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THE ABDUCTION OF
MODERNITY
Part V: The Enlightenment and modernity
By Henry C K Liu
Part 1: The race toward barbarism
Part 2: That old time religion
Part 3: Rule of law vs Confucianism
Part 4: Taoism and modernity
The Enlightenment, generally accepted
as the flowering of modernity in the West from its
Renaissance roots, is a periodization in history.
Periodization, a complex problem in history, is the
attempt to categorize or divide historical time,
mentality or events into discrete named blocks. History
is in fact continuous, and so all systems of
periodization are to some extent arbitrary. History does
not end as long as the human species survives. Those who
proclaim the end of history are predicting the death of
civilization, not the victory of neo-liberalism as
heaven on Earth. Imperialism and neo-imperialism,
operating with cultural hegemony, are a cancer the
invasive growth of which will kill the world as a living
organism.
It is nevertheless useful to segment
history so that the past can provide lessons to the
present by being conceptually organized and significant
changes over time articulated. Different peoples and
cultures have different histories, and so will need
different models of periodization. Periodizing labels
constantly change and are subject to redefinition as
contemporary perceptions change. A historian may claim
that there is no such thing as modernity, or the
Enlightenment or the Renaissance, or the Nuclear Age,
while others will defend the concept. Modernity, as
currently constituted in the West, can also be viewed as
a relapse of civilization toward barbarism through
advanced technology.
Many periodizing concepts
apply only in specific conditions, but they are often
mistaken as universal generalities. Some have a cultural
usage (such the Romantic period, the Age of Reason or
the Age of Science or the Space Age), others refer to
historical events (the Age of Imperialism, the
Depression Years or the New Deal era) and others are
defined by decimal numbering systems (the 1960s, the
16th century).
In chronology, an era is a period
reckoned from an artificially fixed point in time, as
before or after the birth of Christ: BC for Before
Christ and AD for Anno Domini (year of the Lord). There
are less known but also significant points in historical
time beside the birth of Christ. The alleged creation of
the world in Jewish mythical history is equivalent to
3761 BC, and in Byzantine history, the creation date was
5508 BC. The founding of the city of Rome took place in
753 BC, with subsequent years marked AUD for ad urbe
condita (from the founding of the city). The
hijira marks the migration of the Prophet
Mohammed to Medina from Mecca in AD 622. Abbreviated AH,
it is the starting timepost for all Muslims.
The
division between AD and BC defines history according to
the birth of one man, whose divinity is far from
universally accepted. Only about 33 percent of the
world's population are Christians. The most far-reaching
date anomaly is the late setting of the beginning of the
Christian era by the Roman monk-scholar Dionysius
Exiguous (died circa AD 545), thus putting the
historical birth of Christ at 4 BC, four years before
the calendar birth year of Christ. The year AD 2000
marks two chronological events in the Western calendar:
a new millennium and a new century. Its celebration
marks the global dominance of Western culture in the
20th century. The new millennium is merely year 4398 in
Chinese lunar calendar - a non-event.
The French
revolutionary calendar changed the names of the months
to remove all reminders of despotic traditions, such as
August, named after the Roman emperor Augustus, July,
named after Julius Caesar, and March (mars in
French), named after the Roman god of war. It made all
months 30 days equally to emphasize equality and
rationality. The names for the months in the new
calendar were invented hastily, by revolutionary
dramatist Philippe Fabre d'Eglantine (1755-94), George
Jacques Danton's talented secretary who would be
tragically guillotined at the prime age of 39, a mere
five years after the storming of the Bastille, the
popular uprising that launched the French Revolution.
The 12 30-day months added up to 360 days; the remaining
five days of the year, called sans-culottides,
after the name given to the members of the lower classes
not wearing fancy culottes (breeches), were to be
feast days for the laboring class, called Virtue,
Genius, Labor, Reason and Rewards.
The French
revolutionary calendar rejected the year of the birth of
Christ as the first Anno Domini. It replaced the
seven-day week, viewed by revolutionary zealots as an
obsolete Christian relic, with the metric 10-day decade,
unwittingly causing a counterrevolutionary, regressive
reduction in the number of days of rest for the working
populace from four to three in a month. The overall
purpose was to remove from the cultural consciousness
all Christian events such as Christmas, Easter, All
Saints Day, the Sabbath, etc, as part of a program to
replace Christianity with a Cult of Reason. The French
revolutionary calendar remained in effect until the
Thermidorian Reaction, a period of political
revisionism, of vulgar extravagance in social manners,
of greed and scandal and of merveilleuses, women
known for their underdressed overdressing in public. The
Thermidorian Reaction was marked by the growth of
corruption, inflationary speculation and manipulative
profiteering, suspension of populist economic
regulations, topped with a wholesale repeal of
de-Christianization practices.
The Thermidorian
Reaction is so named because it came after the coup
d'etat of 9 Thermidor, Year III of the Republic (July
27, 1794), that brought down Maximilien Robespierre
(1758-94), thus ending the Reign of Terror, and brought
to power a convenient coalition of the conservative old
bourgeoisie and the boisterous parvenus and
nouveaux riches, which would deliver the French
nation, another five years later, to a military dictator
in the person of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Still other
periodizations are derived from influential or
talismanic individuals (the Victorian era, the
Elizabethan era, the Napoleonic era or the Mao era).
Some of these usages are geographically specific. This
is especially true of periodizing labels derived from
individuals or ruling elites, such as the Jacksonian era
in the United States, or the Meiji era in Japan, or the
Merovingian period in France. Cultural terms may also
have a limited reach. Thus the concept of the Romantic
period may be meaningless outside of Europe and of
Europe-influenced cultures.
