Naked Modernity
Value Harmonics - Part 2 - Chapter 4
This series is an essay-in-parts on values, in which we develop a post-postmodern value sensibility.
Post-postmodernism is a loaded term, encompassing three important insights about where we are as a species: that modernity marks a distinct and unprecedented phase in human history; that there is ongoing postmodern disillusionment with modernity, its values, assumptions, and limitations; and that something lies even beyond this disillusionment. A post-postmodern position must be grounded both in history and in a richer vision of human nature and potential. It moves to metabolize the yet-undigested lessons of history more fully, so as to better choose a new path forward for humanity. If we have a future, it will be post-postmodern.
We aim to stabilize a new post-postmodern value discourse, fit to carry us beyond (post)modern limitations. More than presenting another theory of value, this is a means of engendering the clarity to clear the fog of millennia of value confusion.
But what are values? We mean much more than the named ideals that have come and gone through the ages, such as benevolence, generosity, justice, or equality. These we labeled nominal values. Nominal values alone present a partial, vague, and misleading impression of a larger, more important story. Alongside them, we introduced lived values. Often private, implicit, or unexamined, these nevertheless shape humanity’s landscapes of salience and desirability. If nominal values are banners, lived values are sails.
Like our nominal values, our lived values, examined or otherwise, have also changed with the ages. In Part 2 of the series, we have been presenting this history of values. As we have seen, values are complex and flow from many sources. They co-arise with complementary social systems. They are shaped by intergenerational traumas and sociocultural access and constraint, and, even more deeply, by our understanding of Nature, life, and the universe, in the broadest sense.
To envision a post-postmodern horizon, we must first grasp modernity and postmodernity as well as their limitations. We are now set to conclude our history of values with the final chapter, in which we shall review these movements, bringing us squarely into our present moment of collapse and transformation.
Our values, conscious or otherwise, determine what we seek to protect, salvage, replace, rebuild, or invent, as the dust settles on the declining modern world order.
Where We Left Off
In Part 1, we presented the territory by asking and answering: What are values? Instead of limiting the discussion to nominal values, we employed a phenomenological lens, reclaiming values as tangible, investigable forces in human experience—lived values. The gap between nominal and lived values serves as a qualitative measure of sociocultural hypocrisy.
In Chapter 2, we argued for the value crisis as the defining issue of our time, seeing how the metacrisis of modernity is, at its core, a crisis of orientation, stemming from confusion regarding what does and does not matter.
In Part 2, we have been presenting a genealogy of the modern value system. It has only been a rough sketch, but still, it reveals the various sedimentary layers that constitute the modern value system.
In Chapter 1, we outlined the scope of our search and discussed Nature, from which human culture emerged, countering modern bias and alienation to more clearly present the backdrop of the first, natural societies.
In Chapter 2, we described these natural societies and the violent dialectical turn that replaced a natural perception of intrinsic value with extrinsic, utilitarian, anthropo-projected values oriented around power, through the conquests of a traumatically nature-alienated dominator-culture. These extrinsic values were incompatible with the value systems of the natural cultures they replaced. The perception of intrinsic values, though ineradicable, has taken a back seat in orienting human society and directing history since.
In Chapter 3, we examined the various stages of the classical (class-based) world, a world formed by the formalization and institutionalization of the warriors’ conquests. Through inheritance law, custom, and myth—ensuring plunder was legitimized and passed to the victors' descendants—the first stratified societies and hereditary aristocrats were born, as value systems bifurcated along class lines, reflecting social realities.
The higher class, those elites who inherit prestige, power, and possessions by birth, are largely oriented around the logic of power games through which they may expand or protect their family’s intergenerational wealth and status. Alongside the game of power, elites were oriented toward luxury goods (which only they could access), the spoils of the winners.
Meanwhile, the marginalized and downtrodden—slaves, women, and the lower classes—are not motivated by nor pursue the same things in classical societies as the elites. They cannot. Broadly speaking, in such societies, the values of the “masses” are shaped by socioeconomic circumstances, availabilities and constraints, and the dictates of their rulers. At best, the simple well-being of a close-knit community, perhaps in peaceful interludes, and at worst, not much more than day-by-day survival.
In terms of this basic structure of a stratified value system, the classical world remained largely unchanged throughout this larger classical period, from Bronze Age states through the Bronze Age collapse and into Rome. This composite classical value system survived relatively unscathed even the revolutionary threat of early Christianity, which was co-opted by and then merged with the Roman Empire, setting the tone for medieval Europe for another millennium.
But the attempt to use Christianity, with its egalitarian spirit and intrinsic-value perception, as a unifying force to stabilize the classical world order with its stratified, extrinsic-value system, exacerbated the contradictions and tensions within Christian Europe. The classical system was now justified by Christian dogma, perpetuating castes and rationalizing religious wars. To maintain stability through these contradictions, the Catholic Church suppressed free speech and independent thought, going as far as unleashing a violent Inquisition to quash heretical sects.
A contorted Christian Europe, held together by sheer force, was primed for revolution through a series of crises in the 14th and 15th centuries. With the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Gutenberg press, the perfect storm was about to hit this house of cards, reshuffling the deck.
