The Dignity and Disaster of Modernity

Wilber's View

This is Wilber's recurring refrain for refusing both uncritical boosterism about modernity and blanket Romantic condemnation of it. Modernity's dignity, following Max Weber and Charles Taylor, was the genuine differentiation of the [[big-three|Big Three]] — science (it), morals (we), and art (I) — into autonomous value spheres, each finally free to pursue its own validity claims (truth, justice, taste) without being subordinated to or policed by the others. That's real, hard-won progress on Wilber's account, not an illusion to be debunked: it's the same move as "No more myths," the liberation from mythic-imperialism and ethnocentric prejudice that comes with formal operational, worldcentric cognition. Modernity's disaster is that differentiation was never followed by integration: with no unifying center holding the Big Three together, they didn't just separate, they dissociated — became "hyper-autonomous" realms with nothing to say to each other, held apart by mutual disdain, exactly the differentiation-going-too-far pattern Wilber applies at every scale in this book (see repression for its individual-psyche version).

The elegance of this framing is that it lets Wilber hold two things at once that most accounts of modernity treat as a package deal to accept or reject wholesale: he can credit the Enlightenment's differentiation of value spheres as genuine emancipation while still diagnosing exactly what went wrong, without needing either a triumphalist or a declinist story. What's doing a lot of unstated work, though, is the assumption that "differentiation followed by adequate integration" was ever really on offer as a historical possibility rather than a retrospective ideal — Wilber's own account (see The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp) suggests the flatland ontology that caused the dissociation was baked in from very early in the Enlightenment's own philosophical commitments, which raises the question of whether "dignity without disaster" was ever actually achievable given the premises modernity started from.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

We have seen that one of the great defining marks of modernity—what has been called its genuine dignity—was the clear differentiation of the Big Three, the differentiation of science (it), morals (we), and art (I), so that each could pursue its own course and establish its own truths without domination by the others.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12, "The Collapse of the Kosmos"

"Cultural modernity's specific dignity is constituted by what Max Weber called the differentiation of the value spheres in accord with their own logics."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12, "The Collapse of the Kosmos"

But if the dignity of modernity was the differentiation of the Big Three, the disaster of modernity would be that it had not yet found a way to integrate them. Indeed, with no unifying center, the Big Three had already begun to move into dissociation—to exist as radically separate, "hyper-autonomous" realms, with nothing to say to each other, bound only by a thoroughgoing and often mutual disdain.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12, "The Collapse of the Kosmos"

This was indeed part of the dignity of modernity, part of the liberating and enlightening move that strove, ideally, to free itself from ethnocentric prejudice and mythic imperialism, and the violence inherent in those shallower engagements. No more myths!

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 12, "The Collapse of the Kosmos"

These values—in particular, universal pluralism, altruism, and freedom—are what Taylor calls the three "hypergoods"… that no doubt constitute much of the true dignity of modernity. But no sooner had the rational Ego secured some notion of these hypergoods than it began not just to differentiate from other goods, but to alienate them, dissociate them, repress them, seal them off.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 13, "The Dominance of the Descenders"

…most of the aspects of modernity that many theorists have seen as positive and beneficial can in fact be resolved into variations on "No more myths"… and likewise, most of the aspects of modernity that have been harshly criticized by theorists can be resolved into variations on "No more Ascent!"

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 11 (footnote)

See Also

• big-three — the science/morals/art differentiation whose splitting-apart is the "disaster" half of this concept
• The Ego Camp and the Eco Camp — the modern rivalry Wilber says grew directly out of this unresolved dissociation
• flatland — where the dissociated value spheres eventually collapse to (the Big Three reduced to just It)
• repression — the same differentiation/dissociation logic at the scale of an individual psyche rather than a civilization
• Wilber on Postmodernism — Wilber's account of what happens next, when postmodernity inherits this unresolved dissociation
• Max Weber — the source of the "differentiation of value spheres" language this concept is built on