A Crisis of Cultural Modernity?

The End of Modernism, Matthias Gisslar's attempt at a new non-leftist social theory, brings Critical Woke Studies and classical sociology together in conversation

Is cultural modernity – the push for group equality and expressive individualism – exhausted?

In today’s high-octane online infosphere, obscure scholars struggle to be heard above the din of those who regularly appear on podcasts and/or have a significant number of Twitter followers (I modestly count myself in this category!).

One such individual is Matthias Gisslar, who has all of 155 followers on Twitter and whose pinned tweet about his self-published book on wokeness and modern society, The End of Modernism, garnered just 4 likes (one of which is my recent contribution!)

And yet…

He has written a relatively interesting book that sets out a theory of modern society and contains insights that should interest readers of more popular critical discussions of woke – such as my new book Taboo / Third Awokening.

Gisslar is clearly well-read in both Sociology and in the emerging discipline of what I call Critical Woke Studies (CWS).

His book synthesizes the arguments of recent CWS works by Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott, Chris Rufo, Chris Caldwell, Richard Hanania, Frances Fukuyama, Douglas Murray, Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Victor Davis Hanson, Joanna Williams, Scott McKay, Vivek Ramaswamy, Eric and Brett Weinstein, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and more.

These recent anti-woke claims are considered alongside a venerable sociological tradition from Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Weber through Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, the postmodernists, Critical Theorists and, more recently, Anthony Giddens  - the LSE Vice-Chancellor who handed me my PhD scroll in 1999 (I still have the photo)!

There are very few non-progressive sociologists (I count myself as one), and it is refreshing to see another mind that is well-steeped in both the classics and the recent outpouring of CWS titles.

Gisslar’s ambition, like many classical sociological theorists, is to craft a total theory of modernity. He distinguishes between modernity as a time period – typically dated from 1789 – and as spirit. He reserves the term modernism for the latter, which is a kind of optimistic zeitgeist characterized by a belief in linear rational and technical progress.

When post-modernists declared an end to the ‘grand narrative’ of modernization, what they were really describing was intellectuals’ loss of confidence in the optimistic project of Enlightenment reason and modernization. (This attitudes goes back to the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century and Martin Heidegger’s gloomy prognostications in the early twentieth, but came to fruition in the 60s and 70s.)

But what most late twentieth century sociologists – such as Foucault or Giddens – miss, is that modernity actually has three thrusts. Not just the rationality of techno-capitalism (i.e. ‘ neoliberalism’), but the equality and expressive individualism imperatives. Because sociologists of the past half century have been, almost without exception, cultural leftists, they are blind to to the march of egalitarianism and expressive individualism, which they take as self-evidently good things. They have thereby chosen to define modernity only in rational-technical terms.

This creates a blind spot around liberal-egalitarian modernization. This is a theme that Daniel Bell took on in his classic work The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), an enormous omission from Gisslar’s book. Bell defined modernism as a cultural attitude which replaced community and tradition with expressive individualism, pastiche and novelty. He dates this new sensibility to the 1880s with post-Impressionism in art, involving a rising radicalism as we move to abstraction and deconstruction, exemplified in inter-war aesthetic rebellions such as Dada and Surrealism. Its stance toward national and religious narratives was to tear them down as stifling, outdated and bourgeois.

If we think of modernization in terms of a deepening push for Bell’s expressive individualism as well as a Tocquevillean socialist-cum-humanitarian egalitarianism, then it is abundantly clear that we are not ‘post’ modern.

Gisslar prefers to think of us as inhabiting an interregnum between early and late (or ‘high’) modernity. The early phase, from about 1800 to 1950, was marked by unbridled optimism and linear growth, the latter, since then, by pessimism and turbulence.

The left-wing commitments of most social scientists render them blind to, or complicit in, cultural modernity. While they fixate on economic and techno-scientific modernization with a keen eye, they fail to notice the cultural current they are swimming in.

Extreme individualism, evident in trends such as divorce, deaths of despair, the decline of community and social capital, and falling birth rates, point to a crisis of expressive individualism. Likewise, for Gisslar, the persistent failure of the left, whether in the guise of communism’s collapse or the excesses of the 1970s-80s welfare state and unions, have created anxiety on the intellectual left.

According to Gisslar, we face a cyclical pattern of radical left-wing outbursts every 30 years. ‘The French Revolution was in the 1780s….there were revolutions in the 1840s and 1870s…[in] 1900 we have the general strike…From the 1930s, we have polarisation and the limited threat from communism. In the 1960s, we have the student revolt.’ He sees the 1990s as an exception because of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but picks up the thread with BLM in 2020.

I am not convinced, but it is a bold claim.

More compelling is his Tocquevillean argument that as equality is achieved, the left becomes increasingly utopian and radical. ‘Radicalism can happen when a formerly disempowered group has become larger, more equal, organised, educated, wealthy and influential…radicalism can follow from too rapid change, even if this change is mostly positive.’

Rising class equality, race equality, sexual and gender equality can throw up the question of revenge: ‘what to do with the former masters.’ For Gisslar, revenge is an important motivation for radicals, who may be fired by past success in equal rights movements to then move toward utopianism. Hence affirmative action.

Gisslar views affirmative action as a ‘modernized form of blood feud because innocent children are punished for the alleged sins of their fathers. This is something that normally only tribal societies, the mafia, or the worst kinds of tyrannies engage in.’ He is an unsparing critic of woke, which he deems as embodying the same ‘oppressor-oppressed’ structure as Marxism, even if the content differs.

