A Book Review… The Rise And Fall Of The Human Empire

By JOHN LYON

(Editor’s Note: John Lyon holds a doctorate in history from the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at seven colleges or universities, as well as at Providence Academy in La Crosse, Wis.)

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Remi Brague, The Kingdom of Man: Genesis and Failure of the Modern Project, translated by Paul Seaton. University of Notre Dame Press; 2018. Available on amazon.com.

This is a marvelous work, written by a man of encyclopedic knowledge and sharp focus. In terms of his sources, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, German, and other modern foreign languages are cited in the appropriate alphabet in footnotes and bibliography and then given their French (or in translation, English) transliteration. In terms of the scope of his sources, Brague seems almost to have been places where the hand of man has never set foot. To say that his sources are comprehensive is to belittle them.
The narrative theme that threads its way surely through the historical data is centered on what man has made of man, ultimately, though not initially, without God or nature as guarantor of the human project. Brague makes much of that word (pro-ject), and perhaps as good a way as any to undertake a summary of the work is to use a figure of speech the author introduces early in the book. Napoleon, the very type of Faustian man, Brague notes, spoke of himself as “a bit of stone thrown into space” (p. 3). As Napoleon, so modern-post-modern man. Brague’s section titles suggest the trajectory: “Preparation.” “Deployment.” “Failure.”
Brague is extraordinarily aware of biblical and Medieval material which in general commissions man to his task (as opposed to his “project”). In another work he characterizes man in the earlier dispensation as an ambassador with plenipotentiary powers. By the seventeenth century, however, our species does seem to move or be moved from the security of enwombment in nature and assurance of our goodness in being by a creator God, toward the present insecurity, rootlessness, and ressentiment that seem to characterize post-modern man.
Courtesy of Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, and their ilk, we became fascinated by the apparently necessary though perhaps fatal allure of scientific and technological advancement. This pursuit, this “project,” we were assured, would initiate an order of things that would be characterized by such an amelioration of the human condition that we would come near, or reassume, our initial Edenic condition.
In this science-based account of the ascent of man, dominant now for four centuries, little reference has been made to a variant account of our initial seduction to progress in Gen. 3:4-5: “You shall become as God, knowing good and evil.”
In our progress toward Camp Siberia, “God” slowly became an unnecessary construct of “human” consciousness, and “man” was left temporarily knowing good and evil, and then conflating both into the “useful,” which in turn led him to ask, what was the use of the useful? This perhaps endless iteration “man” has put to himself and the “world” from his present location, somewhere East of Eden. Perhaps from a Caucasian rock?
Mark Twain once commented that man left Eden for a perfectly good reason: There was a snake in it. Yet vipers seem to abound around man yet.
This ascent of “man” has perhaps had its penultimate denouement in thought in “scientific” concepts such as relativity and indeterminacy, and in action with nuclear fission. So long as the bow in the clouds remains, we have assurance that we shall not all perish by water. We have not escaped scot-free, however, having apparently been promised “the fire next time” (cf. 2 Thess. 1:1-12). We await nuclear fusion.
There is a striking figure that Brague might have used to illustrate the position of modern-post-modern man. He does speak of the significance of the discovery and application of electricity, a force simply unknown to ancient man. This almost transcendent form of energy, readily generated, mechanically transmissible to any site and applicable to myriad purposes, was the dominant factor in the striking position Henry Adams found himself forced to at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. In the third-person narrative of his autobiographical account (The Education of Henry Adams), Adams found himself floored, in the House of Dynamos, by the size and immense force of these machines, “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of force totally new,” as he meditated on the evolution of energy available to man, from the Virgin to the dynamo.
The movement of the human “stone thrown into space” has had two faces, turned in opposite directions, Brague suggests (p. 3). The first face of the human project looks below, toward the conquest of nature as mechanically conceived; the second looks above, and entails the emancipation of man from anything superior to him, that is, God, or nature seen as divinely informed. Humanism consequently, Brague argues, must become atheism. The question then becomes, in the name of what will man reform himself? (p. 4).
Traveling along this reformist trajectory has not been easy for “man,” who has had to devise various ideologies to justify the sacrifices necessary to bring about utopia. “Utopia in power,” Brague notes (p. 177). Utopia: Will it be “a good place,” or “no place”?
To take but one Russian example of this quandary of man attempting to reform himself: Count Betzky has the Empress Catherine speaking of “rejuvenating our subjects,” and “creating” new human beings (p. 177). This project had its temporally interrupted but logically inevitable conclusion in Soviet times. Valerian Muravyev, for example, argued for a state (i.e., party) controlled eugenics in which “the peoples that resist this endeavor have no right to live” (p. 180).
For further details of Soviet utter ruthlessness, see Gary Saul Morson’s essays on Leninism in the September and October 2019 issues of The New Criterion. For example: Focusing on the greater importance of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat than Marx’s idea of the class struggle, Lenin in 1906 defined the former as “nothing other than power which is totally unlimited by any laws, totally unrestrained by any rules, and based directly on force” (Morson, October 2019, p. 5).
The problematic phrase “man attempting to reform himself” seems oxymoronic, and at least brings to mind brain-tickling images such as those induced by the phrase, “lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps.” The presumption is that a part of “mankind” with superior “scientific” knowledge will move the rest, by sheer force if necessary, toward the “inevitable” goal of human evolution.
Brague notes, as have others such as C.S. Lewis, that this move may entail the abolition of man. One way of putting the issue lies in the definition of education, the vehicle by which man will be re-formed. Traditional meanings of education rely on the etymology of the word, from the Latin e(ex) + ducere, to lead out from, to draw out of man what is inside him.
Taking cues from the apparent record of biological evolution, however, newer “educational” projects rely in some fashion on epigenesis, the superimposition on existing “stock” of a new form which will dissolve all the old categories. Simply put, force — power devoid of reason, of logos — will burst the seams and limits of the “old man” and replace him in the linear progress of our species with the next stage-actor of the drama of man’s progress. Per aspera ad astra. Or Camp Siberia. Or Disneyland.
A dominant segment of Enlightenment thought sought by means of science, technology, and political and social positivism to so constrain the necessities facing man that man would come to be — “happy,” so that he would enjoy his circumstances rather than be subject to them.
Inheriting from seventeenth-century physical science’s agents (e.g., Newton) and agents provocateurs (e.g., Bacon), the nominal “ability to throw stones into space,” the proponents of human progress in the next two centuries came to focus more on social physics and political science. Man has now become thrower and thrown, for Comte will have him improving “not only his condition but his nature” (p. 176).
This focus would supposedly advance our “scientific” knowledge of man per se, and thus allow for proper manipulation of the subject thus thrown. As Brague points out, however, the stone thus in space would still require a supportive milieu to maintain its trajectory and direction (p. 3).
A supportive milieu. Supportive milieu, however, come in various forms, from Olympian couches to Caucasian rocks. Have we joined the Olympian Assembly, or merely dismissed it in spite? Whichever might be the case, our terms of engagement have changed as we moved from modern to post-modern times.
Those terms may be well put by a description of Michel Foucault’s which, like so much else, I would never have come across save for Brague’s mention (in a different work). Humanism, defined at least politically, as “any attitude that thinks that the goal of politics is to produce happiness,” was for Foucault the great enemy to be destroyed (in Brague, The Legitimacy of the Human, 2017, p. 94). We are, or should be, then, beyond happiness and sorrow.
“Happiness!” Nietzsche wrote somewhere, “That’s only for Englishmen!” If Foucault is right in his contention, however, we should be well beyond happiness, or even, in American terms, the pursuit of happiness.
Oh! To have been in England then, when happiness was there!
A wise contemporary of Brague’s and ours, Ryszard Legutko, cites some contemporary critic as pontificating that “the world as it stands is unbearable.” In other words, we cannot stand the way things stand. Such idiocy can be expressed, because, as Brague comments elsewhere and on another topic, language is an obedient servant.
But, he continues, can it be thought? The contemporary literary stance appears to be dominantly ironic, distancing itself from life as being, as something good, very good. The sub-ject has become ob-ject.

