THE DARK SIDE OF MODERNITY

THE DARK SIDE OF MODERNITY

For Steven Seidman

THE DARK SIDE OF MODERNITY JEFFREY C. ALEXANDER polity

Copyright Jeffrey C. Alexander 2013 The right of Jeffrey C. Alexander to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2013 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4821-7 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4822-4(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 Social Theory between Progress and Apocalypse 5 2 Autonomy and Domination: Weber s Cage 29 3 Barbarism and Modernity: Eisenstadt s Regret 54 4 Integration and Justice: Parsons Utopia 62 5 Despising Others: Simmel s Stranger 78 6 Meaning Evil 99 7 De-civilizing the Civil Sphere 123 8 Psychotherapy as Central Institution 140 9 The Frictions of Modernity and their Possible Repair 147 Notes 158 Bibliography 170 Index 182 v

Suddenly holy Janus in marvelous two-headed form Thrust his binary face before my eyes. I panicked and felt my hair spike with fear, My heart iced over with a sudden chill. Ovid, Fasti

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I first studied social theory at Harvard as an undergraduate during the late 1960s, a time of social and cultural upheaval over modernity. Attending H. Stuart Hughes lectures on twentieth-century intellectual history, I was taken by his exploration of the irrational in Consciousness and Society. When I started writing social theory, the challenge of the irrational and the non-rational continued to haunt me, particularly in the context of the extraordinary difficulties faced by modern, putatively rational societies. The essays assembled here, written over the last 25 years, can be seen as a series of reports on this rumination, which has continued until today. In my struggle to comprehend modernity, Steven Seidman has been a particularly important interlocutor. His critical yet empathic voice has never been distant from the thinking I present in this book, which I dedicate to him. Each of these essays has been revised, sometimes significantly, and I am grateful, as always, for Nadine Amalfi s editorial assistance in preparing the present versions for publication. The chapters that follow have been revised in small or large part for publication here. I thank the following publishers for permission to reprint. Verso Press for Between Progress and Apocalypse: Social Theory and the Dream of Reason in the Twentieth Century. In J. C. Alexander (1995), Fin de Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason. (Chapter One). vii

preface and acknowledgments Allen and Unwin for The Dialectic of Individuation and Domination: Weber s Rationalization Theory and Beyond. In S. Whimster and S. Lash (eds.) (1987), Max Weber and Rationality. (Chapter Two). Brill for The Dark Side of Modernity: Tension Relief, Splitting, and Grace. In E. Ben-Rafael and Y. Sternberg (eds.) (2005), Comparing Modernities: Pluralism Versus Homogenity. Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt. (Chapter Three). Russell Sage Foundation for Contradictions in the Societal Community: The Promise and Disappointments of Parsons Concept. In R. Fox, V. Lidz, and H. Bershady (eds.) (2005), After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century. (Chapter Four). Sage Publications for Rethinking Strangeness. Thesis Eleven 79, November 2004: 87 104. (Chapter Five). University of California Press for Towards a Sociology of Evil: Getting beyond Modernist Common Sense about the Alternative to the Good. In M.P. Lara (ed.) (2001), Rethinking Evil: Contemporary Perspectives. (Chapter Six). Lawrence & Wishart Publishers for Contradictions: The Uncivilizing Pressures of Space, Time, and Function. Soundings 16, 2000: 96 112. (Chapter Seven). Sage Publications for Social Subjectivity: Therapy as Central Institution. Thesis Eleven, 96, 2009: 128 34. (Chapter Eight). Fudan University Press for Dangerous Frictions: Conditions of Modernity and Its Possible Repair. The Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 4 (4) (2011): 1 11. (Chapter Nine). Page vi, from Fasti by Ovid, translated and edited with an introduction, notes and glossary by A. J. Boyle and R. D. Woodward (Penguin Classics, 2000). Copyright A. J. Boyle and R. D. Woodward, 2000. viii

INTRODUCTION To say that modernity has been a disappointment would be understating horrors that continue to endanger the very existence of humankind. Yet to say modernity has been only a nightmare would be telling a one-sided story. Modernity has also been liberating, providing ideals, movements, and institutions that can repair, not only some of its self-inflicted injuries, but cultural and structural disorders that have plagued social life from its beginning. In Western societies, the once rosy hopes for modernity have faded. The twentieth century produced a series of catastrophes that had been adumbrated in the centuries before. Voltaire, the intellectual hero of the Enlightenment, was deeply anti-semitic. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was a slave-holder. Kant, the Enlightenment s most important philosopher, was racist and orientalist. As modernity emerged, so did colonial expansion; as modernity intensified, colonial domination deepened in the name of Enlightenment and civilization. From Napoleon onward, modern nations waged wars for progress with heinous weapons forged by technological reason. In the middle of the twentieth century, Germany, a nation of scientific achievement and Enlightenment Bildung, committed genocidal murder against six million Jews and killed millions more innocents and soldiers in a war that almost succeeded in returning Europe to medieval times. Two decades later, the American Air Force tried bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age. In the years since, social theory 1