But how thoroughly was the deck truly shuffled? When a system collapses, whatever we build in its stead is made in accordance with our values, as they reveal to us the contours of what is desirable. If our values remain unexamined and unchanged, will the new not be a repetition of the old? Is such a transformation not superficial and aesthetic? Do we not try again for the same thing, only this time to ‘get it right?’ Is modernity somehow an inadvertent echo of the legacies it sought to replace?
Rather than regurgitating well-known history, we are attempting to excavate our modern value system. Only by digging deeper will the undercurrents of the world come into view—the world we have created, are living in, and are perhaps witnessing the demise of. Only by fully coming to terms with these unexamined values may we become free of them—free, that is, to seek something new.
The Rise of Modernity
Late Medieval Background
The crises of 14th–15th century Europe—the Black Death, famines, wars, financial panics, peasant revolts—were predictable symptoms of the limitations and internal contradictions of classical societies.
If these phenomena are predictable in classical societies, why did they prove so catalytic for Catholic Europe? Now that Europe’s classical social order was supposedly sanctioned by God, it became rigid and brittle. In polytheistic societies, gods were capricious, lustful, vain, warlike, and, crucially, fallible. By contrast, if one’s society is supposedly ordained by a perfect being, each failure contradicts the ruling narrative. During the Schism of 1378, Europe had two, then three, simultaneous claimants to the Papacy, in a society long fatigued and cynical regarding Church corruption.
These crises and failures delegitimized the social order and catalyzed transformation, facilitating three interrelated processes that would come to shape the coming age: a shift in the social role of money; urbanization; and, through these, the ascendance of a “middle” class.
The Renaissance
Renaissance literally means rebirth. But the rebirth of what? It is the rebirth of nothing less than the human spirit, from a decaying medieval Europe. In the Renaissance—a revolution still underway—the fetters that curtailed human potential in classical society began to crack.
For centuries, since the rise of the Roman Empire and its Catholic offspring, free thought and speech were stifled in Europe, sacrificed on the altar of its stability. In classical society, it was common sense that the lot of most people was to till the fields and obey their betters. But the capacity for independent thought capable of challenging such assumptions, long suppressed in Europe, was due for a comeback.
In 1453, wider Christendom suffered a blow as Byzantium fell to the Turks. Greek scholars fled the city to settle in Italian city-states. With them, the original words of Plato and Aristotle reappeared on the European stage.1 With the spirit of free inquiry exemplified by the Greeks, the notions of a deliberative process of value clarification and social reexamination were precariously reemerging. This signaled a rekindling of a humanist spirit, extolling the potential of the individual to become, as well as the potential to think independently, often in opposition to the common sense of one’s peers. The individual was to be empowered to question, to doubt, to challenge calcified assumptions, and to reach one’s own conclusions.
Renaissance thinkers such as Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536), and Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) presented an image of human nature as openly self-creating and self-inventing, and employed philosophical methods to prod dogmatic claims and sociocultural givens. Humanist artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Raphael (1483–1520) embodied the polymathic Renaissance Man and created art that depicted the human form and essence as noble and heroic. This posed a fundamental, if implicit, threat to hierarchical classical society, with its institutionalized inequality of human worth. After all, are classical societies not based on the premise that some are born superior to others? Is nobility (of spirit) not reserved for nobles (by birth)? By ennobling intrinsic human nature, these trailblazers set the stage for the next, bolder phase of the movement, with more direct challenges of the long-standing status quo of classical European society.
This intellectual avant-garde found receptive patrons in the Italian city-states, where new wealth was made through trade and finance rather than the ‘old’ inherited wealth of aristocratic bloodlines and their vast estates. In these city-states with their wealthy denizens, money and bourgeois, non-noble status were visible, prestigious, and politically potent, prefiguring similar trends in Northwestern Europe.
Whereas in ancient Greece such discourse was limited to a select few, the timely invention of the printing press (c. 1440s) made this fickle flame into a wildfire destined to sweep over old Europe. The printing press challenged the Church’s monopoly on knowledge transmission and lowered the barrier to entry to the collective discourse.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to establish direct trade routes to India and China, the monarchies of Western Europe sponsored naval expeditions that led to the unintended discovery of a so-called New World. These expeditions led to the further “horizontal” expansion of classical culture’s violent warrior logic, as Western European powers began to exert colonial control abroad. Whatever social transformations would convulse Europe were now destined to reach the entire planet.
Vast quantities of precious metals discovered in the New World—extracted with the lives of hundreds of thousands of enslaved natives—surged into European markets, facilitating the monetization of a previously feudal economy where obligations were primarily paid in-kind.
Rise of the Middle Class
Broadly speaking, classical societies divide into two groups—winners and losers: a tiny minority of elites—hereditary aristocrats—and a vast lower class to serve them. But between these two classes—high and low—a new one began to claim its space and distinct identity in the “middle.” This growing middle class was composed of urbanites (hence bourgeoisie, from Frankish burg, meaning fortified town) who climbed the social ladder only to find a glass ceiling barring their path to the upper, bloodline-based crust of society and status that money could not buy.
Traditionally in Christian Europe, usury, alongside excessive handling of money more generally, was shunned and reserved for the unscrupulous (or for Jews, those disposable middlemen of aristocratic wealth). But several processes changed the social role of money. The Reformation (and, to a greater extent, Calvinism) challenged the old prohibitions of usury, New World gold and silver facilitated the monetization of the economy, and the Black Death (1347-1353) brought a ‘demographic shock’ that greatly strengthened the bargaining power of surviving peasants, also allowing them to seek better fortunes in the growing cities of Western Europe. Simultaneously, cities grew in importance as proto-industrial centers, for instance, to support a growing gunpowder industry, which required highly concentrated skill and capital.
