Facing up to Modernity, by Peter L. Berger
Levy, David
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Facing up to Modernity, by Peter L. Berger" bailing out before his Washington ego trip ends in moral disaster. He resigns and, in the closing line of the book, we are told that, "The next day he flew home—to Louisville." Literature would have...
...but one of his fictional colleagues at least gives us a succinct description of how the White House syndrome tends to corrupt so many bright young men, not to mention dim-witted old ones: We're hooked...
...Their egos get all screwed up, all tied up with his—and they call it loyalty, call it a sense of public duty, call it everything except what it really is...
...Phenomenologically, it is an integral part of man's effort to make sense of his existence...
...Indeed, revolutionary movements can be successful only if they succeed fairly rapidly in establishing new structures of order within which people can settle down with some semblance of social and psychic safety...
...Religion is man's way of coming to terms with this realm of experience...
...He is also, by his own description, a conservative and, as he puts it, "a rather heretical" Christian...
...According to Berger, the myth of socialism has exerted such a strong appeal in our modern age precisely because it promises all the benefits of modernization with none of its alienating costs...
...When Andy Martin tells a senator the President can't possibly see him until next month, or when he calls up some middle-level bureaucrat and chews his ass, he's the President...
...At a time when sociology is often popularly regarded as a synonym for either radicalism or statistic-mania, a conservative humanist in the field will sometimes feel the need for an apologia pro suae professions...
...Facing up to Modernity is a collection of 18 essays whose subject matter ranges from a sociological understanding of the reasons for the popularity of psychoanalysis to the significance of the Calley and Manson trials...
...And yet he helps us to understand that behind the call for socialization lies, ultimately, a totalitarian social reality...
...It generally fails to understand that, just because of this precariousness, societies will react with almost instinctive violence to any fundamentol or long-lasting threat to their order...
...Professor Berger examines, among other things, paradoxes in intellectual conservatism, the socialist myth, the trend of American foreign policy, and (in several essays) the nature and limits of secularization...
...As one who has served as an aide, writer, or consultant to two presidents, two vice presidents, several congressmen and senators, two party chairmen, and a Secretary of the Treasury, I have had all too many opportunities to watch this sinister psychological process in its variousdegrees of fermentation...
...But it is also conservative in its implications: "Society, in its essence, is the imposition of order upon the flux of human experience [and] order is the primary imperative of social life...
...Of course from the religious point of view it is much more—a revelation of transcendent truth which Berger as a Christian accepts in the knowledge that as a sociologist of religion he can say nothing touching upon its validity...
...What he can say, and does with great force, is that no account of reality which dogmatically excludes the religious dimension can hope to be true to the full range of man's experience...
...We've all had a taste of the White House...
...When I brief the press—why I'm the President...
...By ordering experience, then, society attempts to make sense of its existence in space and time...
...I don't mean the cars, the trips, all that...
...Literature would have been none the poorer if Cardwell never left Louisville in the first place...
...34 The American Spectator April 1978...
...But don't count on it...
...The idea of "permanent revolution" is an anthropologically absurd fantasy...
...His picture of modern social life, dichotomized between powerful social institutions and an underinstitutionalized private sphere, draws on a long tradition of sociological work...
...It is not a pretty sight, and the only sure way to avoid it is to come to the job mature—a matter of character, not years—and with a keen eye for the ridiculous in one's self and one's colleagues...
...In his account of modernization and its discontents Professor Berger emphasizes not only secularization but also the primary importance of industrialization and bureaucratization...
...I mean the chance to play President...
...Ervin Duggan and Ben Wattenberg both seem to have done so, and Against All Enemies just may help to vaccinate a few new arrivals against Potomac Fever in the years ahead...
...Fortunately, Peter Berger is not the sort to offer simple and fraudulent answers...
...Like Eric Voegelin, Berger maintains that any meaningful interpretation of reality must take account of the religious experience of transcendence...
...In a sense this is what Berger provides in his introduction...
...BOOK REVIEW Facing up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics, and Religion Peter L. Berger / Basic Books / $11.50 David Levy eter L. Berger, a professor of sociology at Rutgers, is one of the most distinguished representatives of the phenomenological approach to social science...
...Long after they've cured the common cold, it will probably still be with us...
...understands that all social order is precarious...
...And you speechwriters...I think you've got it worst of all!...It's true with every guy I know, everyone who's ever gotten close to a President...
...He admits that sociology is, as the radicals claim, subversive of established patterns of thought because it brings to consciousness the roots of much that is normally taken for granted in social life...
...Like any really strong virus, Potomac Fever has a way of building up resistance to medication...
...Even the left David Levy teaches sociology at Middlesex Polytechnic, in England...
...He is fully aware of the present disarray of organized religion—indeed, secularization, the denial of transcendence, is a major component of modernization—and he provides acute criticism of the ultramodernist "death-of-God" theology: ...a world view without transcendence must eventually collapse, because it denies ineradicable aspects of human experience....Transcendence is the experience that human life touches on boundaries...
...If it does, then it will have served a worthwhile purpose after all...
...On this side of the boundaries is the world of everyday events, practical activity, and reason, a world in which one is at home in a self evident way...
...The combination of sociology, conservatism, and Christianity is unusual enough in itself, but when the man in whom they combine is as intelligent and humane a social scientist as Peter Berger the result is fascinating...
...On the other side of the boundaries is the world of the uncanny, of the "totally other," in which the assumptions of ordinary life no longer hold...
...Berger regards the critique of modernity as a "task...of human and moral urgency," not because the work of modernization can be or ought to be undone, but because by understanding its nature we can mitigate its effects and build a humanly satisfying order in the midst of the modern rush of events...
...Modernization is a complex process, and "facing up to modernity" is something we all have to do...
...and his emphasis on the importance of institutions which mediate between the individual and the state (family, church, etc...
...We all play President, every day...
...echoes Robert Nisbet, the great anti-Rousseau of present sociology...
Vol. 11 • April 1978 • No. 6
