Abstract
Beyond Civilization is a rare sort. It attempts to take in the grand sweep of the history and culture of western society and modernity, which is an always ambitious and potentially hubristic task. It works in the field of civilizational theory, which was, until more recent times, a fairly neglected sphere of intellectual endeavour. The reasons for this neglect would seem to be both professional and scholarly: on the one hand, the comparative study of civilizations within the proliferation of specializations is too massive a task for the solitary mind, especially with the constant demand from above for regular output; on the other, the concept of ‘civilization’ itself fell out of vogue for its monolithic claim to contain what might be otherwise envisioned as uncontainable – the movement of cultures around the planet, across borders, through states, effecting transition and transformation, seems so pervasive as to render the hitherto static world of nations into a globalized one of flows. Rather than seeing the influence of grand civilizations, we presumably ought to see multiplicities of hybrid cultures. At best, this interpretation might run, the notion of civilization is a curiosity of intellectual history that can no longer apply to our situation, and at worst, it is a normative construct that creates in the minds of those who live inside the container an oppositional attitude, viz. the famous ‘clash of civilizations’.
The difficulty of the use of this concept begins with its definition: what is civilization, where are its limits, what is essential and inessential to it, and so on. Redner’s book is very clear about what civilization is, and part of his argument with other civilizational theorists is over its definition. Indeed, the main thrust of the work is to demonstrate how the concerns just outlined affect the trajectory of western civilization itself. Redner is unequivocal: western civilization proper was born in the Axial Age; the Axial Age represents the emergence of ‘high’ literacy (literacy that is generalized to the majority of the population, and contained in the knowledge of great literary works). With literacy comes ethical codes: ‘Ethics and high literacy have been conjoined like Siamese twins since the Axial Age; a weakening of one leads inexorably to a debilitation of the other’ (p. 51). This conjoining underpins the entire historical and cultural argument of the book.
Civilization, then, in Redner’s view, is a particular historical (non-teleological) stage of human development, which for us westerners happened to occur in a certain place and time. It has characteristics that, until relatively recently, we largely took for granted, and that are slowly being undone by what he refers to as the Forces of Modernity (this, and other terms, are capitalized by the author). But while the civilizational turn occurred in the Axial Age of the great religions, it is not synonymous with religion (as it is for Huntington). Neither are the forces of modernity to be confused with civilization, whether as a new one or an embellished one (Eisenstadt, and to a lesser extent Arnason). Redner views the history of civilizations from within our current transitional phase towards a future post-civilizational state. By observing the tendencies of post-civilizational forces, we can begin to study this transition to somewhere beyond civilization. So the short answer to those sorts of criticisms above is that we must study civilization, because it is only with that concept that we can comprehend the profundity of the changes that envelope us at this moment of history.
Beyond Civilization traverses many of the contemporary debates on modernities, the transformation of society in globalization, increasing individualization and its effect on culture, technification and commodification of life and time, and the decline of cultural literacy. Much of this springs from the soil of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Ideas such as rationalization, the ‘Culture Industry’, atomization and cultural levelling, pseudo-individualization, are all essential to Redner’s analysis of the modern lifeworld. Another apparent, but not stated, progenitor is Thorstein Veblen and his critique of the American middle class, captured in the idea of ‘conspicuous consumption’: rather than affluence freeing people to indulge in substantial life activity and authentic relations, it promotes the opposite – vain competitivity over the superficial, social ranking based on quantitative measures like money, and inauthentic relationships based on self-serving opportunism and desire.
The difference between Veblen and contemporary critical theorists like Giddens and Redner is that Veblen was talking about the late 19th century, not the late 20th. This same period is held up in Beyond Civilization as a high point of culture, association, and solidarity. Where Veblen only saw shallow decadence, Redner recounts the peak of workers associations, popular involvement in music, bourgeois excellence in art and politics, and the rise of the intellectual. The catalysts of modernity – the impersonal logics of rationalization – had well begun in this period, but had not yet fully taken hold of the administration of society, and therefore done less damage to culture and personality. Or to put it the opposite way: the reservoir of culture was still near full, and so the violent transformations brought about by capitalism (described by Polanyi) could be commuted into new social forms, like the trade union, and bourgeois sponsorship of fine arts.
