Abstract
We continue the historical theme of Chap. 3. We note that despite the profound enhancement of (components of) human well-being that modernization has produced, there are serious problems associated with the modern condition, which may be quantitatively (but likely not qualitatively) unique in the broader context of human history. Salient among these problems are nihilism and psychopathology, which seem to share phenomenology at the individual level and to be statistically associated at the group level.
We conclude with an analysis of the largely modern phenomena of “permanent revolutionaries” and disaffected intellectuals. These are interpreted as related in part to modernizing societies’ waning ability to provide their members with enduring collective bases of existential purpose.
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Notes
- 1.
It is “progressivism” because it involves the belief that Western (or even global) society has developed for the better and will continue to do so, that is, belief in progress.
- 2.
Heiner Rindermann’s Cognitive Capitalism (2018) offers a similar argument. But unlike the other books mentioned, a positive assessment of (aspects of) modernity is incidental to CC’s thesis, which concerns the sources of variation in levels of modernization across nations. Moreover, CC’s prognosis for the West is not particularly optimistic.
- 3.
Admittedly, the optimism cottage industry has been most prolific in recent years, and little of what its members have to say is original. A fairly comprehensive review of the evidence for human “progress,” encompassing everything from early hunter-gatherer bands to highly modernized Western societies, is available from Sanderson (1999).
- 4.
- 5.
“Modernity” is understood in a variety of different ways, differing especially across academic fields. For historians, modernity is simply the time period beginning around the end of the 1400s (the start of the Early Modern Era) and extending into the present (which is within the Late Modern Era).
- 6.
By contrast, Rindermann (2018), via rigorous theoretical and statistical analyses, offers a highly persuasive theory of the origins and “active ingredients,” so to speak, of modernity.
- 7.
As we will see later, the claim that growth in GDP predicts rising happiness is probably false, contra Pinker (2018) and other optimists.
- 8.
Although touched on earlier, in considering the political views associated with the different moral foundation’s clusters (individualizing vs. binding), it is important to understand the psychology of the “left-right” divide, which does not lend itself to an uncontroversial explanation. Some argue that this divide has become irrelevant or nearly so in recent decades (de Benoist, 1995; Milbank & Pabst, 2016). Still, persistent use of “left” and “right” as moral-political classificatory terms suggests that they continue to capture something important. The primary basis of the left-right split seems to be egalitarianism, or the idea that equality (moral, political, economic, and/or whatever) among some class of people (increasingly, all humans) should be promoted, or should at least factor into decision-making in morally consequential domains (e.g. it might be argued that the basic moral equality of persons should constrain political decision-making). (As noted earlier, differential concern for avoidance of harm and for compassionate treatment of others seems to be another basis of the left-right divide, with leftists exhibiting more of such concern than rightists, although more so in contemporary contexts [it does not seem, for instance, that Soviet communists were much interested in avoiding harm to others].)
Leftists need not treat equality as the most important value, contra Paul Gottfried (Hawley, 2016). But leftists do see equality of one sort or another (but almost always of economic resources, political power, quality of life, and/or interpersonal respect), among at least all members of a national community (but often far more people, even including everyone on Earth), as either intrinsically good or, in some sense, morally required. Contrariwise, rightists give equality far less moral salience, more commonly understanding it as having instrumental value at best, but not as good in itself or morally required (except in cases where equality, of whatever kind, would apply only to much more limited sets of people than entire national communities; nevertheless, certain rightists, particularly some Christians, may view all persons as having some sort of fundamental equality in terms of basic moral worth—intuitively, however, one would think that this makes them less right-wing than they would be without that belief). It must be again stressed that many or most so-called rightists of the contemporary West are more reasonably classified as leftists (Salyer, 2018) given the definition just provided, for example, most “right-wing” libertarians. They are “right-wing” in contemporary times, not because they ascribe minimal moral significance to equality (however conceived), but because they are among those persons who do not give equality sufficient moral pride of place (sufficiency here being determined by current moral norms). But for our purposes, it is the left-right dichotomy, as just specified, that is relevant; to avoid confusion, we write, and have written, of the “world-historical” left and right because only quite recently in historical time, and mostly in the Western world, does it seem that egalitarians have started to identify or be classified as “right-wing” in large numbers (Salyer, 2018).
It should also be observed that this definition of the left-right split is not completely adequate because, for example, traditional Marxists are uncontroversially leftists but are not committed to thinking of equality in moralistic terms by virtue of their Marxism. In practice, however, it seems indisputable that leftists overwhelmingly tend to have moral-psychological commitments to equality of some kind(s), including Marxists especially (Gregor, 2012). For our purposes, it is the psychology of left and right that is key, and so the non-moralistic quality of orthodox Marxist theory is not particularly troubling.
