Modernity: Modernism

Cult of the present, alleged to be intrinsically superior to that which is past.

As a notion, modernity is ambiguous; at first positive, it became negative. Originally conceived in terms of the European’s capacity for innovation and transcendence, by the Twentieth century modernity has ended up being confused with a naïve progressivism and anti-traditionalism — in the name of the present, treated as if it’s intrinsically superior to the past. Modernism is now nothing but a fashionable academicism. Modernity has never fulfilled its promises, because these promises were impossible, given their roots in utopianism and their denial of the real. Modernity promised to: first, ensure happiness, peace, and prosperity through economic and technological domination; second, replace aesthetics and traditional philosophies with radical new aesthetics and philosophies lacking continuity; and third, do away with peoples, religions, and customs for the sake of a homogeneous humanity and an atomised individual. Formulated in the late Seventeenth century, such objectives have since been taken up by globalist mercantilism, Marxism, and the myth of progress.

Modernity has been a total failure, commensurate with the conceit of its pretensions. After three and a half modern centuries, the Twenty-first century is heading now toward a convergence of catastrophes. Its failure, however, is no reason to embrace a contemplative ‘traditionalism’. Just the opposite.

Modernity is old-fashioned, the very opposite of futurism. In condemning a despised ancestry, that is, the formative vitalistic traditions, modernity condemns itself to the ephemeral. (On this point, see my Archeofuturism.) In accord with my theses, Rodolphe Badinand and Georges Feltin-Tracol write, ‘Post-modernity (or archeofuturism, or paganism, the term doesn’t matter) senses the imperative of re-establishing that ancient spherical coherence between present, past, and future. Contrary to the traditionalist attitude, vehemently voluntarist, coming ultimately from modernity in its refusal of modernism, it doesn’t take refuge in a long-gone past, impossible to recover — but affirms the possibility of another future, to which it opens the way’. Traditionalism might be seen as a ‘shallow modernism’. Not so much ‘anti-modern’, as ‘non-modern’. The alternative to modernity is not traditionalism and antiquarianism, since they share the same linear vision of time as modernity (except in seeking a regression rather than a progression); traditionalism and modernism are both equally opposed to the spherical, dynamic vision of time.

Exhausted at the height of its influence, at the very moment when it’s everywhere acclaimed with thunderous praise, modernity is dying. The word ‘modern’ has even lost its meaning. It was already employed in the Seventeenth century (during ‘the quarrel between the Ancients and Moderns’). The deepest sense of the concept implies ‘everything opposed to the past’ — and this for the last three centuries. This makes the term now doubly stupid, since it opposes what was considered modern a hundred years ago (in a period when the term had a far greater resonance than it has today), but above all, it deprives itself of a future by ‘making the past a tabula rasa’. The concept of ‘modernity’ is inherently suicidal, since, from the beginning, it denies a people and civilisation longevity, it denies the unity of past and future.

Pierre-Émile Blairon writes, ‘Modernity is a totalitarianism of nothingness: globalisation, indifferentiation, homogenisation . . . Modernity isn’t in crisis, modernity is a crisis’.

In every realm, the present system endlessly reassures itself, legitimising itself, forgetting its failures and imperiousness. In its view, everything is to be modernised — ‘to modernise democracy’ being one of its favourite expressions: human relations, communications, morals, institutions, justice, sexuality, social behaviour, immigrant policy, etc., all are constantly to be ‘modernised’. And we’ve seen the results. The most pitiful of these are evident in the modernisation of art, which has come to mean decadence and primitiveness — the new barbarism.

Similarly, ‘modern’ (or ‘contemporary’) art has become the worst sort of academic nostalgia; for fifty years it’s gone in circles, a subsidised nonentity. Paradox: seeing itself as permanent innovation, modernity ends up being an insistent repetition, powerless to advance or create. Once an avant-garde, modernity has since become a rearguard, stymied by its own insolence. It is now a cult — sign of an ageing people that has persuaded itself that it’s eternally young.

With Vatican II, the Church also sought to modernise itself: the result, a seventy percent loss of parishioners. In triumphing, Islam has never for a second thought of ‘modernising’! Indeed, everything decadent and declining assumes the guise of the ‘modern’. It thus adorns itself with the degradation of mores, the confusion of sexual roles, social permissiveness, the abdication of discipline, cosmopolitanism, unbridled free trade (after having made the proper sacrifice to the Marxist god), etc., portraying these pathological trends as ‘novelties’, in the sense that ‘everything new is positive’, even the nothing, the regressive, anything. It has indeed succumbed to historical fatalism, without the slightest understanding that history is no longer following it.

Against modernity, we oppose not traditionalism or reactionism, which are also forms of the ‘modern’, but the tradition and spirit of continuity. As for techno-science, there’s nothing ‘modern’ about it, since it comes from Greek Antiquity; it’s a perfectly neutral instrument in service to the will.

(see archeofuturism; convergence of catastrophes; interregnum; progress)