JOHN LUKACS: AT THE END OF AN AGE: "It's over, finished, terminee, kaput."

booktv.org ^ | May 2002 | John Lukacs

[cornelis]

At the End of an Age.

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This book has very much to do with thinking, it has nothing to do with psychology. Psychology asks why? But we should ask when?. Why is implicit in when. It makes a world of difference when something happens.

We are at the end of not only the century, but of the entire modern age.

It began about 500 years ago with the discover of new continents . . .

That age is not only passing, it is now over . .

One of the superstitions of the modern age . . . is that this age was going to last forever.

There's an awful lot of people who still think that. There was an excuse for that in Gibbon's time, there's no excuse for this today.

You know, that progress . . also a very debatable and disgusting word . .

But this age is now not only passing, it's over finished, termine kaput, you know.

What were the main conditions, symptoms of the modern age?

Watch Lukacs give his talk on At the End of an Age

[Valin]

I've got a bone to pick with you! Thanks to your post I am now being forced to stay up past my bedtime(and trust me I really need my beauty sleep). So If I'm cranky in the morning it's all your fault.

[Dumb_Ox]

A few disheveled thoughts and notes: The Modern Age was the European Age, the age of the power of the State, the age marked by the importance of money, the age of industry, of the city, of the book, of privacy.

It seems Lukacs argues that the autonomous individual is also dead, or dying, yet there are so many dead men walking about. Can there be such a thing as an autonomous zombie? Moreover, to be pedantic, I think his aside about children being excluded from the medieval family could be based on recently discredited research(there is more information in a recent First Things review of a new book on medieval children).

Very interesting talk. Have you happened across Louis Dupre's book Passage to Modernity? I'm told it details how the Modern Age started.

"At the end of an age the theorists of the age will go to any length to stretch their theory to fit the events of the age in the name of science, even if it means that theory is stretched out of shape and is no longer scientific.

What theorists of the old modern age had to confront were the altogether unexpected disasters of the twentieth century: that after three hundred years of the scientific revolution and in the emergence of rational ethics in European Christendom, Western man in the twentieth century elected instead of an era of peace and freedom an orgy of wars, tortures, genocide, suicide, murder, and rapine unparalleled in history.

The old modern age ended in 1914. In 1916 one million Frenchmen and Germans were killed in a single battle."

-Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle