Tag Archives: modernism

On hating the real world

03 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Aesthetics, Christianity, Confucianism, Early Factions, Place, Politics, Supernatural

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A few months ago I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is particularly given to pithy epigrams. We were discussing the Stata Center: a brightly colourful building on the MIT campus, designed by architect Frank Gehry, which is designed deliberately to look chaotic, unfinished, random. It’s not a building that leaves many people feeling neutral. My friend disliked its artifice, disjoint from the things around it. I said I thought it would be terribly inappropriate in the middle of a historic neighbourhood, but that it’s just right for a school like MIT, so focused on progress and the future. She didn’t think it was appropriate anywhere, and added: “Frank Gehry hates the real world.”

I’ve been thinking about that quote while reading articles by Patrick Deneen and others at Front Porch Republic, who would probably agree with my friend about Gehry’s architecture (though not about much else). Continue reading →

On innovation through conservatism

20 Sunday May 2012

Posted by in Confucianism, Hermeneutics, Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Modern Hinduism, Roman Catholicism, Shinto, Social Science, Vedānta

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I noted two weeks ago how Ken Wilber’s recent post/modern turn (“Wilber-5”) is right in important respects, but suggested important problems with it. Last week I noted empirical problems: sociological data on Christianity show a very different picture from his. This week I want to turn to a deeper philosophical problem, which I suspect underlies last week’s sociological picture.

We cannot go back to premodernity. This much is true and important. Our options going forward must take account of the post/modern world, be developed within it. On all of this I agree with Wilber. But what I don’t think Wilber makes room for is this: one can take account of the post/modern world, understand it, know it, and still reject it. Continue reading →

Wilber’s post/modern turn

06 Sunday May 2012

Posted by in Metaphilosophy, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Natural Science

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I’ve recently been writing an article on Ken Wilber’s thought, and have come to realize just how much his ideas have changed over the past ten years. His readers, and increasingly he himself, have come to characterize this as a change from a fourth phase of his thought (“Wilber-4”) to a fifth phase (“Wilber-5”). The changes can be hard to spot because the new view is detailed in only one book (Integral Spirituality); the rest of it is found online, in excerpts from a long forthcoming volume.

What is most striking in the change from Wilber-4 to Wilber-5 is its post/modernism. Wilber has moved much closer to a postmodern view in which there are only perspectives, which bring worlds into existence rather than discovering them; he has also become more modernist, giving much more prominence to an idea of cultural evolution where the modern age supersedes those that came before. But as David Harvey has noted, the continuities between modernism and postmodernism can be more significant than their self-proclaimed differences. (In this discussion I will repeatedly use the term “post/modern”, to emphasize the important respects in which the two are the same.) In this case, premodern traditions play an ever smaller role. Wilber’s earlier thought, in looking at the traditions of the premodern world, had tended to incorporate only mystical experience, but mystical experience still got the trump card – it was able to tell us what ultimate reality is. In Wilber-5, mystical experience needs to be kept in its place, without any sovereignty over other kinds of knowledge. Where Wilber’s earlier thought was all about the relationship between Ascent and Descent, Ascent now takes a smaller role as only one or two perspectives out of many, the rest being Descending and post/modern.

Since so much of my philosophical project has to do with recovering premodern wisdom, I was at first quite negatively disposed toward Wilber-5: it seemed like a decline rather than an improvement. But after mulling over the impressive methodological comments of one of my anonymous peer reviewers, I’ve revised that view. I’ve come to think that the change to Wilber-5 happened for some very good reasons. Continue reading →

MacIntyre against Wilber’s worldcentrism

12 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Confucianism, Foundations of Ethics, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Psychology, Self

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While recently poring over Ken Wilber‘s works, I’ve thought repeatedly about his ideas in relation to Alasdair MacIntyre‘s. Wilber, ever since he identified the pre-trans fallacy, has been an arch-modernist: the world from the Enlightenment onwards has been far better than the traditional world that preceded it. His most recent phase has taken a more postmodern, relativistic turn, but even as a postmodernist he is still a modernist: for Wilber the pluralism of a postmodern worldview is a clear advance, a development, and a pretty unambiguous one.

This is not the worldview one finds in MacIntyre. Continue reading →

Philosophical single-mindedness (2)

27 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Place, Politics, Protestantism, Psychology, Salafi, Vedānta

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Last week I spoke of a philosophical single-mindedness shared by modernists, evangelical Protestants, Salafi Muslims and St. Augustine, and this week I’d like to reflect on it further. What these various single-minded thinkers hold in common is opposed above all, I think, by literal conservatism. Conservatives in the literal sense seek to preserve much of the world as it is – “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They are opposed to radical breaks and revolutions, whether those aim to take us forward (as the modernists) or backward (as the Salafis). I noted in my earlier post that Jane Jacobs’s urban criticism, a direct attack on modernist architecture and modernist urban planning, is a quintessential example of literal conservatism; Jacobs would react with the same hostility to the Salafi assault on Mecca. In that respect, for all its urbanity, Jacobs’s work is of a piece with the agrarian rural conservatism of Front Porch Republic and Wendell Berry.