Yet the term
"modernity" takes on universal characteristics that
spring from Western cultural hegemony. In recent times,
modernity has again been abducted as a war cry to
perpetuate the domination by the capitalist West of the
rest of the world. Previously, the Renaissance claimed
modernity as a justification against secular power of
the Church, the bourgeoisie claimed modernity as a
justification against absolute monarchism, and the
socialist revolutions claimed modernity as justification
against capitalism. All these claims were associated
with social progress. But the current abduction of
modernity by the capitalistic West represents the first
time in history when reaction is claimed as modernity
and barbarism as progress. The law of the jungle is
celebrated as competitive market fundamentalism, and the
doctrine of "might is right" permeates modern diplomacy,
replacing morality and legitimacy.
Periodizing
terms are often tools of cultural hegemony with negative
connotation for oppressed cultures and positive
connotation for the hegemonic culture. Thus there is the
Age of Monarchy in the West but the Age of Asiatic and
Oriental Tyrants in Asia and the Middle East. The
Victorian era, which is known for sexual repression,
racism, class conflict and exploitation, and
imperialism, is hailed in the West as the age of
propriety, industrialization and capitalism. Other
labels such as "Renaissance" have positive
characteristics as compared with "Medieval", despite
that fact that historians have suggested that unlike the
Middle Ages, the Renaissance failed to develop
significant lasting social institutions.
The
French term "Renaissance" - meaning "rebirth" though in
the English-speaking world it is commonly known by its
French name - was created by Petrarch (Francesco
Petrarca, 1304-74), an Italian humanist poet whose
famous vernacular poem inspired by his love for Laura
transcended medieval asceticism into individual
expression of emotion. The term refers to the cultural
changes that occurred in Italy as a reaction to Italian
conditions of the time, which began around the
quattrocento (15th century) and culminated in
what is termed the High Renaissance, at around 1500.
Many Western historians regard the Renaissance as the
beginning of modernity. Yet, the basic institutions, the
great framework of collective purpose and action by
which the West continues to operate far into the present
time, all originated in the Middle Ages. Parliaments,
for example, were medieval feudal institutions. The
Magna Carta was signed by King John of England in 1215.
The Renaissance, also known as the Age of
Humanism, was a period of secularization of Western
civilization. The Renaissance Church became a secular
institution in this period, shedding its spiritual
roots, with insatiable greed for material wealth and
temporal power. The Italian Renaissance produced little
of what could be considered great ideas or institutions
by which men living in society could be held together in
harmony. Indeed, the greatest of all Europeans
institutions, the Roman Church, in which Europeans had
lived for centuries, fell into neglect under Renaissance
popes, whose fall from spiritual grace sparked the
Reformation.
Nor did the Renaissance produce any
effectual political institutions. Unlike the medieval
agricultural towns of France that developed gradually,
the trading towns of Italy prospered abruptly as trade
converged on the Mediterranean. The sudden riches from
trade held in private hands required a new culture
separate from the medieval communal spirit to
rationalize its acceptability. As merchants made obscene
fortunes from trade and banking, they diverted social
criticism by sponsoring art, to glorify their worldly
sins with beauty. Successful bankers lent money to
popes, kings and princes, and with the profits they
gained political control of Italian trading towns to
turn them into despotic city-states. They employed
mercenaries in the form of condottieri, private
captains of armed bands, who contracted with opposing
city-states to carry on warfare, sometime even changing
sides during hostility for a better price. As they
forgot about things that money could not buy, they
glorified the power of money in a philosophy of humanism
and despotism.
The most notable example was the
Medici clan of Florence. Giovanni (died 1429) founded
the banking fortune that enabled his son Cosimo de'
Medici (1389-1464) to become the de facto ruler of
Florence through populist politics. Cosimo's grandson,
Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-92), used his great wealth
to govern as a connoisseur and lavish benefactor of art
and letters. Tuscany became a duchy of which Medici men
were hereditary grand dukes until the clan died out in
1753. The clan furnished two popes and numerous
cardinals to the Church, and two Medici women became
queens of France. It was the first time in history when
money led to political significance rather than the
reverse. Italian politics degenerated into a tangled web
of subterfuge and conspiracy, making no pretense to
legitimacy, to represent any moral idea or to further
any social good.
The Renaissance idea of
virtu (to be man) had little to do with the
medieval idea of virtue. Virtu describes the
quality of being a man in the sense of demonstrating
individual human powers as expressed in the arts, in war
and statecraft. It is the root of Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche's hero and the rationale of fascism. This
concept applies dominantly to the visual arts, referring
to the work of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da
Vinci. It also applies to the emergence of capitalism,
private banking, provincial despotism and materialistic
secularism. It celebrated the specific differences in
man in contrast to the medieval concept of the common
generality of man. The discovery of the rules of
perspective and detailed anatomy in drawing allowed
painters to locate humanity in specific contexts rather
than symbolic generality of abstract truth. In
Leonardo's The Last Supper, Christ and his
disciples were portrayed as a group of men each having
distinct individual personalities.
