Author Meets Critics: Paul Murphy, “What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Modernism?: Comments on Kunal Parker, The Turn to Process and Daniel Wickberg, A History of Modern Thought, 1860-2000”

In 1903, the conservative critic Paul Elmer More noted that two hundred years previously truth was “something fixed and unalterable.”  “Religion had been established once for all by a perfect revelation; and as in religion so in culture, the forms of art and literature had received their final form.”  However, such certainty existed no more.  More identified the culprit as the “historic sense,” which was, he argued, “that perception of growth leading through ceaseless change which tends to give everything a value relative only to its time and circumstances, that feeling for the past as something different from the present and subject to different laws.”  The historic sense acted “like a dissolving acid.”^[1]  He made a related point in 1909, reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, this time identifying the “dissolving acid” as Darwin’s method.^[2]  Twenty years later, Walter Lippmann used the same image in A Preface to Morals (1929), his meditation on the quandary of modern “men” who, having lost their faith, lost also the “certainty that their lives are significant.”[3]  The “acids of modernity” dissolved the “order in the universe” by which men made sense of their lives.[4]

In taking up the ways in which modern thinkers submit previously accepted truths to the “acid bath” of history and psychology, in Kunal Parker’s words (Parker 4), Parker and Daniel Wickberg are in distinguished company.[5]  In the short scope of this comment, I cannot convey the rich complexity of both authors’ convincing arguments nor their utility in prodding us to rethink the course of American social thought, philosophy, and criticism in the twentieth century.  They do, however, compel me to ask, what do we talk about when we talk about modernism?

Parker analyzes modernism as an epistemological problem, exploring how legal theorists, political scientists, and economists “reoriented their fields away from truths, ends, and foundations toward methods, techniques, and processes” in response to both a “modernist crisis of knowledge” and the emergence of the administrative state (Parker ix).  History and psychology undercut accepted assumptions about knowledge because they challenged the competency of those who conceived them:  People are the products of their times, are often non-rational, and are limited in their ability to perceive the world.  In short, history and psychology eroded the foundations of legal, democratic, and economic theory:  the ideas that law is grounded in nature, that citizens possess autonomy, and that the market is both natural and equitable.  Now leading thinkers sought alternatives (Parker 3-5, 12, 17-18).  Modernism was an intellectual workaround in a moment of crisis.

Wickberg agrees.  Modernism consisted of a series of attempts “to grapple with a world unmoored from its foundations, a world made fluid” (Wickberg 1).[6]  In Wickberg’s account, modern thinkers faced the challenge of retaining the achievements of Enlightenment thinkers, who had freed humans from tradition and revelation but on flawed premises:  Rationalists had appealed to timeless principles, now discredited; empiricists appealed to a fixed natural order that Darwin among others proved did not exist.  Pragmatists attempted to find a via media between them:  knowledge saved because reconceived as habitual actions grounded in a “community of inquiry” and truth preserved as a set of provisional but valid statements (Wickberg 35-42).

Both Parker and Wickberg present modern thought as a salvage operation—an attempt to retain the fruits of progress, including enlightened values, even as the world became fluid and unsettling.  Let’s be clear:  In doing this, modernists were also salvaging their increased authority as experts and that of the values they espoused.  The crisis occurred only because their own ways of thinking exploded the premises upon which they had based their authority.  For example, in the “turn to process”:  The dissolution of foundations meant the erosion of a faith in common law (warranted by precedent and principles of justice) leading to the displacement of confidence in judges as oracles of the law.  The solution was to invest authority in procedures and processes of the law stripped of any further justification.  Jurists would retain their authority (Parker 17-20).  A similar process happened in political science and economics.  “Thinkers salvaged their truths…,” Parker observes, “by representing them as methods, processes, and techniques.  Methods were truths rendered methods” (Parker 295).  That is, theorists who once grounded truth claims in metaphysical or natural foundations now grounded them in processes (Parker 302).  To Wickberg, modern thinkers were battling with tradition from the moment Darwin articulated natural selection, which set off the “culture wars” we have known ever since.  The contending parties conceived the conflict as one between the “received ways of the past” and “a progressive overcoming of those received ways”— the very terms of battle, Wickberg argues, a product of modernism (Wickberg 11).

