All That is Solid Melts into Summary

Summary quotes & thoughts per Marshall Berman All That is Solid Melts into Air (Penguin, 1988 rev ed.)

In All That is Solid Melts into Air, I define modernism as any attempt by modern men and women to become subjects as well as objects of modernization, to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it. . . . They are moved at once by a will to change--to transform both themselves and their world--and by a terror of disorientation and disintegration, of life falling apart. To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction, a life characterized by the uninterrupted disturbances of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation which have been part of modernity for two hundred years.

If we think of modernism as a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world, we will realize that no mode of modernism can ever be definitive.

I believe that communication and dialogue have taken on a new specific weight and urgency in modern times, because subjectivity and inwardness have become at once richer and more intensely developed, and more lonely and entrapped, than they ever were before. In such a context, communication and dialogue become both a desperate need and a primary source of delight. In a world where meanings melt into air, these experiences are among the few solid sources of meaning we can count on. One of the things that can make modern life worth living is the enhanced opportunities it offers us--and sometimes even forces on us--to talk together, to reach and understand each other.

[In response to postmodernism's absolute dismissal of all grand narratives.] Have we really outgrown the dilemmas that arise when "all that is solid melts into air," or the dream of a life in which "the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all"? I do not think so.

[There is] a widespread and often desperate fear of the freedom that modernity opens up for every individual, and the desire to escape from freedom [Erich Fromm] by any means possible.

There is a mode of vital experience--experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils--that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience "modernity."

Berman goes on to say that his desire in this book is to recover the history of modernity so that our own contemporary experience will be enriched and perhaps guided into the future. The experience of previous generations with modernity, both positive and negative, has been far richer than our own, he argues. We need to re-examine our situation and come up with better, more hopeful solutions. For example, in the past people understood the danger of being circumscribed by technology and the overwhelming power of social forces of organization, "but they all believed that modern individuals had the capacity both to understand this fate and, once they understood it, to fight it. Hence, even in the midst of a wretched present, they could imagine an open future. Twentieth-century critics of modernity almost entirely lack this empathy with, and faith in, their fellow men and women. . . . Modern man as a subject--as a living being capable of response, judgment, and action in and on the world--has disappeared. In the opinion of the modern intelligensia:

The masses have no egos, no ids, their souls are devoid of inner tension or dynamism: their ideas, their needs, even their dreams, are 'not their own'; their inner lives are 'totally administered,' programmed to produce exactly those desires that the social system can satisfy, and no more. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobiles, hi-fi sets, split-level homes, kitchen equipment.

Berman sees this opinion as a rejection of earlier visions of history as restless activity, dynamic contradiction, dialectical struggle and progress. The responses tended to simply into three groups based on attitudes toward modern life as a whole: affirmative, negative, and withdrawn.

All these visions and revisions of modernity were active orientations toward history, attempts to connect the turbulent present with a past and a future, to help men and women all over the contemporary world to make themselves at home in this world. Virtually no one today seems to want to make the large, human connections that the idea of modernity entails. Hence, discourse and controversy over the meaning of modernity, so lively a few decades ago, has virtually ceased today.

The modernisms of the past can give us back a sense of our own roots. They can:

(1) Help us connect our lives with people throughout the rest of the world who are living through the trauma of modernization.

(2) Illuminate the contradictory forces which inspire and torment us, such as

(a) our desire to be rooted in a stable and coherent person and social past which conflicts with our desire for limitless growth (economically, socially, psychologically, etc.) a growth which enriches the future while destroying the solidities of the past.

(b) our desire for clear and solid values to live by which conflicts with our desire to embrace the limitless possibilites of modern life and experience which often call such values into question, producing a constant negotiation of personal and political allegiances and hostilities.

This entire series can also be read as a single document.

Marshall Berman; modernity; Erich Fromm; freedom.

the wave that has us all

Marshall Berman in his book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Penguine 1982) describes modernity as a dynamo, building, destroying and then re-building with unchecked insatiability.

The innate dynamism of the modern economy, and of the culture that grows from this economy, annihilates everything that it creates--physical environments, social institutions, metaphysics ideas, artistic visions, moral values--in order to create more, to go on endlessly creating the world anew. This drive draws all modern men and women into its orbit, and forces us all to grapple with the question of what is essential, what is meaningful, what is real in the maelstrom in which we move and live.

Berman goes on to describe his own experience of modernity growing up the Bronx in the late-40’s. Overnight, from out of nowhere, the idyllic Jewish & Irish neighborhoods of his youth were torn apart by “an immense expressway, unprecedented in scale, expense and difficulty of construction.” Worse, he continues, this was done on the back of the very values of the dispossessed. To oppose the destruction of their homes was to oppose “progress.” To oppose “bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams, stadia, cultural centers . . . few people, especially in New York [are] prepared to do that.” New Yorkers identify themselves and their city with progress, and so the world beloved by Berman’s family and tens of thousands of their neighbors was destroyed “in the name of values that we ourselves embraced.”

This, friends, is the wave that has us all. This is the overwhelming cultural current in which we all live. From the latest rise of Islamic terrorism from eastern Mosques to the malaise and alienation we feel in our Western churches: this is the riptide that joins us both. And it is disorienting. One may experience it as “alienation” one moment and as “freedom” the next.

It's effect is omnipresent. I hear it in the guitar stylings of Jimi Hendrix--the way he sweeps effortlessly along the frets, touching his figertips down lightly here or there just long enough to tap on or half bend a note which races off again--and in the anthropology of psychologist and one-time-cofounder of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm.

In Fromm's last book, To Have or to Be (Abacus 1976), he argues that two ways of existence are competing for "the spirit of mankind": having and being. The having mode looks to things and material possessions and is based on aggression and greed. The being mode is rooted in love and is concerned with shared experience and productive activity. The book ends by asking about the new man and the new society.

So then, have we come any further than the 1960’s? Is John’s apocalpytic city of the world, Babylon, really so apocalyptic, or is it the air we breathe, the way we dress and the political discourse of our nations? Fundamentalism is not an option; the church can’t hide from this. Some meaningful response has to be spoken into the gale, some way of properly saying “Kingdom” into the podcasts & videophones of the world. Some way of making words meaningful again, when we ourselves hardly find them so.

This entire series can also be read as a single document.

modernity; Erich Fromm; Marshall Berman; All That Is Solid Melts Into Air; Jimi Hendrix; progress.