Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century

The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century: An Essay on Late Modernity by Chantal Delsol, translated by Robin Dick, 202 pages

As French intellectual Delsol diagnoses it, the crisis of late modernity is that a culture which has accepted the ideological premise that any limitation is a form of oppression has encountered the limits of its capacity to reshape reality to fit its desires.  In this telling, the catastrophic cost - in the hundreds of millions of lives lost, but also in the spiritual damage done to billions more - of the twentieth century's utopian schemes - not only Nazism and Communism but also liberal democracy - is secondary to the bare fact of the utter failure of those schemes to achieve their promised ends.  The rediscovery that man is inherently limited has led to a rejection of reality, a nihilistic reaction, and not even the triumphant nihilism of the past, but a cramped, craven nihilism.  The greatest tragedy is that the pervasive reductionist materialism of modernity even reduces the quest for solidarity into the mere impersonal reallocation of resources, whether through voluntary philanthropy or taxation and social spending.

Delsol's primary concern is with the damage the acids of modernity inflict upon the modern world's hardest won and most cherished insight - the inherent dignity of every human person.  The impoverished worldview of late modernity, she claims, cannot long sustain a belief in human dignity against its own instrumentalist ideology which is perpetually tempted to view people as means rather than as ends.