THE MODERN ERROR: OR, THE UNBEARABLE ENLIGHTENMENT OF BEING Eugene Halton It seems to me that man has what we call a human heart, but that he also has something of the baboon within him. The modern age treats the heart as a pump and denies the presence of the baboon within us. And so again and again, this officially non-existent baboon, unobserved, goes on the rampage. (Vaclav Havel, 1986) In order to convey what I mean by 'the modern error', let us consider what is meant by the term 'the modern era'. By the word 'modern' most people mean the twentieth century, especially when talking about art. Take, for example, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which is renowned for its twentieth-century collection. 'Modern' in this sense used to function as a synonym for the term 'contemporary' in the first half of the twentieth century, but now connotes the art of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. A broader chronological sense of what is meant by 'the modern era' would include the industrial era, basically the development of mechanized industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Broader again would be the Age of Enlightenment, especially the rise of revolutionary governments, democ- racy and the Western project of 'liberty, fraternity and equality'. The theme of the Enlightenment is most often connected with the goal of a society ruled by reason and its laws, rather than by royal decree, caprice or irrational upsurges. We can take a yet longer view of the modern era as synonymous with the rise of capitalism, or with the rise of scientific materialism in the West, and its establishment of a mechanical universe ruled by mechanical, physical law. We can also take a sceptical view, as postmodernists have done, of the modern era as a delusionary culture which 'privileged' such concepts as individualism, progress, science and being, among others. In 'privileging' being, according to postmodernists, modernity falsely accorded 'essential' and 'natural' characteristics to what were merely the dominant conventions of the culture. Being, say the postmods, is insignificant, and significance, or edited by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash and Roland Robertson In Global Modernities SAGE Publications London • Thousand Oaks • New Delhi First published