introduction and social movements have relentlessly uncovered new forms of irrational prejudice at the very core of Western institutions, from abiding racism and misogyny to orientalism and homophobia (Seidman 2013). As these shockingly antimodern events and qualities have piled up, great social thinkers became critics of modernity itself (see chapter 1, below). Marx had fervently believed that, with the advent of socialism, modernity s basic structures could be saved. After the Holocaust and two world wars, Frankfurt school Marxists came to reject the Enlightenment as such. Speaking the fatalistic language of Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno described the disenchantment of the world as the dissolution of myth and the substitution of knowledge for fancy (1969). They asserted that Enlightenment reason had become merely instrumental, authentic meanings and responsible feelings impossible, and that culture, having lost its autonomy, was reduced to an industry. Marcuse argued capitalism had so quantified modern mental life that one-dimensional society had entirely suppressed critical thought and moral responsibility (Marcuse 1964). Suggestions that modernity empties culture of meaning, eliminating the very possibility of morality, have become widespread (Alexander 1995). Such arguments represent an understandable emotional and moral reaction to the traumas of the twentieth century, but empirically they are incorrect. Rather than modernity repressing moral substance and emotional imagination, we must see it as Janus-faced, as blocking and facilitating at the same time. Immensely difficult and deeply destructive, modernity has also produced new technologies of self and society that facilitate farreaching repairs. A civil sphere has been partially institutionalized, its culture and institutions providing unprecedented opportunities for group incorporation and individual recognition (chapters 6 and 7 below). Ministering to individual rather than collective wounds, psychotherapy has emerged as a central institution in modernity (chapter 8). Modern societies overflow with critical counter-narratives that illuminate political alternatives and frequently demand moral responsibility (Alexander 2006). One can no longer conceive modernity as representing a sharp break from orders of a traditional kind, if, indeed, it were ever 2

introduction possible at all. Decades ago, Umberto Eco already identified a contemporary return of the Middle Ages, suggesting that a broad spirit of neo-medievalism has permeated modern life (1986). We have witnessed the return of the sacred in our time, paroxysms of apocalypse and utopia, romanticism and chivalry, ecstasy and repentance, barbarism and crusades, localism and difference, blood and soil (Holsinger 2007, 2008). There has also unfolded a proliferating attention to signs and icons, the intellectual response to which has been the renewal of semiotic theorizing and hermeneutical methods of interpretation. In contemporary social science, cultural sociology has been one particularly notable disciplinary result of such proliferation. At the foundation of cultural sociology is the anti-historicist claim that structures of meaning cultural codes, symbols, and narratives are a permanent, not transitory element of consciousness and society (Alexander 2003b). As Robert Bellah once put it, neither religious man nor the structure of man s ultimate religious situation evolves over historical time; what changes is religion as a symbol system (1991). Culture structures remain anchors for collective meanings without which social and individual life is impossible to conceive. Rather than evicting meaning, modernity reformulates cultural structures and subjects them to new strains. This line of theorizing has been severely constrained by the reluctance of cultural theorists to confront the dark side of modern meaning. For Durkheim and Parsons (chapter 4), simply to sustain culture meant creating social value and moral good; it was the absence of meaning that created instability and evil. Simmel and Eisenstadt seemed to move beyond such an idealizing model of culture, the former identifying the stranger (chapter 5), the latter associating normative institutionalization with tension rather than stability (chapter 3). Neither, however, viewed evil as residing inside the core of modern culture itself. Only Weber tries to theorize both sides of modernity, conceptualizing not only autonomy but also terrifying discipline, the combination of which produce endemic efforts at flight (chapter 2). Yet Weber believed such escape efforts to be doomed: Authentic meanings and emancipatory movement were impossible in the modern age. 3

introduction Ovid imagined Janus first as the ancient god Chaos, presiding over the disorderly mass of matter before the formation of the world, a crude, unstructured mass, nothing but weight without motion, a general conglomeration of... disparate, incompatible elements inside of which the sky had no light. Eventually, Ovid tells us, Janus divided the substance of Chaos and ordered it into its different constituent members, among which was the strange new figure of Man (2004). The ancient Romans saw Janus as the god of beginnings and of transitions to the future from the past. With one face, Janus could see backward in time; with the other, he looked forward into the future, marking the midpoint between barbarism and civilization. Social theorists have struggled to comprehend the Janus faces of modernity. Weber linked this-worldly asceticism to autonomy and domination, yet, while conceptualizing flight, he saw no remedy for rationalization. Simmel pointed to the otherness haunting modernity, yet normalized the stranger. Eisenstadt celebrated ethical transcendence in the Axial Age, but barely acknowledged its capacity for barbarity. Parsons heralded American community, but ignored modernity s fragmentation. In the chapters that follow, I argue that, inside the culture and structure of modernity, good and evil are tensely intertwined. We should not be naïve about the evils of modernity. Modernity s contradictions cannot be resolved in some magisterial new synthesis. It is a dangerous delusion to think modernity can eliminate evil; new kinds of dangers are produced that challenge new kinds of good. Social theory must accept modernity as Janus-faced. We need to theorize the dangerous frictions of modernity and also lay out new lines for social amelioration and emotional repair. We need to be able to see backward and forward at the same time. 4

1 SOCIAL THEORY BETWEEN PROGRESS AND APOCALYPSE Social theory is a mental reconstruction of its time, not a reflection but a self-reflection. Art is self-reflection in an iconic and expressive form. Theoretical self-reflection is intellectual and abstract. It leads not to experience and epiphany but to analysis and thought. Social theory cannot induce catharsis, but it can transform understanding. We need social theory if we are going to understand our world. As the great and terrible twentieth century closed and a new one began, this need became even more important. The thesis of this chapter is that the twentieth century was a unique construction, a historically demarcated world, and that twentieth-century theory is differentiated from earlier theorizing in much the same way. This may be an illusion for future historians to correct. Certainly, neither theory nor history can hope to break out of the self conceptions of their own time. At this point, however, the historical uniqueness of our just completed century seems an empirical fact. It certainly was a social fact, for in this uniqueness most of the participants in that century fervently believed. To comprehend the underlying motifs of the twentieth century, and eventually its social theory, we must clarify what initially marked the West off from other civilizations, the modern West from earlier periods in its history, and the twentieth century from earlier Western modern societies. This distinguishing notion was progress and the possibility of perfection it implied. 5