Star Systems
On Secularization, Stanley Cavell, and How the Movies Made Us Pagans
1.
In a previous essay, I mentioned in passing that while I long imagined I grew up under the reign of secular modernity, I now understand that I was raised as a pagan. Most of you reading me are of pagan origin too. I want now to explain something of what I mean by that. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that my explanation has much to do with the history of information technology and of entertainment media.
Recently I have been rereading Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), in which the author disputes the familiar argument, going back to Karl Löwith and ultimately to Max Weber, concerning the religious roots of modern secularism. For Blumenberg modernity is an autonomous epoch, characterized primarily by human self-assertion, and not a further development of a cultural process begun with the Protestant Reformation. Weber, by contrast, takes the economic system that emerges in the modern period as in large part a further evolution of Protestant virtues connected with work and industry. Many other scholars have similarly identified particular elements of secular modernity as having their origins in religious movements.
Such arguments seem particularly compelling, to me, when it comes to French secularism — see for example Dale Van Kley’s book, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (1984), to learn how one might trace a direct line from Calvin to the Jacobins. (We might also mention Richard Dawkins in the Anglosphere, who much more recently conceded that while he remains an atheist, he is an atheist of a distinctly Anglican variety.) Whether Van Kley’s argument is correct in its details, it is safe to say at least that the French Revolution represents the culmination of a historical process, which begins with the arrival of the printing press; facilitates the publication of the Bible in national languages; triggers a proliferation of new Biblical criticism from below, without the mediation or approval of the ecclesiastical authorities; and inevitably, within a few centuries, succeeds in radically transforming societal attitudes and expectations regarding individual autonomy and control over our own destinies.
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In several recent essays, then, I have affirmed the view that Protestantism, the Westphalian order, the scientific revolution, secularization, and many other long-term processes we associate with modernity can plausibly be traced back, as a not-too-distal cause, to the new way information had begun to circulate by the end of the 15th century. And I have likewise insisted that there is much to learn about our current revolution in digital information technology by attention to what happened in the centuries following our last major information revolution.
But there is also, I think, plenty to be learned about these same processes by consideration of the arrival of photographic and moving images at the end of the 19th century. Unlike printing, we do not think of photography and cinema as constituting an “information” revolution first and foremost. Images may contain information, but they are not in their nature informational — which is why image metadata, or text descriptions of images for the visually impaired, always seem to fall comically, or tragically, short of their intended goal. Yet the processes we might suspect photographic and cinematic images of having influenced have not been entirely informational either. Secularization in particular has not been a matter of “updating your priors” in light of new information. It is less a change of belief than a change of focus, and this sort of change, we might say, has more to do with the brightest sources of light in a given era than with the available books. From the end of the 19th century, no light has been quite as bright as the one that conveys the cinematic image. No image has been as captivating as the cinematic one.
I find Weber’s secularization thesis partially compelling, then — the part, namely, that holds that secular modernity is the natural culmination of the Protestant Reformation. But I disagree with that part of Weber’s account that sees secularism as connected with the disenchantment of nature. As I’ve argued previously, the mechanization of the world picture was not primarily about “killing” nature or depriving it of soul, as it was about developing tools for treating it abstractly, which is to say, ultimately, as itself a sort of abstraction. And once nature was abstracted away, enchantment could now be more freely sought by attention to a different category of appearances — namely, those that are produced by human art, and above all, from the end of the 19th century, the new human art that uses light —the condition of all appearances— as its medium.
Even if nature was disenchanted, in that we were no longer worshiping waterfalls or rock outcroppings, still, as André Bazin observed (somewhat inadequately, as we’ll see), “The medium of the movies is physical reality as such.” And at least when nature is delivered to us through that medium, with the appropriate idols foregrounded, we certainly still proved able, in late modernity, to worship that. Maybe a better way to say this is that the printing press made us secular moderns, but the movies made us pagans.
