Time exists, and time passes. Our lives are passing. Our lives are passing more quickly than the human community to which we belong. From time immemorial, the human intellect has been challenged, and basically shaped, by an awareness of both my personal time, which was born together with me and which will carry me off, and the collective time of the human community to which I belong, which came before me, which runs through me and which will outlive me. Who am I in time? Who am I in relation to my forefathers? Who am I in relation to my children? Am I the temporary guardian of a memory and values that might justify my presence here on earth, or am I rather the expression of a historical singularity that I accept because no one but me will ever be me?
We have reached the parting of the ways. Let us go back to the heart of the twentieth century that has just left us midway between the African storyteller Amadou Hampaté Bâ and the French poet André Breton. When the time came for him to write his memoirs, Amadou Hampaté Bâ brought together his scattered writings, reconstructed the story of his origins and integrated the ‘Fulani child’ he once was into a cycle of successive generations, of families with countless relationships, transversal oral traditions, values and norms that were both spoken and unspoken, received, repeated and transmitted from age to age and from person to person. Amkoullel, l’enfant peul, which is the title of the first volume of this ‘Fulani child’s’ autobiography, comes from that world. His consciousness and memory are full of those human relations, of the never-ending cycles that are reflected in the landscapes of Africa. Those landscapes transmit that sense of the infinite, of power and vulnerability, and of the return of the same, which is of the essence, and of the vanishing of singularity, which is a matter of contingency. Poetic, realist and surrealist, André Breton’s novel Nadja is the complete antithesis of the Fulani child. The two universes could not be more different, and nor could the writers or their characters, who are, in both cases, direct or indirect incarnations of their authors. The poet asks himself about the ‘significant events’ in his life, about his subjectivity and his obsessions, and about the ‘me’ (moi) that exists inside the ‘I’ (je). He seems to have no past, to live completely in the present and to be looking for a future he can decide, shape and create. His memories are of memories of random events, of the unpredictable and of chance encounters. He quite naturally asks himself what it is that justifies his presence on earth and concludes that it is his singularity and difference: the ‘I’ that no one else has ever inhabited, that no one else will ever inhabit, and that will never inhabit any consciousness but his. His heroine Nadja comes from nowhere. She is the incarnation of the subject that exists in the fleeting moment, in the evanescent. She has no memories and is attached to no norms: she is ‘the heart of a flower that has no heart’, and she is free. She leads the poet into an uncertain future that comes close to madness and knows only creative but fleeting intuitions that know no past and no tradition. The scale of the cycles of time and of millenary affiliations says something about time and maturation, and about the old and the wise who bear and convey a memory and meaning. When an old man dies, said Hampâté Bâ, ‘a library burns’. The carefree youth Nadja could not be more different. She draws the poet not into an awareness of an extensible time, but into the dense energy of a fleeting moment. André Breton wanted the hereafter to exist here in this life, in the eternal instant of the ‘I’ that exists … Amadou Hampâté Bâ watches himself in the cycles of the infinite and thinks of himself as an instant within an eternity in which everything returns, but the hereafter is far away, way beyond that.
Tradition and modernity. This is, of course, a matter of our relationship with time, and of our relationship to oneself in history. And at a much deeper level, it is a matter of power and authority. The old traditions, and especially those inscribed within the oral tradition, stress the importance of the past and the meaning of the cycles that bind us to that past and give a meaning to the present. Nature, the seasons, life and death and agriculture teach us about the perpetual return of things and about repetition. We have to meditate on them and give them a meaning. Orality is to tradition what cycles are to time: we must speak, transmit, repeat and inscribe in our memories the history of our origins, our sources, our line of descent and the path that leads us to ourselves. Traditions speak of meaning and identity: we know where we come from. Memory transmits a meaning to us and inscribes us in a history that both repeats itself and moves on because it always includes the younger generations. A tradition is, by definition, never static or closed. Traditions constantly evolve, in particular through transition to the next generation that becomes part of them and that will in its turn pass them on. Along with memory and a concept of ‘meaningful time’, a tradition transmits values, norms, a culture and a way of life. Whether we like it or not, our individual consciousness accepts (or rejects) them, and those values and norms have a natural authority: they are what bind the tradition together, give it substance, organize its internal system and determine its priorities and hierarchy. Human beings therefore discover that change is based upon a collective memory rather than individual reason when it comes to determining meaning and values: maintaining a tradition implies an act of trust on the part of the faithful.
