Blogging in the Modern World

The world has no lack of forums for opinions. From the most educated critic down to the lowliest vacationing blogger, everyone, it seems, has their say in today’s marketplace of ideas. The marketplace of ideas is one of the foundational ideas of modernity, and it bears a resemblance to its sister marketplace capitalism in its unwarranted faith in an “invisible hand” to guide it forward. More often than not, this results in the proclamation of whatever direction in which we seem to be headed as “progress,” even if it takes arms races, genocides, starvation, and the death of any hope founded in organized religion to get wherever it is, exactly, that we are headed.

John Milbank in his book Theology and Social Theory makes the case that where this line of thinking is headed is nihilism - and not the sort of nihilism that shrugs at truth and leaves us all in happy Lockean contracts with one another, but to a totalizing narrative of violence, where there is no conceivable reason for the strong not to rule where the may and the weak not to suffer what they must - the agon of Homer, the Hobbesian state of nature, the future according to George Orwell. In his work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben sees this already occurring in the modern world as the state of nature never fully leaves any sovereign government, but instead rests in the hands of the highest power and manifests itself in the “state of exception” - that zone of indistinction between nomos and physis. Agamben uses George Bush’s removal of legal status from the detainees at Guantanamo Bay as a perfect example of this (State of Exception). In the most direct exposure of its ultimate fate since the Nazi concentration camps, here the modern world oversteps the boundaries of the juridical altogether as it exercises its power over the bare fact of creaturely living, removing from human beings not just their lives, but the very status of life. In a way, the Bush administration has not treated these detainees any differently than modernity has treated all of mankind.

There is a certain sense in which modernity was always fated to end in post-modernity, and in the same sense, the modern, soulless man was always destined to be treated as one without a soul. Insofar as it was always a monumental oversight of Enlightenment thought, as it spread and detached itself from tradition, that truth-by-consensus would inevitably lead to disagreements of perspective and the ultimate questioning of the rules of legitimacy (as Johann Georg Hamann pointed out to Kant even as the ink from the words “Dare to know!” was still wet on the page), so the denial of an absolute transcendent reality (the fact-value split, many call it) would by its very nature end in the death of human nature at the hands of a giant, empty negative. It is a wonder that the pipe-dream of purely temporal justice lasted as long as it did.

Yet the attitude of the west towards matters of ultimate truth continues to be laissez-faire. “They’ll tell us when they figure it out.” While some muster the outrage to write the New York Times about political atrocities like Guantanamo Bay, a candidate for the Presidency declares he would double its size. While Christian activists and radicals like Shane Claiborne sell their possessions and go to live with the poor, pastors of megachurches like Joel Osteen lie to millions of people that God will give them wealth if they follow a simple plan, and mainline denominations eviscerate religion by removing its claims to any meaningful sort of Truth, following the example of theologians like John Spong. How are even the academics, much less the average person, supposed to know what’s right?

When it comes to legitimizing truth, modernity cheats. Clearly, there are no grounds for the declaration of truth through any ultimate, unquestionable process. This is the failure of Enlightenment thought - the failure to establish a truly indubitable set of criteria for truth beyond the habits of scientists. Post-modern thinkers from Lyotard to Derrida take this for granted, but the monolithic systems of modernity continue to thrive while excluding even the most basic truths of human existence from our everyday life. Modernity has achieved irrational independence from philosophy and theory to the degree that even the simplest working, voting man demands that assertions meet certain requirements for proof in areas of thought where they absolutely do not apply.

And up bubbles an idea. It is possible to subvert this popular submission to modern thought in favor of a more holistic approach to human existence. It is, in fact, possible to fill the hole of post-modern thought without betraying the honesty of those who have arrived there. The first thing we must understand is that the nihilistic gap in human thought represented by post-modernism is no more legitimate than the modern systems of legitimacy that did away with the transcendent in the first place. Rather, this void that is felt by so many that reach the precipice of the post-modern is the result not of an actual theoretical arrival at nothing, but of an arbitrary denial of ontological purchase to the transcendent a priori - that is to say, in their zeal to boil the world down into only those things of which we can be sure, the great philosophers of the Enlightenment attempted to do away with all those things of which they could not be sure. Not only was this an impossible task (demonstrated by none more effectively than Michael Polanyi in Personal Knowledge), but when this attempt at empirical certainty strayed into the realms of ethics, justice, and politics, the ridiculous idea of natural rights began to crop up in the work of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Rousseau, and their contemporaries.

And there we remain. We still speak of human rights, ones that are "inalienable," and of truths that are "self-evident," and we don't give it a second thought. What happens when modernity catches up to itself? Some think liberal democracy will degenerate into totalitarianism. What do I think? I think that if it does, it will be of such a brand that few of us will notice. In the mean time, the marketplace of ideas does have one great virtue - it is often used for stories, not arguments. Therein, I believe, lies an exit from this mess.