20th century AD

ORBIS, Fall, 1997 by David R. Gress

Ask scholars and intellectuals, and they will tell you that Americans and citizens of other countries normally thought of as part of the West live an era of posts: post - cold war, postmodern, postindustrial, post-Christian, post-ideological, postmaterialist, post-Eurocentric. Almost no one among the academic elite of the North Atlantic nations is prepared to define these last years of the second millennium as being pre-anything. It is as though everything has already happened; all the political, ideological, religious, strategic, and emotional options of human life have been discovered and tried; hence the denizens of the post-era can look forward only to endless rounds of trying on one familiar suit of clothes after the other: rationalist, romantic, revolutionary, reactionary, multiculturalist, American, pagan, Christian, liberal, conservative.

Ask economists who instruct developing and former communist nations how to achieve capitalist growth, however, and they will tell you that far from being over, the best of the modern era, whose hallmarks are progress and universality, is yet to be. In their optimistic vision, which duffers so radically from the post mentality of our universities, talk shows, and magazines, the Western inventions of capitalism, science, and liberal democracy have not only been astonishingly successful in their culture of origin, but are on the verge of embracing the vast majority of the world's people, not least the most numerous and by many measures most competent of all, the Chinese. The twenty-first century, the optimists say, may be the first truly democratic and capitalist century thanks to the long-overdue return of China to the center of the global stage. As the great bulk of humanity enters irrevocably on the path of democratic and capitalist development, the prospects for peace, prosperity, and stability will become better than ever before. Postmodernism? Hah! Not only is the modern age not over, it has not even properly begun.

Both mentalities are right on their own terms - they are simply not looking at the same reality. In America the late 1990s are undeniably a post-Western age, yet it is also true that the Western-born ideas of democracy and capitalism seem headed for a glorious future. Does this mean that even as America de-Westernizes her culture, pedagogy, society, and religion, China and East Asia are rapidly Westernizing? Is it true, as the optimists claim, that the West is becoming a universal civilization and/or will reincarnate itself in the East? The answer is no, because science, democracy, and capitalism - the three pillars of modernity - may have arisen in the West (to be precise, in England and Holland) but are not in themselves bearers of substantive culture. The very point of modernity is that it is universally applicable, hence does not belong to any particular culture. In the words of the French historical sociologist Jean Baechler, modernity is the arithmetic of reality, not a style of thought about reality.(1) That modernity had a particular origin in a particular culture is something that has to be explained in terms of that culture, but the virtue of modernity is that, once invented, it is universal and does not require that other civilizations adopt the European form of culture that happened to serve as modernity's cradle. The history of Chinese capitalism may ultimately show that some cultures are better than the West at modernizing, even though they did not themselves invent modernity.

The optimists confuse two different things when they point to American technological and strategic hegemony and to the spread of democracy and capitalism and conclude that Western civilization is becoming universal. The right conclusion is more likely to be the opposite, for three reasons.

First, modernity dissolves all existing civilizations and creates, in Baechler's words, a matrix for future civilizations that do not yet exist. A fully modern world may have as many, or more, civilizations as did the premodern world because a civilization is not just a matter of democracy, science, and capitalism, but of ritual, manners, literature, pedagogy, family structure, and a particular way of coming to terms with what Christians call the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Modernity will not change or remove the basic human condition, to which each culture provides its own distinct answers. To repeat, modernity transforms all existing civilizations, including that of the West. It is not Westernization, but a universal change in the fundamental conditions of any and all civilizations.

Secondly, American strategic and technological hegemony is a function of mere instruments, procedures, and methods, not of a culture or civilization. Technology and strategy may be powerful, pervasive, and universal, but by the same token they convey no fixed civilizational pattern, Western or otherwise. Likewise, democracy and capitalism, as elements of modernity, do not equate to Westernization, because there is nothing necessarily Western about them, even though the West invented them.