Whilst traditions are never static, modernity is not without a sense of its origins, references and traditions. It is always conceived and conceptualized in terms of a particular history and memory: in the West, modernity is bound up with a process that began before the Renaissance and climaxed in the age of the Enlightenment. The European cultural tradition and the power of the Church had the effect of producing the stages of the modern ‘resistance’, and art and love were its first vectors. Italian painting, drama and sculpture were expressions of transgression and dissidence (sometimes mediated by Ancient Greece and Rome); the courtly love of which the troubadours and trouvères sang was also a literature of resistance that contested the norms and values of Christianity, its conception of the body and pleasure, and, of course, of paradise, where carnality became spiritualized. In certain medieval love songs, the hereafter, with its pure springs and emancipated bodies, is already of this world. It is already ‘here on earth’ and anticipates Breton’s ‘surrealist’ wish. Reason then joined the senses’ resistance, and demanded its share of autonomy and freedom both in the quest for truth and in the organization of society and the political realm. Modernity, or what we understand by modernity in the West, derives from that history and that tradition, and bears the mark of both its resistance and its emancipation. When philosophers, writers, sociologists and researchers from Byron to Chateaubriand, Weber, Rawls, Habermas, Touraine, Gauchet or Wolton speak, either directly or indirectly, of modernity, they find that the universe of the Christian (and sometimes Jewish) tradition is omnipresent, and that it has been read through the prisms of both the heritage of antiquity and post-Enlightenment developments. Modernity is in effect an affirmation of reason, of the autonomy of the individual, and of the demand for progress, the sciences, secularization (which is what made the process possible) and democracy, which is its legitimate Western daughter. The political power of religion recedes, and religious tradition loosens its hold over minds and memories in terms of points of reference and heritage. The world becomes ‘disenchanted’ and becomes an object of study for a newly liberated analytic and scientific reason. Time becomes linear, and the mind projects itself into an indeterminate future that is always new, always open and always there to be conquered.
This modernity is not the modernity of all civilizations and all cultures. It is the modernity of the West, and it is very much in the minority if we look at all the world’s memories. It has become the terminological norm thanks to developments and advances in industry and the sciences, and of course the economic and political hegemony of European societies (and now that of the United States). Modernity was therefore the product of resistance to a tradition that had failed to allow its members to fulfil their human potential because it was beholden to a religious hierarchy and moral norms that finally smothered them. Modernity is, in historical terms, the other name for that process of liberation. Elsewhere in the world, other civilizations, such as African and Asian cultures and traditions, did not experience the same intense conflict, and power relations are never so pronounced, mainly because the religious hierarchy and the upholders of tradition never had such exclusive or absolute power. In historical terms, Native Americans, South Americans, Africans and Asians had to face the consequences of the emancipation of the West and the revolution that took place there: colonization, the mastery of technology, economic power and political domination overturned their ancestral traditions and undermined their certainties. Some thought that the West’s dominance was proof that its civilization was superior and wanted to imitate it. Others saw it as nothing more that an expression of its arrogance and dehumanization and were determined to resist it, whilst still others tried to be more selective and to strike a balance between the benefits that might be derived from a painful historical experience, and their potential harmful effects. Quite apart from the complexity of relations between the West and other civilizations, the products of Western modernity were to entail serious consquences, whether positive or negative effect, on every society in the world. All traditions and religions had to ask themselves new questions about the status of reason, the individual, progress and how to deal with pluralism. These questions were in themselves both basic and positive: it was often the way in which they were asked and imposed that created the problem. And to put it in negative terms, the problem was the imposed postulate that there was only one legitimate answer and that it was provided by the dominant civilization. The West’s scientific understanding of the elements forced the African, Amerindian and Asiatic traditions to reconsider the role of ‘spirits’. Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism and many other ancestral traditions in the South had to reconcile their conception of cyclical time with the proven efficiency of the postulate that time is linear. The freedom of reason, the primacy of the individual and equality challenged ancient orders, from Hinduism’s castes to the traditional powers of communities, of memory and of its depositaries. A lot of certainties were undermined, a lot of habits were disrupted, and a lot of orders were thrown into disorder! Did the accession to the conditions of an exogenous modernity mean casting aside the roots of tradition and millenary endogenous points of reference? With the exception of a few minority voices within them, most civilizations and cultures have always chosen to remain true to their past, whilst agreeing to compromise, should the need to do so arise, without losing a sense of their own identity. In some case, the balance of power meant that cultures could not survive, and in others the compromise resulted in adulteration and alienation, but resistance sometimes allowed endangered civilizations to renew themselves from within. Ibn Khaldûn, who was the precursor of sociology, made an interesting study of these relationships and these cycles of emergence, paroxysm, resistance, tension and decline. Our recent history often proves him right. The civilizations of South America, Africa and Asia, like Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam and so many other spiritualities and cultures, are in a state of crisis and are asking themselves questions about the meaning of their traditions: how can they preserve their memories, values and norms, and their feeling of belonging to a world of pre-given points of reference?
Modernity and its at times excessive effects have their critics inside Western civilization itself. There have, of course, been political criticisms of the attitude of the colonizers and the use they made of their power. Like Montaigne, the early humanists intuitively sensed that the way they judged and treated ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’ implied the possibility of abuse. Those criticisms were to grow louder, and they went hand in hand with comments on some basic philosophical, political and economic issues. Nietzsche saw the so-called democratization of the intellect and rights as a dangerous inversion of the old order and, like Schopenhauer, opted for a return to the cyclical conception of time and the idea of selection (through the agency of the Eternal Return). The linear nature of time not only implied, in his view, a reference to Christianity associated with morality; it also established a dangerous link between rationality and the illusion of progress. Schopenhauer defended an oriental conception of temporal cycles, whilst Nietzsche turned to art, where the idea of a cycle had the twofold advantage of allowing him to use form to avoid the question of meaning. The ‘last metaphysician’, as Heidegger called him, was a true critic of modernity, even though, or perhaps because, he was its most perfect exemplar. Heidegger was also critical of modernity, as was Bergson, who rejected the reductionism of rationality, albeit for very different reasons. Other thinkers and intellectuals, such as the political theorist Hannah Arendt, saw Stalin’s purges, the extermination of the Jews and the enslavement of whole peoples as the logical outcome of modernity’s premises. Others were to adopt the same position, and many ecologists, such as René Dumont, associate the destruction of the planet with the economic order and behaviours promoted by the ‘ideology of modernity’.
The critical theory of the ‘Frankfurt School’ is of interest in that it attempts to discuss both the founding assumptions of modernity and its implications. Its studies of the ‘mass culture’ produced by the combination of rationalization, individualism and scientific and technological progress reach the conclusion that what was originally a process of liberation has turned on itself and produced a new alienation. Without roots, without memory, without belonging to a group, man is left prey to economic logic that offers for consumption the plural illusion of standardization. Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man makes a critique of this illusion of freedom and diversity by revealing the underlying trend towards the standardization of terminologies, behaviours and consumerism. The power to influence minds has changed its form, but it is as effective as ever: we have to begin by deconstructing power relations (this was the thesis of Foucault and Bourdieu). Modernity, it would seem, does no more to set us free than tradition, whilst mass culture traps individuals into a relationship of stimulus and response that is anything but rational. The culture of mass consumerism is killing cultures and their diversity: the former caters to the instincts while the latter cultivate taste. Both the excesses of modernity and the prisons of tradition are bringing about a crisis in the quest for a balance.
