Ah, this modern world, how far it is from realising its ideals

Have you ever given any thought to when “modern” started? Have we been living our modern lives a couple of years? A generation? Perhaps even longer?

Think of all those museums of modern art we have. When I was a kid, we’d never have included the impressionists in a modern art exhibition. But when I first began to be interested in art, the impressionist Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette was under a century old, and today Picasso’s modernist Demoiselles d’Avignon is over a century old.

Renoir. Modern Art? Don't be silly

So when will modern art stop being modern?

Picasso. Modern art.
From 1907? Seriously?

We even have the notion of “post-modernism”, one of the more ludicrous we’ve come up with. After all, what comes after modernity? Surely it’s the future, isn’t it? So unless we have a time machine, how on earth can we know what “post-modern” looks like?

At the moment, I’m reading a book by Elizabeth Badinter, a leading French philosopher and feminist, who adds to her range of talents a profound understanding, and knowledge, of eighteenth-century history of thought. The book confirms a feeling I’ve had for some time, that the “modern period” started in the middle of that century. She traces two remarkable women of the time, Emile du Châtelet and Louise d’Epinay. They were contemporaries for a while, but du Châtelet died in 1749, and Epinay’s writing dates from the 1750s onwards.

Badinter shows that there is a real watershed between them. Du Châtelet was a leading physicist and philosopher, the first major French woman scientist, and the last before Marie Curie. Epinay wrote principally about education, in an environment where the natural sciences were beginning to lose their popularity in favour of the social sciences and moral philosophy. This trend led to the emergence of a notion of Man as opposed to classes, which would later in the century inform such ideas as “the rights of Man”, applying to all men or women, regardless of their station in life.

In Badinter’s words, “increasingly, the idea of humanity took hold in minds, previously more used to distinguishing men by their station than to bringing them together within a single concept.”

The changing view is illustrated by a story told by a certain Longchamp, a former manservant of du Châtelet’s, who claimed in his memoirs that she would undress without any kind of modesty in front of him; on one occasion, she called him to bring hot water for her bath; she opened her legs wide so that he could pour the water between them and, when he averted his eyes, she told him to watch what he was doing so that he didn’t scald her (I suppose she scolded him to avoid being scalded).

Now du Châtelet would never have behaved that way with anyone she felt she had to treat as a man, in other words, someone of her own aristocratic caste. But Longchamp was a servant; he didn’t count.

That was the kind of thinking that began to change around 1750, so that in 1776 the nascent United States could declare that they were acting on the principle that all men are created equal. To them, there is a community of man, to which we all belong, and from which are derived certain inalienable rights. A world-changing concept after 1750, it held little sway before.

Since that’s a fundamental idea of our time, I like to date the modern from then.

And yet. No changes in human mentalities is sudden. The old ideas cling on long after the new ones have begun to emerge and supplant them. Even the framers of that great Declaration of Independence were in many cases slave-owners: equality of humanity clearly didn’t extend to involuntary African immigrants to America.

Nor are we out of the woods yet. You probably saw the pair of demonstrators from the States, one white and carrying a placard asking “is my life worth more than his?”, the other black and with a placard asking “is his life worth more than mine?”

Sadly, our societies don't (yet) value them equally

The founding fathers of the United States framed a constitution in which a black man’s life was officially valued at 3/5 of a white’s. The idea should have been buried by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, but was it? Judging by the apparent right for whites, inside or outside the police, to shoot with impunity young black men in the States, one would have to say we’re not there yet.

No-one in Europe should feel any self-satisfaction with respect to the US either. If you’re Muslim, or black, or simply a foreigner, there’s a view in most of Europe today that you’re a lesser being. Your rights can be denied. If you’re attempting to enter Europe illegally and your boat sinks, you should be left to drown. Behind such thoughts is the notion that other people are inferior, not fully entitled to human rights, perhaps not entirely human.

Not caring whether such a person sees you naked may be a little degrading, but it does no more ham than that. Thinking such a person may be gunned down in the street for no offence, or doesn’t deserve to be rescued from a watery grave in the Med, is much more serious. When we reach a point where our societies no longer find it acceptable to shoot young blacks or abandon drowning migrants, we shall at last have realised the ideals that began to emerge in the eighteenth century.

So my view? The modern period did indeed start around 1750. When will it end? Oh, it has a long way to run yet...

