Modernism In Recent Times

One of the articles that I have read recently is The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Allan Hepburn.  It is a review of the book The Extinct Scene, by Thomas S. Davis.  Here is one of Davis’s lines:

Late modernism designates the moment when modernism no longer recognizes itself. (Davis)

It’s one of those lines that you read, and say, “Yeah okay”, but somehow it keeps coming to mind.  There is always a reason for that.  I think that I have it partly figured out.  Without having read the book, or even the context of that line, I cannot say for sure.  But I thought at first that Davis was pointing out an oversight in Modernism.  I thought that Davis would want Modernism to study its own history, so that it could learn how to recognize itself.  Then it could perhaps define itself.

For those of you who are not up to date on Modernism, it has been around under that alias for well over a century.  Here I argue that its heretical species has been known of for thousands of years.  But Modernism has not yet managed to authoritatively define itself.  Some have tried.

In 1987, Lawrence B. Gamache wrote an article titled, “Toward a Definition of Modernism”.

In 2016, Gayle Rogers wrote that

... while there is no consensus on what “modernism” means, the term carries significant conceptual and professional weight. (Rogers)

In Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism (Sept. 2001), Susan Stanford Friedman wrote:

As terms in an evolving scholarly discourse, modern, modernity, and modernism constitute a critical Tower of Babel, a cacophony of categories that become increasingly useless the more inconsistently they are used. We can regard them as a parody of critical discourse in which everyone keeps talking at the same time in a language without common meanings. When terms mean radically different or contradictory things to people, then their use appears to threaten the project of scholarship/teaching altogether. (Friedman)

I do not think that God is confusing the language of Modernism, as He did to the language of the Babylonians so long ago.  He doesn’t need to.  Modernism is so gargantuan, so ill-defined and so poorly-recognized—that Modernism itself literally means different things to different people.  It might be that people from each of Modernism’s hundreds of sub-categories are too bound by Modernist doctrines to find an appropriate categorization for Modernism—one that exists outside of Modernist doctrines.  Or maybe Modernists don’t want to define Modernism.  People from a non-Modernist tradition have defined Modernism without too much trouble.

Before we go too far into the weeds, I wish to introduce the Christ Above Me Modernism theme song: Walk Like a Man.  I cannot find a good recording of it separately.  So the other two songs are gravy.  My favorite performers of Walk Like a Man are The Jersey Boys:

I am not arguing that The Jersey Boys are Modernist.  I selected them because I like their work.

As I was saying, I thought that Modernists would want to study Modernist history, acquire the ability to recognize Modernism, and eventually define Modernism.  I now think that they don’t want to do any of those.

I conjecture that the study of the history of anything, including Modernism, would be too much like scholasticism for Modernists.  Modernism rejects scholasticism.

I conjecture also that Modernism does not want to be recognizable.  Not that it wants to be FUBAR.  I think that it wants to be quite functional.  But I think that it doesn’t want to always appear in the same form.  It wants to travel incognito, alongside everything else.  One could be sitting next to Modernism, and not know it.  One could be indoctrinated into Modernism, and not know it.  In fact, it seems to me that, for part of the 20th Century, Modernism wanted people to think that it wasn’t even around anymore.

What, after all, do you think that the term postmodernist means?  On its face, it means that the age of Modernism is over.  Finis.  The End.  And what better way to not be recognized, than for people to believe that you don’t exist anymore!  I think that postmodernism is a Modernist ruse.

For similar reasons, I conjecture that Modernism does not want to define itself.  If it really wanted to, it would have done so by now.  I think also that Modernism wants people—those who believe that it exists—to not understand what it is.

The above conjectures agree with the tendency of Modernism to reject traditional or historic forms of all kinds—even of Modernism.  If it is true to that rejection, then Modernism would not want to recognize the forms in which it once appeared, and was known.  Nor would it want to define itself.  Defining itself would, from its point of view, be a form of vanity; in the future, Modernism would not want to refer back to what it once defined itself to be.  So, why should it bother to define itself in the first place?

Then it gets strange.

It is said that Modernism came back, or had a rebirth in the West in the early 1990’s.  Obviously, Modernism never really died.  It never really was finis.  It stayed on the bottom for a long time, post-World war II, sort of like a sturgeon in the Columbia River, eating whatever food was down there, and getting bigger and bigger.  Suddenly, in the 1990’s it surfaces again, and starts to feed on the top.  It became popular in western academies as New Modernistic Studies.  Sounds redundant, but it became a popular study.

New Modernism seems to want the limelight, whereas formerly, in so-called postmodernist times, Modernism sought the obscurity of the depths.  Who knows? Maybe that is the difference between New Modernism and Modernism.

Modernism knew that, back when it started, which was the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was popular, partly because it was novel.  Judging from the name, New Modernism apparently also wants to be novel.  By novel, I do not mean truly new.  I mean something that seems new, and is accepted as such, whereas the Book of Ecclesiastes says,

Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: for it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us. (Ecclesiastes 1:10)

We will return to the idea of Modernism as a novelty that is neither new nor modern.

Ayn Rand called Modernism’s political forms “all the variants of modern collectivism (communist, fascist, Nazi, etc.)”  Those variants cruelly hammered and disfigured the twentieth century.  In turn, anti-fascists hammered fascism, and gave it hell.  So, fascist Modernism was not coming back anytime soon, post-World war II.  However, 1991 was 46 years from 1945.  Kids going to college in the 1990’s did not have parents that fought in World war II.  Of course, western academies never really stopped presenting Communism as desirable.  And by the 1990’s, college kids could be introduced to another form of collectivist government—globalism—as something novel.  They could also be indoctrinated to see the transmogrification of non-collectivist government into collectivist government as something good and desirable, even as something that social consciousness and social justice demand.

In other words, Modernism could be coming back, not only as globalist government, but also as a novel and Modernist morality—one that defines collectivist government as the only moral and socially just form of government.  That aspect of Modernism’s comeback is observable today.  And this is where the so-called new Modernism is not just political; now it’s defining morality; it’s religious.

It gets curiouser yet.

Modernism in its beginnings was popular, partly because it tapped into anti-religious sentiment.  Curious, because most of the anti-religious sentiment out there today is against religions that do not preach against Modernism’s new morality: that only collectivist government is moral and socially just.  So, today’s Modernism is not necessarily anti-religion.  Nonetheless, Modernism as such is not a Godly system—not as Godliness is traditionally or Biblically defined.  According to Saint Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), Modernism is a system that has its own definition of God, its own dogma, and its own theologians and believers.

Even though a religion is probably the last thing that most people today would associate with Modernism, it is religious.  St. Pius X defined it as “the synthesis of all heresies” (ibid. §39).

A heresy is a defective religious doctrine that tries to make itself part of a body of sound religious doctrine.

According to St. Pius, the heretical system that is Modernism redefines what it means to believe in God.  It holds that God is a collection of perennial sentiments strictly immanent to humans.  That is, not outside of humans, and by extension, not independent of humans.  Modernism would conclude that God can safely be discounted as a human phenomenon (cf. Pascendi §5-23).  Modernism developed a theology according to its idea of God, and Modernist believers believed according to the Modernist idea of God.  Atheists, Agnostics, and godless philosophers can and do at times think about the idea of God.  This is one of the ways in which the secular academy subjects religion to analysis (as St. Pius points out in §16 and §17).

Modernism also tries to make itself part of sound doctrine.  St. Pius in the same encyclical complained of Modernist priests in holy Church, and of Modernist doctrine seeping in (Cf. Pascendi §2, §10, §14, §40 ¶2).  Modernism is in both senses heretical.

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