René Girard and Modernity’s Apocalypse

Abstract

Modernity is inadequately characterized as a mere chronological time period, on the one hand, or a timeless abstract idea, on the other. It is, rather, better described as a culturally and historically embodied consciousness and cast of mind, a “social imaginary.”² For, in spite of how it is depicted and narrated by its more superficial devotees, modernity functions in practice as a religious culture. It possesses a historically located origin (the Renaissance or Enlightenment); a sacred event or set of events (the Reformation, Treaty of Westphalia, Glorious Revolution, American Revolution, French Revolution); sacred texts (Kant’s sapere aude, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution); sacred dogmas (the separation of church and state, and religion and politics, individual rights, “religion” as non-coercive and private, the toleration of all beliefs, “the right to define one’s concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life”³); a perpetual enemy and source of evil (dogmatic belief, religious war, intolerance, racism); and, lastly, a soteriology. If we define soteriology as that which makes peace between competing individuals,⁴ modernity’s soteriology is manifold, including the political hegemony of the Nation-State owning the exclusive right to employ coercive force, the privatization and freedom of religion, scientific advancement, and commercial prosperity; for the late-moderns, we can add “private self-creation,” moralistic therapeutic deism, a globalistic market of multicultural carnivals, a trans-humanistic utopia without “Truth” and therefore without terror.