Modernism

Scruton on Baudelaire:

Such is the task of the modern poet: to show consciousness, alive and judging, in a world that will not be judged.

You could say a lot—and knowing me I probably will—but the key thing here is the world that will not be judged. Will it not? I daresay most people probably continue to believe it will, which might lead us to wonder how a relatively small elite ever got off telling us that something had changed forever and that it couldn't be put back.

And what would it be like to live if you thought the world would never be judged? It would not be a world without rules. To the contrary, we'd need more rules because people who believe that the world would never be judged would need to be controlled. But that is all the rules would be about—control. Supremely evil types of control, such as the Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany or Muslim theocracies, would be just as legitimate as liberal democracy in such a world. The only restraint on such regimes would be their sustainability.

And the rules wouldn't apply differently. Wealthy powerful people like Roman Polanski would still get away with rape in such a world.

Outwardly, it would resemble our world in every respect. The only difference is that everything in such a world would turn on fate. "Hope" would mean simply wishing for a lucky break.

If that is what modern is, why would anybody want to be a modernist? It's not like we have to be.

The funny thing is that much modernism consists in arguing that it isn't a matter of "what we want to be"; that it is rather that the world has changed and you either must be a modernist or live a life of illusion. But why would that be true?

In any case, the vast majority of people chose to simply ignore modernism. Today, Freud, Marx, Wagner and a host of others are just historical artifacts.