Have you ever played the game where you pick what time period you'd rather be in? So did the antimoderns. They were a group of primarily middle class thinkers in the Age of Modernism--a movement in the late 19th - early 20th-century where sociological, physiological, technological, and industrial change progressed at a rapid rate the world had never seen before.
No doubt a few stuffy, hat-wearing figures have already swept in your mind: Charles Dickens, Andrew Carnegie, Queen Victoria, and maybe even T.S. Eliot. Most of these classic giants belonged in the Victorian world. But is time period, an age of fear and questioning, really that different from the world we live in today?
I don't think so.
Modernity brought much baggage: anxiety, hopelessness, restlessness. Many Western cultures had within a few decades gone from being staunchly Christian states to a place, as Nietzsche believed, where God was dead. In Jackson Lear's well known book concerning antimodernism, "No Place of Grace," the author focuses on a universal problems the moderns faced: the need for authenticity. Mankind looked for something solid to hold on to in the impersonal industrializing world.
The ones searching deeply for authenticity were the antimoderns. They feared what the world was becoming: Rationalized--stripped away from emotion away and left with calculated rules and truths. It was also over-civilized and urban. America was built by strong, faithful, independent men. Urbanization stripped the clean self-sufficiency from man and made him a weak unit in a greater whole. Like a part to a machine.
Do you ever find yourself peering at Instagram feeds where pictures of mountains and tents and red plaid shirts make you long for a simpler life?
So did the antimoderns.
In fact, they feared the culture was losing too much sufficiency, so started the Arts and Crafts Movement. Yes, that's really a thing. Long before Hobby Lobby, Arts and Crafts really changed the world. It didn't just mean paining birdhouses either, at the beginning of the movement. Leaders began agricultural societies where the urbanized, over-worked, weak urbanite could come and get a taste of true, hard works. There were even magazines like their are today dedicated to the handmade craft.
The moderns were considered very introspective. Psychology became a study of the Self--the Self suddenly could do no wrong. The Self was a infested with a lot of inherited problems from family and environment. After the assassination of President James Garfrield in 1881, some psychiatrists tried to justify the acts by the murder by giving a lost lists of reasons why it wasn't really the assassin, Charles J. Guiteau's fault for what he had done. They believed he should plea insane.
If this sounds like the familiar, "I can't help it, it's just who I am," excuse you've heard all your life, be comforted those in the late 1880s heard it as well. At the time, this excuse was very new and many were horrified.
Anxiety was also very high like it is today, despite the fact the most likely to suffer from did not lack much in the way of material goods. As the observation went in Lear's book "suicide was less the custom of the barbarous than of the cultivated man."
Modern Psychiatrists blamed the anxieties due to the ever-growing, luxurious, advancing modern world. This theory makes sense in modern day America as we are privileged to have the means to consume much technology and things to make our life comfortable. What about other societies? I looked up the suicide rates in Japan, which is close to America in the terms of how comfortably its citizens lives, and how rapid technology is advancing. To my surprise, and to the confirmation of Modern psychiatrists, Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world--a horrifying 60% higher than the global average.
One thing that truly struck me when studying antimodernism was the Modern youth which was then descried as a "generation that is more interested in questions about life than living."
I see this every day with my own generation. People want to get into debates about everything. Everyone asks why. But the sanctity of life is lost. The question has turned from, "What am I here to do," to, "Why is life worth living?"
To help fill this void, many moderns--both the ones who critiqued societies and the ones who didn't--sought cleansing. They wanted rest cures from the stressed world. brain cures where they practiced meditation. Bodily cures where they practiced eating and exercising well regularly to help cleanse from the everyday filth.
Meanwhile, writers and artists abandoned their culture to find something richer. More meaningful.
They looked back to simpler times.
As my professor said, nothing says we haven't left the modern era if the name for the new era is "post-modern."
Maybe we haven't left the Modern world. Maybe we're just all antimoderns.