The
Renaissance was a movement of the non-aristocratic elite
minority, exclusive in spirit in contrast to the
medieval notion of community. Renaissance individualism
was the privilege of a dazzling few. The Italian
humanists were lay writers, instead of clerics or court
scribes. "Humanism" is a name given to the literary
movement of the Italian Renaissance. The pomposity of
the humanists was mocked by the populace in their own
time. The humanists were in awe of antiquity, a peculiar
preoccupation for modernists. They tried to dress, talk,
and comport themselves like Roman nobles. They disdained
writing in Italian as Dante Alighieri and Giovanni
Boccaccio had done. They dismissed even medieval Latin
as barbaric and corrupt, and reverted to the style of
the excessively flowery language of the schoolbook Latin
of Cicero (106-43 BC), the great Roman orator whose
famous First Oration Against Catiline skillfully
condemned Catiline as a conspirator based on hearsay
testimony obtained from Catiline's mistress. Cicero,
despite his rhetorical eloquence, remained unable to
substantiate his legal authority to execute Catiline's
five associates, thus subjecting himself to exile
subsequently for having put to death Roman citizens
without due process of law.
The Humanist
movement did not survive the test of time, the exception
being Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), who showed conclusively
from the language used in the document that the Donation
of Constantine, on which the papacy based it temporal
claims, could not have been written in Constantine's
time and so was a forgery. The discovery was welcomed by
the Italian Renaissance city-state despots who were
eager to undermine the legitimacy of the papacy's
temporal power.
The Renaissance invented the
idea of the "gentleman", later emulated by the British
elite. Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1520) wrote Book
of the Courtier, liberating Europeans from their
uncouth manners of publicly spitting, belching, blowing
their noses on their sleeves, snatching food with their
bare hands and general bawling and sulking openly with
little inhibition. According to Castiglione, a courtier
should cultivate graceful manners in society and poised
approaches toward his equals, converse with facility, be
proficient in sports and arms, be an expert dancer with
appreciation for music and poetry and be gallant to the
fair sex. He should know Latin and Greek as a sign of
good education and be familiar with literary trends but
not too engrossed. In sum, it was a promotion of
dilettantism, which as transformed into the English
gentleman of the Oxbridge variety became what many
identified as the mentality that contributed to the
demise of the British Empire. It was also the mentality
of much of the British-trained Third World elite. This
mentality left the post-colonial independent nations
with a poverty of political and economic leadership
after the fall of the British Empire, from India to the
Middle East, from Africa to Asia. Such mentality has
kept the former colonies from cultural and economic
revitalization from the wounds of colonialism.
Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince (1513)
was Europe's first secular treatise on politics, devoid
of concern for morality, legitimacy or justice, issues
that rulers have since learned to manipulate to
rationalize their political interests. He described the
barbaric chaos of 16th-century Italy as universal modern
reality. Ironically, this perspective deprived Italy of
the development of institutions, such as the
nation-state, in which men can act in concert for a
larger purpose. In a new age of rising national
monarchies, the city-states of Italy could not compete
without the protection of the spiritual and temporal
power of the Church, against which Renaissance Italy
itself played a central role in weakening. In 1494, a
French army crossed the Alps and Italy became the bone
of contention between France and Spain. In 1527, a horde
of undisciplined Spanish and German mercenaries sacked
Rome, killing thousands in an orgy of rape and looting,
imprisoned the pope and mockingly paraded cardinals
facing backward on mules in the streets. Never had Rome
experienced anything so horrible and degrading, not even
from the barbaric Goths of the 5th century.
The
term "Middle Ages" also derived from Petrarch, who was
comparing his own period to the Ancient or Classical
world, seeing his time as a time of rebirth after a dark
intermediate period, the Middle Ages. The idea that the
Middle Ages were a "middle" phase between two other
large-scale periodizing concepts - Ancient and Modern -
still persists. Smaller periodizing concepts such as
Dark Ages occur within it. Both "Dark Ages" and "Middle
Ages" still have negative connotations - the latter
especially in its Latin form "medieval". However, other
terms, such as "Gothic" as in Gothic architecture, used
to refer to a style typical of the High Middle Ages,
have largely lost the negative connotations they
initially had, only to acquire others. Critics
derisively called the French Physiocrats of the French
Enlightenment "economists" because they concerned
themselves with materialistic issues.
The Gothic
and the Baroque were both named during subsequent
stylistic periods when the preceding style had become
unpopular. The word "Gothic" was applied as a pejorative
term to all things Northern European and, hence,
barbarian, by Italian writers during the 15th and 16th
centuries. The word baroque was used first in
late 18th century French to depict the irregular natural
pearl shape and later an architectural style perceived
to be boisterously irregular and larger than life, in
comparison with the highly restrained regularity of
Neoclassical architecture. Subsequently, these terms
have become purely descriptive, and have largely lost
negative connotations. However, the term "Baroque" as
applied to art (for example Peter Paul Rubens) refers to
a much earlier historical period than when applied to
music (George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach).
This reflects the difference between stylistic histories
internal to an art form and the external chronological
history beyond it.
Gothic construction, most
identifiable in popular culture by the flying buttress,
is the technological response to the medieval pious
aspiration toward light and height transformed into
ecclesiastical architecture. The boisterous Baroque was
the awe-inspiring instrument of the Counter-reformation,
sponsored by the Jesuits, defenders of the True Faith.
Baroque architecture was the propaganda vehicle of the
Jesuits in their counter-reformation campaign and the
dramatic stage of the Inquisition. It spread quickly to
all Roman Catholic countries. King Louis XIV of France
later coopted the propaganda effectiveness of the
Baroque and the stately legitimacy of Classicism to
enshrine the stature of absolute monarchy. Modern
architecture rose from the hopes of social democratic
ideals stemming from the collapse, in the aftermath of
World War I, of the European monarchies and their
attendant social and esthetic values as constituted in
the system of court-sponsored academies. While the
cultured public welcomed the new artistic philosophy,
official suppression of the Modern Movement by both Nazi
Germany and the post-Lenin Soviet Union forced its
migration to the United States, where it was coopted
into the service of corporate capitalism after being
sanitized of most of its social-democratic program, the
way modernity is now being abducted to serve the current
"war on terrorism".
