8. Weber thoughts on the
prospects and the fate of modernity can be summarized into a double formulae
"loss of meaning", "loss of freedom". (A) The "loss of
meaning" refers to the idea of "disenchantment" just elaborated.
The traditional Christian cosmology that provided a fixed, hierarchical and
harmonized view of the world and gave the individual security by locating his/her
place in the world by providing limits and certainty has now collapsed inducing
a "crisis" of experience. The pre-modern individual knew their place
in the world, knew the bounds of that world and what could be expected of
themselves and others. Such an order made life meaningful. The modern
individual must make sense of life and determine conduct without the security
of traditionally endorsed values and life conduct, without the weight of a
collectively affirmed set of rules and practices and amidst a welter of competing
and clashing values and standpoints.
Rationalisation has forever destroyed the harmony of the old cosmologies
that subordinated all values to one overriding value (typically religious like
salvation). Before I mentioned intellectualisation as a facet of rationalisation:
the way in which various aspects of culture become autonomous. Motored by their
own highest value and its institutions, the logic and possibilities of this
sphere are explored. The pursuit of science or art as a value has its own
necessity that further estranges these cultural activities from each other and
problematises the possibility of their ultimate reconcilability. Weber believes that in modernity we
have re-entered the age of polytheism (of multiple and warring Gods), of
conflict between depersonalised value standpoints that cannot be reconciled in
any rational way.
The
grandiose rationalism of an ethical and methodical conduct of life which flows
from every religious prophesy has dethroned this polytheism in favour of “ the
one thing that is needful”. Faced with the realities of inner and outer life,
Christianity has deemed it necessary to make those compromises and relative
judgements, which we all know from its history. Today the routines of everyday
life challenge religion. Many old Gods ascend from their graves; they are
disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain
power over our lives and again resume their eternal struggle with one another
(S asV, p149)
At the dawn of the
modern age Machiavelli had argued that politics had to obey its own laws and
grasp its own ethical schema. He drew our attention to the fact that ordinary
ethics and the necessities of political life are incompatible. Kant first
grasped this increasing differentiation of value spheres philosophically; he
separates the theoretical-scientific, practical-moral and aesthetic- spheres.
Weber gives a cultural reading of this insight in terms of the increasing
autonomy and inter-conflict of value-spheres of life. One of his favourite examples
is the birth of modern science out of religious wonder in the harmonious and
lawful character of the natural cosmos. For many of the early modern scientists
like Newton, their work was a demonstration of a theological design in nature.
However, the ongoing evolution of science allows it to completely dispense with
theological presuppositions about design. Moreover, in many cases science is
compelled by is own logic and method to contest a religious view of the world.
As he says, it becomes an irreligious power. Since the late 18th century it has
been impossible to reconcile truth, morality and beauty. Kant argued that these
are theoretically irreducible human faculties but practically reconcilable. But
even this practical postulate of ultimate reconciliation is in doubt. The
difficulty is expressed even more strongly in Nietzsche with his idea of the
incompatibility and tension between art, science and morality. Weber maintains
that intellectual honesty now forces us to choose between competing conflicting
values-spheres. The dissolution of an objective cosmic order is now compounded
by the fragmentation of the unity of subjective experience itself in the sense
of coherent meaningfulness. The challenge is now the existential one of how the
individual can establish a personal unity and meaningfulness out of these
fragmentary and conflicting perspectives.
9. The idea of a
"loss of freedom" refers to both the increasingly irresistible power
of the modern industrial economic order and its more frequent incursions into,
and annihilation of, individual space and the possibility of autonomy. Weber
argued that in modern western society the material fate of vast populations
depended upon the increasingly bureaucratised mechanisms of private capitalism.
Here Weber does not mention the state. This is because he did not live to see
the modern welfare state nor the Soviet style command economies of Eastern
Europe. However, his comments on the Bolshevik Revolution and his analysis of
socialist doctrine, demonstrate a remarkable prescience: he recognized both the
increasing necessity of massive bureaucracies both in private capitalism and
the state apparatus but also their dangers. For Weber, all hopes that these
vast modern bureaucratic mechanisms could be eliminated were completely
utopian. The necessity of large-scale economic organization requires, and even
demands, the further refinement of specialisation, an increasing individual
discipline and predictability and growth of bureaucracy. The imperatives of
specialisation and discipline conscript individuals into a universal vocational
culture. Here vocations are stripped of their former religious meaning and now
typically entrap their bearers in an endless advance of "progress”,
"career”, specialisation, fragmentation and "tension”. The
increasingly all-encompassing universality of these system-demands foreshadows
the rapidly encroaching "rational" discipline shaping all private and
public relations. The emphasis is on behaviour that is calculable and predictable.