Necessity made money handling more legitimate. Increasingly, it became a central status indicator. Perhaps more significant was its growing efficacy as a lever of power amid the general monetization of economic life, and its tendency toward concentration as the taboo against usury eroded. Overall, we see here the gradual, quiet emergence of capitalism. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, the aristocratic status that money once could not buy was indeed commodified through venality of office, first in France and Spain, and later throughout Western Europe.
An emerging capitalism saw the invention of the economist, a novel social scientist for a novel social phenomenon. The first, political economists, challenged the entrenched nobility over the hereditary property rights they retained since the dawn of the classical age, and their unproductive economic function as parasitic rentiers.2
The rise of the bourgeoisie threatened the justification of hereditary power and, through it, the stability of the preexisting power structure. The Church and the nobility, the complicit beneficiaries of classical Europe and the symbols of its traditional structure, suffered from a legitimacy crisis. With the Protestant Reformation and a rising middle class, Western Europe was primed for a revolution in thought.
The Enlightenment
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self‑incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without the guidance of another.”
- Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment? (1784)
The Enlightenment was a climactic resurgence of the philosopher’s quest to challenge unexamined assumptions, promising a just society ruled by reason rather than might or unexamined dogmas. This intellectual movement, reacting with fervent zeal to centuries of suppression of honest sociocultural self-reflection, put individual reason on a pedestal as the final adjudicator of all things. The Enlightenment subjected all aspects of social life to the scrutiny of rational inquiry and sought universality, assuming that whatever is based on clear-headed reason rather than arbitrary custom must be good, true, and fit for all humanity at all times and all places.
As we argued, the culture into which this philosophical process was reintroduced had not fundamentally changed since its dawn in Greece. Rome rose to total power, fell, and then reincarnated as a loose theocratic confederacy under the Catholic banner—a similarly classical society, only now justified on totalizing, monotheistic grounds. Due to this religious justification, the rational examination of the foundations of society now required a deconstruction of its metaphysical dogmas and its religious façade. The Enlighteners’ pursuit of a just society was thus entangled with secularization. Its rejection of traditional assumptions led to a pervasive, if often implicit, sense of superiority over all prior modes of thought.
Soon, much of the content of ancient Greek thought was discarded (say, Platonic forms or Aristotelian telos), but the spirit of the process became unstoppable. Reviving the self-ordained authority of the individual to (re)think from first principles culminated, as it always threatened to, in a radically ambitious project of a social clean slate. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) sought philosophical systems that justified new, unadulterated value systems on purely rational grounds, free of metaphysical assumptions or blindly inherited traditions. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire (1694-1778) espoused reason over superstition, alongside liberty and tolerance. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) proposed equality, fraternity, and popular sovereignty. A growing basket of “rational” nominal values was being collected.
As the Enlightenment unfolded, it challenged the divine right of kings, religious authority, and the traditional privileges of the aristocracy. This period marked the beginning of a reevaluation of Europe’s long-standing value system, largely intact and unchallenged since the Bronze Age. But what were the Enlighteners using their newly liberated rationality to rationalize? Even as they challenged Christianity’s nominal values, they must still have been moved by underlying currents that guided them toward desirable outcomes. What value landscape nevertheless drives one to try and derive a value system, supposedly ex nihilo?
Progressing… Where?
In a newly dynamic Europe shaking off dogmatic stagnation, individuals were incentivized to innovate for newly accessible social mobility and monetary rewards. Unprecedented events and fresh ideas, scientific leaps and technological novelties proliferated. Europe glimpsed a vision of humanity leaving its dogmatic darkness toward a better world, through a greater realization of truth through science, power through technology, and an increasingly rational society. By racing in this direction, utopian Enlighteners argued, the future will be better. Better, that is, than the classical, feudal, dogmatic society which was all they knew. Better, however, according to the values of that very same classical society.
Were the Enlighteners really able to wipe the slate clean? It is often argued that thinkers of this era sought to rationalize Judeo-Christian values, which they were so thoroughly steeped in that they could not even notice. Kant, for instance, has been accused by Nietzsche of simply supposing that all souls are equal so as to elevate the primacy of the moral conscience. The notion of material progress that lies at the heart of modernity is commonly presented as a secularization of salvation mythology, justifying the sacrifices of industrialization in the name of a prophesied technological utopia.
In the classical world, historical movement was “horizontal,” that is, one nation’s (or aristocratic family’s) benefit incurred another’s loss in strictly win-lose dynamics. Seasons change, but the world, in essence, stays the same. From Judaism, Christianity inherited the notion of linear time with an eschatological future horizon in which the righteous enjoy eternal peace.3 In a secularizing Europe, this promised land would not be given to the righteous by God, but must be wrested from an oppressive Nature and a cold, dead universe. This “paradise” of material comfort, hard-won through human ingenuity and effort, persists as the grand aspiration of modernity to this day.