Modernism, then, is a discourse of intellectuals regarding ideas and social authority; it draws from intellectuals’ insecurities.  The new scientific advances of the nineteenth century undoubtedly did represent a formidable challenge to the religious beliefs and moral assumptions of many and of the social order they supported.  As everyone realized, whether pragmatists, mid-twentieth theorists of culture such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, postwar analysts of ideology such as Hannah Arendt and Daniel Bell, historians of science such as Thomas Kuhn, and varied postmodernist thinkers (all subjects expertly covered by Wickberg), people believe things not because of reason but on faith or out of habit or as a result of socialization.  Beliefs can be religious or religion-like in function.  As such, they have authority, and they provide social coherence and unity.  They impel collective action, and have functioned in the past, as, the Deweyan philosopher John Herman Randall, Jr., keenly observed, as the basis of a grand cultural synthesis capable of uniting the thought and actions of an entire people.[7]

Both More and Lippmann used the metaphor of “acids” to explain this crisis of faith.  While modern ideas left many disconsolate and confused, the loss of scientific and metaphysical “foundations” is a problem only for those who premise their beliefs on rational explanations and empirical evidence.  This is not true for all.  To see modernism as a form of anti-foundationalism reflects the concerns and responses only of the group that relies on such foundations.  Moreover, when we talk about modernism, we must talk about multiple responses to this crisis of faith, to which different thinkers and scholars attached different meanings.  For example, other modernists focused on alienation, the lack of a feeling of at-homeness in the world.  Alternately, modernist artists pioneered abstraction (for example, Jackson Pollock and his booster Clement Greenberg, presented as intuitive process thinkers at the beginning of Parker’s account [Parker 1-3]), atonality, stream of consciousness, or fractured narrative.  For them, the autonomy of the artist, the integrity of form, and the authority of artist and critic reigned supreme.

We ought not conflate modernists with progressives or liberals, though the two groups often overlap.  As Parker shows, the rehabilitation of modernist authority could eventuate in both liberal success (as in the triumph over legal formalism in constitutional law) or conservative success (as in the triumph of market-based laissez-faire in economics) or a result more difficult to characterize (as in group-based pluralism managed by elite interventions in political theory).  Modernist thinkers, Wickberg notes, were often frustrated by the vexing qualities (irony, contradiction, unintended consequences) of the various modernist instruments they created.  They asserted the “power of critical intellect to remake the world,” and yet the modern order consistently challenged that power, remaining one of bureaucratic and technological complexity, “alienation and unfreedom,” and “the mind apparently enslaved by its own fictional categories” (Wickberg 10-11).

Many conservative thinkers adopt modernist understandings of one form or another, including, as with More cited above, a belief that science and history disproved key elements of Christian theology, yet they continue to advocate for “the received ways of the past.”  Consider the New Critic, modernist poet, and Southern Agrarian critic John Crowe Ransom.  The son and grandson of Methodist ministers, Ransom rejected the supernaturalism of the Christian faith, including Christ’s divinity, yet he insisted that humans should retain the Old Testament, fire-breathing God of judgment and wrath rather than the meek God of service and humility presented by liberal theologians.  Religion was about myths, and myths function in society only when they become dogmas, “tolerably hard, and exceedingly jealous of their rivals.”[8]  To say that myths are unscientific does not vitiate their truth; their “unhistorical and unscientific character is not their vice but their excellence, and this it certainly was their intent,” Ransom declared.[9]  Not a process thinker nor a pragmatist, but a modernist all the same.[10]

