I agree with the overall thrust of your post, but many would say that “Modernity” has been offering its own substitute certainties, and that “violent nationalisms, imperialism, communism, revolution, and fascist/authoritarian reaction” are no less modern than liberal democratic capitalism - that what we have before us is not simply a clash between the Modern and the Pre-Modern but also, and perhaps more importantly, a clash *between **competing ***modernities.
Which was why I said that we had to look back to our pasts to understand Islam’s present.
I was careful to use the phrase ‘the Modern’ rather than ‘Modernity’ or ‘Modernism’ and I was putting forward “violent nationalism etc” as ‘replacement’ certainties in the face of what I’d argue were/are
impersonal forces which are far, far more difficult to deal with than ideologies – you can attempt to defeat ideologies, economics and technological development are another matter all together.
I think that the idea of ‘mass society’ and technological change is key to understanding what is and has been going on. The agrarian and industrial revolutions that came out of England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries set loose enormous impersonal forces in worlds that had changed only very slowly over the centuries
for the ‘mass’ of the population and this was replicated in country after country. Old ways of seeing and doing were in many ways helpless against the rapidity of change and many of the forces for change (the old farm-leasing/owning, commercial middle and artisan classes, four example) were very much on the back heel – they were eventually even to become the backbone of the fascist and authoritarian parties.
Meanwhile, one of the ironies of the Reich was that, while the Party program and NSDAP idealists sought for a return to a Germany of earlier age – peasant farming, artisan production, small shops etc and the end of the era of what it considered as alienation from the true nature of the ‘Volk’ – the means necessary to achieve that required levels of industrial production and centralization that would have furthered destruction of those very aims. On the other extreme, ‘Socialism In One Country’ in the USSR not only failed to produce ‘Communism’ (in the original sense of the word in Marxism and Marxism-Leninism) but drove the society further and further away from it – leaving it in the end as a de-industrialized (through obsolescence of technology and management systems) hulk. As for the petty tyrannies of countries like Spain and Portugal, they couldn’t escape the contradiction that stasis is impossible and economic development brings with it the need for training, education and contact with the outside world, which constantly undermined the established certainties – something from which not even the far more cohesive (but democratic) society of Ireland (DeValera’s ‘peasant country for a peasant people’) proved to be immune.
I’d suggest that Islamic clericalism and all the various theorists of Islamic reaction are making the same sort of ‘category error’ that featured in European history – you can’t achieve stasis without the kind of isolation seen in Tibet or Japan for centuries and, even then, eventually, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army turns up or an American admiral parks his boat in your harbor and everybody realizes that the game is up.
