A Brief, Brief Exam of the Modern Counter-Enlightenment

    Someone recently asked if we have passed through the postmodern era into a new period of cultural and social history.

    No.

    "Marxism and postmodernism: people often seem to find this combination peculiar or paradoxical..."[1] They are neither. It was the 'modernists' who led us from Lockean/Jeffersonian individualism into the 'Beat Generation' of artists who came, post-WWII, from the indoctrination of the socialist elements of the unionist movements of their parents' and grandparents' generation.

    The tenets of the movement, its belief in progress, freedom, and equality, had been sustained from the outset by artists and intellectuals, and embraced by those who reaped the material benefits it brought.[2]

   Those were the individualists like Alexis de Tocqueville, whose historic first-hand description of Americans showed us to believe that "all values are human-centered, the individual is of supreme importance, and all individuals are morally equal. Individualism places great value on self-reliance, on privacy, and on mutual respect. Negatively, it embraces opposition to authority and to all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state."[3] And so it included writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Washington Irving.

    But envy of men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, A. A. Talmadge, and others led to a form of anti-industrialism where the forerunner of today's lobbyists were the so-called competitors of those men. 

    "Intense lobbying began between 1869 and 1877, during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant. The most influential lobbies wanted railroad subsidies and a tariff on wool. At the same time in the Reconstruction South, lobbying was a high intensity activity near the state legislatures, especially regarding railroad subsidies. The term itself came from Britain to describe approaches made to Members of Parliament in the lobbies of the House of Commons..."[4]

    Lobbying as it was practiced then does not 'embrace opposition to authority', it used authority; nor did it despise 'all manner of controls over the individual, especially when exercised by the state'. It wanted the intervention of the State, because then the lobbyists gained power over those who could manage quite nicely without any government assistance.

    In other cases it was quite the opposite: those who could do quite nicely without government interference or 'assistance', were forced to pay-off men in high places who could create interference with tariffs and subsidies to their competitors who were seen as being unable to 'compete' without running interference on their behalf.

    'Modernists' were therefore anti-industrialist anti-individualists. The violence of the unionist movement is rampant with people more interested in wresting power from the industries, than with the plight of the poor working class who needed someone to speak for them, to help them raise their wages and gain benefits. "The Russian Revolution had seemed at the time, and for a long time after, to be the answer to the progressive modernist's dream."[2]

  We are--and have been since the age of Rousseau and Kant--in the age of the counter-Enlightenment. To think of 'modernism' or 'post-modernism' while stuck in one era (in which we are going backward toward Plato's Cave) is ridiculous. Until we overthrow the counter-Enlightenment that spawned Napoleon and Trotsky, Eugene V. Debs, the Industrial Workers of the World,  and "the anti-modern, ideological religious right"[5]--until we do this and get back to thinking in terms of negative rights rather than positive rights, (not to be confused with 'negative liberty' and 'positive liberty') will we actually be in the 'modern era'. Only then, someday far in the future, can we ever look to a 'post-modern' era---and I hope it's rational.

[1] New Left Review
[2] Modernism and Politics
[3] Britannica Precise Encyclopedia
[4] Lobbying in the United States: History
[5] American conservatism as Counter Enlightenment

© Curtis Edward Clark 2011

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