The Age of Anxiety

 

Again we start with TC, and a footnote:

If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. Would it be altogether unfair to imagine something liked the following series of letters in our correspondence columns? It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home. A. writes deploring that in this progressive age few of the younger generation ever notice a sunset; perhaps this is due to the pernicious influence of the teaching of Copernicus who maintains that the sun is really stationary. This rouses B* to reply that nowadays every reasonable person accepts Copernicus’s doctrine. C is positive that he has many times seen the sun set, and Copernicus must be wrong. D calls for a restatement of belief, so that we may know just how much modern science has left of the sunset, and appreciated the remnant without disloyalty to truth. E (perhaps significantly my own initial) in a misguided effort for peace points out that on the most modern scientific theory there is no absolute distinction between the heavens revolving around the earth and the earth revolving under the heavens; both parties are (relatively) right. F regards this as a most dangerous sophistry, which insinuates that there is no essential difference between truth and untruth. G thinks that we ought now to admit frankly that the revolution of the heavens is a myth; nevertheless such myths have still a practical teaching for us in the present day. H produces an obscure passage in the Almagest, which he interprets as showing that the philosophy of the ancients was not really opposed to the Copernican view. And so it goes on. And the simple reader feels himself in an age of disquiet, insecurity and dissension, all because it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.

It's from a lecture by Arthur Stanley Eddington; you can go to the post for more. I cite it entirely for the last sentence, though the whole thing is wonderful (especially the very British experience of people conversing in public in letters in newspapers.  It was a surreal experience in the early '70's to watch "Monty Python" (I was living near Dallas; the PBS station there was the first to broadcast the show in America, so yes, I mean early '70's) break in between skits with fatuous letters from viewers responding immediately to what had just happened.  It was only on a trip to England in 1976 that I found out reading such letters on air was a standard BBC practice. There will always be an England, but alas, I wonder if such practices have faded along with the Agatha Christie-esque quaint English villages where murder runs rampant, albeit genteely.)

That last sentence, as I was saying:

And the simple reader feels himself in an age of disquiet, insecurity and dissension, all because it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.

A: I am becoming more and more Wittgensteinian in my prediliction that most philosophizing (and theologizing!) is a fly in a bottle (Wittgenstein's metaphor), seeking to supplant experience with a creed.  But it's the first  part of the sentence I'm most interested in, so:

B:  "in an age of disquiet, insecurity, and dissension...."  Which is where we are all sure we are firmly lodged, even as we long for the "good old days" when things were more settled.

Like, say, early 19th century England, as the class system began to give way to the robber barons, the "captains of industry" who turfed the serfs out of the fields and into the factories, the "dark Satanic mills" where they could be enslaved to the machine (not that working the fields was an idyll, as Hardy came along to point out).  The era when the Romantics preached revolution they would never suffer (the French Revolution that would fire the spirits of Shelley appalled the middle-class middlebrow of Dickens) the consequences of, and a true cultural revolution (the Romantics) which really upset the applecart of religion (far more than science did).  Yes, the age of chemistry when it was the science that would provide the grand unified theory of the world; supplanted by phsyics in the 20th century; and now by (almost literally) the meta-physics of string theory and "multiverses" (no, not the ones in the MCU); or by theories of the world as data, the cosmos as a computer (Grammatical Man was the first stab at popularizing that), the idea that we can understand the world in terms of data and datums.  Which is really just applying modern analytical philosophy and its analysis of language as the fundamental factum of human understanding, to science.  Science-y!  So you know it's right!

The cultural revolution of Romanticism eventually set off the revolutionary century of the 19th century in Europe, an era that began in the late 18th century with the American Revolution which inspired the French one and led, finally, to the Russian one; although none of them were actually that revolutionary, just changing who held the whip hand.  (Arguably the French revolution was finally the most successful; the people more truly control France than the people do in America or, certainly, Russia).  The tottering social order of Europe, built almost entirely by Victoria and her children (every leader in Europe was cousins or in-laws to every other, from Victoria to Nicholas and Alexandra), collapsed finally in World War I.  The pieces of that revolution fueled World War II, and finally things settled down.  Except for the Cold War, the rise of Communism in China; Korea; Vietnam; the collapse of communism in China, to be replaced with state-sanctioned/controlled capitalism; and now the near collapse of Russia (coming any day now, almost literally).  