The Events of the Twentieth Century hastened the depletion of that reservoir. The world wars, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, all contributed to the acceleration of disintegration, by allowing the Forces of Modernity to colonize and occupy increasing amounts of the lifeworld. This rapid shift into globalization was hastened by the catastrophic implosions of old Europe, but Redner holds that the globalized outcome would have occurred regardless, albeit slower. Western civilization is, as a result, endangered: the formal, empty, abstract powers of capital and bureaucracy catalyse the substantial and complex core of western culture and reduce it to simpler forms. George Ritzer’s formulation of this problem as ‘McDonaldization’ is a pithy moniker for how the global market reduces, homogenizes, and simplifies patterns and styles of production and consumption. Redner picks up on Ritzer’s work, but not without noting and avoiding his value judgements.
Capitalism further erodes values by inserting the structural demand of profiteering into all cultural activities. This occurs because of the use of technologies that require financing. Redner asks not ‘who owns or controls culture’ in the manner of a Marxist, but ‘what kind of culture arises out of this mode of production?’ (p. 241). Schumpeter’s principle of creative destruction in the operation of capitalist development rules over even the value sphere of culture: ‘The logic of creative destruction is the inverse of value conservation of traditional cultures, the culture of civilization’ (p. 242). This principle ensures the ephemerality of pop culture and its products, which drift past and are forgotten as quickly as is needed. Global culture demands plasticity, plasticity erodes individuality. As individuals embrace or are forced into consumption as a lifestyle, and are obliged to constantly reform themselves to suit the needs of a ‘flexible’ workforce, plasticity of self becomes a quality worth fostering. ‘Authentic’ individuality, modelled on the Romantic notion of Bildung, is replaced by a ‘sham’ individualism that remains shallow because of its need to continuously transform itself to adhere to external standards that are forever changing: ‘Any predisposition to cultural self-development or Bildung characteristic of the older individualism is now mocked as old-fogey presumption or condemned as elitism. Instead, surrounding oneself with brand-name goods that are the most expensive of their type is the accepted way to signal that one has made it’ (p. 289).
The question of elitism in culture and the problem of levelling in the democratic demand for equality in all things leads Redner to assert the importance of protecting culture from equality. While he does not advocate for schemes of superiority of ‘cultural endowment’, he does acknowledge the inevitability and necessity of their existence. Involvement of the state to reduce this inequality will only be a destructive force.
What kind of society, then, is western civilization becoming? Some prominent sociological attempts at an answer are Daniel Bell’s post-industrial society and Manuel Castells’ information society. Redner rejects both options. The notion of a post-industrial moment of history, analogous to the great shift from agricultural to industrial observed by Marx, elides the facts of industrial life that persist. What seems to be a cultural change towards an ‘international division of labour’, an exportation of low-value forms of labour such as factory work, does not signal an essential transformation in the direction or intention of western society. Redner reminds us that modern states in the West still contain industrial elements that make up a large part of their productive capacity, and can be large employers. Castells’ concept of the information-driven society is less distinct than Bell’s historical formulation. The definition of ‘information’ is spread so wide and thin that it ends up being nebulous and all-encompassing (although the levelling of the complex interface between being and mind to ‘information’ is perhaps what determines an ‘information age’).
The final effect of the scuttling of literary tradition, and therefore our ethical tradition, by the Forces of Modernity, in combination with globalization and pseudo-individualization, is the Untergang of western civilization, and the inauguration of a ‘post-civilizational’ state. Post-civilization means that the substantial core of culture is now gone, and the protean, superficial culture of globalization has won. This moment is still only a possible future, but huge efforts must be made in the present to shore up what remains of the western traditions and knowledge. Cultures need conservation, and that is the future task for western society that the book recommends.
