Thoughts from a Life: On Modernity
By Rémi Brague
The main thrust of Sir Roger’s thought may be an attempt at staving off the ‘secularizing forces of modernity’, which endeavour to ‘clear away from the Lebenswelt all the threads of pious observance that cannot be replaced by free choice and self-made obligations’. [1] Hence, the ‘religious deficit in modern societies’. [2] This predicament of modernity was seen clearly by many, including Nietzsche. [3]
In order to see the modern world as such, wrote Sir Roger in an essay on T. S. Eliot, we must get to a point of view outside it. [4] Since we cannot jump beyond the present and into the future, to see Modernity in the rear-view mirror requires us to take our bearings from the past. What came before Modernity is often called the ‘Middle Ages’—something meant with a derogatory shade of meaning. For Eliot, this vantage-point was provided by Dante’s synthesis of the medieval world-view. For Sir Roger, this was the Christian tradition, and especially the Church of England, conceived of as a repository of culture, i.e. ‘our highest moral resource, in a world that has come through to modernity’. [5]
Sir Roger saw modernity in its purest form through the metonymy of modernism in architecture—the art of arts, for it provides a place both for plastic and performing arts. [6] Modernist buildings are not meant to fit in the urban landscape any longer, but to replace it. [7] ‘This iconoclastic spirit can be seen in a great many modern projects’. [8]
However, Modernity is self-defeating in the long run since, for modern mankind, ‘consumption takes over from reproduction to become the high point of the human drama’. [9] Edmund Burke’s famous sentence about the dead and the unborn belonging to the human community underlies Sir Roger’s thought: ‘Contempt for the dead leads to the disenfranchisement of the unborn’. [10] The dead are the ‘metaphysical guardians of the unborn’. [11]
The cure against modernity, then, is the arousal of a feeling of continuity, the refusal to break away from the past, piety towards what came before us and made us possible in the first place. Sir Roger uses the Latin word pietas to describe this cure. [12] It involves ‘love of what has been good to you, and forgiveness of what has not’. [13]
If Modernity is a ‘culture of repudiation’ grounded on the ‘myth of progress’, conservatism is the philosophy of attachment. [14] Sir Roger did not advocate repudiating Modernity in the same way as Modernity repudiates the past, though. On the contrary,
the conservative response to modernity is to embrace it, but to embrace it critically, in full consciousness that human achievements are rare and precarious, that we have no God-given right to destroy our inheritance, but must always patiently submit to the voice of order, and set an example of orderly living. [15]
Rémi Brague is professor emeritus of Medieval and Arabic Philosophy at the University of Paris, and the Romano Guardini chair of Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität of Munich. Brague is a member of the Institut de France.
The Face of God: the Gifford Lectures, 146; The Soul of the World, 94.
The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, 81.
A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, 189.
A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism, 193.
Culture Counts, 60.
Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, Chapter 11.
Green Philosophy: How to think seriously about the Planet, 278.
The Face of God, 124.
How to be a Conservative, 131.
Ibid., 20, 56.
The West and the Rest, 13.
Gentle Regrets, 232f.
Ibid., 67.
How to be a Conservative, 27, 29, 39
A Political Philosophy, 208.