One of the things that is difficult to keep in mind is that the modern world is, in certain terms, barely a century old. Even in the United States, it was not until about WWI that the population shifted to predominantly urban, and industrial employment outstripped rural occupations. Many of the features of our world that we take for granted were discovered/invented at the end of the 19th century or beginning of the 20th: electric lights, automobiles, airplanes, the radio, phonographs, photographic cameras, the telephone, and so forth. The Enlightenment was the modern world as a program, so to speak: suddenly, the effects were overwhelming and widespread.
The problem is that there was much about the modern world not to like. Urbanization brought with it a host of social problems for those uprooted from traditional cultures; capitalism was new and prone to volatility, to cycles of boom and bust that caused insecurity and mass unemployment; the cities became petri dishes for influenza and other diseases; and labor and capital came into violent conflict in many industries.
Then came the First World War, the first truly modern war, characterized by massive mobilization, the industrialization of war materiel, and the power of invention in creating more efficient means of killing. For some, this hideous face of modernity signified that we had lost our bearings and needed to revive our best traditions, so that barbarity would not engulf us and lead mainly to bigger, more inventive wars. For others, the culprit was traditional culture, and the solution was the rise of social science and the rule of the technocrat.
In terms of general culture, the sense of crisis manifested itself ambiguously in authors like Kafka (The Trial), Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain), and TS Eliot (The Wasteland). There are many more Modernist works that explore this territory.In visual art, Picasso suggested the crisis in analytical cubism, which broke up objects into their geometric components, and often included commercial objects in still life collages; and Matisse and the Fauvists used bizarre color contrasts and simplification of figure to achieve a similar result. To a certain extent, our idea of the intellectual became bound up with someone who was culturally sensitive to the "problem of modernity", whether he were Right wing (Eliot) or Left wing (Picasso).
After awhile, a portion of the Left drifted to the idea that certain terms which seemed substantial to us were really social constructs and the means by which the bourgeoisies maintained social control. This meant that we had to problematize these constructs in order to conceive of different ways things could be, thus superceding faith in technocracy and making speculation and imagination primary in the search for an improved social order.
At this time, the "cultural elite" is permeated with a sense of being more attuned to the problem of modernity and of not letting itself be duped by the "givenness" of key concepts (such as "gender), and therefore of carrying the seeds of progress. Of course, it is utterly unanchored to any requirement of rational or empirical verification. Funnily enough, a defense of the utility of social science has become a relatively conservative position.
This is all by way of saying that the cultural elite has tended to regard itself as intrinsically Leftist because of its ability to "see through" things. |
