Attack of the MOMS: Part IV

So here we go, the last Attack of the MOMS, and my last chance to convince myself and my readership that modern society is not going down the tubes. This attack is the most formidable since it is the hardest to refute with hard evidence. When people say that there is an epidemic of violent crime, you can show them the statistics that show how crime has actually fallen. When they claim that people in the West are unhappy, you can show them statistics that show that in fact, most of them are pretty happy. But when they say that we have lost our spiritual bearings and are wallowing in a false contentment, then it's not so easy to come up with a counterargument. We can't quantify virtue or measure meaning.

Another reason why it is hard to oppose the idea of spiritual malaise is that the very fact that the question gets raised implies that something has gone wrong, especially when some of the people raising it are, by all accounts, very clever people. Something happened in the middle of the twentieth century to make some of the best minds of Europe and America decide that we had taken a wrong turning: T.S. Eliot, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, C.S. Lewis, Jean-Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Hermann Hesse, J.R.R. Tolkien … all very different people, but all united in a conviction that Western society had gone off the rails. Of course the twentieth century also had its complacent and self-congratulatory intellectuals, and modernism has famous apologists, but here I'm more interested in the nay-sayers. Why, after the optimism that opened the twentieth century, were so many intelligent people saying that everything was getting worse?

It is a feature of the best of times as well as the worst that a lot of people will think that things are getting worse, and in particular, that people are getting worse. But in the middle of the twentieth century, it really did seem like Western civilisation was destroying itself. No sooner had society started to recover from “the war to end all wars" than Europe started gearing up for another one. World War I threw the old values of patriotism and tradition into question in a way an army of nineteenth-century intellectuals could not; the rise of Nazism, though, threatened the new values of science and social progress. Some intellectuals rallied to their defence, some rushed headlong into Stalinism, some journeyed to the East, some returned to the Church, some even flirted with fascism. Like any period of rapid change, it was a mess, with more people cursing the dark than lighting candles. With half the world going crazy, it is hard to blame them.

If this intellectual nausée had been merely a reaction to the ugly state of Europe from 1914 to 1944, though, it would have dissipated, but if anything, it became stronger in the second half of the century. Whether the criticism comes from progressives or conservatives, mystics or existentialists, there is enough disillusionment with modern society to indicate that some things really did change in a serious way. Whether these changes are all that bad, though, is a matter of debate. I would say that the criticism focusses on four closely related areas: the decline of religion, estrangement from the natural world, consumerism and mass society.

Some critics of modernity, such as C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot and a host of Catholic converts, see the decline in religion as the main source of the malaise of modern society. Even those with no particular religious axe to grind have misgivings about the “disenchantment” (to borrow Weber's term) that modernity brought. And yes, there has been a decline in religion in Europe (and to a lesser extent, America), and yes, this does mean we've lost some good things, like the way a shared faith can give purpose to a community. On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that religion often gives us bad purposes, and if we want all the warm fuzzies that come with a strong religious community then perhaps we shouldn't complain when they burn the occasional heretic. My personal view is that there's a kind of ideal ratio of faith which occurs when a third of the population have definite religious beliefs, a third have some vague notions of spirituality and the rest are either committed atheists or apathetic agnostics. In any case, what we definitely do not have in today's society is the “spiritual vacuum” that religious anti-modernists complain about. If modern society were so materialistic, how come books on spirituality sell so well? Usually what these people are complaining about is that people are getting interested in other people's spiritual beliefs and practices. There's a double standard involved: if someone goes to church, they are spiritually fulfilled, but if they go to a reiki class, they're trying vainly to fill the spiritual vacuum inside them.

Estrangement from nature and the evils of industrialism have been a theme of anti-modernists on both the right and left since William Wordsworth and William Cobbett, and to be fair, they often make some very good points. The industrial revolution made life hell for a lot of people, and even after the living standards of the working class rocketed in the twentieth century, it left us with a lot of ugliness and the likelihood of a global catastrophe of Biblical proportions. (There again, we shouldn't forget that they had Biblical catastrophes in Biblical times too, and they were much less equipped to deal with them.) It's a major theme of my favourite anti-modernist, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose hobbits live in a rural utopia, while Saruman and Sauron go all out for industrialisation. Tolkien was influenced by his childhood, when he moved from a Hobbiton-like village to Birmingham, which in those days was a pretty good model for Isengard. Even my own childhood visits to Birmingham in the 1960s were enough to put me off big cities for a long time. But we shouldn't forget two things: firstly, while English village life may be idyllic, it is only possible because it is (and was even before Tolkien's day) supported by industry; secondly, technology has advanced a long way since the industrial revolution. The centre of Birmingham, which used to be black with soot, is now a pleasant place to wander around.