An another interesting digression, he draws attention to a ‘structural tragedy’ whereby productive bourgeois citizens put their heads down while the left takes over meaning-making functions like academia, art and journalism. This division of labour in western societies results in powerful imbalances, the consequences of which we are currently living through.

The book goes on to make interesting claims about the modern university. Specifically, Gisslar views science as largely proceeding along the lines of the older modernization assumptions centred on rationality and technology, and linear progress. However, the social sciences and humanities have increasingly tended to oscillate with fads, always pursuing the latest ‘shiny new object’, with careerists pouring old wine into new bottles.

My personal favourites are (unmentioned in the book), ‘path-dependency’, a relabeling of the older theory of historicist causation, and ‘process-tracing’, otherwise known as historical analysis. As he writes, ‘sociological theory reads like an elephant’s churchyard of debunked “isms”.’

More importantly, the human sciences are shot through with ideology. ‘Rather than just doing science, the social sciences are more or less directly involved in doing the culture.’ In other words, social scientists aren’t observers but active participants in ideas. Not just analysts but ideologues. This is the genesis of scholar-activism.

The only difference, I would add, is that in the past most scholars would at least pretend to be detached. Now, with the growing influence of critical race, gender and sexuality perspectives, the faux-neutral academics of the social sciences are ideologically out and proud between the covers of journals. There is perhaps no better illustration of this than the multi-journal academic hoax perpetrated by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian.

Late in the book, Gisslar takes no prisoners in interrogating several anti-woke scholars, notably Richard Hanania. Hanania’s claim that culture is downstream of politics is, according to Gisslar, an unproven assertion that flies in the face of comparative evidence. Despite my affection for Richard, as head of the CSPI think tank where I am a board member, I think that criticism hits the mark.

What follows is, however, far less commendable:

‘Hanania in reality is fragmented, incoherent and confused, repeatedly contradicts himself, shifts the goalposts, cherry-picks his empirical examples, replaces argument with rhetoric, resorts to low-resolution and idiosyncratic terminology. Because of this, and because of his arrogance toward all other explanations, including outright claims that others are conceptually confused and self-serving, it is doubtful if we should take him seriously. My view is that we should not. What this looks like is a small dog who thinks that he is a big dog, and perhaps also a result of lowered standards for research degrees in the American university system.’

Phew. I’ve seen attacks but that is quite something. I would definitely push back inasmuch as Richard is sharp on quantitative public opinion and voting research as well as legal scholarship and largely sticks to intelligible terminology in his important book rather than jargon. I share Gisslar’s culturalist critique of Hanania, and Hanania certainly doesn’t keep his powder dry online when he thinks someone is a fool. But I think this passage does a disservice to the book and trivializes otherwise important arguments.

Gisslar makes a final, and obvious (though rarely acknowledged) point, which is that most of the predictions of social theory are nonsense. Foucault, one of the top-cited academics of all time, peddled a succession of claims about knowledge as a power construct that went wholly unmeasured and untested. ‘When and where did Foucault disprove this [counterarguments],’ Gisslar taunts. ‘Through historical comparisons? And when did he prove the capitalist’s actual motives [of power and control]. Maybe it [knowledge] was just a heritage from religion, and had nothing to do with capitalism.’

The idea that power games underpin knowledge claims is nothing but a fact-free meta theory. If Foucault’s claim is true, adds Gisslar, how are we to believe that he and those like him have pure motives rather than also acting out of a will to power? Foucault ducked the question. Meanwhile we can judge where his ideas led him: endorsing Iranian theocrats, lauding criminal sociopaths and engaging in violent sadomasochistic sex.

Foucault’s lack of accountability speaks to a larger game, adds Gisslar, in which ‘the radical left…could reinvent itself, deny others the right to do objective social science and [thereby] divert attention’ from the failures of communism. By deconstructing the objective truth-based order, the radical left spared itself the humiliation of being held to account by science. Its ideas have been a disaster for mankind, but it got away with it. Che and Karl Marx are viewed as cuddly romantic and benign figures while anyone on the intellectual right is demonized as a mean reactionary.

The book takes some odd turns. It rightly criticizes relativism, but somehow decides that quantitative social science is wrongheaded because the social sciences cannot be rational. Instead social scientists should aspire to something called pursuing ‘knowledge about a universal human nature.’ This seems the riposte of the classicist who prefers reading old tomes – however insightful – to crunching numbers and collecting new data about the world.

There is also a ‘just-so’ quality to the explanatory framework, exemplified in the 20-odd independent explanations for woke that are laid out in pages 162-164 of his conclusion. As with the 30-year cycles of left radicalism, this appears to be a kind of meta-qualitative p-hacking to join the dots of an overdetermined intellectual edifice. I will admit to being a splitter rather than a lumper when it comes to explaining the world, but this strikes me as a flagrant insult to Occam’s Razor.

When all is said and done, I found the book interesting and refreshing, even if its core suggestion for a science of universal human nature is elusive and anticlimactic. It makes its most important contribution by calling bullshit on the claims of many modern social theorists.

More than anything else, the idea that left-wing theorists set up a ‘modernist’ straw man to deconstruct while leaving cultural liberalism and egalitarianism untouched rings true.

Perhaps we can discern, in falling birth and marriage rates; as well as rising mental illness, polarization and mistrust; a crisis of cultural modernity.

This could herald a limit to 120 years of Anglo-American cultural left-liberalization, especially its post-1960s extremist phase.