Smatterings of the Philosopher’s Stone – Chapter 1, part 1

Some years ago, the Western world succumbed to the force of its own personality and arrogated itself to one of the most bizarre titles in the history of civilisation. There is something quaint in the old Roman idea that a golden age might come after an iron age and outshine it, as if, having progressed from stone through bronze in stages of increasing technological facility, people suddenly forgot the practical needs of life and ran off in pursuit of a shiny and useless metal. But the charming innocence that conceived gold as the next in a series stretching from stone to iron is not quite so ludicrous as the unassailable logic that put the postmodern age after the modern age. It was the cultural equivalent of Napoleon’s self-coronation, every bit as naïvely arrogant and every bit as dazzlingly insane. For the word postmodern, signifying post-present, could only have occurred to a peculiarly romantic (or unthinking) thinker, and could only have become popular in an age obsessed with time travel. In short, the idea of postmodernity is an outstandingly modern idea. It suits the age that could invent it very well.

That said, it seems to me that it forebodes a tragedy. It reflects a chronic boredom with respectable reasoning and prosaic ‘real life’ – a chronic boredom I respect deeply, as it is one of the key ingredients of commonsense, but one which means that, soon enough, they will become bored with the postmodern too. After the postmodern will come the post-postmodern; that is to say, after the post-present will come the post-future. The idea will tantalise them – there is already talk of it – and eventually they will give in, and post-postmodernity will gain general recognition. Having moved on from the present and now also fallen off the edge of the future, they will be forced to acknowledge, by process of elimination, that their age is not temporal at all, but eternal; and though they will fight the thought for a long time, they will eventually be forced to admit the bitter truth. The instinct that first impelled them, the chronic boredom which is chronological boredom, the fierce urge to maintain that no age is eternal, that even the present must pass and the modern shall be no more, and that human ‘progress’ is not a steady ascent, but, like a planet on an epicycle of an epicycle, a series of regressions and even digressions leading nowhere in particular, though always through new places – this urge will destroy itself, when, in the post-future, they find that there is nowhere left to go.

Like all historical phenomena, this chronic boredom was inevitable as soon as it existed (though not before). It was inevitable because the kind of progress that kept the intellectual elite smugly boasting of its ‘modernity’ from the fifteenth century to just about the present day turned out (600 years in) to be rather uninspiring after all. It turned out to be less artistic, less fulfilling, and less meaningful than they had though. In the 18^th century there were still hopes that natural human progress could be made into the greatest of all religions. In the 19^th century the notion that it was actually quite poetic had not fully died. By the turn of the 20^th century there was still talk of it solving all social problems. But after these several centuries, two world wars, the invention of the atom bomb, and the moon-landing (which, since it meant it was no longer possible to believe the Man in the Moon, was felt to be one giant leap backwards for mankind) people could no longer avoid the fact that progress is only as good as its use. And it is hard to believe that it has generally been used well. It has made the world much more pleasant in some respects, and quite wantonly made it worse in others. Architecture is a prime example. Bauhaus, say some, has a beauty of its own; but Bauhaus, say the masses of mankind, has nothing on the Gothic. Our own generation – even those with an appreciation for modern artforms – is not universally happy to reflect that ‘the great masters’ is a phrase that refers to individuals who have been dead 300 years and more, and that new great poetry has not been seen in the land for nearly a century. A few obscure song-writers make up the meagre exception.

Progress and knowledge and technology and democracy are not to blame for any of this. Most of us are happy to acknowledge that. At the same time, most would agree that modernity has taken its toll on the attractiveness of the world we live in and of the way we live in it. While it hasn’t lessened the number of inquisitions, it has lessened the number of forests. It hasn’t increased the average person’s love for their neighbour, but it has decreased their faith in God. And while it may have increased the amount of things we know, it has also increased the sense that that they are mere facts. Something in the spirit of the world has been weakened by modernity. Secularism has sapped its energy. The human world has lost character.

Perhaps every generation has its own grievance with the past. The scholars of the Renaissance blamed the medievals for leaving them in a sink of ignorance; the romantics blamed the Enlightenment for leaving them too many drawing-room ballads and too few outdoor ramblings. It is true that the modern age is not the first to take its toll. But out of the entire syndicate of tax-collecting eras, it is probably the one that has embezzled the most, and there is some justice in hanging around to see what we can possibly retrieve from it. At least, that would be less insane than hanging around the ancient Assyrian tax-booth to complain.

The intent of these essays is to illustrate the issue of embezzled character, not through a grieved postmodern bitterly looking back on the past, but by something more peculiar and prodigious, a grieved premodern suspiciously looking forward onto the future. I have spent as much time as any frustratedly bumping up against the banality of modern life; here I propose to take a detour and approach it from the other end. The ideal of modernity has not really died, whatever the postmoderns say; really we all do appreciate science and innovation and the less abysmal aspects of the 21^st century; but the ideal has been handled poorly for all of four hundred years, and it has become hard to remember what exactly the ideal was. The dissatisfied critic sitting at this end of modernity and trying to get in soon discovers that the door is exit only. But at the other end, the seventeenth century, there is an entry door; and at that door there is also a dissatisfied critic – though not an unhappy one; a medieval man committed with enthusiasm to the modern ideal, but critical of the way he saw it playing out. That man, Sir Thomas Browne, is to be the subject of our study.