So when did this "age of disquiet, insecurity, and dissension" begin?  More to the point:  when did it ever end so it could begin again?

I'm not picking on Eddington; he's proposing a metaphor to put into context the beleaguered state of the poor man looking only for an experience, and everyone wanting to replace it with a creed.  'Twas ever thus, 'tis still ever thus.  I heard someone last weekend on the TeeVee trying to argue for a third party in America, a "third way" that would be more "moderate" than either major party today because those parties are run by the "extremes."  I thought, first, when Bernie and AOC supplant Schumer and Pelosi, we can talk.  But the idea that a "middle" is just waiting to take over, if it could get the chance to appeal to "the people," is as silly as the idea that in the past all was settled and content and the only turmoil was in Agatha Christie's villages (murder) or Sherlock Holmes' London (crimes including murder), all of which were, of course, solved and resolved by stories end, affirming that the natural order of the universe was calmness.

Just read Orwell to find the price of that "order" for the British Empire.  Suffice to say there are no Jack Nicholsons standing on walls keeping us free inside those walls in Orwell's experience.  If there is ever peace and contentment, it's not from American GI's handing out Hershey bars to kids in some war-torn area of the world.  It's almost always at the end of a gun, as we exploit "they" and content ourselves that God must be in his heaven and all must be right with the world, or we should have certainly heard.  And of course, when we do hear, we wonder why the authorities aren't doing something about it, and why doth the heathen rage, and when will they mind their place and how dare they be angry with us?

It's probably because we want to impose a creed on them, trying to replace the experience they have of being the garbage dump for our industrial overproduction and planned obsolescence, and a sewer outfall for the waste we don't want in our backyards (NIMBY).  And then we wonder why the world doesn't love us.

The example of the inexcusable attack on Salman Rushdie comes to mind.  Mr. Rushdie is no more deserving of violence against him than the writers for Charlie Hebdo were in Paris.  But the fatwa issued against him was aimed more at Western culture than at one person (sadly, he was still the target).  True, it was issued by a fundamentalist Muslim cleric, but as many scholars have pointed out, fundamentalism is a modernist phenomena, a reaction to ideas first promulgated in the 19th century.  It took hold in Christianity in the early 20th century as a reaction to German Biblical scholars in the 19th century (I won't bore you with the details).  It spread to Islam as the West pressed more and more on Middle East Muslim states (Bill Maher made a stupid and bigoted remark about Islam being dangerous on his show recently, ignoring how many countries in Africa and Asia are majority Muslims, and hardly hotbeds of fundamentalism or violence.).  Fundamentalism in Islam is a reaction to the modern world invented by the West starting with the Industrial Revolution just as in Christianity it is a reaction to "modern thought" fostered by the Romantic Revolution and the Industrial one (which prompted the Romantic one, so everything really is connected).  That it is more prominent in Islam in the Middle East reflects the impact of Europe and the industrial revolution (i.e., oil). Modernity, in other words. Does that excuse a death sentence on Rushdie by anyone who can get to him?  No; of course not.  But context is all, as Forster said.  Nothing ever happens in a vacuum.

This "age of disquiet, insecurity, and dissension" is just the present chugging along as ever.  The Pax Romana of Rome was in place by brutal suppresseion and summary executions like crucifixions. It held because people were brutalized, not civilized.  Consider the benefits of a different idea of society and order, as identified by Walter Brueggeman in the Torah:

In the end Torah is Israel's testimony to the covenantal shape of social existence. That the world is organized according to steadfast love, that the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice, that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good. The entire purpose of liberal arts, I suggest, is to help students situate themselves in a summoning tradition that refuses the autonomy of enlightenment reason with its concomitant of consumer seduction. 

You'll have to go read about it more extensively at Thought Criminal. I read the news, about matters like Rushdie's injuries (from which he appears to be recovering, although he will never be whole again), and I think on Auden:

I and the school children know

What everyone must learn

Those to whom violence is done

Do violence in return.

And then we are surprised when it comes back to us; we who only want an experience, not a creed.  But we establish a creed by the very society we call to order, and the order we expect from it and call it to.  Aye, there's the rub.