- 9.
- 10.
For example, concern for personal autonomy may lead pro-modernists to embrace and celebrate rather than lament childlessness; indeed, a connection between sex-egalitarian ideas—which certainly comprise an element of the modernization syndrome (Inglehart, 2018)—and efforts to reduce fertility and “control” population size have been well documented (Cherry, 2016, p. 144; p. 130, n. 32).
- 11.
Edgerton (1992) challenges this view, collecting many examples of pre-industrial, including hunter-gatherer, societies in times of extreme misery, as well as cases of members of such societies who found the latter repugnant and/or felt alienated from them and the like (Hallpike, 2018 offers other reasons for pessimism about the quality of life in non-state pre-industrial societies). Edgerton’s basic point is that it is a mistake to think that evolution adapts populations to ways of life such as to render them basically content with them.
It is admittedly difficult to evaluate the literature about the quality of life in hunter-gatherer and other non-state societies, since it presents a highly varied set of mostly qualitative investigations of sometimes very diverse populations—for example, some pre-industrial non-state societies have been documented with levels of violence below those found in certain modernized societies, but other pre-industrial non-state societies have been studied with levels of violence far above what is typical of modernized ones (Widerquist & McCall, 2015, 2017). It does seem to us that Widerquist and McCall (2017) present a very evenhanded survey of the available evidence and are far more sanguine in their conclusions than Edgerton (1992), who seems to have deliberately focused on the worst the pre-industrial world has (and had) to offer. Further, it is not always clear what caused the suffering to certain societies that Edgerton documents—in some cases, one suspects that negative effects from surrounding modernizing/modernized societies may have been to blame—or how accurately his isolated examples of discontent reflect the quality of life in the society generally. Moreover, for all his pessimism on the matter, he concedes that “[w]e are likely to think of people in small, traditional societies as being emotionally and psychologically committed to their way of life, and in fact this is often the case … Even the miserable Ik of Uganda, who were quite literally starving to death when Colin Turnbull visited them in the mid-1960s, preferred to stay together and die rather than move away from their sacred mountain in search of food and survival” (Edgerton, 1992, p. 148). And while Edgerton points to certain instances of high suicide rates in non-state societies as evidencing despair and societal dissatisfaction, Widerquist and McCall’s (2017) more current and seemingly comprehensive and balanced review mentions that “[s]uicide tends to be very low or even negligible in stateless societies” (p. 147).
Kaczynski (2019) presents what might serve as a counterpoint to some of Edgerton’s observations, noting a variety of instances of hunter-gatherers and other non-state people unifying through and taking great pleasure in circumstances that modernized people would overwhelmingly consider horrific. Consider one case that Kaczynski offers (from writer Gontran de Poncins), which in a key respect parallels that of the Ache quoted in the main text above:
[T]hese Eskimos afforded me decisive proof that happiness is a disposition of the spirit. Here was a people living in the most rigorous climate in the world, … haunted by famine …; shivering in their tents in the autumn, fighting the recurrent blizzard in the winter, toiling and moiling fifteen hours a day merely in order to get food and stay alive … [T]hey ought to have been melancholy men, men despondent and suicidal; instead, they were a cheerful people, always laughing, never weary of laughter. (Poncins, cited in Kaczynski, 2019, p. 160)
One fact that could have serious negative implications for quality of life among hunter-gatherers is the non-monogamy and strikingly lopsided reproductive participation ratios that have been found in some of their populations, favoring female over male reproduction (Brown, Laland, & Mulder, 2009). Although it has been asserted that hunter-gatherer populations tend to be highly monogamous, or at least that some are (e.g. Hallpike, 2018), genetic evidence does not align with this claim. For example, Lippold et al. (2014) find that far more females than males have participated in reproduction in human evolutionary history, and since hunting-gathering was the only subsistence paradigm for most of that history, this strongly suggests that Brown et al.’s findings accurately indicate a positive association between non-monogamy with high female/low male reproductive participation and hunter-gatherer life. The reduced mating opportunities for men in these societies reasonably count against the aggregate quality of life of hunter-gatherers—but it should be noted that such severe sexual selection likely helped to keep burdens of deleterious mutations low (see Chap. 6).
- 12.
See Pellicani (1998). Pellicani’s pro-modernism is quite principled because he is fully aware of many of the serious problems with modernity.
- 13.
Pellicani (2003) quotes Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of “revolutionaries” who “came into being” with the French revolution as “of a new species, never before seen.” This species was “still before our eyes” in Tocqueville’s time.
- 14.
- 15.