The appeal of such literal conservatism is certainly not limited to aesthetics, but one may perhaps see it most clearly in the aesthetic realm. (Some modernists, like the Marxist geographer David Harvey, see an aesthetic conservatism as opposed to a more ethical modernism.) For it’s hard to imagine elevating a single most important principle, as modernists typically do, as the principle behind beauty: could one ever say “Everything constructed according to principle X will be beautiful,” without making principle X entirely vacuous and devoid of content? Aesthetics seem to require a focus on the details and not merely the big picture.

Now of the various single-minded thinkers I’ve mentioned so far – modernists, evangelicals, Salafis and Augustine – one might note that they all have their historical roots in Western traditions. Continue reading →

Philosophical single-mindedness (1)

20 Sunday Nov 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, Modernized Buddhism, Place, Prayer, Protestantism, Rites, Roman Catholicism, Salafi

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One of the most common slams made against modernist (Yavanayāna) Buddhism is that it is “Protestant.” I’ve previously written about how there’s more to Buddhist modernism than this, and about the curious quasi-theological assumption that having Protestant influence is seen as a bad thing. At the same time, I’ve been realizing that there are close links between Protestantism and modernism. Not too surprising, perhaps, since the two emerge out of the same historical context, the Europe of the past 500 years – but I think their similarities may go deeper than that. Continue reading →

Aesthetics and ethics in Zanzibar Town

13 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in Aesthetics, African Thought, Food, Place, Politics

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Skholiast has an interesting riff on my recent post about happiness, and I’d like to riff right back. Skholiast quotes from Alain Finkielkraut‘s La défaite de la pensée – a book I read long ago while backpacking through France, in the hope of beefing up my philosophical French. And Skholiast’s quote from Finkielkraut got me thinking of a much more recent trip, my honeymoon in Zanzibar two months ago.

As well as spectacular beaches, Zanzibar has a tremendously atmospheric old Stone Town, and crumbling palaces built in the nineteenth century by Sultan Said. On a tour of these palace ruins, our guide spoke mournfully about how the government had destroyed and misused these palaces after independence and revolution in 1964. It is surely worth mourning when a beautiful object from the past is lost forever. In addition to this destruction, the revolutionary government built most of Ng’ambo, the “other side” of Zanzibar town – the part that is completely non-atmospheric, full of concrete blocks designed by East German engineers. It is in Ng’ambo that the majority of urban Zanzibaris live. The tourist guidebooks tend to scoff at Ng’ambo if they mention it at all, which they rarely do – and no surprise, since it is utterly charmless to look at, a generic site that could be anywhere.

And yet driving through Ng’ambo, I could also see what motivated the revolutionary government to build it that way; more than that, I was quite pleased to see it. Continue reading →

Caution towards innovation

21 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, French Tradition, German Tradition, Modernized Buddhism, Place, Politics, Psychology

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Sunday’s post, on modernism and the change in values from “old-fashioned” to “old-school,” might help explain a question that I and others have pondered here: why do human beings so often prefer what is old? Stephen Walker noted the point in his comment on Yavanayāna Buddhism: people often seem unwilling to credit themselves with innovations, to accept that their ideas are new. Rather they present themselves as defending old ideas when they come up with new ones. (In his The Sociology of Philosophies, Randall Collins suggests that this is a typical pattern in human thought (especially in Japan, but elsewhere as well): “innovation through conservatism.” A while back I asked a similar question about authenticity: why do we privilege authenticity so much, when its distinguishing feature would seem to be the absence of choice?

Maybe we can start to see an answer now that we’ve had a chance to look back on the alternative. The twentieth century, in many ways, was the century of modernism – the rejection of the past as a guide to living. As I noted last time, modernism brought us Pruitt-Igoe, the grand and innovative housing project that was dynamited as unlivable. But more than that, I think, it brought us Communism, the form of government practised in the Soviet Union, China and their allies in the mid-twentieth century. Continue reading →

“Old-fashioned” and “old-school”

18 Sunday Oct 2009

Posted by in Aesthetics, French Tradition, Islam, Place, Politics, Social Science

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Texaco buildingAmong my peers in their twenties and thirties, the word “old-fashioned” seems, well, old-fashioned (unless, tellingly, it’s referring to the cocktail). I rarely hear it anymore. More commonly, to describe something that seems to belong to an earlier time – a rotary-dial telephone, a tabletop Ms. Pac-Man game, a handlebar moustache – the word of choice is “old-school.” As far as I know, this term has its current provenance from hip-hop music, referring to older works from the 1980s, before the genre became completely mainstream. Urban Dictionary, the anarchic oracle of contemporary slang, identifies “old school” as “Anything that is from an earlier era and looked upon with high regard or respect…. Typically, they are highly regarded and sometimes the very thing that started it all.” Compare a definition of “old-fashioned” from Apple’s dictionary widget: “(of a person or their views) favoring traditional and usually restrictive styles, ideas or customs: she’s stuffy and old-fashioned.”

This change in usage can’t be a coincidence. I think of a twentysomething friend of mine whose father is a modernist architect, a devotee of the International Style. He builds the kind of buildings that only architects can love, eminently functional buildings that appear to most people (including his daughter) as merely ugly: what Jane Jacobs famously called a Great Blight of Dullness. When I visit their house, I see at a picture of him on the wall from the 1970s: a dashing, handsome young man, decked out resplendently in the fashions of the age. Once upon a time, it was the trend to be modern. Continue reading →