The entire Renaissance was
supported by a political ideology that is of dubious
acceptability by contemporary standards. Despotism was a
boon to Italian Renaissance art and architecture. A case
can be made to condemn the Italian Renaissance as a
movement of courtly pretension and elitist taste
prescribed by theme, content and form to the
questionable needs of secular potentates and
ecclesiastical mania. The noblest social art, one can
argue, is that which the contribution of multitudes
create for themselves as a common gift of glory, such as
the Gothic cathedrals and the temples of ancient Greece.
By contrast, Vladimir Tatlin's monument for the Third
International was an attempt to unite artistic
expression with the new socialist ideal as the Eiffel
Tower did for industrialization. The Productivist Group
maintained in its polemic that material and intellectual
production were of the same order. Leftist artists
devoted their energy to making propaganda for the new
Soviet government by painting the surfaces of all means
of transport with revolutionary images to be viewed in
remote corners of the collapsing czarist empire.
Constructivism declared all-out war on bourgeois art.
Alas, the revolutionary movement met its demise not from
bourgeois resistance, but from internal doctrinal
inquisition. Much of Constructivist esthetic creativity
was subsequently coopted by bourgeois society. Modernity
is socialism, but the term has been abducted by
bourgeois capitalism since the end of the Cold War.
In many cases, those living through a period are
unable to identify themselves as belonging to the
"period" historians may later assign to them. This is
partly because they are unable to predict the future,
and so will not be able to tell whether they are at the
beginning, middle or end of a period. Another reason may
be that their own sense of historical development may be
determined by religions or ideologies that differ from
those used by later historians. We may well be living in
the dawning of the age of socialism, free from the false
starts of the past century, and ushered in finally by
the self-destructive excesses of capitalism run amok.
It is important to recognize the difference
between self-defined historical periods and those which
are later defined by historians. At the beginning of the
20th century there was a general belief that culture,
politics and history were entering a new era - that the
new century would also be a new "era" in human
development. This belief in progress had been largely
abandoned by the end of the century with the triumph of
militant reaction crowned by a proclamation of the end
of history. Yet just as the Catholic Counter-Reformation
failed to arrest the spread of the Reformation, the
capitalist reaction against the socialist revolutionary
movement since 1848 is faced with the option of
including socialist programs in the capitalist system or
the replacement of capitalism by socialism. Democracy is
not the exclusive tool of the bourgeoisie. Just as the
bourgeoisie used democracy and the rebellious power of
the working class to pressure the aristocracy, the
working class will use democracy to remove the
bourgeoisie from controlling the fate of the human race.
"The Enlightenment" is a periodization term that
applies to the mainstream of thought of 18th century
Europe. The scientific and intellectual developments of
the 17th century fostered the belief in natural laws and
universal order and the confidence in reason which
spread to influence 18th century society in Europe.
These development were typified by the discoveries of
Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the rationalism of Rene
Descartes (1596-1650) and Pierre Bayle (1647-1700), the
pantheism of Baruch Spinoza (1632-77) that equates god
with the forces and natural laws of the universe and the
empiricism of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and John Locke
(1632-1704). A rational and scientific approach to
religious, social, political and economic issues
promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense
of progress and perfectibility.
The proponents
of the Enlightenment were of one mind on certain basic
attitudes, and sought to discover and act on universally
valid principles governing humanity, nature and society.
They attacked spiritual and scientific authority,
dogmatism, intolerance, censorship and economic and
social constraints. They considered the state the proper
and rational instrument of progress. In England, Lockean
theories of learning by sense perception were carried
forward by David Hume (1711-16). The philosophical view
of rational man in harmony with the universe set the
climate for the "laissez-faire" economics of Adam Smith
(1723-90) and for the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832) of the greatest good for the greatest
number. Historical writing gained secular detachment in
the work of Edward Gibbon (1737-94). In Germany, the
universities became centers of the Enlightenment
(Aufklarung). Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86) set
forth a doctrine of rational process; Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing (1729-81), whom Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832) credited as having placed the young poet in
the true path, advanced a natural religion of morality;
J G Herder (1744-1803) developed a philosophy of
cultural nationalism. The supreme importance of the
individual formed the basis of the ethics of Immanuel
Kant (1724-1804). The movement received strong support
of the rising bourgeoisie and vigorous opposition from
the high clergy and the nobility.
The strongest
claim by the West on modernity is derived from ideas and
concepts generally grouped under the category of the
Enlightenment. These are ideas that were developed
during the half a century preceding the French
Revolution, between 1740 and 1789, known in history as
the Age of Enlightenment. It was at the time that the
idea of progress gained popular acceptance in the West.
It was a time when Europeans emerged from a long
twilight, from which the past was considered barbaric
and dark. This was the age of enlightened thinkers,
known as philosophes, and enlightened despots.
The idea of the Enlightenment was drawn from
earlier sources, carried over from the old philosophy of
natural law, which held that right depends on a
universal reason, not on local conditions or on the will
or perspective of any person or group. It carried over,
from the intellectual revolution of the previous
century, the ideas of Bacon and Locke, Descartes and
Newton, Bayle and Spinoza. It was antagonistic and
skeptical toward tradition, confident in the powers of
science and places faith firmly in the regularity of
nature. It most serious shortcoming was the assumption
that European values derived from European experience
were universal truth and that such truth gave license to
world dominance: the rest of the world, to escape
domination and exploitation, must adopt Western ways of
militarism and exploitation. The modernization of Japan
was a perfect example of this trend.