Pellicani’s account is, in ways, similar to A. James Gregor’s (2012) analysis of the rise of Russian socialism, which notes that “[populations displaced from rural to urban settings were d]isengaged from traditional roles, and traditional moral constraints, [making] such population elements … available for mobilization” (p. 90). Gregor goes on to observe that Russian revolutionary intellectuals were not always optimistic about their ability to radicalize the peasantry—but peasants nevertheless were ultimately essential to the Russian Revolution, seemingly because their opportunities to participate in traditional life became seriously limited, facilitating their exploitation by the intellectuals.
- 16.
In Pellicani’s (2003) view, the uneducated and ignorant status of medieval populations has some role in explaining the apparently low rate of ideological revolutionaries that they exhibited. But he also treats the discontent of intellectuals with the movement away from traditional social life as perhaps the major driver of pre-industrial revolutions with an ideological character, indicating that the problem may have had less to do with levels of education than the attitudes of those who were educated. Gregor’s (2012) account of the Bolshevik revolution (about which see the prior note) seems consistent with the view that malcontent intellectuals wield disproportionate influence in political revolutions, and that it is their reaction to certain social conditions rather than the mere fact of their having formal educations that explains their discontent.
- 17.
To be sure, Pellicani (2003) and others have documented revolutionary and millenarian movements in the Middle Ages. But they contend that these movements were typically a response to fundamental changes undoing the “traditional” quality of medieval societies, chiefly, to repeat, the emergence of capitalism. Given that capitalism, especially industrial capitalism, is the sociological root of modernization, we treat it as a “modernist” phenomenon. In any case, however, note that Reynolds (2010) indicates the relative insignificance of revolutionary movements in the medieval period where she writes of “the recorded radicalism of a few radicals” (quoted in main text).
- 18.
It should be stressed that Marx and Engels believed capitalism was a necessary precursor to socialism in a broader process of societal economic evolution. There is thus some sense in which they were not anti-capitalists. Nonetheless, they inveighed against capitalism with profound and moralistic rage, making it difficult to avoid the conclusion that they hated this economic system (Gregor, 2012, p. 85).
- 19.
The Frankfurt School was, and remains, aggressively anti-fascist and anti-National-Socialist in reaction to the Holocaust. Wolin (2004, p. xi) quotes perhaps the most noted figure of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, as having written the following: “Hitler has compelled humanity to accept a new categorical imperative: orient your thinking and acting so that Auschwitz would never repeat itself, so that nothing similar would recur.”
- 20.
There are complexities here, however. Ohana (2019) distinguishes “modernity” and “Enlightenment,” the former referring to the condition in which humankind aims at sha** its own nature and destiny as it (or some or all of its various constituent groups) desires and the latter referring to a “normative” outlook involving commitment to the equality and freedom of all people, as well as to progress through education and open “rational criticism” and ideological exchange (pp. 1–28). Pellicani (1998) elides this distinction, and we follow suit here, in that the only significant non-“Enlightened” (i.e. non-liberal-egalitarian) forms of modernization—fascism, National Socialism, and Communism—have all but disappeared. Even those nations that might appear to be following a path of modernization alternative to the liberal-egalitarian one, such as China, seem to be exhibiting the same cultural changes that have attended modernization in the West (Zeng & Greenfield, 2015).
- 21.
For example, liberals, about whom more will be said later, will only count as positive human satisfaction that is acquired without violating others’ rights, understood as restrictions on what can be done to those others.
- 22.
As intimated in the previous chapter, the sociologist Max Weber also understood nihilism, which he saw as a consequence of “disenchantment,” to involve a retreat into the personal realm, but he was not a rightist. Critically, however, Weber seemed relatively sanguine about individuals’ ability to draw meaning from the personal realm, though nonetheless regarded the loss of public sources of meaning as tragic.
- 23.
The nature of Nietzsche’s political beliefs is a matter of controversy among relevant academics. Nonetheless, he was clearly illiberal and inegalitarian.
- 24.
These constraints limit one’s ability to interfere in the lives of others, for example, by killing them.
- 25.
In Minkov’s (2011) analysis, once monumentalism is included, SWB is a weak predictor of national suicide rates (p. 108).
- 26.
As we will discuss in Chap. 7, in recent decades political polarization has potentially started to increase in the Western world, which may signal the waning ability of liberal regimes to cope with rising genetic diversity in Western populations. It may nevertheless be that moderns remain without the deep commitment to their moral and political values that their premodern counterparts had.
- 27.
Again, the neutrality of such differences is in fact a basic tenet of liberal political philosophy (Ci, 2015).
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Sarraf, M.A., Woodley of Menie, M.A., Feltham, C. (2019). Discontent with Modernity. In: Modernity and Cultural Decline. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32984-6_4
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