These organizational imperatives enhance the role of the professional expert
and further restrict the scope for individual charisma and idiosyncratic
behaviour. This tendency towards organisational regimentation is prescribed by
the principles of rationalisation, by the rational economy of doing things
efficiently and predictably in a complex, mass society. The expert and the
bureaucrat are servants of totally impersonal orders. One serves science and
the other higher authority. Each is required to subordinate personality to
impersonal, objective rules and functions. Increasingly all moderns find
themselves imprisoned in or effected by similar "chains of command",
mere cogs in the wheels of a vast machine over which they have little control.
This physiognomy of modern society-- vast political and economic systems,
regimentation, discipline, specialisation and uniformity--means that these
systems threaten to become more and more autonomous, operating only according
to their own purely functional and systemic requirements. They either
subordinate or completely negate the needs/personalities of contemporary
individuals. In general, Weber is wary of historical predictions. He refuses to
allocate a definite outcome or meaning to his diagnosis of modernity. The
threatening aspect of the diagnosis is more a negative utopia. On the positive
side, Weber offers a guarded emancipatory potential.
10. For Weber, the
modern individual is set before a task.
Recognising that the loss of immediate unified experience of the past
has problematised the very idea of a modern self, the challenge becomes to
recreate meaning and centreness out of the passion and critical scepticism of
modern subjectivity. For Weber, this task requires the abandonment of all
illusions, a sober acknowledgement of all the facts --bad as well as good--and
sense of responsibility to history.
We know of no scientifically demonstrable
ideals. To be sure, our labours are now rendered more difficult, since we must
create our ideals from within our own chests in the very age of subjectivist
culture. But we must not and cannot promise a fool's paradise and an easy
street, neither in the here and now nor in the beyond, neither in thought nor
in action, and it is the stigma of our human dignity that the peace of our
souls cannot be as great as the peace of one who dreams of such a paradise
(Debate at the
Association for Sozialpolitik in Vienna
1909)(GASS, S420)
The
liberating aspect of this task is the prospect of emancipation from the age-old
straitjacket of tradition and "received" self-definition and world
order. Its attraction lies in the possible realisation of a new ethical dignity
forged in radical autonomy. The exemplary modern individual's life is a
self-chosen one. The individual creates their own lives meaning by choosing a
particular value sphere and living in its terms to the full, making their life
harmonious and integral in terms of the chosen value. Paradoxically, for Weber
the real personality is not the individual who seeks meaning in merely
subjective experience but the one who can passionately commit themselves to the
impersonal demands required by service to these higher values whether they be
art, politics or science. This requires a stoic acceptance of limits imposed by
the modern objective order, the determination to struggle for the realisation
of chosen values against resistance and in full consciousness. Weber wages on
the individual and his/her ethical autonomy and passionate commitment as the
principal bulwark against both the increasing power and dominance of objective
rationalised processes and institutions and the correlated subjective retreat
into "mere experience". Weber recognises that this view of a calling
and existential ethics radicalises the element of choice in social action. But
he particularly also emphasizes the weight of these choices by driving home the
need for individual responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of
self-chosen actions. This understanding of self-creation is not without risks.
Weber realises that a proposal for the radical subjectivisation of meaning and
value is not for all. Not everyone can live without the security of a sense of
absolute standards and bear the internal tensions of conflicting norms.
To
the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may
he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades,
but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are open widely and
compassionately to him. Afterall, they do not make it hard for him. One way or
another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice—that is inevitable. If he
can do it, we shall not rebuke him. For such an intellectual sacrifice in
favour of an unconditional religious devotion is ethically quite a different
matter than the evasion of the plain duty of intellectual integrity…(S as V,
p155)
Those who have the
intellectual courage to dispense with fixed signposts and beautiful illusions
face heightened dangers. Such an individual commitment can become a
"demonic possession".
Commitment to one value can involve conflict with other cherished values
and even their annihilation i.e. ethics and politics. As recent events have
only too well demonstrated, the passion to “become what you are” does not allow
for the discrimination between saint and assassin. In Weber's view such conflicts are irresolvable: there is no
rational way of resolving questions of value. Science can only demonstrate the
appropriate means to given ends and the consequences of adopting alternative
means: it cannot hierarchise the ends themselves. This must be left to
individual choice. In a famous passage Weber maintains:
The
fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know
that it cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis,
be it ever so perfect; It must recognise that general views of life and the
universe can never be products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the
highest ideals, which move us forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle
with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.
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