The
philosophes of the Enlightenment were mostly
popularizers, in an age when the great books were not
read by the public. They reworded the ideas of past
civilizations in ways that held the interest of the
growing reading public. These philosophes were
primarily men of letters, exemplified by Francois Marie
Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778), who made fortunes and
gained fame with his writings. They differed from
intellectuals of the past who were mostly proteges of
aristocratic or royal patrons or clerics in the Church.
The emergence of a literate middle class made
such freelancers possible. Naturally, as most writers
who enjoy popularity write what their audiences like to
hear, what economist John Galbraith calls "conventional
wisdom", the Enlightenment authors mostly wrote to
enhance the political and economic interests of the
bourgeoisie. Most of the works produced during this
period focused on the catalogue and organization of
information, made entertaining with wit and lightness.
This was the age of the salon literati, of clever
one-upmanship and satire, full of innuendos and sly
digs, particularly insider jokes understood only by the
enlightened few. Voltaire attacked European society by
making fun not of the French, but by stereotyping the
Persians, the Iroquois and the Chinese.
Frederick the Great of Prussia was regarded as
an eminent philosophe through his friendship with
Voltaire, whose style he emulated, as was Catherine the
Great of Russia (1762-96). While Maria Teresa of Austria
(1740-80) was not a philosophe on account of her
piety, her son Joseph, brother of the ill-fated
Marie-Antoinette of France (1755-93), worked hard to
become one, as a patron of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In
England, Bishop Warburton (1698-1779) tried to become
one by claiming that the Church of England as a social
institution was exactly what pure reason would have
invented. Edward Gibbon (1737-94), whose Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire summarized the millennium
following the birth of Christ as "the triumph of
barbarism and religion", much as the centuries after the
Renaissance are summarized today as the triumph of
capitalistic democracy over socialist revolutions as a
religious truth. Gibbon was counted as a
philosophe for his secular outlook.
Dr
Samuel Johnson (1709-84) was not considered a
philosophe. He was fascinated by the
supernatural, adhered to the established church,
deflated pretentious authors, even declared Voltaire and
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) "bad men" who should be
sent to the plantations in America.
The
Enlightenment was in essence French, a product of
sophisticated Parisian salons run by the likes of
Madame de Pompadour, mistress of Louis XV, lubricated by
the liberal flow of French champagne. Denis Diderot
(1713-84) was not only a card-carrying
philosophe, his Encyclopedie was described
as a "reasoned dictionary" written by a distinguished
list of other philosophes who went on to enjoy
the awesome rank of Encyclopedists. Another group of
philosophes was the Physiocrats, whom critics
derisively called "economists" who concerned themselves
with fiscal and monetary reform, with measures to
increase the national wealth of France. Among the
Physiocrats were Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), physician
to Louis XV (1715-74), and Dupont de Nemour (1739-1817),
whose descendants became the US industrial/chemical
Dupont family.
The three giants of the
philosophes were Montesquieu, Voltaire and
Rousseau. Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brede
et de Montesquieu (1533-92), a landed aristocrat, was a
defender of his class interest. Among his associates was
the Count of Boulainvilliers (1658-1722), who held that
French nobility was descended from a superior Germanic
race, a view that contributed to the emergence of racism
in the West.
In his The Spirit of Laws
(1748), Montesquieu developed two principal ideas. One
was that forms of government varied according to climate
and circumstances, for example that despotism was suited
more to large empires in hot climates and that democracy
only would work in small city-states. Thus democracy is
inconsistent with the idea of empire. The other idea was
the separation and balance of powers. In France, he
believed that power should be divided between the king
and a number of "intermediate bodies" - parliaments,
provincial estates, organized nobility, chartered towns,
and even the church. It was natural for Montesquieu, a
judge in parliament, a provincial and a landed nobleman,
and reasonable for him to recognize the position of the
bourgeoisie of the towns, but as for the Church he
observed that while he took no stock in its teachings,
he thought is useful as an offset to undue
centralization of government. Montesquieu admired the
unwritten English constitution as he understood it, not
for its democratic qualities but in believing that
England carried over, more successfully than any other
European country, the feudal liberties of the Middle
Ages. To Montesquieu, government should be a mixture of
monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, a term representing
the interests of the bourgeoisie, not the general
population and definitely not workers and peasants.
The ideas of Montesquieu were well known to the
drafters of the US constitution, who, because the United
States at that time had no history of social
institutions besides slavery, distorted the meaning of
democracy and the separation of powers as defined by
Montesquieu to create a political structure peculiarly
suited only to US conditions. Those who now claim that
the US version of democracy is a heritage of the
Enlightenment universally suited for all humankind have
been highly selective in their understanding of history.
Strictly speaking, the modern world arrived in
the 18th and 19th centuries with the transfer of power
from the aristocracy and the absolutist kings (Louis XIV
in France and James I in England) to the upper middle
classes - the elite bourgeoisie. The upper middle
classes were represented by constitutional assemblies,
legislatures, and parliaments, which took power away
from the kings and aristocrats by violent revolutions or
by reform legislation: England (1688, 1830s), the United
States (1776), France (1789, 1830, 1848, 1870), Canada
(1840s and 1850s), and Germany (1848, 1918). Japan
embarked on a deliberate program of "modernization" in
the late 19th century and early 20th century.