On these points—the selective definition of modernism, the question of whose agenda it served, and its political valence—some questions arise.  In Wickberg’s account, “thinking the modern” generated a series of rapidly evolving sensibilities, including a mid-twentieth-century liberal sensibility that political and social radicals came to see as hopelessly conservative. ^[11]  Wickberg prefers sensibility in discussing succeeding phases of modernism, but it is “culture” that looms larger in his assessment of American thought.  Modernism was less about “process,” in his account, than culture, which became the basis of mid-century intellectuals’ social criticism and a means to tether the self.  So much of modernist and liberal intellectualism takes the form of cultural criticism; culture, as Wickberg emphasizes, functions most often as a vessel for values (Wickberg 101, 107).  Were “process” and “culture” both tools by which to obscure value and political commitments?  Is modernism as Wickberg conceives it a more narrow discourse than we have appreciated—one less about the forces of emancipation than about means of containing them?  A related question looms large for Kunal Parker:  Who gains authority by the turn to process?  One would think it would be the agent of the administrative state—the faceless, stubborn, and unimaginative bureaucrat who cannot see the substantive forest for the procedural trees.  However, it is not the bureaucrat who gains power by the turn to process, but the jurist, the economist, and the political theorist.  As the legal scholar Aziz Rana notes in a symposium on Parker’s book, “so much of the faith in process was at root faith in the social class of elites likely to operate the tools—inside and outside of the academy.”[12]  Did the turn to process reinforce the authority of elites, eventuating in conservative or liberal policies depending on the proclivities of which elites held power when?

Political progressivism and modernism often become conflated in such discussions.  Liberal and progressive intellectuals espouse moral values rarely acknowledged as moral claims:  open-mindedness, tolerance, pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and self-expression.  Modernists most often uphold individual freedom.  The two groups of intellectuals seem to mesh, and often, indeed, overlap, but claims of freedom vitiate claims of authority (as well as hopes for a cultural synthesis).  What modernists and liberals rarely agree on is a common faith, which requires a source of authority and social unity, a reigning synthesis that necessarily impinges on personal autonomy.  Neither modernists nor liberals were able to abate the corrosive force of the acids of modernity nor have they fashioned a faith that inculcates the shared values and commitments needed to maintain a progressive, liberal order going forward.

[1] [Paul Elmer More], “Classics and the Historic Sense,” Independent, Jan. 8, 1903, p. 105.  This essay continues themes developed in one the previous week.  See [Paul Elmer More], “Classics and the Teachers of Them,” Independent, Jan. 1, 1903, pp. 47-48  More’s biographer Arthur Dakin considered the first published essay as possibly written by More but could not state so authoritatively.  More was literary editor of The Independent at the time.

[2] “Fifty Years of Darwinism,” Nation, Jan. 7, 1909, 7.  The was likely written by Paul Elmer More.  “We can no more avoid thinking in terms of evolution than we can cease breathing,” the author observed.  Creeds evaporated.  “Men could not always give an exact account of what had happened to their creeds.  They simply knew that Darwin had given them a new way of looking at everything, and had made many old things pass away, for them, forever.”

[3] Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Morals (New York:  Macmillan, 1929), 3.

[4] Lippmann, Preface to Morals, 8.

[5] Kunal M. Parker, The Turn to Process:  American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).

[6] Daniel Wickberg, A History of American Thought, 1860-2000:  Thinking the Modern (New York:  Routledge, 2024).

[7] John Herman Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind:  A Survey of the Intellectual Background of the Present Age (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1926), 49-50, 59, 106.

[8] John Crowe Ransom, God Without: An Unorthodox Defense of Orthodoxy (1930; reprint, Hamden, CT:  Archon Books, 1965), 93, 95, 97.

[9] Ransom, God Without Thunder, 55.

[10] So argued Daniel Joseph Singal, The War Within:  From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

[11] Daniel Wickberg, “What Is the History of Sensibilities?  On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” American Historical Review, 112:3 (June 2007), 662-664.

[12] Aziz Rana, “The Procedural Turn’s Faith in Elite Judgement,” Nov. 19, 2024, Balkinization Blog https://balkin.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-procedural-turns-faith-in-elite.html