Though the Enlighteners justified their convictions with reason and rationality, they were guided by underlying, often implicit value sensibilities. Kant, as noted, worked in his system of thought to have humans be seen as moral ends rather than means—intrinsically valued. This sentiment can be credited to Christianity, as it often is, but with a wider historical aperture, it can be appreciated that Yeshua Himself did not “invent” intrinsic value; rather, the great teacher simply insisted on the primacy of intrinsic value over the contingent, transient, socially constructed value system of classical Rome. However, as we saw, rather than informing Catholic Europe, this insight lingered as a nominal-lived contradiction within classical Christian society.
Therefore, alongside the accusation of “Jesus smuggling,” we must lay a more pernicious one at the feet of the Enlighteners—”classical smuggling.” “Jesus smuggling” names the way Enlightenment thinkers supposedly secularized Christian mythology, as well as its nominal values—the equality, sanctity, and dignity of the human being—while presenting them as deduced from some pure, objective, self-standing reason. “Classical smuggling,” by contrast, names the unexamined importation of warrior-classical desires—domination, accumulation, prestige, luxury—into the very heart of the new rational order. Modernity thus fused a Christian-inflected language of intrinsic human worth with a classical grammar of extrinsic, competitive value, all under the banner of a supposedly neutral objectivity.
We now come full circle to the underlying question of Nature (explored in Chapter 1 of Part 2). How can one who attempts to think, from first principles, on the essence of culture, society, and human nature, know whether or not they are unwittingly carrying over unexamined cultural baggage? How far must one dig? Is reason a sufficient tool for this task? What may unconsciously drive this reason? Are other tools, perhaps, needed?4
As the warrior’s conquests (of Chapter 2) were normalized (Chapter 3), the alienation of Western culture from Nature was enshrined, and extrinsic valueception became indistinguishable from human nature. This traumatic alienation was reproduced intergenerationally by the social structure of hierarchical, coercive, objectifying classical societies, finally infecting the “objective” first principles of the Enlightenment. In terms of attitude toward Nature, this was seen, for instance, in the language of Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific method, when portraying the practice of science in relation to Nature with terms that later, feminist thinkers identified as no less than rape-metaphor. An even clearer expression of this alienation can be seen in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651), which famously depicts the human condition in pre-civilized (natural) societies as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” To avoid this old pitfall, we began this story by first attempting to counter modern Nature-alienation.
Alongside the universalist (mostly continental) project that sought a moral law valid for all rational beings, another, proprietarian (mostly English) strand elevated private property and contract as the civilizing grammar of social life, as seen through John Locke’s three “natural” rights—life, liberty, and estate (private property). All in all, the Enlightenment sought, admirably, to democratize the values it revered. But which values were these? Enlighteners sought to emulate and distribute the valuables hoarded by the first conquerors and their aristocratic progeny.
The Enlightenment was far from a monolithic movement. In contrast with the assumptions of Enlightenment thinkers, reason is not an objective, universal faculty of cognition that will reach identical conclusions for all reasoning beings “freed from dogma.” This misunderstanding stemmed from a failure to recognize that all reasoning is motivated, driven by underlying values, and is thus subjective. On this false premise was based the notion that the rational conclusions of the Enlightenment could legitimately be universalized. It is unsurprising, in hindsight, that this “rational” movement diverged into conflicting, antinomical strands, or that it sought to create an equal society on the one hand, and to recreate classical society on the other.
A Self-Conflicted Revolution
Objective or otherwise, be they traumatized or clean slate, these revolutionary trends posed the greatest threat to the traditional power structure since the dawn of the classical era. The French Revolution (1789-1799) followed the American Revolution (1775-1783), overthrowing Louis XVI, and monarchs across Europe scrambled to stave off the threat.
Whereas France, long accustomed to total monarchy and overburdened by crises, quickly regressed into another despotism under Napoleon, the young American colonies were better positioned to shake off the yoke of far-off British monarchs. They enacted a completely novel social experiment on a vast, rich, insulated, “unoccupied” “virgin” land. They were inspired by the humanistic spirit of the Enlightenment and, crucially, by the egalitarian democracies of the natural, indigenous societies they encountered in the Americas.5 The conflicting strands of the Enlightenment wove into the American project, espousing equality on the one hand and the sanctity of personal power and hereditary property on the other.6
Alongside the universalist idealism embodied by the likes of Kant and the property-and-contract strand embodied by Locke, another can be identified. This one was more suspicious of the grand promises of a world liberated through individual reason, which, once unchained, may become the new tyrant. This strand was evident in the Romantics, especially after the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. This persistent skeptical strand foreshadows later, mature postmodern critique.
Blind to their own internal motivations and reacting to a particular, contingent historical context while making universal generalities, the Enlightenment enacted a tragically ironic historical repetition. Whereas the Church veiled an unexamined classical value system in religious garb, the Enlighteners spun the whole cloth of a supposedly objective rationality to cover over their inherited values. Seeking to make everyone a winner in a win-lose game, their self-contradictory notions of universal good and bad were spread and imposed on the entire planet. Welcome to…
“Modernity”
As we pointed out elsewhere, modernity is a misnomer as misleading as calling the American natives “Indians.” The very naming scheme modernity presumes to have found the rational, universal measure through which to distinguish a primitive past from a rational present. The power to differentiate, rationally and objectively, good and bad, progressive and obsolete, truth and superstition, thereby bringing about the so-called “end of history.” Therefore, modernity, as we call it today, is not a term that refers to the leading edge of sociocultural evolution but rather the implementation of the self-contradicting vision of the Western Age of Enlightenment. This problematic vision was imposed on the entire planet with unprecedented efficiency, enacted as secular social systems in which individual rational agents maximize their own ends (considerate, ideally, of others)—modern democracies and global capitalism.
