Book Review
The Modern Project
Le règne de l'homme: Genèse et échec du projet moderne
by Rémi Brague
Paris: Gallimard, 2015
(416 pages, 25.00, paperback)
T he king of Lilliput, one of Jonathan Swift's more memorable creations, called himself "the delight and terror of the universe." Today that delusion is more democratic but less comical. The choice and master spirits of this age all claim to rule time and space, and they say so without smiling. Genetic and social engineers, environmentalists, politicians, and educationists are all impatient to take charge of nature, history, and the human species.
We Christians shake our heads when we hear of Planned Parenthood's ruthless promotion of abortion, when we see the creeping acceptance, and seeming inevitability, of euthanasia. Who are these people, we wonder, who presume to know how many of us have a right to live? We shake our heads once more when we hear about cyborg anthropologists, genetic engineers, post-genderists and transhumanists, the growing host of people who not only believe in evolution but claim the ability to steer its course. They will determine not only how many of us there will be, but what we will be like, unless they decide to scrap us altogether in favour of some cybernetic or bio-medical improvement of their own invention.
We shake our heads because we think these people are aberrant. We strive to classify them as comic or pathetic figures like the king of Lilliput. We concede that by some evil quirk they have got the ear of media and politicians. But their moment will pass; common sense will reassert itself; the pendulum, in which we long to believe, will swing back.
Sadly, there is no such pendulum. The aberrants are mainstream and so not really aberrant, at least in the statistical sense of the term. They are the latest products of what the philosopher Rémi Brague calls "the modern project," a post-Christian conception of ourselves and nature with its roots in the wild hopes and enthusiasms unleashed by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.
I apologize to Brague for introducing his book a little sensationally. Brague is scholarly: impressive in erudition, lucid in language, and Christian in inspiration. No brief review can do justice to his book. My aim is only to alert those who read French to a work they will not want to overlook, and those who do not to watch for the translation. (The publisher's response to my inquiry on this possibility was that as yet no Anglo-American firm has come forward with a proposal for an English translation. Any with such an interest should contact Mme. Noble at Éditions Gallimard.)
The Internal Logic of Modern Hubris
Of course there were centuries of scientia and technological developments prior to the modern age. But a new approach to doing science began in the seventeenth century, one rooted both in the experimentalism of Francis Bacon and the rational mathesis of René Descartes. The new science turned its back on history and contemplative wisdom in pursuit of progress and utility. Descartes captured the Faustian character of the age when he foresaw that the new science would make us "like masters and possessors of nature." By the eighteenth century the aim was no longer to be men like gods. It was to supplant God and reign in his place. Hence Brague's title, The Reign of Man.
Brague's story is not just a sequence of personalities, achievements, theories, and events leading from those early days to the "aberrant" mainstream of today. He is aiming at something more difficult than a history of ideas. The goal is to lay bare the internal logic of modern hubris, to disinter link by link from the debris of history the chain of ideas that took us from early modern theistic humanism, through atheistic humanism, to today's regnant anti-humanism, which expresses itself in art as ugliness and distortion of the human form, and in social science as the program of abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide—from early modern utopian dreams to current dystopian nightmares.
The power of Brague's account owes much to his single-minded focus on that chain of ideas. It could easily have been lost. At every step in what our betters want us to call the "ascent" from the seventeenth century to our wonderful selves—at every step, articulate religious and philosophical -conservatives sounded warnings, often eloquent and profound ones. But Brague mentions them only obliquely. To have acknowledged them more fully would almost certainly have blurred the clear line of his account, focused on the internal contradictions of the modern project.
Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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