AT THE END OF AN AGE

JOHN LUKACS

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS        2002

PART 1I

 

Chapter 1: At the End of an Age (Cont.)

Contradictory dualities

To list the evidences of the ending of the Modern Age would fill an enormous book. Here I must try to sum up – or better, to suggest – some of them.

The progressive spreading of democracy has marked the history of mankind, certainly during the past 200 years but in many ways throughout the entire Modern Age. This progress was usually gradual, at times revolutionary, and not always clearly visible on the surface of world events.

·         History has moved from the aristocratic to the democratic era – a passage occurring mostly during the Modern Age, and one that may transcend even the great accepted (Western) scheme of Ancient and Middle and Modern times.

·         The spread of democracy was the vision of Alexis de Tocqueville. The Modern Age was marked by the coexistence of aristocracy and democracy, something which has now come to an end.

·         Most of the great minds and the greatest artistic creations of the past 500 years were the products of people of bourgeois origins and of bourgeois status.

·         It is reasonable to give the Modern Age (or at least its two centuries before 1914) a telling qualifier or adjective: the Bourgeois Age.

 

“Post modern”

The Bourgeois Age was the Age of the State; the Age of Money; the Age of Industry; the Age of Cities; the Age of Privacy; the Age of family; the Age of Schooling; the Age of the Book; the Age of Representation; the Age of Science; and the age of an evolving historical consciousness. Except for the last two, all of these primacies are now fading and declining fast.

• The modern state was a product of the Modern Age. Its establishment occurred together with the ideal of civilization: a progress from barbarism.
• It was a response to, or a result of, the warfare of diverse aristocracies during the 15^th century, and of the even more injurious religious wars of the 16^th.
• The result was the strong, centralized, and sovereign state in most of Western Europe and England, established by absolute or near absolute monarchs whose rule was especially appreciated by the bourgeois classes, since it provided for their relative safety.
• Gradually the democratic element, in this case the bourgeoisie, turned against royal as well as aristocratic power – in England in the 17^th century, in France in the second half of the 18^th.
• Due to increasing democracy, in the 20^th century the authority of the state grew further, intending to ensure the material welfare of most of its inhabitants.
• Hitler and Mussolini were unopposed by the great majority of their subjects: in sum, they were representatives of popular sovereignty.
• By the second half of the 20^th century the power and authority of the state, and respect for it, began to decline.
• The most evident example of this is Russia, where after the fall of the Soviet Union the problem was no longer the overwhelming power of the state but, to the contrary, its weakness.
• Elsewhere, too, the break-up of entire states has begun, of which the “privatization” of some of its former functions and services, or the formation of such supra-national institutions as the European Union, are but superficial – and perhaps even transitory – appearances, together with the evident lessening of the authority of the state.
• While the opponents of “big government” are the very people who support every expenditure and establishment of “defense” (as if the armed forces were not part of “government”), successive administrations of the United States have been both unable and unwilling to protect the very frontiers of the American state, through which millions of illegal migrants are pouring in.

 

The Age of Money

Money, in one form or another, has always existed; and money has its history like everything else; and the Modern Age has been the age of money – increasingly so, perhaps reaching its peak around 1900. During the Middle Ages there were some material assets, often land, that money could not buy; but by 1900 there was hardly any material thing that money could not buy, while paper money was exchangeable for its equivalent in silver or gold. But during the 20^th century the value of money diminished fast. One symptom (and cause) of this was inflation. When there is more and more of something, its value becomes less and less; and democracy is probably inseparable from inflation. Therefore the cyclical rise and fall in the value of money has largely ceased to exist. That the inflation of words led to the inflation of money is an important phenomenon, because the value of every material thing is not only conditioned (as a few economists have at long last become constrained to admit) but entirely determined by what people think it is; and people think in words. The inflation of money went apace with the rise of a general, and historically unprecedented, prosperity; but this prosperity had little to do with what is still called “capitalism,” the latter meaning the preservation and the husbanding of money, rather than the spending of it. By the end of the 20^th century the inflation of stocks and of other financial instruments became even more rapid than the inflation of money – at the bottom of which phenomenon another development exists, which is the increasingly abstract character of money – due, in part, to the increasing reliance on entirely electronic transactions and on their records. Credit cards are but a superficial, though astonishingly widespread, example of this development in a world where income is more important than capital, quick profits more than accumulation of assets, and potentially more than actuality – that is, creditability more than actual ownership. What has been happening with money is, of course, but part and parcel of a much more profound development: the increasing intrusion of mind into matter. That this happens at a time when philosophies of materialism are still predominant only reflects the mental confusion of our times. In any event, the end of the Modern Age is also the end of the Age of Money – at least as our ancestors used to know it.

 

The Age of Industry

• The Modern Age was, by and large, marked by an increase in the numbers of people; and by an increase of the production of goods and of their availability.
• The Age of Industry was remarkably short-lived. It was less than 130 years ago (in 1874) that the majority of people in England were employed in industrial work, not in agricultural production.
• The people of the United States followed this pattern. But by 1956 the majority of the American population were no longer engaged in any kind of material production, either agricultural or industrial. They were employed in administration and in services.
• Advertisement and transportation of goods now cost more (and involve more people) than their production.
• There are entire countries (and some states of the American Union) whose main “industry” is the attraction and management of tourists.
• While in the past a respected industrialist was someone who was successful in creating production, now he is someone who creates consumption.
• The perception of and the temporary use of goods has often become more important than their actual possession.

 

The Age of Cities

• The Modern Age was the age of the town. Bourgeois civilization was largely, though not exclusively, urban.
• By 1850 London and Paris had more than 1 million inhabitants each; by 1900 there were more such cities in Europe and 3 in the United States.
• This was in part the result of industrialism; the civilization and the culture and the amenities of city life attracted men and women of many kinds.
• After 1950 the decline of the cities set in. by the end of the 20^th century the association of urbanity with city-living disappeared: the presence of an urbane middle-class within the cities lost its influence and importance.

 

The Age of Privacy

• The Modern Age discovered the virtues – and pleasures – of privacy. Life in the Middle Ages – both in and outside the dwellings of people – was public, in more than one way.
• Respect for privacy distinguished a civilized society from barbarians or primitive people.
• In a mass democratic society (perhaps especially in the United States) the desire for privacy was much weaker than the desire for respectability, usually within a particular community.
• As the 19^th century progressed, bourgeois ideals concerning the protection and the education of children were adopted by various governments.
• Toward the end of the 20^th century large numbers of married women, including mothers, no longer had to work in the field or in factories – because of the wages and the industrial employment of their husbands. Like the entire Industrial Age, this development was short-lived.
• The ideal of the family woman, wife and mother and homemaker began to fade.
• The desire of a woman to be employed somewhere in the so-called “marketplace” was often not the result of financial necessity but, rather, of a new kind of impulse: the life of a housewife – especially in the suburbs – proved to be lonely and boring.

The rising tide of divorces and abortions, the acceptance of sexual liberties, including pre-marital (and at times post-marital) habits of frequent copulation and other forms of cohabitation, the increasing numbers of unmarried women and single mothers, the dropping birth rate – thus the decline of the so-called “nuclear” family – were, especially after 1955, grave symptoms suggesting vast social changes. They included the perhaps seldom wholly conscious, but more and more evident, tendency of many young women to desire any kind of male companionship, even of a strong and brutal kind, if need be at the cost of their self-respect. In sum, the professional recognition as well as the legal protection of women had risen, while the respect for them had declined.

• The education (in the original sense of that word) of children toward maturity was another bourgeois ideal fading away.

 

The Age of Schooling