Feudal serfs and freeholders, released from their traditional rights and obligations, shuffled dispossessed and disoriented into the cities, to act as the choiceless workforce of the capital industrialists. Cut off from land and natural commons, in the cities, one must use money to pay for one’s food and shelter. The descendants and inheritors of the vanquished, who graduated first from slavery to serfdom, acting always as the economic base of society, were now packed into factory floors and workshops. In some ways, the proletariat—literally meaning those having (nothing but) children—were beneficiaries of the new system. They slowly received legal rights under the rational, universal nominal values of the Enlightenment—liberté, égalité, fraternité. These new, rational, universal laws protect the property rights of the propertyless just as well as those of the propertied. Legal equality alongside economic inequality. At a thin, nominal level, equality was achieved.
Hypothetically, within modernity or, more specifically, under capitalism, the lowborn, now a less clearly defined class, enjoy social mobility. Playing their bad hand just right, they can climb the social ladder. They may even be doubly appreciated for their luck and grit if they manage to rise a notch or two above their original station. And what is dangled in their faces as the rewards of ascension? Possessions and respect. Luxury and leisure. Safety. A taste of the life of an aristocrat, feeling like the winners rather than the perpetually anxious losers in the pyramid. What is the golden goose of capitalism if not the passive income that allows one to live off of rent, freeing one from the necessity of selling one’s time and energy—indeed, life force, so to speak—to another?
Both haves and have-nots, within this new system, were set on an ostensibly even playing field, all striving toward the same goal—the old conspicuous consumption of the nobility, the spoils of the old wounded warriors, material wealth and luxury goods, and the privilege of being served rather than serving others. To deliver on this impossible promise, if not (slave) servants, how about a new GE washing machine? If not a horse-led carriage, a brand new, affordable Ford Motor. If not a royal estate, a 2-bedroom in the suburbs with a private lawn,7 and so on.
And so, what are modern values? One may typically expect answers such as liberty, equality, or free education. In our framing, these are merely the nominal, public values of modernity. Its ideals on a good day, empty platitudes on any other. Beneath this surface layer lies the competitive logic of self-interest maximization and capital accumulation, the evolution of the classical-warrior era’s domination over nature and others, now democratized through the new game of power:
Money, Money, Money
In the modern era, the poor and marginalized still eke out a daily existence. Living paycheck to paycheck, one ‘slaves’ for whatever meager cash inflow survival under the new regime requires. Even worse, through usury, one is pulled down into ever-deepening bondage by debt service and compound interest (can a world with usury be free of de facto slavery?). Whatever lofty ideals one may wish to ascribe to the modern era, on the lower strata of the ladder, one’s value landscape collapses to anxious survival due to sheer circumstances and constraints.
Of course, in booming economies, rising tides lift all boats, liberal economists may object. Unfortunately, those who drown as such tides rise can be reliably found outside the bounds of one’s economic analysis.8 One might persist: isn’t the very goal of liberal economics the expansion of the middle class? In other words, getting a higher ratio of winners to losers in the system. Whether or not this is possible,9 the underlying winner-loser dynamic remains the same, and, ultimately, capitalism requires poverty to function.10
More than an economic system, capitalism is modernity’s lived value system. To expand the game of power to include everyone within a single universal logic, money has been made the measure of all things. This mutation of classical hierarchy was brought about by the Enlightenment’s attempt to democratize access to the goods their society had to offer—goods that remained largely unexamined and unchanged since the Bronze Age.
The warriors imposed their win-lose ideology and social stratification by force, suppressing culture’s capacity to recognize intrinsic values and replacing it with extrinsic, utilitarian values as perceived and dictated by the winners. With money, with modern capital logic, this extrinsic-value system was fully democratized. Not in the sense that it was equally distributed, but in that everyone can—indeed must—play.
Hypothetically, every player can climb the social hierarchy by carefully applying their capital and labor, like good little rational economic agents, saving and investing, thereby laying claim to society's products and resources, as well as the work of others. Those who ascend the ladder meritocratically demonstrate their worth and justify their higher position over others. In other words, the stratified society that defined clearly segregated castes did not change its hierarchical logic, but was instead blown open into a frenzied free-for-all. Money differentials define the contours of the new social hierarchy, dissolving the clearly segregated castes of classical societies into a smooth gradient while retaining the basic hierarchical shape of society.
Money became the supremely “objective” measure of value itself. It is our purest abstraction and distillation of all forms of value into a single, one-dimensional metric. How much is loyalty worth to you? Or justice? Well, we can find your price. Every-one has a price. Just as every-thing has a price. And, through money, all of these are put on a single axis.11 Bread, water, diamonds, cars, guns, land, and, practically speaking, the lives of others. These are now unified under a single form of value logic, ostensibly dictated by elegant, impartial forces of supply and demand—the objective logic of the market's distributed intelligence, acting through independent rational agents. No one to blame but sheer mathematics and “human nature.”
