Resomodernity Café v5: The Exposers’ Parlor

Posted: December 16, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: civilization, morality, values |Leave a comment

A skit in the style of Oscar Wilde — dry, cutting, elegant — yet still earnestly concerned with the question: What, precisely, was Modernity, and what category does it inhabit?

Cast

• Hannah Arendt — cool, incisive, effortlessly unimpressed.
• Deirdre McCloskey — vivacious, brilliant, bourgeois-charm incarnate.
• Ivan Illich — ascetic, piercing, allergic to institutional perfume.

Setting

A salon-like annex of the Resomodern Café. Plush chairs. Too many mirrors. A chandelier that flickers whenever someone pretends to be more certain than they actually are.

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1. Opening: An Inconvenient Question

Arendt (sitting upright, inspecting the chandelier as if it has personally disappointed her):
Modernity, we are told, must be understood from the vantage of Resomodernity. A flattering conceit, though it risks making us acrobats performing epistemology upon a tightrope woven from our own blind spots.

McCloskey (cheerfully pouring tea she does not intend to drink):
My dear Hannah, modernity simply needs better marketing. Give people dignity, liberty, and a decent set of bourgeois virtues, and they’ll make something splendid of themselves.

Illich (leaning back like a man waiting for civilization to finish embarrassing itself):
Splendid? Deirdre, modernity took people’s souls, placed them in institutions, and fed them from plastic spoons. Nothing splendid was ever mass-produced.

Arendt (dryly):
We seem already to disagree, which is promising. Nothing reveals the structure of an age so well as three people failing to describe it in the same sentence.

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2. The First Exposition: What Was Modernity?

McCloskey:
Modernity was the great dignity revolution! Ordinary people mattered. Commerce taught us to treat strangers with virtue. A rising tide of rhetoric lifted all moral boats.

Illich:
Yes, and modernity promptly installed bilge pumps that drained every last drop of human autonomy. Schools deschooled us, hospitals unhealed us, transport dislocated us, and economists congratulated themselves.

Arendt (unbothered):
You are both charmingly earnest. But modernity was, above all, a world-alienation. A shift from common sense to technical sense. From the shared to the abstract. From action to administration.

McCloskey:
Well, I never said administration had virtues.

Illich:
Administration has vices that reproduce faster than rabbits.

Arendt:
And with far less charm.

(The chandelier sparkles approvingly at the collective disdain.)

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3. The Tension Surfaces: What “Category” is Modernity?

Arendt:
I propose that modernity is not an age but a condition — an estrangement of humans from the world they themselves create.

McCloskey:
I propose that it is a cultural innovation, a moral recalibration that favored persuasion over aristocratic violence.

Illich:
I propose that it is a systemic pathology — a fever caused by institutions that mistook themselves for reality.

Arendt:
We have three categories and no coherence. Which means we are very close to truth.

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4. Enter Resomodernity (Quietly, Like a Servant Who Knows More Than His Employers)

McCloskey:
Resomodernity urges us to hold our convictions lightly. Preach the metaethic, they say — humility, context, no malice — and practice the metaphysic, which is simply love in decent clothing.

Arendt:
How fashionable. A public humility and a private faith. An admirable asymmetry, though dangerously susceptible to self-congratulation.

Illich:
Or worse: institutionalization.

(The chandelier flickers alarmingly.)

McCloskey:
The danger of institutionalization is precisely why the metaphysic must be practiced, not legislated.

Arendt:
And why the metaethic must be preached, not imposed.

Illich:
And why humanity must be treated with at least as much understanding as a misaligned machine-learning model.

Arendt:
You mean: with suspicion?

Illich:
With mercy.

Arendt:
Ah. A rarer commodity.

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5. Convergence: The Unresolved Resofesto

McCloskey:
So modernity is a moral experiment — incomplete, inconsistent, but not without virtue.

Illich:
It is also a spiritual calamity — uprooting, standardizing, degrading.

Arendt:
And a political eclipse — replacing action with behavior, freedom with surveillance, judgment with expertise.

McCloskey:
And yet…
Resomodernity insists all three of us are right, but none of us are complete.

Illich:
Resomodernity demands our categories resonate, not resolve.

Arendt:
A clever trick. It keeps contradiction alive so that thinking does not die.

(The chandelier glows steadily — the room approves.)

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Closing Line

Together (reluctantly, but with grace):
To be resomodern is to expose modernity: not to condemn it, nor to praise it, but to understand it —
and to inhabit the unresolved tension between what it promised, what it achieved, and what it cost.

(Lights fade; a faint sound of polite philosophical applause — the only applause that never disturbs anyone.)

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