The predicament of the modern

From Anything goes a review by Harold James. An interesting turn of phrase.

the predicament of the modern, the material curse of poverty and the mental afflictions of prosperity.

It captures the predicament of the West where the various strands of philosophy, religion, government, culture and technology of the past five centuries have delivered such incredible prosperity that even the poorest are wealthy in absolute terms compared to the rest of the world and to history and yet everywhere people appear to suffer the mental afflictions of propserity. The material curse of poverty has virtually disappeared in the West yet its disappearance is marked by rising anxiety about the present and future. These mental afflictions appear in various guises including a disposition not to have children (fear of the future perhaps), to indulge in narrative and emotional arguments rather than data and logic, self-accuse oneself of sins committed by others elsewhere or in the past and over which one has not control and little influence, and finally an insisistence on focusing on the tactical, picayune or marginal and ignoring the strategic, substantial, and critical. There is something systemic here which, if we wish to succeed materially, we need to understand and address.

Other points:

Again and again, Gregory insists that Christianity is fundamentally a message about living in community: deus caritas est, or as Jesus put it: “Love one another as I have loved you.”

[snip]

The outcome of this plurality, which led to such horrifying violence, was to shift attention away from behaviour to an internalised and individualised belief. People believed all kinds of different and incompatible doctrines but who cared as long as they all could associate peacefully together? They disagreed. Anything goes. Whatever.

[snip]

Gregory gives a modern, and much more sophisticated, update of the Weber thesis. For him, the shift that really mattered was the movement to a belief in individual motivation. What was lost was any demonstration of how love works in a genuine community, based on shared responsibilities. By being concerned with individual salvation, the Reformation opened the way to an obsession with individual enrichment – at the expense of communities, friends and families. So the world was left with the accumulation of ... stuff.

In Gregory’s scrupulous account, the Netherlands invented modernity. That meant not only religious toleration but also its flipside – material accumulation and vulnerability to speculative manias such as the financially driven Amsterdam tulip craze.

The Dutch model was then taken up during the American Revolution by figures as politically and intellectually different as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The result, as Gregory puts it, led straight to “contemporary Western hyperpluralism with respect to truth claims about meaning, morality, values, priorities, and purpose”.