Alienation, ugliness, cheapness, materialism, subservience to our own technology, distraction, excessive haste, inattention, hideous cruelties carried out in secret while a finicky daintiness and moral rectitude governs in public, an accumulation of “knowledge” beneath which we can hardly breathe or see—none of these is new.
Except for the outdated technological references, Thoreau could almost be writing today when he says, “The nation itself, with all its so called internal improvements, which, by the way, are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim… It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour… We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us” (Walden).
Gandhi, sixty years later: “Only evil can travel by railways, because only evil wants to travel fast” (Hind Swaraj).
Something is wrong with modernity. It has been wrong all along, but it’s reached a new pitch. No prophet is needed now to warn us: we all feel the disaster upon us.
You can’t return to the past. But if forwards is terrible and backwards impossible, then where do we go?
*
Every project to turn back or remake modernity has devolved into nightmare; every project to respond gently to it with something other than its own logic has sputtered out and vanished. Its logic emerges supreme, unstoppable. I would like to call this the logic of capital, but that’s too easy. It is the logic of prosperity, of more for less—more goods, more entertainment, more information for less labor, less effort, less trouble.
The problem is not to defeat this logic, for it is already defeating itself: its promise is ease, comfort, certainty, happiness, whereas we are nervous, angry, confused and filled with despair. Even its basic premises are coming apart: the goods are cheap and ugly and break quickly; the food is unhealthy, the entertainment trashy, the work week keeps getting longer.
The problem is, what other principle is there?
What can organize human behavior on so large a scale, so powerfully, organically, and simply as the market? Nothing. Nothing. Let us think not of replacing it but of introducing other principles that adhere to different logics, principles strong enough to oppose it, to control it, to keep it from ruining itself. This was, by some accounts, to be the role of the state; the state fails to play this role not, as some believe, because it was hijacked by special interests, but because it never was a force opposed to modernity but a force of modernity. It is governed by the same logic: the logic of improvement, of efficiency, of growth, of material-political-economic power. The modern state, the modern system of private land ownership, the corporation, the principle of oversight and control from the center— all these emerge together, not incidentally but necessarily, outgrowths of the same vision.
What follows a fundamentally different logic must be of a fundamentally different kind: not economic, not legalistic, not contractual. It will not come from the state nor from any economic model or business initiative. It will not "succeed" in those terms. It will come, if it comes at all, from individual human beings entering into association with one another, based on agreements that are not enforced by law, but which are nonetheless felt as binding and are enforced by social pressure and by personal honor. So this new association will have exactly the same form (but not the same content) as those old, stiffling, prejudiced codes that we were so eager to shuffle off. It will not free us but constrain us. It will limit our actions, bind us to conduct that will not always be in our material “interests” or in line with our immediate desires. We will enter into these agreements, if we enter into them, because we understand that the constraints are necessary for the kinds of lives we want to live, for the kind of world (however small) that we want to live in.
Such an association could reasonably be called a society. (Whereas an arrangement in which people's obligations towards one another are wholly defined by contract and required by law perhaps should not be called that.)
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