes was really a Christian, and of what sort. Another on Benjamin Franklin defends his ethical ministrations against European detractors. Many of Smith’s insightful exegetical excursions—especially his first chapter on Machiavelli’s comedic play Mandragola and the last two chapters on Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet—do little to advance the central thesis of the book. In turn, the attention to literary detail stands in stark contrast to the sweeping survey of moral decline, which ignores a host of important issues and cultural distinctions. For example, the author is silent about any number of modernity’s worldly impacts. There is no mention of environmental degradation, nothing on racism, patriarchy, or colonialism; imperialism gets only a brief mention, mostly in reference to Kant’s rejection of it in favor of commerce-based cosmopolitanism (with nothing said of Kant’s own racist proclivities). These features of modernity get ignored, one suspects, because they are deemed mere by-products of a world-historic process of cultural and spiritual decline.
Smith’s world, for all its literary richness and appreciation of pluralism, appears a pretty simple place. There are basically two types of people. The chapter on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary concludes: “Each reader will have to determine whether the state of democracy today heads to a Tocquevillian sense of public-spiritedness and engagement or to a Flaubertian sense of nausea and disgust. How one responds to these two books will determine what kind of human being and citizen one is” (p. 242). Apparently, things are quite black and white, our choices dichotomized, and our identities but one of two.
The fundamental difference between the two sorts of people populating Smith’s world is not, pace Carl Schmidt, whether one is a friend or enemy, but in Straussian fashion whether or not one accepts the primacy of justice and the human good (p. 266). Those who prioritize justice align with Plato and Aristotle in wanting the wise to rule. Or, at least, they hope an aristocracy finds a way within a “mixed regime” to assert the human good against the deafening shouts of voters and consumers who, as unthinking democrats and free marketers would have us believe, are always right.
The distinction between the few and the many is really between those who embody a love of wisdom and those who are inherently incapable of such philosophic passion or have seen it dissipate in the wake of an overpowering, value-free, consumer culture. Leo Strauss’s notion was that liberal education, with particular emphasis on the rediscovery of ancient wisdom, is the means to create “an aristocracy within democratic mass society” (p. 22). Smith acknowledges but never questions Strauss’s claim that the ancients had a “privileged position” from which to “shape the moral horizon out of which the fundamental concepts and categories of political philosophy arose and against which they can be checked” (p. 301). Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, we have been hankering after shadows on cave walls. Only the few see the light, an ocular capacity gained by way of mentorship at the hands of the right sort of political philosophers. The sectlike quality of Straussianism is acknowledged (p. 306), but it is deemed less dangerous than the effort to translate philosophy into a public doctrine. At least political philosophy, notwithstanding Straussian eulogies, will remain an esoteric activity engaged by the few. Ideologies adopted by the masses, in contrast, can become totalitarian.
Smith argues that Strauss understood himself to be “a friend of liberal democracy, who, precisely because he was a friend, refused to be a flatterer” (p. 22). Any number of democratically inclined political theorists might ask: With friends like these, who needs enemies? But, to be fair, Smith does not appear overly concerned with whether his readers join the Straussian tribe or not. More to the point, he wants to ensure that modernity is accompanied by Counter-Enlightenment and philosophic concerns such that we remain “perpetually gnawed at by our manifold discontents” (p. 352). This I would not gainsay.
To be sure, there is much callow flattery of democracy today. And faith in progress is misguided. Real historical progress—improvements in the social, political, economic, and educational institutions that we build—will largely remain the product of thoughtful trial and error. If we forgo the sustained self-interrogation and careful experimentation that democracy at its best entails, then America, its professed champion, will indeed become the place where culture goes to die. And the rest of the world may not be far behind.
