Romano Guardini on “The End of the Modern World“.

“This frightful destruction did not drop down from heaven; in truth it rose up out of hell!” —Romano Guardini.

Mark Malvasi writes, “…absorbed by technology,  [Romano] Guardini anticipated the emergence of a new type of human being that was defined by regimentation and conformity.  This “man without personality” would make no effort to assert his identity or to achieve individual excellence, two of the hallmarks of the Modern Age.  Rather, the post-modern individual would disappear into the collective, ceasing to exist as a person and becoming a biological, sociological, economic, political, and psychological abstraction.

Human responsibility would be the most important casualty of this development.  People would no longer give an account of their behavior, nor would they wish to do so.  In their irresponsibility would be their freedom.  Conscious of, and confident in, their absolute power, human beings, Guardini predicted, would come to live life without a sense of limits.  They would take possession of the earth and manipulate creation itself to achieve their objectives without fear of the consequences.  As Guardini understood, history—the record of actions in the past—had demonstrated the fallacy of these convictions.  Human beings were free to do evil as well as good.  They could build and preserve or they could tear down and demolish.

  “The facts prove that man often takes an evil road,” Guardini asserted.  “Our age is aware of the reality of the deliberate destructiveness in the human spirit and our age is troubled to its very depths.” Far from ensuring a better future, humanity at the end of the Modern Age stood in danger of losing itself, befouling nature, and annihilating the world on which life itself depends.

Since the seventeenth century, the modern assumption had been that increased power accelerated progress and enhanced security.  But since intemperance and irresponsibility had guided human conduct, the problem of the future, as Guardini saw it, was to limit, not to expand, power.  In his view, power had become demonic. 

“Close examination proves that recent years [Guardini wrote in the late 1940s] have been marked by a monstrous growth in man’s power over being, over things and over men, but the grave responsibility, the clear consciousness, the strong character needed for exercising this power well have not kept pace with its growth at all.”6  As a consequence, Guardini assumed, the future will be fraught with, and defined by, a single characteristic: danger.  Human beings will face danger at every turn—danger from the state, from culture, from nature, from each other.

With the advent of science and technology, human beings may have gained ascendancy over nature.  They may have fashioned a culture that was the work of human hands, wholly independent of God.  Culture since the Renaissance was conceived as the product of human intelligence, imagination, and creativity.  It replaced divine revelation as the source of meaning and made humanity the lord of creation.  At the same time, human achievements had dispossessed human beings of their humanity and cast them adrift.  They had no place in the world and no home in the cosmos.  They were disoriented.  Modern men had not learned how to control their aspirations and so had not learned to master their use of power. 

That peril for Guardini was the legacy of the Modern Age.  It brought about the demise of grand hopes for democracy, prosperity, justice, equality, and progress.  Civilization was reversing course, “all the abysses of primeval ages yawn before man, all the wild choking growth of the long-dead forests press forward from this second wilderness, all the monsters of the desert wastes, all the horrors of darkness are once more upon man.”7  At the end of the Modern Age, humanity confronted the frightful prospect of a decent into chaos.

“Progress,” discerned the French historian Albert Sorel, “was only one of the beautiful theories of philosophers.”8  At the zenith of the Modern Age during the first half of the nineteenth century there was a long moment of sublime tranquility, a precious equilibrium that did not lead to stagnation.  The Modern Age was a unique development of Western Civilization, and belonged more specifically to the history of Europe.  It was thus Europeans who initiated its dissolution first in their quarrels over the “Eastern Question,” the competition to seize the remnants of a dissolving Ottoman Empire, and then completed its destruction in the two world wars of the twentieth century.  “Could the events of the last decades have happened at the peak of a really true culture in Europe?”  Guardini wondered.  “This frightful destruction did not drop down from heaven; in truth it rose up out of hell!”

A culture marked by a true ordering could not have invented such incomprehensible systems of degradation and destruction.  Monstrosities of such conscious design do not emerge from the calculations of a few degenerate men or of small groups of men; they come from processes of agitation and poisoning which had been long at work.  What we call moral standards—responsibility, honor, sensitivity of conscience—do not vanish from humanity at large if men have not already been long debilitated.  These degradations could never have happened if its culture had been as supreme as the modern world thought.9

The Great War not only destroyed governments and empires, laid waste to cities and farms, slaughtered millions, and gave rise to radical ideas about art, literature, fashion, manners , and sexuality, it also, as Guardini made clear, bred a carelessness and irresponsibility in the conduct of human affairs from which new and even more sinister dangers emerged.

After the end of the Second World War in 1945, Western Europeans lived on borrowed money and borrowed time.  Most sensed that their good fortune was temporary and dependent on American resources and largess, but they preferred it to the desolation that their counterparts in Eastern Europe suffered.  They had learned how to live with a sense of impending doom, and so cherished their affluence while it lasted.  Gradually, Americans also began to recognize that their country and way of life were not immune to the decline of the modern world.  By the middle of the 1960s, more Americans began to sense an element of despair looming up beneath the vibrant surface of American life.  To the rest of the world, and especially to Europeans, Americans had represented the pinnacle of success.  They appeared youthful, powerful, and rich.  But that image, that cult of youth, power, and wealth, was almost utterly devoid of substance.  Despite suspicions that something had gone amiss, Americans continued to think of themselves and their country as exceptional.  They believed because they wanted desperately to believe that through the special favor of heaven the United States would escape the perils and tribulations of history that had twice in the twentieth century devastated Europe.  They were wrong.

The United States, of course, did not replicate the fate of Europe in the twentieth century.  No bombs fell on American cities.  No great wars were fought on American soil.  Yet, the United States, once thought of as a city on hill, a beacon to humanity, the last, best hope of mankind, has neither forestalled nor avoided the crisis of the Modern Age.  America shows myriad symptoms of decay, exhibiting both the infantilism and the senility that accompanies premature old age.  Like Europeans a century ago, Americans are rejecting the ideas, values, and institutions of the Modern Age, that is, the ideas, values, and institutions of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the American War for Independence.  Guardini detected in the Modern Age, and more so in the waning of modernity, a nihilistic egoism that stood in marked contrast to the world view prevalent during the Middle Ages….Read it all.

— from Romano Guardini & “The End of the Modern World”