Homo Saecularis

Modernity is puzzling and unnamable

precisely because of the death of God.

Who is secular man, and why is he so unhappy?

Those are the questions animating The Unnamable Present, a

short but wide-ranging book on the puzzles of late modernity and
the ninth volume of Roberto Calasso’s extended commentaries on,
among many other related topics, the mythical-religious
wellsprings of human civilizations. Chairman of Italy’s
distinguished literary house Adelphi Edizione, Calasso is too good
a historian to say that Homo saecularis emerged only in recent
centuries. The lineaments of the type have existed since
Paleolithic times, present as what Calasso calls a “perpetual
shadow.” The shadow has been cast by the figure dominating most
of the human record, Homo religiosus, defined by the sociologist
Mircea Eliade as one who “always believes there is an absolute
reality, the sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself
in the world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real.”

What has changed dramatically in recent centuries, Calasso writes,

is that “the shadow has been transformed into normal man, who
finds himself a solitary, hapless protagonist at the center of the
stage.” Unlike the many varieties of Homo religiosus—Calasso
mentions Vedic man, born owing four debts, above all those to the
Hindu gods—Homo saecularis “owes nothing to anyone,” stands
alone, free to do what he wishes “so long as it is lawful.”

So why are humans in the secular age so unhappy? Calasso says it

is because they find something ominous in the insubstantiality
they feel both within themselves and in the world around them, an
emptiness from which they began to recoil at the very moment
secularity prevailed—“around 1950 in the United States,” Calasso
declares with half-facetious but plausible specificity. Instead of
being welcomed as release from burdensome obligations, the
normalization of secularity was met with “muted rancor.” That
anger quickly found expressive, even noisy, outlets: “When an
international youth movement began to protest in the campuses
and lecture halls against the system, that rancor was already
beginning to be voiced, even if its targets could be illusory and
misleading.”

Calasso is often described as a literary critic, but his work extends

beyond literature and runs deeper than criticism. A blend of
philology and philosophy in the Nietzschean vein, it glosses texts,
artworks, and other symbolic artifacts to identify the primal
longings, fears, and needs that have informed cultures across
different civilizations and eras. The frequently visited sites of this
investigation are the myths and rituals—the sacred stories, spaces,
and practices—in which humans seek to locate their transient
existence in an enduring order. Supreme among such practices—
indeed, the primordial ones—are acts of propitiation that serve as
acknowledgment of and payment for the gift of life itself, acts we
call sacrifice.

Sacrifice is the leitmotif of Calasso’s nine-volume study,

beginning with The Ruin of Kasch. For him, it is the great
mythical-religious constant, whether in its most direct and grisly
enactments (the slaying of animals or even humans) or in more
symbolic and substitutionary forms. In the nameless present,
sacrifice takes monstrous shapes that often go unnoticed for what
they so horrifyingly are. “Islamic terrorism,” Calasso writes, “is
sacrificial: in its perfect form, the victim is the bomber. Those
who are killed in the attack are the beneficial fruit of the killer’s
sacrifice.” Such terrorism is based on meaning, he elaborates, “and
that meaning is interlinked with other meanings, all converging on
the same motive: a hatred of secular society.”

But sacrifice is hardly restricted to the murderous acts of

misguided jihadists. “To understand the transformation that
sacrifice has undergone in the secular age,” Calasso writes,
“sacrifice has to be swapped for the word experiment. Which is
not only what happens in laboratories—and this would already
indicate its immensity. But experimentation is what society
performs every day on itself. And here the ambivalence of the
word becomes even clearer, for the two supreme social
experimenters of the twentieth century were Hitler and Stalin.”

Modernity is puzzling and unnamable precisely because the death

of God, the loss of belief in a distant, invisible order behind the
visible, physical world has led to the sacralization of things that
we only slowly, if ever, recognize as misguided constructions of
the sacred. Once we belatedly recognize the power we have
bestowed upon these things—the folk, the nation, the super race,
truly existing socialism, the market, the end of history, the digital
dispensation, the Singularity—and once the often disastrous
consequences of our idolatry have become clear, we proceed, after
a brief chastening, to forget or even suppress what we have
learned, in a pattern of learning and forgetting that repeats itself
again and again in our amnesiac age.
The brilliance of Calasso’s thought and style cannot be reduced to
general propositions. Many of his ideas have been advanced by
others, and he generously acknowledges his debts to earlier
thinkers, whether arguing with or against them in his digressive
but always purposeful way. Discussing one of the great
enchantments of modernity—that of “society” itself, particularly
as formulated by the forefathers and founders of sociology and
anthropology—Calasso explains how secular society, “without
any need for proclamations, has become the ultimate repository
for all meaning, almost as if its form corresponded to the
physiology of whatever community, and meaning had only to be
sought within society itself.” Passing through the formulations of
Marx, Rousseau, and Saint-Simon—and their disastrous
ideological heirs, Hitler and Lenin—Calasso asserts that the
“worst disasters have come to light when secular societies have
sought to become organic, a recurrent aspiration among all
societies that develop the cult of themselves.”

