THE DISINTEGRATING CONSCIENCE AND THE DECLINE OF MODERNITY

STEVEN D. SMITH

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

How Did We Get Here?

Mire’ los muros de la patria mia, si un tiempo fuertes, ya desmoronados de la carrera de la edad cansados por quien caduca ya su valentia.

I gazed upon my country’s walls, So powerful once, now a withered ruin, Weary with the passage of the years, Their valor now by age outworn.

—Francisco de Quevedo, “Miré’ los muros de la patria mía”

Modern Western civilization is finished. Done. Or at least so declared the eminent historian Jacques Barzun, possibly the most learned human being then residing on the planet, in a hefty book timed to align with the start of the new millennium (or, more apropos, with the close of the old millennium). The twentieth century is ending, Barzun said, and “in the West the culture of the last 500 years is ending at the same time.”1

The previous glorious and exciting half-millennium—the “modern era”—had blessed humankind with a rich endowment of unprecedented achievement and progress, scientifically and politically and economically. “[T]he peoples of the West offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere,” Barzun observed.2 But the project had run its course. “[T]he culture is old and unraveling,”3 he intoned mournfully.

Barzun elaborated on this doleful assessment for eight-hundredplus pages in a lively history covering a vast and sometimes bewildering panorama of people, ideas, and movements. These people, ideas, and movements had advanced a number of exhilarating principles and causes, including—Barzun put the major themes in capital letters— EMANCIPATION, INDIVIDUALISM, and SECULARISM. Lofty causes, these. We may think so, anyway. And yet now these purposes, carried out to their utmost possibilities, are bringing about [the civilization’s] demise. This ending is shown by the deadlocks of our time: for and against nationalism, for and against individualism, for and against the high arts, for and against strict morals and religious belief.4

Whether or not Barzun was right about the demise of Western culture, it seemed that he himself, at the age of 93, must surely be nearing his own demise. And yet, perhaps like the civilization he admired, and lamented, the venerable historian lingered on—not departing until 2012, after a respectable tenure in this mortal realm of 104 years. As of this writing, Western culture with its commitments to emancipation and individualism and secularism—and to rule of law and democratic governance and human rights—likewise lingers on. Or at least staggers on. And yet it would be premature to declare with any confidence that Barzun was mistaken. Against the backdrop of centuries that the historian was working from, after all, what is a decade or two? A few grains of sand in the hourglass. And surely the “deadlocks” that Barzun noted would seem to be if anything more intractable now than they were when he wrote.

So the institutions of contemporary Western democracies— electoral politics, capitalism, the rule of law—lurch along clumsily at best. Polarization has intensified; it increasingly seems to be both toxic and irremediable. In America, the major political parties seem categorically incapable of perceiving their opponents as anything other than vile and mendacious. Unable to work together constructively, they instead offer rationalizations for adopting Shermanesque “scorched earth” policies on one or another issue—a tax bill, a judicial nomination, an impeachment. In surveys, startlingly high percentages of citizens anticipate an imminent civil war. 5 As of the time I write this sentence, the nation along with much of the world is in “lockdown,” and large-scale protests sometimes accompanied by rioting, looting, and shooting have been regularly breaking out around the country— in Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, New York, and elsewhere.

And with a fraught election upcoming, things look to get worse. Who knows what the situation will be by the time the book is finished and you read these words, if indeed that ever happens?

Still, who can say? If anything can be learned from history, it is that history is unruly, hard to reduce to secure generalizations and predictions. Even for the most learned historians (like Barzun)—that is why they are historians, not prophets. History’s contours are discernible, if at all, mostly in hindsight. Things will seem to be following a definite trajectory, which a decade or so later will have been forgotten, replaced by a different trajectory, which will in its turn be replaced by still another one. The population is growing at an unsustainably rapid pace. Population growth is too low for sustainability. Religion is destined for imminent extinction. Religion is taking over the world. Liberalism is dead (after the 2004 American election). Conservativism is dead (after the 2012 election). And so on.

