Theological Origins of Modernity

the contradictions of enlightenment 285
late-nineteenth-century thinkers such as Nietzsche viewed history more
pessimistically. In this view, European history since Plato had been a process
of decline, and while he hoped that this process could be reversed by
a titanic act of will, he knew that decadence and degeneration might well
continue to increase and spread. Building on this view in the aft ermath
of the First World War, thinkers like Spengler (Th e Decline of the West),
Husserl (Th e Crisis of the European Sciences), and Heidegger presented
a much darker image of the historical destiny of European humanity.
Heidegger argued that European humanity had been in continual decline
since the time of the Presocratic Greeks. In fact, Europeans had sunk to
such depths that they were no longer even capable of recognizing their
own degradation. In his view modern human beings believed that they
were becoming masters and possessors of nature when in fact they were
being enslaved by the very technology that they imagined to be the means
of their liberation. Th is technology in fact converted humans into mere raw
material for a productive process that was itself an aimless and pointless
pursuit of nothing other than more production. In this way the Manichean
vision of a demonic force at the heart of things that so concerned Luther
and that resurfaced on a number of occasions in the development of modernity
comes to light as the dominant force behind history.
Th e idea of history had its origin in the attempt to make sense of the
modern project in light of the contradictions that became increasingly evident
in the Enlightenment. Th e idea of history itself, however, is rent by
these same contradictions. It too vacillates between a Pelagian notion of
individual freedom and a Manichean notion of radical determinism. We
see this in the development of history as an explanation that replaces philosophy
and metaphysics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
but also in our continuing eff orts to make sense out of modernity. Th is
is particularly evident in the prevailing debates about globalization with
which we began our discussion.
Th e initial image of globalization that came to predominate in the period
aft er the fall of the Berlin Wall rested on a liberal view of history
and society that saw human development as the result of the increasingly
intertwined interactions of human beings connected by free trade and almost
instantaneous communications. Th is was a liberal vision of a process
that many believed would produce global peace, freedom, and prosperity.
Th is extraordinarily positive view of globalization rested on a faith in
the hidden hand of the free market and a sense that the dialectic of history
had fi nally reached the end that Hegel had predicted. Th ose who held
this view imagined worldwide economic development, a growing toler-