The Age of Secularization

Studies in the History of Ideas #74

by Augusto Del Noce, Carlo Lancellotti (Translator)

Augusto Del Noce is widely considered one of Italy’s foremost philosophers and political thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century. He is also remembered as an original and profound cultural critic, and in particular as a great scholar of the process of secularization that took place in the West during the 1960s. A collection of eleven essays and lectures by Del Noce that originally appeared between 1964 and 1969, and which the author published as a book in 1971, The Age of Secularization quickly became recognized as one of the most original and penetrating attempts to interpret the cultural and political turmoil of the period. In its pages Del Noce discusses, among other topics, the student protests of 1968, the counterculture of the 1960s, the significance of the sexual revolution, the nature of the technological society, and the relationship between Christianity and modern culture. The Age of Secularization documents the encounter between a key period of contemporary history and the full intellectual maturity of one of its most perceptive observers. It makes available to English-language readers a lasting reflection on the philosophical roots of contemporary culture, and it is just as illuminating and topical today as it was nearly fifty years ago.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Politics, Italian Literature

301 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 8, 2017

Reviews

[Aaron Crofut · Rating 4 out of 5]

Del Noce is a big name among those critiquing modernity; to those wondering just why things don't seem quite right and haven't lied to themselves about how evil our time is (that we have the most poverty or racism or anything else that is blatantly not true), Del Noce is probably a must read. "Probably a must read" is a strange thing to type, but 1) the man saw through the post WWII order and wasn't impressed and 2) the man was an egghead. Richard Weaver and C. S. Lewis have far more readable books against modernity, but neither is as penetrating as Del Noce. Anyway, this is not going to be easy is my point. This isn't a book per se, but rather a collection of essays, which means there will be quite a bit of repetition. Given how academic this is, however, that's not always a bad thing. Del Noce expected his audience to know Marx, Hegel, Comte, Giovanni Gentile, Lenin, Croce, Kant of course, Pascal, Juvulta (?), Teilhard, Maritain, and a host of others. Sometimes he'll deign to explain what this philosopher said; at other times, he'll just summarize their position and toss in a "but this cannot survive Pascal's critique" and assume we'll just be like "oh, Pascal would have DESTROYED this argument!!" Meanwhile, I'm looking at my copy of Pascal's works on my bookshelf and wondering why the local used bookstore won't give me credit for a trade.

So, at least half of this probably went over my head. A second reading would be very helpful, but I'm exhausted from the first and have to return it to the library shortly. And even then, I would have to bone up on Rosmini, starting with learning his first name.

With that all in mind, let me jot down what I did get out of those monumental 250 page book:

First, there is a crisis in modernity (which is, yes, the title of another of Del Noce's books, but one written after this one). The World Wars truly broke our understanding of life. In particular, anything smacking of "truth" or "transcendence" is written off as too dangerous, the seeds of fascism (Del Noce notes the irony in accusing Christianity of fostering Nazisim and not the pseudo-scientific, neo-pagan, vitalist foundations it actually claimed). Marx was wrong because Marx was, ironically, too religious, even if his religion was militantly atheistic. The promise of the Revolution and utopia in the Future were tenets of faith no less so than Revelation and Heaven. The modern world we live in took the issue of religion right off the table. There is no debate anymore; people can practice religion as a form of entertainment, say, but as an actual force that defines the world around us, it is practically dead, and people are practically atheists. This, mind you, was in the late 1960's.

The implications of this new worldview are massive. For starters, it isn't working, hence the "crisis" in the crisis of modernity. But modernity itself is a value now, a badge of honor for those living in this time for not being as backward as those who came before. The 1968 student revolts are seen as an example of this paradox: they both knew things were amiss but were so deeply absorbed into the modernist project that they couldn't reject that project itself. And so they achieved nothing. 2020 is a repeat I'm afraid. Get everyone riled up, expose how unhappy we are with our world, get the corporations to sign on, but see if anything actually changes. We have the allusion of democracy because we have functional elections, a two party system, etc, but "democracy" as equality of people isn't any nearer today than it was at any other point in history. Del Noce does not talk about why, but the short of it is we can't all be influencers.

The problem lies in the pointlessness of life preached by modernity, but never openly. Be authentic! Be novel! All that jazz leads absolutely nowhere. "Authenticity" is an empty buzzword that Ryszard Legutko correctly points out used to have meaning, namely, that a thing was what it claimed to be. Be novel? Why? So that ten minutes later, you can be forgotten as old hat while someone else becomes novel? Newness for its own sake is a joke. And at heart, we know this. The mental health crisis is a sign of that. We know this is not working, but having trusted the Really Smart People that this way of living is the only good way of living, it shouldn't be a surprise to see so many people depressed when the goals they chased or even achieved fail to satisfy.

This is the life of "well-being." It amounts to keeping up with the Jones and curating your social media feed to project an image of success. And we are miserable. Our grandparents were not this unhappy, their parents were not, nor the generation that went before them. And what lies we tell ourselves to justify this. "We have never had Issue X worse than now!" Really? Poverty was never worse than today? Racism was never worse than today? Healthcare was never worse than today? But if those things are not true, how can we be so miserable, so depressed, so dependent upon psychological care?

Truth. That's something people are not much interested in anymore, oddly, and Del Noce says as much. Authenticity, novel, new, power, sure sure sure, but truth? Anyone using that word anymore? No, it doesn't match up well with self-definition, novelty, blah blah blah. An example: the Tolkien Society has just taken the opportunity to imply Frodo and Sam could be homosexual. A novel take, a new take, but a true one? Well, that waited for Christopher Tolkien to die first for a reason. The idea that J. R. R. Tolkien, a traditional Catholic, would support that is ludicrous. Our entire society is ripe with stupid, blatant lies. "The election was stolen" cried both candidates of the 2016 election.

Anywho. Truth matters. These lies eat at our soul, our society, our sanity. Del Noce points out that we have given people divine attributes and pretended eternal truths are merely passing, temporal things.

Both Del Noce and Reiff hit an a frightening truth: our modern world is incapable of creating values not subject to modernity's own criticism of values, namely that they are said merely passing and temporal opinions. Unable to build any real worldview, most people not content with Bread and Circus take to destroying our faith in values. Things like our nation, our family, anything concerning sexual norms and the like. All are outdated products of their time, you see. Well, we're almost out of sexual norms to violate; give it a couple of years and pedophilia will be openly preached and opposition condemned. What then? Will we all be happy then? No, we'll need to either create new values (which, again, are openly acknowledged to be passing jokes) or find some other value to destroy. This roads ultimately runs to Auschwitz for the lack of anything else to do.

There is no revolution coming, of course, or at least not a Marxist one. Rather than overthrow the bourgeois, we all became bourgeois.

When will the crisis come to a head? It already has. This is the crisis. Europe is well on its way to heat death and the United States is following closely.

I suppose I should stop now, as this is less of a review and more of a me trying to work out what it is I just read. I'm sure it would not stand up to Pascal's critique. But the things Del Noce had to say are true and important, so I must do my best to bring those true (now and forever) ideas and see how they work out on the temporal (passing) realm I see before me. Plato, you bastard...

Last point: Del Noce saw the Catholic Church as the only possible bulwark against this generation of Last Men, but was horrified by the progressive Catholics then taking charge. He rightly points out that while they may have meant well (helping the poor, preventing fascism, etc.), they failed to baptize Marx, but Marx did not fail to unbaptize them. By undermining their own doctrines and dogmas as mere products of historical situations and their economic production, they undermined everything they stood for, those things also being merely manifestations of historical circumstances and not Truth. Most who went down that path ended up atheists, even if they stayed in the Church, even high positions within it. But there is nothing, nothing, that can give us a chance at the good life rather than the life of well-being save the Church.

To go back to Tolkien: we can either have the Lord of the Rings as written, where truth and courage and justice and friendship and faith and love have meaning in the narrative of our lives which can end in the Undying Lands, or we can claim the highest form of life is simply impossible without a hobbit penis in a hobbit orifice.

And with that, I bid you good night.

[William Bies · Rating 3 out of 5]

One aspect of the modern condition one may wonder about, after reading Augusto del Noce’s The Crisis of Modernity (just reviewed by us a moment ago, here), is what responses men and women of a religious temperament may take to the developments, characterized by an ever-accelerating secularization and the final loss of any residual sense of the sacred in public life. The work presently to be reviewed, The Age of Secularization, collects essays and lectures from 1964 to 1969 and published in book form in 1971, in Italian of course. Carlo Lancellotti has continued his efforts as a translator of del Noce into English and, what is more, provides an introduction to set the context and to guide the reader concerning how to take in del Noce’s distinctive style, which he describes as ‘philosophy through history’: in other words, one can derive properly philosophical insights by examining the fate of specific positions as they encounter historical reality as well as competition from other philosophical schools.