Unlike Barzun’s tome, therefore, this book will be both much shorter and more tentative: it will offer no confident pronouncements on the death of Western civilization. Still, his title—From Dawn to Decadence —seems apt, whatever the future may hold. Ideas and movements that were fresh in the sixteenth century, and that have had in some cases a glorious run, do seem to be floundering or decrepit today. Maybe they will recover—who knows?—but they seem in deep trouble at the moment.6

So, how did we get from there to here?

That is what this book aims to consider, in a limited way. It is what Barzun considered as well, of course, but there will be no attempt here to duplicate his scholarly achievement. For one thing, his book has already been written, so there is no need to write it again. And even if Barzun had, let’s say, decided in a fit of frustration to chuck his manuscript into the fire without publishing it, an author with scarcely a smidgeon of Barzun’s erudition could hardly undertake a similar project. Rather than attempt to canvas the field, therefore, the much more modest effort here will be to discern and ponder the transformative changes in several smaller, discrete episodes.

In three episodes, to be precise, or three chapters. These three episodes, I will suggest, reflected in microcosm decisive turning points at which Western civilization changed from what it had been in premodern times to what it is today. Just in themselves these episodes may not seem to have carried any epic significance. And yet by focusing in on them (and, yes, by projecting onto them), we can discern what have turned out to be major transformations.

Instead of offering the panoramic cast of characters that Barzun discussed—a cast that makes the list of figures in a Tolstoy novel seem paltry by comparison—we will focus instead on three main characters, one for each chapter or episode. To anticipate: our principal protagonists will be Thomas More, James Madison, and William Brennan. Other supporting actors will appear as well, of course: none of our protagonists performed on an empty stage. But we will center our inquiry on one character per episode. The hope is that through this “up close and personal” perspective we may discern and appreciate possibilities and tendencies and contradictions—and slowly developing dangers—that would be left in fuzzier focus if we tried to survey the entire historical landscape.

The treatment here will be more modest than Barzun’s in two other ways as well. First, Barzun tried to trace and develop about a dozen themes. Here we will focus on only one—conscience—and not even one that showed up explicitly on his list, although it has been very closely associated several of his themes, including the ones noted already: emancipation, individualism, and secularism. A commitment to something called “conscience,” I will suggest, has been a central and in some ways defining feature of modern Western civilization. Reflecting on the changing meanings and importance attributed to conscience can thus provide a revealing perspective on fundamental developments that gave rise to the “modern era” Barzun presented, and that may now be bringing that era to some sort of close.

There are of course other themes that might have been chosen— changing ideas about God, for example, or the nature of the human person—that may seem more fundamental and potentially more revealing. Conscience has the advantage, however, of being concrete and profoundly practical: it has often been at the core of live political or legal controversies with existential consequences that have forced participants to articulate their assumptions and commitments not just in abstract or academic ways but in situations where a good deal—life or death, freedom or imprisonment—has been on the line. Nor is conscience a matter independent of arguably more fundamental issues like God and human personhood; on the contrary, it is in a sense a practical or as-applied implementation of those fundamentals.

But, second, although our first chapter will be international in the scope of its reflections, our second and third chapters will be more particularly focused on the political experiment that nearly everyone will agree has played a leading role, for better or worse, in the unfolding of modernity. Namely, America. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville contended that the emergence of democracy and egalitarianism in America was leading and presaging a transformation that would spread through the civilized world. In that he was surely correct. So examining the development of conscience in America is no parochial undertaking. Still, there is no reason to suppose that events have followed exactly the same course—or that they must necessarily follow exactly the same course in the future—in other regions and countries as they have done and will do in America. (This is an observation, I trust, that carries with it a measure of hopefulness.)

So much for the preliminaries. And now . . . let us raise the curtain on chapter one, in which a paragon loses his head.