Book review - The Trouble with “Modernity”
Mark Greif: The Age of the Crisis of Man
Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER NEALON
Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER NEALON
It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that capitalism is the
engine behind the environmental crises of the early 21st century. It doesn’t
even take a Marxist: as the French environmental journalist Hervé Kempf put it
in a recent book, it’s not so much Homo sapiens as the rich who are
destroying the earth—rich people, rich nations.1 His claim is backed up by reams of data, and
he’s not the only one who’s making it (see, for instance, the latest volume by
Naomi Klein2). So why do we cling to the idea that it’s “humanity”—humanity
in some essential sense, not just the accidents of particular human
societies—that’s brought the planet to the brink of disaster? Mark Greif’s
probing new book, The Age of the Crisis of Man, offers a kind of
prehistory of this humanity’s-to-blame discourse, and therefore the beginnings
of an explanation for its resilience.
From the very start of his book, Greif is up front about the
limits of the discourse he’s reconstructed for us. He describes the experience
of realizing, to his dismay, “how tedious, how unhelpful” the crisis-of-man
language feels, in the rearview mirror. And he is unsparing in his criticisms
of how, for instance, such language erased the specifics of the lives of women,
colonized people, and people of color in its deployment of the idea of “man.”
Again and again, however, just when he’s on the brink of suggesting there might
be better ways to think about the political, economic, and ecological crises of
the past century, he shies away, as though it would be rude to criticize the
prominent thinkers who produced this “tedious, unhelpful” language.
At the heart of the discourse was the question of whether
there’s just something innately self-destructive about Homo sapiens, and
that concern, Greif shows, expressed itself in questions about history, about
religion and faith and ideology, and about technology. Can there be progress?
Is faith in a higher power, or even just faith in humanity’s ability to become
its best collective self, built from the same materials as susceptibility to
the worst authoritarianism? Now that we’ve built atom bombs and gas chambers,
have we lost control of our own powers of technological innovation?
The agonized questions driving this discourse attracted an
extraordinary range of renowned commentators. Some of its most influential
texts, like the Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s 1944 Essay on Man,
have receded from our cultural memory; others, like Hannah Arendt’s The
Human Condition (1958), are still widely read today. The discourse was not
only a matter for philosophers, though: it caught the imagination of historians
like Lewis Mumford (The Condition of Man, 1944), theologians like Reinhold
Niebuhr (The Nature and Destiny of Man,1941–43), and literary critics like C.
S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1943). For Greif the discourse can take
reactionary form in precursor texts like Oswald Spengler’s two-volume Decline
of the West (1918–1923), yet also includes many left-wing variants, like
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).
But perhaps because the reach of this discourse extended
downward from traditional academic writing to popular journalism, it created
odd combinations of genre and style: Greif refers (accurately, I think) to the
Adorno and Horkheimer volume, for instance, as “one of the slowest page-turners
of all time.” For Greif, this awkward blend of academic and popular imperatives
was soon joined, during and immediately after World War II, by an equally
unusual mix of domestic American concerns and émigré anxieties, which places a
double burden on theorists of “the crisis of man,” to explain both history and
human nature in terms of each other. In Greif’s account, this creates a
particular, and tedious, narrative method:
In the American discourse of man through the war
years, under the influence of the émigrés … a particular kind of history
emerges—the revival of the Enlightenment’s version of a universal critical
history, but without a confident faith in progress. This could be called re-enlightenment
history. … Re-enlightenment writers conceived the whole of Western history as,
once again, a long progress, but one in which something had gone wrong; and
behaved as if by running through the entire history of the mind, man, faith, or
ideas of human nature, developmentally, they might find the flaw and figure out
how to repair it.
This method of re-narrating the history of
“civilization,” meanwhile, ends up creating a distinctive, and awkward, style:
This [insistence on synopsis] is part of what gives
the crisis of man canon its painfully laborious character for readers. An
author will carry a thesis summarizable in a sentence or in five pages through
two volumes. … To protect civilization at its moment of danger, you, the
reader, must hear of it; to find the flaw that endangered this civilization,
he, the intellectual, must relive it.
Things get worse from here. It’s not only the method
and the style of the discourse, Greif points out, but its substance, that
hobbles it at every turn. The universalism of “man,” to begin with, quite
obviously masks the specificity of “woman,” and it turns out, over and over,
essentially to mean “white man.” As he puts it, “Was there no ‘crisis of
woman’? No ‘crisis of color’ in a country where W. E. B. DuBois editedThe
Crisis until 1934?” Greif does yeoman’s work in showing how figures like
Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan tried to explode the discourse from
within; in a chapter on the 1960s he traces a fascinating mutation of the
language of “man” into the language of “the man,” where the whiteness and conformism
of “man” is exposed at the level of vernacular speech. But the interest and the
political force of feminist and antiracist languages, he implicitly admits, lay
in their power to create completely other ways of thinking and talking, not in
their ability to change the crisis-of-man jargon.
There are other political and historiographical problems
with the discourse worth noting as well.. read more:
