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Epilogue

Andrei A. Znamenski

in The Beauty of the Primitive: Shamanism and Western Imagination

This epilogue looks at the growing popularity of the shamanism idiom and the correlation with the emergence of neo-shamanism to anti-modern sentiments in Western intellectual culture. Since the ... More

This epilogue looks at the growing popularity of the shamanism idiom and the correlation with the emergence of neo-shamanism to anti-modern sentiments in Western intellectual culture. Since the 1960s, Western academics and spiritual seekers have increasingly questioned the modes of thinking associated with the Enlightenment and, more broadly, with the Western tradition in general. More often than not, this tradition is viewed as devoid of spiritual and ecological values. In some respects, the present rise of anti-modernism in the West is a reminder of the Romanticism movement in Europe in the early 19th century, the first reaction to the advances of the Enlightenment. In fact, much of anti-modernism in current humanities and many ideas popular in nature spiritualities can be traced to Romantic writers and philosophers. Like their intellectual predecessors, modern Western seekers and many academics crusade against materialistic science and lament the emptiness of modern Western life, looking to non-European traditions and to European antiquity for spiritual feedback. This line of thought that is critical of modernity has been visibly present in Western tradition since the age of the Enlightenment.Less

Society, philosophy, and religion. Spaemann and the dialectic of anti‐modernism

Holger Zaborowski

in Robert Spaemann's Philosophy of the Human Person: Nature, Freedom, and the Critique of Modernity

This chapter scrutinizes Spaemann's (published) doctoral dissertation, paying particular attention to his interpretation of the dialectic of Bonald's counter-revolutionary writings and to the way ... More

This chapter scrutinizes Spaemann's (published) doctoral dissertation, paying particular attention to his interpretation of the dialectic of Bonald's counter-revolutionary writings and to the way Spaemann's criticism renders questionable or even impossible certain ways of pursuing the relation between truth and religion on the one hand, and history and society on the other. It shows that The Origin of Sociology in the Spirit of Restoration is based upon a modification and extension of Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis of the dialectic of Enlightenment. The French counter-revolution, as Spaemann's argument goes, also turned against itself and its own presuppositions in a typically modern way. Spaemann's doctoral dissertation thus not only thematizes a particular and historically limited dialectic, but also analyses a dialectic that is characteristic of modernity and is thus still the dialectic of Enlightenment.Less

The Discourse of Anti-Relativism in the Political Thought of the Catholic Church

Carlo Invernizzi Accetti

in Relativism and Religion: Why Democratic Societies Do Not Need Moral Absolutes

This chapter provides a history of the discourse of anti-relativism in the political thought of the Catholic Church, from the first recorded usage of the term in 1884 to the present day.

The Wedge of Intelligent Design: Retrograde Science, Schooling, and Society

Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross

in Scientific Values and Civic Virtues

The rejection of evolution in favor of creation by a supernatural deity is not the only feature of intelligent design creationism that marks it as a religious movement. Its integral but lesser known ... More

The rejection of evolution in favor of creation by a supernatural deity is not the only feature of intelligent design creationism that marks it as a religious movement. Its integral but lesser known features include anti-modernism, anti-secularism, religious exclusionism, and anti-rationalism. The intelligent design movement, following a Wedge Strategy, seeks not only to return American education to a premodern understanding of science, but to move the country culturally and politically away from secular democracy and toward a premodern, Christian commonwealth. The movement’s leader, Phillip Johnson, brands secular academics as apostates and warns Christian students against relying on “your own thinking”. Scientists must join concerned citizens in stopping the advance of intelligent design in the public school science class.Less

Collectivistic Christianities and Pluralism: An Inquiry into Agency and Responsibility

Slavica Jakelić

in Fundamentalism or Tradition: Christianity after Secularism

This essay addresses the relationship between religious traditions, secularisms, and fundamentalisms by looking at collectivistic Catholicisms in the communist and post-communist Croatia and Poland. ... More

This essay addresses the relationship between religious traditions, secularisms, and fundamentalisms by looking at collectivistic Catholicisms in the communist and post-communist Croatia and Poland. In response to both theorists of modernity and critics of secularism—who present modernity as a process of secularization and religion as modernity’s other—Jakelić advances the idea of ‘collectivistic religion,’ to refer to religions that are public in manifestation, historically embedded, constitutive of specific group identities—next to linguistic, territorial, cultural, or national identities—and defined in part by the presence of religious (or non-religious) others. On the one hand, she considers the collectivistic Catholicisms that reject the cultural and moral pluralism of modernity but, in the process, end up espousing one of modernity’s aspects—its homogenizing impulse. On the other hand, she traces two instances in which collectivistic Catholicisms in Croatia and Poland affirm the links between Catholicism and national identities but remain open to their Muslim and secular others respectively.Less

Between Modernism and Antimodernism

Ehrhard Bahr

in Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

For the Prague poet and novelist Franz Werfel, the year 1933 was not the occasion of a definite rupture, as it was for the other artists, writers, and intellectuals from Germany. This was in part ... More

For the Prague poet and novelist Franz Werfel, the year 1933 was not the occasion of a definite rupture, as it was for the other artists, writers, and intellectuals from Germany. This was in part because he was a citizen of Czechoslovakia who had opted to live in Vienna, and he was not affected by events in Germany until 1938, when Austria was annexed. The other reason was that Werfel had made his accommodation with reactionary conservatism, and was vacillating between modernism and anti-modernism. Werfel abandoned Expressionism and turned to writing popular novels. Despite his strong affinity for Catholicism since childhood, he never abandoned Judaism and returned to modernism in his last novel, Star of the Unborn. Another novel, written between July 1932 and November 1933, is The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which deals with the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915 and can be considered the first work of Holocaust literature in German. The best of Werfel's work in exile in France, “Cella or the Survivors,” remained unfinished and therefore unpublished during his lifetime.Less

Renegade Modernism: Alfred Döblin’s Novel Karl and Rosa

Ehrhard Bahr

in Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

Alfred Döblin, the least known of all the German exile writers in Los Angeles, departed from modernism in his exile works in tandem with his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1941. After the burning ... More

Alfred Döblin, the least known of all the German exile writers in Los Angeles, departed from modernism in his exile works in tandem with his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1941. After the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, he immediately fled Germany via Zurich to Paris, where he lived relatively comfortably until 1940, when France was invaded by German troops. Like Franz Werfel, Döblin was an author of avant-garde literature who turned to anti-modernism in exile. He continued the form of the modernist novel in November 1918, but advanced a history of salvation that was in conflict with modernism. Although Döblin was Jewish, he showed an affinity for Catholicism that influenced his works. Döblin was quite productive during his years in Los Angeles, completing the first part of his autobiography, Schicksalsreise: Bericht und Bekenntnis (Destiny's Journey), as well as his novel Karl und Rosa (Karl and Rosa), the last part of his tetralogy November 1918: 204 Renegade Modernism Eine deutsche Revolution (November 1918: A German Revolution).Less

Weimar culture and its others

Nicholas Attfield

in Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918-1933

This introductory chapter begins with the post-1945 concept of ‘Weimar culture’, and, through a critique of an article by Michael Kater, considers the concept’s tendency to divide the era into two ... More

This introductory chapter begins with the post-1945 concept of ‘Weimar culture’, and, through a critique of an article by Michael Kater, considers the concept’s tendency to divide the era into two rigid cultural-political factions: progressive ‘sons’ and reactionary ‘fathers’, a metaphor ultimately derived from Peter Gay’s well-known Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968). Having drawn attention to the distortions caused by such historiographical inflexibility, it proceeds to a description of the four studies (Chapters 2–5) that are to follow in the book, presenting these as distinct positions in the discourse of Weimar-era musical conservatisms and demonstrating that—for all their similarities—the subjects just as often took acute issue with one another. These were frictions, the chapter concludes, that continued beyond 1933 and the change of political regime in Germany.Less

A Usable Past

in Jewish Dogs: An Image and Its Interpreters

To advance the glory of martyrs, the early Bollandists perpetuated the medieval vision that Jews were a constant threat. In particular, they perpetuated the idea that martyrdom often went hand in ... More

To advance the glory of martyrs, the early Bollandists perpetuated the medieval vision that Jews were a constant threat. In particular, they perpetuated the idea that martyrdom often went hand in hand with Jewish machinations. Furthermore, martyrdom at Jewish hands had unique, even beneficial, qualities. Paradoxically, the creators of the seventeenth-century Bollandist legacy declared the truth of ritual murder while employing the scholarly tools of reasoned analysis to refute the libel of ritual murder. Conflict arose between proponents of anti-modernism and modernism over ritual murder. In pursuing the truth about sainthood, modernists used an approach which was different from that of their scholarly predecessors.Less

Antimodernism as the Rhetoric of Steampunk Anime: Fullmetal Alchemist, Technological Anxieties, and Controlling the Machine

Elizabeth Birmingham

in Clockwork Rhetoric: The Language and Style of Steampunk

Although not all steampunk texts—whether fiction, television, or film—embrace a rhetoric of anti-modernism, this chapter argues that Full Metal Alchemist does; that it reflects the preoccupations of ... More

Although not all steampunk texts—whether fiction, television, or film—embrace a rhetoric of anti-modernism, this chapter argues that Full Metal Alchemist does; that it reflects the preoccupations of a steampunk text, but that in employing a wide range of Victorian rhetorical tropes, it reinforces the values of the Arts and Crafts movement through an anti-modernist rhetoric. Steampunk, whether academics frame it as a postmodern, anti-modern, or aesthetic movement, is often criticized as idealizing a Victorian past; however, many of the Japanese texts associated with steampunk, like Full Metal Alchemist, are highly critical of the reactionary modernism that shaped the colonial enterprise of the Victorian Era, and as non-western products, are particularly poised to make such a critique.Less

Civilization Itself Consents: Disciplining Bodies in Imperial Suburbia, 1861–1914

Coll Thrush

in Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire

This chapter considers two moments—an ethnographic display of military regimentation from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and an anti-modern jeremiad from the first years of the ... More

This chapter considers two moments—an ethnographic display of military regimentation from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and an anti-modern jeremiad from the first years of the twentieth. Both involved North American Indigenous people and were deeply shaped by narratives of civilization and progress. But perhaps more importantly, both happened in a specific place and time: the late Victorian and Edwardian city, where particular kinds of urban development created new anxieties about London and its empire. These strands came together at a series of large-scale Indigenous spectacles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A Seneca runner, a group of Aboriginal Australian cricketers, a Maori rugby side, and Lakota Wild West Show performers all riveted London, and their presence there speaks much not just about Indigenous visitors but about Victorian and Edwardian—and imperial—culture.Less

The Connotations of an Idea: On the basic connotations of the term Latin America, though said connotations are further elucidated as the essay unfolds and are only stated baldly here

Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo

in Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea

Chapter 1 advances a summary of the basic historical and contemporary connotations of the term Latin America --which are further explored in the following chapters. Among others, the chapter ... More

Chapter 1 advances a summary of the basic historical and contemporary connotations of the term Latin America --which are further explored in the following chapters. Among others, the chapter highlights anti-Americanism; fascination with redemptory violence; a Western doctrine of Non-Westernness; a modern form of anti-modernism; collective economic failure; addiction to authenticity; collectivism vs. individualism; passions over interests; spiritual superiority over materialism; the temptation of political and racial utopias; an odd appropriation of promiscuity as the patrimony of Latin America; and, above all, race as Latin America’s basic connotations.Less

Heidegger’s Religious Provenance:: Kulturkampf and the Modernist Crisis

Wolfe Judith

in Heidegger's Eschatology: Theological Horizons in Martin Heidegger's Early Work

This chapter discusses Heidegger’s religious provenance in Southern Germany inthe aftermath of Vatican I. It outlines the main developments of Catholic ecclesiastical history during the German ... More

This chapter discusses Heidegger’s religious provenance in Southern Germany inthe aftermath of Vatican I. It outlines the main developments of Catholic ecclesiastical history during the German Kulturkampf and the more wide-ranging Modernist Crisis, and discusses Heidegger’s initial response to these developments by way of his earliest articles and reviews (published between 1909 and 1913, mostly in the conservative Catholic organs Heuberger Volksblatt, Der Akademiker, and Allgemeine Rundschau).The chapter concludes by characterising Heidegger’s early anti-Modernism as it emerges from these publications.Less