Immigration: aiming at the wrong target

We never seem to stop talking about immigration these days. And yet the real problem we face isn’t immigration – it’s precisely all that talk about it. Or more generally, the someone-else-to-blame mentality that lies behind all the hot air and bad temper.

Anti-Immigration: it's all the rage
Even among people descended from immigrants

One of the more remarkable women I know of was Emilie du Châtelet. She became a champion, in the eighteenth century, of what the best recent student of her life, calls “feminine ambition”: she forced the scientific world to take her seriously, publishing extensively on physics, including a translation of Newton’s Principia which she raced to complete before her premonition of death was verified.

She had a servant called Sébastien Longchamp, who would ultimately be dismissed from the household she shared at the time with Voltaire. Decades later, after his own death and even that of the man who published them, Longchamp’s Memoirs of his time with the illustrious couple appeared. One has to question the reliability of such a source; even so, there are some stories he tells in his ‘what the Bulter saw’ document, that ring true.

He tells, for example, of a summons to her bathroom, to fetch more hot water from the fireplace and pour it into the bath. As he came to edge, he realised that she was entirely naked, and the water completely transparent. To avoid being scalded, she parted her legs so that he could pour the water safely away from them. When he tried to do so with his eyes averted, she admonished him for getting the hot water too close to her body, so he was obliged to watch what he was doing and therefore view her naked.

Mme du Châtelet was by no means promiscuous. She would certainly not have appeared naked before a man. But that precisely is the point: Longchamp was not a man. He was a servant, and to a noble such as Emilie, that is less than a man. There was no need for modesty before him.

An outspoken champion of rights – hers at least – against the stubborn conservatism of her time could harbour such views. That may make it less surprising that men who took their commitment to freedom and equality so far as to engage in armed rebellion against British rule in North America, could nonetheless condone slavery. There’s no doubt that men like Thomas Jefferson were made uneasy about keeping slaves, but not enough to free them, at least in their own lifetimes.

Surely the answer is that they didn’t see their slaves as truly men or women (they certainly saw them as women in some measure: Jefferson fathered several children on one). Like Longchamp, the slaves were lesser humans, different enough from the masters to warrant denying them their liberty.

Now fast forward two and a half centuries.

We live in a world that is more unequal than at any time since the end of the Second World War. In England, 1.4 million people have an annual income of under £6000 a year; 6000 have an income over £1 million. On their own, the income of each of those super-rich is worth over 150 times that of the people at the bottom. And there many hundreds of people who take many more times still that lowest level.

With that excess money, they can fund politicians and buy them. They can threaten to move their wealth elsewhere to get their way. They have in particular bought the British Tory Party, and are now buying UKIP; it is no accident that while their earnings have grown over the last four years, those of the poorest have fallen still further.

The people who take that money and exercise that power know they deserve it. They know they are exceptional. They excel those who have, and receive, less. In other words they know themselves to be superior. The rest of us may be human, but we are a lesser kind of human. 

 There are 6000 of them which, funnily enough, was the size of the French aristocracy in the eighteenth century too. Like them, their position is based entirely on wealth. It’s no surprise that they preserve and maintain the same attitudes.

There are so many more of us. And we have votes. Why don’t we put an end to their domination?

Because instead of opposing them, we aspire to be like them. We protect the rights of the wealthy in the hope that some day we’ll join their ranks, and enjoy that protection.

However, since we certainly don’t want to blame ourselves for our troubles, we have to find someone else to blame. How about immigrants? There are relatively small numbers, they’re relatively easy to spot, and it’s easy to come up with some kind of justification based on our being the true possessors of this land while they are interlopers in it. Though the English took the country from the Celts, as did the French, and the Americans took it from the Natives who were there before them.

That’s the trap that UKIP or the Tea Party or the Front National in France lure us into. Blame the other, the foreigner, the alien. The lesser human.

The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and above all the fact that his killer has avoided any kind of justice, shows how those ideas are as strong today as they ever were. American Blacks may not be slaves, but who can say that Whites regard their lives as equally valuable?

Here one in six of our voters rally to the xenophobes of UKIP, and a higher still proportion of French voters flock to the Islamophobic Marine Le Pen. So we talk endlessly about the perils of immigration and do nothing about those who steal the bread from our mouths.

What of those people, the ones who really run the show and cause our problems? 

They’re laughing at the lot of us. All the way to the bank.