(From an Appeal to the Need for Meaning):
The logical positivists in the 1920s and 30s were mostly pretty radical leftists, and the emigres to the US stayed at least on the Social Democratic left. What were they afarid of? Well, by the 30s, fascism. In the 20s, hmm, takes some thought... jks
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By the middle 20s it was pretty obvious to anyone thinking and working in the advanced sciences, humanities, and arts (including many political radicals) that there was no foundation to anything, especially modernity. Russell who I think was considered a logical positivist at that point had just finish Principia Mathematica with Whitehead on the mathematical foundation of logic only to realize the central project of his life collapsed on a simple paradox that was unresolvable.
That's just one example. The tip of the iceberg. But the general view came into focus that the great intellectual edifice of modern civilization including its uniform direction forward was a false front, something like a stage prop, beyond which lay absolutely nothing. It all worked sort of, but only because there was a consensus that it should, that it ought to work, provided nobody complained too loudly or looked too close.
In many respects the big chill that Kelley quoted from Weber had set in: "Not summer's bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now."
After almost a full century of permutations on this darkling theme, Jeffery Fisher wants some progressive element to reach out to creat meaning for the great Gaussian hump. Somehow the Left is supposed to do that. Michael Pollak in a warm hearted thought advocates something similar under Rationality of the Masses.
It can not to be, because the deepest source of revolt turns precisely on this point. The modern world must fall away like shattered glass, over and over, as it did for its first generations at the turn of the 18thC. In a paradox that has yet to be explained, to recapitulate modernity is to overthrow it, not as a mere fashion, but as a promised source of direction and enlightenment.
Michael writes:
``And it's not only the short term that's all downside. They also feel -- and they are quite right -- that they can't possibly win from that position. They are surrounded by enemies, both more implacable than themselves. And that makes their goal -- to reconcile religion and modernity -- clearly impossible.''
Modernity born in the throws of the Enlightenment and French Revolution is not only irreconcilable with religion, but all other traditional belief systems, including itself. Octavio Paz called it the tradition against itself as an endless cycle, a closed circle. Seen from this view, the apparent hegemony of the US Right and its Christian followers are just the latest of a series of attempted resuscitations. The neconservatives with their revival of Aristotelian hierarchical orders of the mind and society---loosely based on Jewish intellectual history from the middle ages is another.
We can now look back and see that Postmodernity which may have been definitely close by the US Righwing revivals was just another cycle of the self-consciously modern against itself, not unlike Dada, Surrealism, and the theater of the absurd which it resembled in many respects. In this cycle of the modern against itself we arrive at some period that seems to resemble Weimar in its lurid cacophony of sacred hightbrow intellectualism and the more prosaic world of disaffected masses, capitalism gone asymptotic, trivialized mass culture, and a parade of trumped-up political pretenders who have come to save us from our own condition.
Behind it all is Weber's polar night, and we are supposed to pretend for the sake of building solidarity that the paralyzing chill blowing off the the frozen waste is really a utopian summer breeze?
Of course it's a gamble. When the hall of mirrors shatters once again there is no telling in advance what will happen next. Certainly after the US electorate re-installed a known fraud over a suspected fraud, I was breathless at the spectre. The Gaussian hump had bared its teeth. Now it seems to be growling at its own tail.
My own impulse is to let it growl, let it bite, let it chew.
CG