The shift of power was accompanied by the
Industrial Revolution and liberal, or free-enterprise,
economic theory (laissez faire), the economic
counterpart of the middle-class political revolutions.
Critiques of this modern, elitist middle-class,
democratic, and laissez-faire industrial system emerged
at various points in the 19th century, most notably in
Marxist and other socialist movements. Although these
movements of the working people were critical of the
upper-middle-class entrepreneurs who led the 18th
century and early 19th century "modern" revolutions,
Marxists and other socialists remained modern in most of
their assumptions. Thorough-going critique of the modern
world view and its rational-scientific outlook, its
rationally organized economic production system, and its
rationally centralized bureaucratic politics did not
emerge until the late 19th century and early 20th
century. Such critique came at first only from
philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900),
scientists such as Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Sigmund
Freud (1856-1939), and artists and writers. Only in the
late 20th century did such postmodern critique become
widespread. For most people in the 1980s, in Europe and
North America and increasingly around the world, modern
ways of life dominated, although intellectuals had been
attacking or reinterpreting modern views for some time.
One way to understand Western modernity is to
look at countervailing social, political and religious
manifestations. As anthropologists, sociologists and
historians have studied the "traditional village
societies" that survived in a few remote areas of Europe
and in non-Western cultures, they have learned much
about the nature of the modern Western world view. The
very name "traditional society" focuses on what is
perhaps the most important single aspect. "Modern" means
"now" - a world view focusing on the now, on the latest,
on the newest and the most dominant. A traditional
society takes "handed down" things (Latin
tradita) as its starting point and modifies them
slowly even as it tries to be faithful to the inherited
ideas and customs. A modern world view implicitly
assumes the superiority of the latest and newest as
liberating and expansive, and almost invariably scorns
the old-fashioned as constrictive and oppressive. The
confrontation of the non-Western world with the
ascending West that turned out to be aggressively
intrusive, and the rationalization of victimization as a
deserved fate of not being modern, has affected the
development of the non-Western world, particularly the
ancient cultures found in China, India and the Middle
East. It forced these cultures to reject age-old values
that had evolved from centuries of struggle toward
harmony to adopt the new barbarism of domination,
militarism and racism to survive.
The clearest
example is Japan, the thoroughly "modern" Asian power.
The Meiji era (1868-1912), a period historians identify
as the beginning of modern Japan, marks the reign of the
Meiji emperor during which Japan was "modernized" and
rose to world power status on a path that eventually
brought it the detonation of two atomic bombs. The Meiji
Restoration ended the more than 250-year-old feudalistic
Tokugawa shogunate. In 1868, 14-year-old Mutsuhito
succeeded his father, the Emperor Komei, taking the
title Meiji, meaning ironically "enlightened rule".
Considering that the economic structure and production
of the country was then roughly equivalent to
Elizabethan England, to have become a world power in
such a short amount of time is widely regarded as
remarkable progress. This process was closely guided and
heavily subsidized by the Meiji government, enhancing
the power of the great zaibatsu, firms such as
Mitsubishi. Hand in hand, the zaibatsu and
government developed the modern nation, borrowing
technology and cultural concepts from the West, copying
the British Empire of the Victorian age, much the same
way Japan did from Tang China in nation-building in the
7th century. Kyoto was a scaled-down replica of the Tang
capital, Changan. Japanese mercantilist policies
gradually took control of much of Asia's markets for
manufactures, beginning with textiles. The economic
structure became mercantilist, importing raw materials
and exporting finished products - a reflection of
Japan's relative poverty in raw materials, a condition
similar to those found in England.
Japan's
defeat of China in Korea in the Sino-Japanese War
(1894-95) established it not as an Asian power, but as a
Western power in Asia infatuated with Western racist
values, which generated much anti-Japanese sentiment
throughout Asia. Japan's breakthrough as an
international power came with its victory against
Europeanized Russia in Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904-05. Allied with Britain since 1902 against
Czarist Russian expansionism in Asia, Japan joined the
Allies in World War I, seizing German-held territory in
China and the Pacific in the process, but otherwise
remained largely out of the conflict. After the war, a
weakened Europe left a greater share in international
markets to the United States and Japan, both of which
emerged greatly strengthened, setting them on a path of
conflict that ended in Pearl Harbor. Japanese
competition made great inroads into hitherto
European-dominated markets in Asia, not only in China,
but also even in European colonies such as British India
and Dutch Indonesia.
Japan emerged from the
Tokugawa-Meiji transition as the first industrialized
nation in Asia. Domestic commercial activities and
limited foreign trade had met the demands for material
culture in the Tokugawa period, but the modernized Meiji
era had radically different requirements. From the
onset, the Meiji rulers embraced the concept of a market
economy and adopted British and American forms of
free-enterprise capitalism. The private sector - in a
nation blessed with an abundance of aggressive
entrepreneurs - welcomed such change. Trade in the
Confucian culture that formed Japan ranked below
prostitution in social esteem. Luckily for the merchant
class, trade was rescued from traditional social scorn
through its role in national survival. Similar evolution
is currently taking place in China, with results that
are controversial at best.
Economic reforms
included a unified modern currency based on the yen,
banking, commercial and tax laws, stock exchanges, and a
communications network. Establishment of a modern
institutional framework conducive to an advanced
capitalist economy took time but was put in place by the
1890s. By this time, the government had largely
relinquished direct control of the modernization
process, primarily for budgetary reasons. Many of the
former daimyo, whose pensions had been paid in a
lump sum, benefited greatly through investments they
made in emerging industries. Those who had been
informally involved in foreign trade before the Meiji
Restoration also flourished. Old bakufu-serving
firms that clung to their traditional ways failed in the
new business environment.