That money became the measure of all things and the proxy for all value means that whatever one wants, money is the means to get it. Rather than remaining the means, under such totalizing logic, money becomes the end. The hyper-wealthy hoard money because it is, itself, the universal status indicator.
Value systems are not only the ideals we espouse—nominal values—but also, crucially, the lived values that define how we orient in the world. Capitalism implies that all economic entities (including nations and transnational corporations and institutions) move and act according to this collapsed value system. This has humanity moving to maximize profit, as if it were value itself, at the expense of whatever else this collapsed value system is blind to.
Free Speech and Cheap Speech
But seeing as we have liberated free speech and independent thought, where is the outcry against such folly? Indeed, the outcry is there. But, in practical terms, under capitalism, one must labor to subsist and to keep the game going. Whatever one’s lofty ideals or opinions are about the trajectory of civilization or the faceless machinery of big corporate and finance, these can all be tossed down a ballot box once every election cycle, or shouted into the black hole of social media before one returns to the numbing loop of work and distractions—consuming and being consumed. In Athens, only citizens participated in public discourse. In the Roman Empire, public discourse was hollowed out, and the masses were distracted through bread and circuses. In digital modernity, alongside a hyper-effective feed of mass distraction, everyone receives a microphone to contribute to the great white noise of open discourse.
The radical democratization of free thought, ironically, disarmed public participation, burying any process of value reevaluation and sociocultural rejuvenation beneath a dense carpet of “diversity of opinions.” The gulf between lived and nominal values, the measure of our society’s hypocrisy, is maintained through the ironic negligibility of the individual’s opinion in postmodern discourse. Whereas free speech may challenge our unexamined collective inertia, cheap speech obscures and abets it.
All the while, the structure of modern politics divides humanity into camps around curated topics. These coexist in perpetual (tensegrous) opposition, each made to believe the other to be the cause of our problems, diverting attention from the deeper underlying issues.
Modern Sunset
Exploitation, under the logic of extrinsic values, is not a modern invention—it is older than a bronze spear. But with modernity, it cloaked its reasoning with the authority of economics and “realist” geopolitics, and became efficient enough to conquer the entire planet. With the Earth nearing exhaustion, “rational” modernity is setting its sights on unsuspecting asteroids to keep the desperate game going a while longer.
But the consequences, externalities, and those unpleasant encroachments of Reality that creep up the periphery of modernity go beyond this discussion. To these, modernism can only ascribe some monetary cost, to weigh against its balance sheet. Rather, here we are merely presenting the modern value system, which, alongside its fine nominal values—justice, equality, liberty, etc.—is driven by its lived values—survival, entertainment, or power—depending on where one happens to be on the hierarchy—all mediated through the flattening logic of money. Whereas the nominal values of the West changed alongside its shifting ideologies, its lived values, entangled with its social systems, remained largely consistent and unexamined for millennia.
Despite the best intentions, the Enlightenment brought about a global system that some call evil. But good and evil are moral judgements. Morality is downstream from values (if entertainment and short-term power are the only values, one could argue modernity to be good), and rather than calling modernity evil, this analysis only reveals it to be blind—guided by a flattening, oversimplifying, value-dimension collapsing value system that hides from it the true dimensions of the world.
Postmodernity
The dialectical response to modernity is contemporary and ongoing. We saw that the thinkers of the European Age of Enlightenment, those philosophes who deconstructed their society’s assumptions, aiming for a clean sociocultural slate, were not equipped to situate themselves historically. They inherited biased and alienated views of Nature, civilization, and human nature, and saw as their enemies Catholic dogma and frivolous aristocrats, failing to recognize the underlying assumptions they shared with either.
But were the Enlighteners themselves the issue? Working with what they had, resisting the evils they could recognize, they strove to create a better world for humanity. It is easy to find their faults in hindsight. The real issue may lie in the assumption that the project of the Enlightenment—of self-reflection, of a reinvigorated investigation of human nature and society—was over and done, and has reached its objectively logical conclusions—empowering rational individuals through representative democracies and global capitalism to pursue their own rationally deduced interests. It’s as if these unescapable logical conclusions have been thoroughly thought through by the proper experts and, objective and universal, are safe to deploy on a planetary scale. These assumptions, far from a polite, if lively, intellectual back-and-forth over coffee at a Parisian salon, birthed our modern world.
Postmodern thought calls out the constructed, subjective nature of modern assumptions as well as their disastrous, unintended consequences. The postmodern critique goes as far as to claim that the objectivity the Enlighteners sought is unavailable to humanity, that humans have access only to subjectivity, and that each person will seek their own goods according to their own preferences. In its most extreme form, postmodern thought argues that there is no universal, objective truth and no human nature(!). Truth with a capital T is reduced to subjective truth, i.e., personal opinion.
In its understandable zeal to counter modern hubris, postmodernism takes the insight of sociocultural contingency to a radical extreme. In essence, postmodern thought does not single out modern culture with its critique but places it on the same level as any other culture, as a subjective, arbitrary social construct. Culture, in other words, is seen as nothing more than a self-reinforcing mass delusion. Postmodernism resists establishing a value system with which to criticize modernism, as such a value system would be just as arbitrary. Rather, it rejects all value systems, thereby liberating individuals to pursue whatever they feel like, all the more arbitrarily, in a world ultimately devoid of meaning or value outside the subject.
