THE NEW WORLD OF THE GOTHIC FOX
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recognitIOn that different cultural contexts integrate in their own ways
both the modern political artifact which is democracy and the modern
economic artifact which is the market.
In
other words, there are options
in the making of modernity.
For example, comparing two of Shusaku Endo's novels,
Silence
and
Scar/dal,
set respectively in the seventeenth century and in contemporary
times, gives an acute sense both of the radical modernization of Japan
and of its ongoing cultural identity. Can one not envisage that as China
advances more and more along its long and sinuous march towards
modernity, it is fashioning its own cultural variant of it? Can one not
conceive, however farfetchedly at present, of Islamic nations turned to–
wards their own cultural version of modernity?
It
is surprising and disappointing that Veliz does not follow through
on some critical appraisals of the Gothic fox's culture. After pointing to
the transition from
Gemeinschaft
to
GesellschaJt,
he recognizes that there
have been enough failures in the transition "to establish the fear of lone–
liness as a principal scourge of their prosperous modernity." Later after
mentioning cultural personalities from Nietzsche to Eliot, he admits that
they represent "crucial, occasionally definitive, responses
to
an awesome
process of industrialization without which there would have been no
dissolution of traditional community, no tortured transition from
Gemeinschaft
to
GesellschaJt,
no isolation in the midst of the metropolis,
no anomie, no alienation, no repression, angst or ennui. A hypothesis
contrary to a fact? Certainly, but one that sheds additional light on the
indisputable verity that without an Industrial Revolution, there could
not have been responses, intelligent or otherwise, to its consequences; in
the absence of smoke-belching Satanic mills, it is unlikely to find poets
calling for new Jerusalems surrounded by greenery."
Once the point about the historical fact is made with such fine
irony, why not partake in the human project of attempting, with value–
laden creativity, to find new, less cruel, less oppressive, more humane,
more fulfilling ways of embracing modernity and of continuing to
refashion it? History has not ended. With greenery and all, Jerusalem
does remain the horizon for as long as man is man.
On the way to refashioning modernity so as to deal with the fear of
loneliness and what comes with it, we need to discover at the grassroots
level a sense of community. According to Amitai Etzioni in
The Spirit of
Community,
"Our society is neither without community nor sufficiently
communitarian; it is neither
Gemeinschaft
nor
GesellschaJt,
but a mixture
of the two sociological conditions. America does not need a simple re–
turn to
Gemeinschaft,
to the traditional community. Modern economic