Even if we concede that technology can be made clean, comfortable and eco-friendly, though, will we ever regain the bond with Nature that the industrial revolution cut? Or did we really have such a bond? I'm quite happy to admit that hunter-gatherers have a relationship with their environment which is so spiritually intense I can't really grasp it (in fact, it's because I can't grasp it that I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on the spiritual side). I'm not so sure I'd grant such a holistic vision to a sixteenth-century peasant. Sure, my forebears spent a lot more time in the open air than I do (most of them were farmers, after all) but did they look at Nature any less instrumentally than we do? If anything, I'd say they had a more instrumental attitude, since for them, Nature was not something to commune with, but a way of making a living. They might not have been estranged from Nature in the way that modern city-dwellers are, but Olde England was no Findhorn. In those days, people who talked to nature spirits tended to come to nasty ends.

The loss of spiritual values and the disenchantment of Nature lead to a preoccupation with acquiring material goods. Well, that's what we've been told, and I suppose it's true to an extent. Somebody who has no spiritual life to speak of and doesn't get off on daffodils is more likely to spend their time at the mall. But as I've said, the fact that we don't all believe in the same things doesn't mean we've all lost our spiritual values, nor is material greed unique to modern societies. People have probably been lamenting human acquisitiveness ever since the combination of agriculture and pottery gave us the means to acquire things. Take the Vikings, for example. Do you think they rampaged across Europe just to take in the scenery? They were after gold. OK, gold and slaves, who could later be sold for gold. And maybe a bit of amber, too. Henry VIII didn't dissolve the monasteries because he was a pious Protestant, but because he was a greedy bastard. History is one long, sad story of people killing each other out of greed.

Now I dislike consumerism as much as the next lefty, but I have to ask myself if it is any different from normal human greed. We are told that it creates artificial desires for things we don't really need, but then did Erik Skullsplitter really need that goblet he looted from Lindisfarne? Consumerism is bad because it places what may become unbearable strains on the planet's resources, makes people work harder than is good for them and encourages exploitation of poorer countries. But the only thing that makes it new and different is that it allows almost all of us to do this. In the past, you really had to be somebody to pillage the world's wealth; now any Joe Proletarian can go down to his local department store and do it. I admit I'm playing the Devil's advocate here, but doesn't part of the disdain for consumerism come from elitism? After all, it's all about mass-produced junk for the masses, and the masses are never us.

This brings us neatly to the last cause of our supposed spiritual malaise: mass society, and with it, popular culture. I already (in the poetically titled “Mass Society, My Arse”) debunked the notion that the twentieth century saw the individual crushed by mass society. The forces of collectivism did their utmost to create a conformist mass society and failed; the twentieth century was the first time ever that ordinary people were able—and were sometimes even encouraged—to think for themselves. Even openly conformist mass movements like Fascism were only able to come to power because the masses had become a potent political force. Political propaganda and advertising, obnoxious though both of them may be sometimes, only arose because, again for the first time ever, ordinary people were forming their own opinions, and those opinions were making a big difference. Before the modern age, people didn't need to manipulate the masses so much because the masses didn't matter all that much—you might want to give the yeomanry a stirring speech before sending them to be mowed down by enemy cavalry or egg on a mob to lynch one of your political rivals, but you didn't need a full-time propaganda machine because most of the time nobody gave a lark's tongue what the plebs thought.

Does this render all criticism of mass society invalid? Not entirely, because even though it's preferable for ruling classes to control the masses through TV than torture, manipulation is still not nice. But all too often, criticisms of mass society are really just criticisms of popular culture, which like criticisms of consumerism, often have elitist overtones. To say everything I want in defence of pop culture would take far too long, so I'll just stick to one simple but often overlooked point. When people have a bone to pick with modern pop culture, they generally compare it with what they know of the culture of bygone days, so that they compare, for example, Madonna with Mozart. In other words, they are comparing someone who appeals to the masses with someone whose music was listened to by an aristocratic elite, and whose genius was recognised by a handful of them. If you want a fair comparison, you need to compare what ordinary people today listen to with what ordinary people listened to a few hundred years ago. Let no one complain that pop music is banal and repetitive until they've listened through all twenty-one verses of Mattie Groves.

Taking all of the above points into consideration (as my students love to say) is there a malaise of modern society, or have we never had it so good? The people who claim that crime is skyrocketing, that we are less healthy than we were a hundred years ago or that people in the West are less happy than people in the East are simply wrong, and there is plenty of evidence to prove them wrong. The philosophical objections to the modern world are more complicated and less easily dismissed, though as I think I've shown here, all of them are problematic in one way or another. For me, though, the real clincher is that I am sitting at a computer writing about the malaise of modern society, and millions of people can (should they so wish) read what I write. My great grandmother couldn't read anything anyone wrote, because she'd never learnt to read. And sure, Paradise Lost may be better written than The Da Vinci Code, but I'd still rather live in a world where the masses get to read Dan Brown than one where a handful get to read Milton.