As the reader reaches deeper into the book, it becomes increasingly clear that the decline of substantive culture under the regime of the formal Forces of Modernity is due to the sapping of the inner motivations of individual people. In earlier times, for instance in the 19th century – the golden age of the bourgeoisie – people of different strata were spiritually motivated to be involved in the maintenance of the world around them. Bourgeois families practised arts and literature, proletarians formed associations and communities, all valued the foundation of the family itself, and thus there was some soil in which true substantive individuals could grow. Now with the historical ‘catalysts’ of market competition, the rule of numbers, technification, rationalization, and all the other colonizing logics that emanate from the techno-scientific capitalist way of doing things, individuals are becoming more atomized and disconnected. Here is the paradox: in this age of maximized freedom, true individualism is disappearing. Rather than a growth of cultural goods in exceptional individuals, Redner sees a withering away of the western cultural annuity by the false, sham individualism promoted by the capitalist global marketplace. How can this be? For Redner, at fault is the lack of protection and support of the heritage and substantive content of specific western traditions from the formless powers of modernity. With the structures and institutions that have in the past performed this role slowing sliding towards the demands of the technical, and therefore away from the cultural, the personal benefits that may have been gained by those who invest themselves in a humanist education or tradition begin to disappear. As fewer people choose such things, the demand for them drops, and thus they are at risk of being lost altogether.
However, the problem cannot simply be structural and administered. Surely what made the past successes in arts and association possible was the cultivation of something like ‘virtue’. What Redner is analysing could be described as the decline of the social value of virtue – the virtue that leads self-conscious beings to freely desire things that require materially unrewarded labour. Youths are not encouraged to relive the cultural past in the present, and thus keep traditions alive, and are not applauded when they do. We have now in the First World more freedom and time to pursue our individual curiosity to wherever it takes us. Yet that task is undertaken more rarely than ever, and with less discipline, diligence, and less satisfactory outcomes. The answer for this disappearance of the virtue of self-cultivation might lie in the modern industrial phenomenon of specialization: when worktime becomes labour, non-worktime becomes leisure. The notion of a proletarian who does his labour time and returns home to read Schiller and practise the viola was once popular but has generally not eventuated in fact. Leisure time is the other half of capitalist temporality, when the ‘culture industry’ steps in to provide us with the diversions and entertainment that ‘we want’.
Nevertheless, despite all this degeneration of substantive civilization, we cannot ignore the spontaneous growth of ‘illiterate’ subcultures. While the losing battle between traditional humanism and rationalization rages in the fields of economics and politics, new musical forms, art movements and media, social projects, and associations all appear in the streets and alleyways of cities. These new forms are responsive to the transformations occurring in society, and reveal the eternal need for something like an ‘authentic’ individual expression. Redner despises these organic aesthetic movements – for instance the ‘rant of rap’, graffiti – because they are unintellectual and untrained. His aesthetic theory has no room for naïve expression as it privileges the slow evolution of art forms towards intellectual complexity. ‘Serious’ works begin with a full knowledge of the history of the form. Starting again in a state of innocence, like many did in the dawn of electronic instruments, cannot be accepted as proper culture but rather as an aberration. The birth, growth, maturation, and ultimately the absorption into mainstream culture of these new forms signifies, in their ideal type, a different sort of temporality than the grand movement of civilization itself. Viewed from the perspective of the latter, they are merely symptoms of degeneration, and even a new barbarism – which Spengler declared to be the natural successor to a fallen civilization, the detached and nomadic fellaheen. But as ‘counter-culture’, or as the romantic notion of ‘authentic expression’, they offer a fleeting and vulnerable existential alternative to life under the Forces of Modernity.