The establishment of
the bakufu by Minamoto Yoritomo was the single
most transforming event of early Japan. The
bakufu, or "tent government" (because soldiers
lived in tents), was more or less a military government.
It primarily functioned as a separate government
concerned principally with military and police matters.
The emperor's government in Kyoto continued to function
as before: the court still appointed civil governors,
collected taxes, and exercised complete control in the
area surrounding the capital.
The real power of
the state, however, became more concentrated in the
hands of the Kamakura shogun. The word shogun is
a Chinese term for "general". Minamoto Yoritomo demanded
the title Sei i tai shogun, "barbarian-conquering
great general", when he defeated the Taira. The shogun,
and the military government beneath him, really did not
control much of Japan. For all practical purposes, the
provinces of Japan were independent even though local
lords (daimyo) who swore allegiance to the
shogun.
The shogunate, however, did not remain
in Minamoto clan hands for very long. When Yoritomo died
in 1199, his widow, from the clan of the Hojo, usurped
power from the Minamoto clan. She was a Buddhist nun, so
she became known as the "Nun Shogun". She displaced the
son who had inherited from his father and installed
another son, who was soon assassinated. From that point
onward, the Hojo clan ruled the bakufu while the
Minamoto clan nominally occupied the position of shogun.
The relationship between the bakufu and the
imperial government had never been very friendly; in
1221, the imperial court led an uprising against the
bakufu, but failed. By this point, however, the
ideology of loyalty had become fully ingrained in the
bakufu structure; the imperial court had little success
persuading people to break that loyalty.
The
defining moment for the Kamakura bakufu was the
unsuccessful invasion of Japan by the Mongol Chinese. In
1258, Kublai Khan conquered the Korean Peninsula and in
1266, he declared himself emperor of China and
established the Yuan Dynasty. In 1266, representatives
of the Yuan court came to Japan and demanded submission
to Chinese rule. The imperial court was terrified, but
the Hojo clan decided to stand its ground and sent the
representatives home. In 1274, the Yuan emperor sent a
vast fleet to invade Japan but it was destroyed by a
hurricane - the Japanese called this fortunate hurricane
kamikaze, or "wind from the gods". Again in 1281,
China launched the largest amphibious assault in the
history of the ancient and medieval worlds. The Chinese
army was a terrifying invasion force. But the Hojo clan
managed to keep the Chinese from landing by building a
vast seawall against the invaders. Another hurricane
again sank the Chinese fleet.
The bakufu
might have saved Japan from Chinese invasion, but they
could not survive the modernization program of the Meiji
Restoration. The Meiji government was initially involved
in economic modernization, providing a number of "model
factories" to facilitate the transition to the modern
period. After the first two decades of the Meiji period,
the industrial economy expanded rapidly until about 1920
with inputs of advanced Western technology and large
private investments. Stimulated by wars and through
cautious economic planning, Japan emerged from World War
I as a major industrial nation. Its mercantilist path
led it to the quest of empire in the British fashion.
After World War II, General Douglas MacArthur turned
Japan into an export dynamo in the service of the United
States in the context of the Cold War. This role became
obsolete after the end of the Cold War. The current
economic crisis in Japan is rooted in issues much deeper
than Western economists have identified.
Europeans outside of Italy were much less
conscious of any sudden break with the Middle Ages.
Medieval intellectual interests persisted in the
continuing founding of universities, which the Italian
humanists regarded as pedantic centers of scholastic
learning. Between 1386 and 1506, no fewer than 14
universities were founded in Germany, while no new
university was founded in Italy in the 15th century. At
one of the new German universities, at Wittenburg,
founded in 1502, Marin Luther (1484-1546) launched the
Reformation against the Renaissance Church. The
Scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) laid
the foundation of European thought by calling for
exactness and disciplined thinking, and above all made
Christendom safe for reason with his doctrine that faith
could not be endangered by reason. In contrast, at about
the same time, Islamic authorities ruled that valid
interpretation of the Koran had ended with the Four
Great Doctors of early Islam. "The gate was closed" was
an Islamic saying, and with it centuries of brilliant
Arabic thought withered away gradually. It is the
greatest irony in intellectual history, since it had
been Arabic learning on ancient Greek culture that
helped Christian scholars rediscover Aristotelian
syllogism.
The Holy Roman Empire was proclaimed
in AD 962, five decades after the German magnates
elected a king in 911, who also assumed the title of
Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Empire was in theory
coterminous with Latin Christendom, and endowed with a
special mission of defending and extending the true
faith. The Holy Roman Emperor was never able to
consolidate his political domain as did the kings of
France and England, because the magnates of Germany
allied themselves with the papacy in Rome to preserve
their feudal liberties from the emperor.
In the
mid-15th century, a group of kings in Europe, known in
history as the New Monarchs, succeeded in laying the
foundation for nation-states. The new monarchs offered
the institution of monarchy as a guarantee of law and
order, against aristocratic abuse of the bourgeoisie and
the peasants who were willing to pay taxes to the king
in return for peace and protection, and to let the king
dominate parliament which had proved to be a stronghold
of the aristocracy. The new monarchies broke down the
mass of inherited feudal "common law" through which the
rights of the feudal classes were entrenched, by
reinstituting Roman law, which was actively studied in
the new universities. These new monarchs proclaimed
themselves as sovereigns and required their subjects to
address them as "Your Majesty." According to lex
regia in Roman law, the sovereign incorporates the
will and the welfare of the people in his person, and
upholds the principle of salus populi suprema lex
(the welfare of the people is the highest law). The
sovereign can make law, enact it by his own authority
regardless of past customs or historical liberties by
the principle of quo principi placuit legis habet
vigorem (what pleases the prince has the force of
law).
