Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

But there is a different way to understand the legacy of modernity. Those who are nostalgic for traditional folkways have forgotten how hard our forebears fought to escape them. Though no one gave happiness questionnaires to the people who lived in the close-knit communities that were loosened by modernity, much of the great art composed during the transition brought to life their dark side: the provincialism, conformity, tribalism, and Taliban-like restrictions on women’s autonomy. Many novels from the mid-18th to the early 20th century played out the struggles of individuals to overcome the suffocating norms of aristocratic, bourgeois, or rural regimes, including works by Richardson, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, Fontane, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Alcott, Hardy, Chekhov, and Sinclair Lewis. After urbanized Western society had become more tolerant and cosmopolitan, the tensions were played out again in popular culture’s treatment of small-town American life, such as in songs by Paul Simon (“In my little town I never meant nothin’ / I was just my father’s son”), Lou Reed (“When you’re growing up in a small town / You know you’ll grow down in a small town”), and Bruce Springsteen (“Baby, this town rips the bones from your back / It’s a death trap, a suicide rap”). It was played out yet again in the literature of immigrants, including works by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, and Bernard Malamud and then by Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.

Today we enjoy a world of personal freedom these characters could only fantasize about, a world in which people can marry, work, and live as they please. One can imagine a social critic of today warning Anna Karenina or Nora Helmer that a tolerant cosmopolitan society isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, that without the bonds of family and village they’ll have moments of anxiety and unhappiness. I can’t speak for them, but my guess is they’d think it was a pretty good deal.

A modicum of anxiety may be the price we pay for the uncertainty of freedom. It is another word for the vigilance, deliberation, and heart-searching that freedom demands. It’s not entirely surprising that as women gained in autonomy relative to men they also slipped in happiness. In earlier times, women’s list of responsibilities rarely extended beyond the domestic sphere. Today young women increasingly say that their life goals include career, family, marriage, money, recreation, friendship, experience, correcting social inequities, being a leader in their community, and making a contribution to society.⁸³ That’s a lot of things to worry about, and a lot of ways to be frustrated: Woman plans and God laughs.

It’s not just the options opened up by personal autonomy that place a weight on the modern mind; it’s also the great questions of existence. As people become better educated and increasingly skeptical of received authority, they may become unsatisfied with traditional religious verities and feel unmoored in a morally indifferent cosmos. Here is our modern avatar of anxiety, Woody Allen, playing out the 20th-century generational divide in a conversation with his parents in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986):

MICKEY: Look, you’re getting on in years, right? Aren’t you afraid of dying?

FATHER: Why should I be afraid?

MICKEY: Oh! ’Cause you won’t exist!

FATHER: So?

MICKEY: That thought doesn’t terrify you?

FATHER: Who thinks about such nonsense? Now I’m alive. When I’m dead, I’ll be dead.

MICKEY: I don’t understand. Aren’t you frightened?

FATHER: Of what? I’ll be unconscious.

MICKEY: Yeah, I know. But never to exist again!

FATHER: How do you know?

MICKEY: Well, it certainly doesn’t look promising.

FATHER: Who knows what’ll be? I’ll either be unconscious or I won’t. If not, I’ll deal with it then. I’m not gonna worry now about what’s gonna be when I’m unconscious.

MOTHER [OFFSCREEN]: Of course there’s a God, you idiot! You don’t believe in God?

MICKEY: But if there’s a God, then wh-why is there so much evil in the world? Just on a simplistic level. Why-why were there Nazis?

MOTHER: Tell him, Max.

FATHER: How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t know how the can opener works.⁸⁴