Copyright 1992 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
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March 1, 1992, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section 4; Page 15; Column 2; Editorial Desk
LENGTH: 1427 words
HEADLINE: The End of the Modern Era
BYLINE: By Vaclav
BODY:
The end of Communism is, first and foremost, a message to the human race. It is
a message we have not yet fully deciphered and comprehended. In its deepest
sense, the end of Communism has brought a major era in human history to an end.
It has brought an end not just to the 19th and 20th centuries, but to the
modern age as a whole.
The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in
different forms, that the world -- and Being as such -- is a wholly knowable
system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and
rationally direct for his own benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance
and developing from the Enlightenment to socialism, from positivism to
scientism, from the Industrial Revolution to the information revolution, was
characterized by rapid advances in rational, cognitive thinking.
This, in turn, gave rise to the proud belief that man, as the pinnacle of
everything that exists, was capable of objectively describing, explaining and
controlling everything that exists, and of possessing the one and only truth
about the world. It was an era in which there was a cult of depersonalized
objectivity, an era in which objective knowledge was amassed and
technologically exploited, an era of belief in automatic progress brokered by
the scientific method. It was an era of systems, institutions, mechanisms and
statistical averages. It was an era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations
of reality, an era in which the goal was to find a universal theory of the
world, and thus a universal key to unlock its prosperity.
Communism was the perverse extreme of this trend. It was an attempt, on the
basis of a few propositions masquerading as the only scientific truth, to
organize all of life according to a single model, and to subject it to central
planning and control regardless of whether or not that was what life wanted.
The fall of Communism can be regarded as a sign that modern thought -- based on
the premise that the world is objectively knowable, and that the knowledge so
obtained can be absolutely generalized -- has come to a final crisis. This era
has created the first global, or planetary, technical civilization, but it has
reached the limit of its potential, the point beyond which the abyss begins.
The end of Communism is a serious warning to all mankind. It is a signal that
the era of arrogant, absolutist reason is drawing to a close and that it is
high time to draw conclusions from that fact.
Communism was not defeated by military force, but by life, by the human spirit,
by conscience, by the resistance of Being and man to manipulation. It was
defeated by a revolt of color, authenticity, history in all its variety and
human individuality against imprisonment within a uniform ideology.
This powerful signal is coming at the 11th hour. We all know civilization is in
danger. The population explosion and the greenhouse effect, holes in the ozone
and AIDS, the threat of nuclear terrorism and the dramatically widening gap
between the rich north and the poor south, the danger of famine, the depletion
of the biosphere and the mineral resources of the planet, the expansion of
commercial television culture and the growing threat of regional wars -- all
these, combined with thousands of other factors, represent a general threat to
mankind.
The large paradox at the moment is that man -- a great collector of information
-- is well aware of all this, yet is absolutely incapable of dealing with the
danger. Traditional science, with its usual coolness, can describe the
different ways we might destroy ourselves, but it cannot offer us truly effective
and practicable instructions on how to avert them. There is too much to know;
the information is muddled or poorly organized; these processes can no longer
be fully grasped and understood, let alone contained or halted.
We are looking for new scientific recipes, new ideologies, new control systems,
new institutions, new instruments to eliminate the dreadful consequences of our
previous recipes, ideologies, control systems, institutions and instruments. We
treat the fatal consequences of technology as though they were a technical
defect that could be remedied by technology alone. We are looking for an
objective way out of the crisis of objectivism.
Everything would seem to suggest that this is not the way to go. We cannot
devise, within the traditional modern attitude to reality, a system that will
eliminate all the disastrous consequences of previous systems. We cannot
discover a law or theory whose technical application will eliminate all the
disastrous consequences of the technical application of earlier laws and
technologies.
What is needed is something different, something larger. Man's attitude to the
world must be radically changed. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that
the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use
waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in
the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.
It is my profound conviction that we have to release from the sphere of private
whim such forces as a natural, unique and unrepeatable experience of the world,
an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense
of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage,
compassion and faith in the importance of particular measures that do not
aspire to be a universal key to salvation. Such forces must be rehabilitated.
Things must once more be given a chance to present themselves as they are, to
be perceived in their individuality. We must see the pluralism of the world,
and not bind it by seeking common denominators or reducing everything to a
single common equation.
We must try harder to understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the
mere construction of universal systemic solutions, to be applied to reality
from the outside; it is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality through
personal experience. Such an approach promotes an atmosphere of tolerant
solidarity and unity in diversity based on mutual respect, genuine pluralism
and parallelism. In a word, human uniqueness, human action and the human spirit
must be rehabilitated.
The world today is a world in which generality, objectivity and universality
are in crisis. This world presents a great challenge to the practice of
politics, which, it seems to me, still has a technocratic, utilitarian approach
to Being, and therefore to political power as well. Many of the traditional
mechanisms of democracy created and developed and conserved in the modern era
are so linked to the cult of objectivity and statistical average that they can
annul human individuality. We can see this in political language, where cliche
often squeezes out a personal tone. And when a personal tone does crop up, it
is usually calculated, not an outburst of personal authenticity.
Sooner or later politics will be faced with the task of finding a new,
postmodern face. A politician must become a person again, someone who trusts
not only a scientific representation and analysis of the world, but also the
world itself. He must believe not only in sociological statistics, but also in
real people. He must trust not only an objective interpretation of reality, but
also his own soul; not only an adopted ideology, but also his own thoughts; not
only the summary reports he receives each morning, but also his own feeling.
Soul, individual spirituality, first-hand personal insight into things; the
courage to be himself and go the way his conscience points, humility in the
face of the mysterious order of Being, confidence in its natural direction and,
above all, trust in his own subjectivity as his principal link with the
subjectivity of the world -- these are the qualities that politicians of the
future should cultivate.
Looking at politics "from the inside," as it were, has if anything
confirmed my belief that the world of today -- with the dramatic changes it is
going through and in its determination not to destroy itself -- presents a
great challenge to politicians.
It is not that we should simply seek new and better ways of managing society,
the economy and the world. The point is that we should fundamentally change how
we behave. And who but politicians should lead the way? Their changed attitude
toward the world, themselves and their responsibility can give rise to truly
effective systemic and institutional changes.