Like Every Other Product

In a brief series of paragraphs about contraception, Brague notes that man’s taking control of his destiny was initially quantitative, but by the middle of the eighteenth century had begun to be qualitative, that is, some argued that segments of mankind — the hopelessly old, deformed, inferior — might be eliminated for the sake of a superior form of mankind.
Though this current of thought would come to full expression with Comte in the next century, Brague cites Condorcet at the end of the eighteenth century as writing already that if human beings “have obligations toward beings who do not yet exist, these obligations do not consist in giving them existence, but happiness; they have for their object the general well-being of the human species or the society in which they live, the family to which they are attached, and not the puerile idea of loading the earth with useless and unhappy beings” (pp. 175-176).
Contraception, Brague notes, having entered into the realm of technology, now “rests on the decision to place life under conditions, because it has less value than happiness” (p. 175).
This passage brings one up short. Haven’t we always done that — “place life under conditions”? One might think rather that now we refuse life conditions, demanding instead unconditional surrender.
Brague continues, however, with further explication. Citing Bergson who feared that “if one did not ‘rationalize’ the production of man himself” overpopulation and war would result (p. 176), Brague then concludes that the use of “rationalize” (“even in the mouth of an inoffensive thinker”) involves a double shift. “First one makes the human enter into the sphere of production; then, once man has become no longer a subject but the object (sic) of production, everything invites to subject him to rationalization like every other product” (p. 176).
To borrow a phrase from H.G. Wells, mind seems “at the end of its tether.” The matter proceeds as in Brague’s title of the next chapter: “Man Surpassed and . . . Replaced.”
Brague notes a remarkable citation from the Abbé Dubos (1719): “The philosophical spirit . . . will soon do to a great part of Europe what the Goths and the Vandals did earlier. . . . I see . . . the most useful prejudices for the preservation of society abolished. . . . We conduct ourselves without regard for experience . . . and we have the impudence to act as if we were the first generation that knew how to reason” (p. 150).
May we hope that we are not the last?
Brague concludes with the observation that “the human problem is not ignorance of the law, but the inability to fulfill it.” Can man survive “without a superior instance to affirm him, without someone who has not only granted him his humanity — by breathing into him a soul or, more prosaically, by ensuring the conditions for the evolutionary emergence of superior mental functions (‘mind’) — but also granted him legitimacy. On his own man cannot pronounce on his value; he cannot be party and judge.”
He needs “the One who declared on the sixth day of creation that everything was ‘very good’” (p. 216).