Modern Problems

A wonderful nugget (one of many) from Louis Menand's brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed "story of ideas in America":

"Since the defining characteristic of modern life is social change--not onward or upward, but forward, and toward a future always in the making--the problem of legitimacy continually arises. In a premodern society, legitimacy rests with hereditary authority and tradition; in a modernizing society...legitimacy tends to be transferred from leaders and customs to nature. [Some moderns have] assumed that social arrangements are justified if they correspond with the design of the natural world...[b]ut in societies bent on transforming the past, and on treating nature itself as a process of ceaseless transformation, how do we trust the claim that a particular state of affairs is legitimate? The solution has been to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures. We know an outcome is right not because it was derived from immutable principles, but because it was reached by following the correct procedures. Science became modern when it was conceived not as an empirical confirmation of truths derived from an independent source, divine revelation, but as simply whatever followed from the pursuit of scientific methods of inquiry. If those methods were scientific, the result must be science" (Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, New York: F,S & G, (2001), 431-432).