The New Monarchy came to England with the
dynasty of the Tudors, whose first king, Henry VII
(1485-1509), put an end to the War of the Roses, which
had greatly decimated the English baronial families. In
France, the New Monarchy was represented by Louis XI
(1461-83) and his successors. Louis XI maintained a
regular royal army, no longer dependent on aristocratic
support for maintaining peace and waging war. The French
king acquired much greater authority to raise taxes
without parliament consent than the English Tudors. The
Estate General met only once in the reign of Louis XI,
and on that occasion requested the king to govern
without them in the future. Over the First Estate, the
Church, the French kings asserted extensive powers.
The Pragmatic Sanction of 1438 gave the Gallic
Church much independence from Rome. In 1516, King
Francis I reached an agreement with Pope Leo X, the
Concordat of Bologna, rescinding the Pragmatic Sanction,
by dividing the independence with Rome receiving the
"innates" or money income from French ecclesiastics, the
king appointed the bishops and abbots. The fact that the
French monarchy controlled the Gallic church was the
main reason why France never turned Protestant.
The New Monarchy came to Spain through
facilities offered by the Church, since the kingdom of
Spain did not exist before that. The Spanish were the
most tolerant of all Europeans, with Christians, Muslims
and Jews living in harmony. As the New Monarchy in Spain
followed a religious bent, achieving unification through
the Church, national feelings fused with Catholicity.
With the Christian conquest of Granada, Moors and Jews
were expelled. The Inquisition hunted down Moriscos
(Christians with Moorish background) and Maranos
(Christians of Jewish background). A decree in 1492
expelling Jews followed their expulsion from England in
1290 and from France in 1306. Jews were not allowed to
return to England until the mid-17th century and to
France until after the French Revolution. The Sephardic
Jews from Spain went mostly to the Near and Middle East.
The Jews who left England and France went mostly to
Germany, the great center of Ashkenazic Jewry of the
Middle Ages. Driven from Germany in the 14th century,
they concentrated in Poland until the Holocaust of the
1940s.
Ideas of the New Monarchy were also at
work in the Holy Roman Empire in Germany, with the
difference that the estates in the other new monarchies
took the form of princely states, duchies, margraviats,
bishoprics and abbacies in Germany. The emperor became
an elective office by seven Electors. In 1356, the
Archduke of Austria, a Hapsburg, was elected emperor.
The Hapsburgs remained the principal power in Europe,
until after the Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1648.
Protestantism, as espoused by Martin Luther
(1483-1546), was revolutionary because its doctrines
held not merely that abuses in the Church must be
reformed but that the Roman Church itself, even if
perfect by its own ideals, was wrong in principle.
Protestants aimed not to restore the medieval Church
from Renaissance abuses, but to overthrow it and replace
it with a church founded on principles drawn from the
Bible. Such principles should not be decreed by the
Church but by the individual believer's conscience.
This attitude against central authority was
music to the German princes, who responded positively to
Luther's invitation to the state to assume control of
religion. Protestantism became entwined with social and
political revolution. Charles V, as Holy Roman Emperor,
was obliged to defend the faith because only within a
Catholic world did the Holy Roman Empire have any
meaning. The princely states within the empire saw the
emperor's effort to suppress Luther as a threat to their
own freedom. The imperial free states and the dynastic
states of northern Germany insisted on ius
reformandi, the right to determine their own
religion. They became Lutheran and secularized (ie,
confiscated) church properties to enrich the secular
sovereigns.
Thus Luther, in placing theological
protest under the protection of secular power politics,
exploited the political aspirations of budding German
principalities in the 16th century. In return, he
conveniently provided the German princes with a
theological basis for political secession from the
theocratic Holy Roman Empire.
Luther exploited
the political aspirations of German princes to be
independent of the Holy Roman Emperor to bolster his
theological revolt from the Roman Catholic Church. But
he came to denounce peasant rebellions when the peasants
rebelled against the Protestant German princes. He did
so even though such peasant uprisings against the German
princes claimed inspiration from the same theological
ideas of the Reformation that had motivated the revolt
against the Holy Roman Emperor by the same German
princes for independence. Such radical ideas had been
advocated by Luther. However, even Luther's professed
personal sympathy for peasant demands for improved
treatment from their oppressive princes did not persuade
him to endorse peasant uprisings.
In fact,
Luther could be considered a Stalinist. Or more
accurately, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (1879-1953)
would in fact fit the definition of a Lutheran diehard,
at least in revolutionary strategy if not in ideological
essence. Like Luther, Stalin suppressed populist
radicalism to preserve institutional revolution, and
glorified the state as the sole legitimate expeditor of
revolutionary ideology.
Early Protestantism,
like Stalinism, became more oppressive and intolerant
than the system it replaced. Ironically, puritanical
Protestant ethics celebrating the virtues of thrift,
industry, sobriety and responsibility, were identified
by many sociologists as the driving force centuries
later behind the success of modern capitalism and
industrialized economy. Particularly, ethics as espoused
by Calvinism, which in its extreme advocated
subordination of the state to the church, diverging from
Luther's view of the state to which the church is
subordinate, was ironically credited as the spirit
behind the emergence of the modern Western industrial
state. In that sense, the post-Cold War Islamic
theocratic states are Calvinist in principle.
Next: Imperialism as modernity
Henry C K Liu is chairman of
the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved.
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