Modernism assumed the mantle of supposed objectivity through its measures, metrics, and models. But these are all the fruits of its value-laden, obliviously goal-oriented creators. Rather than subjecting value systems to any sort of critique or analysis based on substance or process, postmodernism rejects the possibility of one value system being somehow better or more justifiable than any other, thereby fit to critique another. We saw this line of thinking in Part 1, moving from Nietzsche’s Übermensch (1883) to the total cynicism of Foucault (1970s).
Postmodernism is a dialectical half-step. An antithesis hovering mid-sentence. Rather than an oversight, this incompleteness is by design. Echoing Camus’s position (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942) that one must confront the absurd—it is the responsibility of the adult to face this situation as it is without recourse to fabricated meaning or a quasi objective philosophical system.
There is much merit to the postmodern rebuke. At the very least, it cannot be dismissed on the grounds of its disempowering and hopeless, if sobering, conclusions—humanity deluded itself into thinking it found objectivity, using this thin veil to pursue its most shortsighted and basest of desires: power and cheap thrills. Meanwhile, the disenfranchised suffer, and the planet burns.
Like the Enlighteners, tearing down all metaphysical and spiritual claims in its shaking off religious dogma, the postmodernists tear down rationality, objectivity, and universality in the deconstruction of its own hypocritical parent, modernism.
With no value-objectivity, there is no truth to value systems outside the preferences of a delusional human subject in a massively delusional human culture. This is the postmodern condition, in which we cannot find a foothold from which to say that this world we created is unjust, shallow, or tragic. The ultimate deconstructive critique of modernity thus nullifies any of its constructive critiques, and likewise saps the energy from any other reconstructive human project.
Is this where the story of humanity ends? With modernity continuing on its path, leading to the exhaustion of Nature, escalation of industrial wars over dwindling resources, and some dystopia to suffer under until “the last man” dies out on this “dead rock floating meaninglessly in space?” Or can we take the postmodern critique seriously, nevertheless attaining an Archimedean point from which to reveal a newfound clarity about values? Does subjectivity necessarily imply arbitrariness?
Is modernity’s failure to arrive at objective values sufficient to dismiss the very notion? Do the flaws and blind spots of the Enlightenment imply that the very attempt toward improvement is somehow a dangerous delusion? Is there another way forward? Or is any proposed path equally arbitrary? Where is “forward,” for that matter? Are there, in some sense, real, objective values? Or, barring that, subjective but nevertheless somehow wiser or better? In the first place, can we even escape our classical legacy and ancient traumas? Can we somehow look back at our history and, despite all our previous failures of imagination and judgment, find newfound clarity and reason to hope?
This is the post-postmodern challenge. Part 2 of this series, our story of the history of values, ends in a cliffhanger: our very real, precarious present moment of collapse, disorientation, and stubborn hope.
To Be Continued…
Our historical analysis reveals how our value systems changed over the millennia. It also revealed how they haven’t. As such, postmodernism itself was never free from its own critique. Just as the Church rose in a particular context and the Enlightenment in another, postmodernism is the cynical, rebellious child of modernity, smarter than but resentful of its parent, modernity, with its shallow vision of progress, its hypocrisies and contradictions, and its hollow ideals. What, then, did postmodernism itself fail to notice?
And is it even enough, for a post-postmodern stance, to respond only to postmodernism? Is there not, perhaps, a larger frame to take?
We must take a step back and a wider aperture to find a meta-historical vista. We must, in other words, find the means to “escape” our historical pendulums and traumatic repetitions. We must become more than savvy critics of the lapses of the postmodern condition, and find the way to metabolize the lessons that remained half-digested throughout the passing ages more fully. We must consider what we may have left behind in our deep past, and, rather than trying to wind back the clock or simply submitting to the modern, unexamined, and impossible vision of progress, find better ways to consider what we should aim for and why.
A post-postmodern value stance must embrace pluralism and complexity, seeking, through meta-historical clarity, to actively choose. We must somehow harmonize and justify values on grounds deeper than dogma (be it of religion or of the Enlightenment), or unexamined, inherited preferences. We must find an Archimedean Point from which we can flip the whole game board.
It is possible that, as the sun sets on the modern world, we will witness a paradoxical decrease in hypocrisy. Since the dawn of classical history, elites were pitched against elites in high-stakes power games. Populations, territory, and Nature were used like pawns on a game board, as nominal values were cynically employed to present a palatable façade with which to seduce and placate the people. By the time of the Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) granted an honest glimpse into this world in his controversial The Prince. With the collapse of American hegemony as the acting center of the world empire, liberal rhetoric is becoming less coherent and is often outright abandoned to reveal the naked game of power underneath. As geopolitical analysts often insist, the coming era will not be shaped by the flowery nominal values of a liberal Enlightenment, but by the same old games of elites, nation-states, and finance. Rather than committing the same mistake, espousing public ideals while the human world keeps moving according to its hidden, private logic, we need a new way to understand, see, clarify, and transmute our values. More honestly. More effectively.
And, rather than simply reacting to modernism or postmodernism, we must take the human condition in its fullness and openness into consideration as we engage once more with the question: what does and does not matter? What creates and shapes our values? How may we clarify them? Can we remake them? Can we become masters, or must we remain slaves to the undercurrents? What is at stake?