The book’s weaknesses also come out in the discussions of family and children. The force of the atomization argument propels the judgement of contemporary families into unresearched generalizations that further rely on the generalizations of other civilization and modernity theorists, like Giddens and Albrow. Atomization of people by capitalist relations and life in the urban metropolis and the narcissism of the individualist psyche cause the unavoidable breakdown of the family. ‘People’ will choose their own desire for love and sex before the now antiquated marital duties relating to child-rearing. Without the proper loving environment, mental degeneration in culture is inevitable. Single mothers and narcissistic parents will not be able to provide essential care and guidance to their children, and thus these children will be ill-equipped for a wholesome life of authentic relationships and higher learning. Can this be true? Is the presence of conventional parental figures and attitudes the sole limiting and necessary condition for successful passage of culture from adult to child? It certainly seems ‘imaginable’ that the atomization of adults cannot be a positive influence for the mental life of children, if we expect those children to grow up with more than an individualist’s attitude. But despite seeing their Baby Boomer parents divorce in droves, and despite being the ‘me, me, me’ generation of hyper-individualization, Gen Y are pairing up, making the traditional life-long pledge, and starting families like those before them. ‘People’ are still interested in love, in friendship, and community, and if anything the problem of parenting has become one of over-parenting, or at least a stressful rationalization of parental duty and guilt. Children and teenagers are not passive sponges that soak up their environment and react predictably: they are equally capable of observation and decision-making, of accepting and rejecting the things that life presents.
At the same time, the traditional criticism of modern urbanization, atomization, technification and disintegration does still hold its compelling grasp on the imagination. While denying the capacity for existential dissent to the people it prejudges, this sort of criticism still goes a long way in understanding general societal changes and trends. Where it falls short, which has been noted since the first studies in subculture, is in the everyday creative and reactive behaviour of actual existing individuals. These sorts of behaviours describe the human experience of dealing with globalization in culture, flexibilization in the workplace, transformation of the neighbourhood, and so on.
The world to which we are currently in transition is a perverted and empty dystopia that accentuates the worst tendencies of the present and presumes a crippling passivity on the part of the vast majority of people. Which is not to say that it is false. Its Weltbild brings to mind that fascinating, hilarious, frighteningly visionary and ultimately depressing sci-fi film Idiocracy, where, in a recognizable future, stupidity and vulgarity reign triumphant. Coddled by centuries of the commercial simplification of life, the atomization of individuality necessary to that commercialization, and the desublimation of desires to their most base, all humans have become morons who are easily angered or aroused, and are completely incapable of independent thought – acting impulsively is valorized, the sound of spoken intelligence is instantly mocked as ‘fag-talk’, pornography is prime-time television, a ‘latte’ is a blow-job delivered in a street-side booth, CostCo dominates the world, monster trucks are used in public executions, and people are oblivious to the crumbling and collapsing state of everything around them. While Beyond Civilization does not make such specific prognostications, the future portrayed in Idiocracy serves as a vivid interpretation of what lies around the corner, should we not arrest the worst tendencies of the Forces of Modernity. In Redner’s words: …the biggest threat to [substantial] individualism will not come from religion but from the ever growing infantilization of people. The childishness and immaturity that Benjamin Barber has identified as characteristic of people growing up in a consumer society amidst global culture will be even more pronounced in coming generations. It will be very difficult for anyone to escape this influence, since there will be hardly any alternative to turn to. (p. 342) Society is tending towards disintegration, culture is moving towards stupefaction, and individualism is being eliminated by atomization, to put it at its most succinct. (p. 344)
One may challenge this argument on the grounds outlined above: that human beings have some sort of inner dynamism that will always produce new cultural forms and resurrect those of the past, whatever the limiting circumstances that they find themselves within. This view does not so much disagree with Redner’s critical stance as it presents a different picture, and also brings with it its own problems, which, at bottom, reduce to a value judgement: are the ‘naïve’ cultural forms that emerge from the de-industrializing West on par with ‘high culture’, or are they ‘low’ and uncultured? Can they play a similar role in the formation of ethics, or do they only yield the barbarism of Spengler’s fellah-type? This leads to a second criticism worth considering: is the deepest and most profound level of human morality really becoming bankrupt? Or are the pseudo-individualists and the narcissists not rather living in a state of bad faith that depends vitally on transitory worldly success? These questions show the stimulating engagement one can have with Beyond Civilization.