Note to Readers: Below is Carl’s gracious response to my review. At the end of his comments I have appended one comment of my own. Part I of my review can be found here and Part II here.
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While I do not typically respond to reviews, believing that reviewers have a right to their opinion and that readers are hopefully capable of assessing the book and the review for themselves, Craig has asked me to offer a few words in response. And, on a personal note, it is a real pleasure to interact with a friend who has read my book so carefully and sympathetically.
I will offer three thoughts on Craig’s comments.
First, Craig says that, while correct in seeing the sexual revolution as the complete annihilation of the old sexual morality, I am unclear ‘that human nature is vaporized as well’. This is actually the burden of Chapter 5, on Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin. It may be that my use of the language of plastic/plasticity relative to human nature is less dramatic than ‘vaporize’ but the essential point – that these three thinkers detach human nature from teleology (with, perhaps, the debated exception of the Marx of the 1844 manuscripts), amounts to the same thing.
Second, Craig is certainly correct to say that the story of modernity and its problems goes back behind Rousseau and has a wider philosophical scope. The problem, of course, with any historical narrative is that there is always going to be a pre-history that makes the historian vulnerable to such a charge. Certainly the nominalism and voluntarism of the late medieval period is important in the formation of modernity, as is the shift to epistemology we find in Descartes and company. Indeed, for these very reasons, along with others (my omission, for example, of significant discussion of technology and the imagining of the self) I am careful in my introduction to emphasize the partial nature of my narrative. And in responding to Craig, I might go back further: one friend challenged me to start the book with discussion of how the Christian distinction of soul and body paved the way for transgenderism’s priority of psychology over embodiment; another to address Paul’s formulation of the will as a necessary precondition for psychologized identity. My lack of time, and my sympathy for the trees that would die as a consequence of significant expansion of my narrative, led me to a more recent starting point.
Given the need to start somewhere, my choice of Rousseau was not arbitrary. His Confessions provides both a brilliant counterpoint to Augustine; and his Discourses express with vivid clarity themes that are now an intuitive part of our social imaginary. In addition, his influence on the Romantics (especially Shelley) and, to some extent, Freud, made him an obvious choice, not so much as an exclusive source of modernity but as one particularly influential expression of key aspects of the same.
Finally, Craig is concerned that I do not emphasize the dramatic stakes for which we are playing in our current cultural game: ‘But it would have been helpful if he had clarified that a culture that deifies the individual ego is not sustainable in the long run. (See Isaiah 14.)’ I actually think I do this, though not in quite the same terms. On page 77, in a discussion of Rieff’s concept of the ‘third world’ and observe that cultures which seek to justify themselves purely on the basis of their own immanent order have set themselves an impossible task that can lead only to the degeneration of moral to a matter of taste. The clear implication of the passage is that such cultures are unsustainable in the long run.
In closing, let me say once again how grateful I am to Craig, not only for his thoughtful review but also for pressing me to think through and clarify the above matters.
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Another Note to Readers: Carl’s response is correct and on point. My critique of this book was sparked by my conviction that it is one of the most important books to come along in years because it gets to the heart of our current cultural malaise. My only critique has to do with nuance and emphasis of various points.
I agree that, as Carl says, the implication of the attempt of modern culture to justify itself on the basis of its own immanent order is that it cannot be sustained in the long run. But I still prefer to put that point even more strongly. The meaning of the events of 2020 seem to confirm what I believed prior to 2020, namely, that modern culture bases itself on false metaphysical doctrines, which simply cannot support a flourishing culture. We are running on the fumes of the metaphysical/religious convictions of past generations and this means we are running down. Collapse is inevitable. Of course it takes a long time for a wealthy society to crash, but a long-drawn out process can be accelerated by a sudden, unforeseen event (like a pandemic) and the rotten foundations give way suddenly. We need to be prepared.