For individuals, a mature post-postmodern position enables one to extricate oneself from one’s cultural value system, as the postmoderns did, and the Greek cynics long before them. Unlike postmodernists, we must claim the tools to navigate this space, so we don’t end up floating in a relativistic, undifferentiated soup of arbitrary, subjective opinions.
And for society, such a stance may be the only hope of escaping the unconscious loop of historical repetition. The Renaissance must continue, and the Enlightenment must reach greater depths, having integrated the postmodern critique, for the West to truly become enlightened. In Part 3, the last of this series, we finally enter the post-postmodern arena.
So that the Enlightenment of the West may dance with that of the East, for harmony to be found between the North and the South, we must seek a post-postmodern value sensibility.
Nothing less will reveal a desirable future for humanity or individuals trapped in the pursuit of unexamined, inherited goals. Our clarity, honesty, and courage (or lack thereof) in value clarification will shape the coming age.
This era need not be the exhausted finale in a chain of tragic oversights. Here lies the potential birthplace of a clarified grammar of values—if we but recognize the gravity well we’re circling and plot our escape trajectory more wisely. This leg of the journey, this chapter in the story of humanity, is our generation’s to write.
Join us in the conclusion of this series on value in Part 3, as we move beyond history and, arriving at the present moment, weave these complex strands to find, despite it all, the unprecedented clarity needed to choose a better destiny.
Christian thought was already heavily influenced by both Plato and Aristotle. But the synthesis of their works with Catholicism was fait accompli, crystallized into Catholic dogma. In other words, though the systems of thought of Plato and Aristotle endured in Christian theology, philosophy itself lay dormant. But the Greek scholars fleeing Byzantium brought with them the preserved works of Plato and Aristotle in the original Greek. Beyond the content of the thought of Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle, the original works exemplify the spirit of free inquiry and of the methodical application of reason that could revive philosophical freedom in Europe.
See the work of economist Michael Hudson, e.g, J Is for Junk Economics, for more on the now-defanged political thrust of the first economists.
Judaism, in turn, was influenced by Zoroastrianism following the destruction of the First Temple and its time in Babylonian exile, where it took on a more cosmic-renewal character. Prior to the exile, the future horizon promised by Jehovah to the Israelites was more mundane—a righteous kingdom in the Levant—”Greater Israel.”
See our previous pieces: Thinking in Color, where we argued that emotional intelligence is a prerequisite for objectivity and independent thought, and Simplicity Complicity, where we investigated the dialectic between simplicity and complexity, including the cultivable skills required for (intimate) (asymptotic) knowing of Reality. Alongside the axiological blind spots explored in this series, these serve as a multipronged critique of Enlightenment and modern worldviews, hegemonic to this day.
The democratic ideas that stirred Europe cannot be reduced to an internal European process. These ideals were inspired by the long-standing natural cultures the Europeans encountered in the Americas, with egalitarian governance and sensibilities foreign to a long-stratified European society, particularly through the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee), alongside other Indigenous confederacies such as the Wabanaki and Huron. See David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. Note that this point is still debated by scholars.
Locke’s life, liberty, and estate (property) were adapted by Thomas Jefferson into the Declaration of Independence (1776) as life, liberty, and “the pursuit of happiness.”
Cut green grass was purposeless and expensive to maintain, making it a status symbol among Old Europe's aristocrats. This changed with the invention of the lawn mower in 1830, making this symbol of luxury and wealth accessible to the masses and, ironically, ubiquitous in American suburbia, where every man was to be king of his own little castle. The signs of nobility, effectively commodified and democratized.
This requires avoiding the common misconception of taking a nation-state as the unit of socio-economic analysis. See sociologist and economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory. This implies that for us to perceive a rising tide lifting all boats, we must first limit our scope to ignore whatever may be happening outside whatever pond we happen to examine. In fact, the boats wouldn’t float without those who drown elsewhere, so to speak. Counter to neoliberal ideology, it is not that certain countries fail to develop. Rather, they fulfill a different role in a larger system. The wealth of the core, under the logic of global capitalism (and empires before it), requires inequality to function, as it must exploit people (and nature) somewhere.
The question of whether it is possible to fully democratize the promise of a tech utopia, say, supported by cheap appliances and, now, “artificial intelligence,” is a tangent that requires material, energy, and economic analysis that will take us too far afield. The short answer, which we will pick up in a future essay, is that this is an impossible promise. A more central point is that it would be foolish to even try, given the costs of the pursuit, including but not limited to the exploitation and decimation of Nature and of humanity itself. But how can we compare these things? Say, human well-being and the planet’s health? It’s like comparing apples and hand drills. This value series argues that there are better ends to strive for and even better ways to think and talk about values.
Another point that requires more space to unpack than this essay can afford. In a nutshell, capitalism requires poverty for both “hard” systemic and “soft” ideological reasons. For one, a system that leverages one’s desire to win over others must establish what losing looks like. A more systemic reason is that money, in essence, creates power differentials. Technically speaking, these differentials form what is known in the hard sciences as an “energy gradient,” needed to produce work. Simply put, there are jobs in society that no one wants to do, so the system requires some people to be desperate enough to do them anyway.
This point was made over a century ago by Georg Simmel in The Philosophy of Money (1900). Money flattens pre-modern, incomparable systems of value into a single quantifiable metric. We will return to this in Part 3.