The present collection is somewhat more loosely organized than The Crisis of Modernity. There are thirteen chapters along with a preface, from among which we shall select a few to highlight. A handful continue themes from the earlier collection, such as ‘The student protests and values’ [pp. 9-18], ‘Tradition and innovation’ [pp. 35-67] and ‘Technological civilization and Christianity’ [pp. 68-85]. The main points here can be encapsulated in a string of quotations:

Consider: what is usually called the student’s rebellion is the critique of the technological society in the name of revolutionary thought. Now I would like to show: 1) that the only possibility of reaffirming revolutionary thought after the technological society is actually expressed by Marcuse’s program; 2) that, on the other hand, such reaffirmation concludes in the disintegration of revolutionary thought itself; 3) that in the course of the disintegration the question of permanent values re-emerges explicitly. [p. 15]

To summarize this first part, I will say that secular, Protestant and Catholic progressivisms no longer exist as such. What exists is just one progressivism characterized by an irreligious form of atheism. Therefore, this progressivism is different from Marxism, which is atheism as a secular religion. Whereas it presumes to surpass Marxism, in reality it just expresses its decomposition, although it must also be said that this decomposition is inevitable. At this point, we can already reach a first definition of the meaning of traditionalism and progressivism today. European tradition was characterized by the idea, albeit expressed in many forms, of the presence in man of a divine element that distinguishes him qualitatively from other beings in our experience….But today’s renewed Enlightenment is forced into a negativism that must go through all the stages of the affirmation that in man there is nothing that possesses an independent metaphysical origin, and that therefore ideas do not reveal anything, but are mere tools to transform reality. We saw how this negativism cannot formulate new ideals, or if it pretends to formulate them it is only as negations of the ideals of the past….It is enough to experience today’s world in its most common aspects in order to find confirmation of what was already written by the philosopher who measured exactly the significance of the death of God, Nietzsche. Love of neighbor is replaced by love of what is distant, and love for what is distant is actually used to justify all kinds of exploitation of our neighbor. The death of God is followed by the will to power, unabated under the masks of altruism, humanitarianism and philanthropy. [p. 55]

To this reviewer, perhaps the best contribution in this volume is the chapter on ‘Simone Weil, interpreter of today’s world’ [pp. 118-152]. In a sympathetic portrayal of her spiritual itinerary from staunch atheist to mystic, del Noce sees her as prophetic, the only one among her generation to have had a clear vision of what was to come after the conclusion of the second world war and the defeat of fascism (she died in 1943) – namely, a reconciliation of the greater part of the religious faction with the modern world under the banner of a recrudescence of the Modernist heresy (which she as well as del Noce abhors; in fact, Weil declined to have herself baptized because she felt a church under the sway of modernism not even to be worth joining).

What del Noce understands by neo-Modernism and his critique of it are to be found in the last two essays, on ‘The political predicament of Catholics’ [pp. 217-235] and ‘On Catholic progressivism’ [pp. 236-266], notable for his discussion of the self-delusion involved in thinking one can Christianize Marx and his clarification of the position occupied by the Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin:

If we make explicit the philosophy behind these statements, we inevitably arrive at Teilhard’s position, which from the theoretical standpoint can only be defined as a form of Bergsonism separated from all neo-Platonic elements. This means that a consistent neo-Modernist must reach the astonishing and utterly false assertion that Teilhard must be considered the great victor of the council (in which case we should conclude that Vatican II was the pure negation of Vatican I, and the church’s act of contrition with respect to her past). Or else, when he realizes that what he has said is paradoxical, the neo-Modernist must present himself as a ‘preconciliar’ person waiting for Vatican III. [p. 253]

All around, Del Noce’s capability as an incisive cultural observer is put on display here once again. Three stars, subtracting two for a complete absence of originality. The same comment as we made with respect to the first essay collection applies here; one wishes del Noce could not merely critique his intellectual opponents, however ably, but also say something positive to support his own position, that of continued religious commitment, despite everything, in an age when atheism has become overwhelmingly dominant.

[Ted Newell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gives insight into the shifts in basic beliefs that yield their differing cultural expressions, in politics, media, society. Del Noce emphasizes the contribution of the Marxist phase of European politics more than e.g. George Grant the Canadian ever did for N Am contexts. However, their conclusions are broadly similar about technocracy, or "technique," or technology (progress, good outcome of history) as primary faith of our era. Del Noce sees a society far from post-ideological, rather, in a triumphant bourgeois phase that is paradoxically in continual revolution, toward its end of maximum comfort. If I had to name a film studio edition, it would be the humans in Disney's Wall-E.

[graceofgod · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than I expected. Agreed with some parts of it, and definitely sympathized with his critiques, especially near the end. Disagreed with some of his takes though -- or at the very least, I felt as if he caricatured Catholic "progressives" (it's never really clear if he means those on the left in general or only a specific sort) a bit too much, even though I definitely (again) can sympathize with the frustrations.