The high priest of the “superstition of society” is Émile Durkheim,

whom Calasso contrasts with Durkheim’s nephew Marcel Mauss.
The latter was concerned with both the function and the nature of
rituals such as sacrifice (“what sacrifice is, what risks it brings,
with what it makes contact”), whereas Durkheim reduced all
social ceremonies and rituals to nothing more than how they
“served to preserve the balance and cohesion of a society.” The
triumph of functionalism underwrote the deification of society
itself, while “cohesion became the divine substance coursing
through its body.” Calasso credits Simone Weil for seeing most
penetratingly through Durkheim’s elision of the social and the
religious, and also for understanding what fate will likely befall
humankind if “the social is the only idol.” As the inadequacy of
this idol became manifest in their alienation and quiet desperation,
many secularists would turn either to the dangerous promoters of a
more organic society or, in a solitary, individual quest, to the
cafeteria of religious and spiritual offerings, arriving more at a sort
of esoteric knowledge, gnosis, or what Calasso calls a
“continual bricolage of knowledge,” than at real belief.

Calasso’s account of the rise of the cult of society lays the

groundwork for the first and longest part of the book’s three
sections, “Tourists and Terrorists,” in which he elaborates on the
more influential “tribes” of modernity. In addition to the two
named in the section title, he turns his bemused gaze on
fundamentalists, transhumanists, digerati, hackers, and, of course,
secularists themselves. His observations on these types are
variously droll, gnomic, and scary—sometimes all three—but
always penetrating: “Tourism has now skidded out of control and
doesn’t necessarily seem to have any more to do with travel.
Rather, it looks like a second reality, which happens to be the
model of virtual reality. Depleted precisely because it is
augmented.”

The second part of the book, “The Vienna Gas Company,” is a

selective and revelatory reading of certain key moments and
episodes from the dark years from 1933 to 1945, chilling vignettes
that introduce scripts and types that will recur throughout the
second half of the twentieth century and into our present one. We
hear from Vasily Grossman, the Russian novelist, on arriving at
Treblinka with the Red Army in 1944 and discovering bunches of
human hair trampled into the earth: “Evidently these are the
contents of a sack, just a single sack that somehow got left behind.
Yes, it is all true. The last hope, the last wild hope that it was all
just a dream, has gone.” We are also given Weil’s incisive,
unsparing appraisal of the human predicament in 1943, when
religion had come to exist only “for Sunday morning” and
believers in everyday science were finding that their morality was
“in contradiction with science no less than the religion of others.”
As a result, she wrote, “today only unreserved adherence to a
totalitarian system, brown, red, or other, can give, so to speak, a
solid illusion of inner unity. This is why it constitutes such a
strong temptation for souls in disarray.”

In “Sighting of the Towers,” the book’s closing section—no more

than a short coda, in fact—Calasso gives the last words to the
subject of one of his earlier books, Charles Baudelaire. On an
unpublished, undated page from his archives, the great poet and
connoisseur of modern evil relates a terrifyingly apocalyptic
vision from “one of those dreams Baudelaire was accustomed to:
those dreams that make you never want to sleep again.”
Baudelaire’s vision of being trapped in an immense building
before it and others around it collapse corresponds with one of the
defining sacrifices of our unnamable present, albeit, Calasso
injects, “with one single addition: the towers were two—and were
twins.”

Baudelaire despaired of warning the “people” or the “nations.” He

thought he could convey the import of his vision only to “the more
intelligent,” but he was unsuccessful even in it that. Calasso’s
warnings of a related but even more general calamity facing the
nations have made their way into print, of course, but they still
may not be heard or understood. Like all true prophecies , they
point not to the future but, cryptically, to what is already here: in
this case, to something still unnamed, an ominous absence.