“We have stepped,” proclaims Marilynne Robinson, “from a metaphysics into a void.” In What Are We Doing Here?, the novelist’s fifth collection of essays, she repeatedly and emphatically names this void: “so-called modernism,” the “modern, the era of science,” the “modern period.” Something has gone wrong, sinking us in a “modernist malaise.” Its root is the failure of intellectual integrity, a refusal on the part of scientists, economists, and political leaders of left and right to acknowledge “the anomalous character of the human presence in the world” and concede that they cannot explain it.
In her critique of modernity, Robinson, an unabashed political liberal, begins to sound surprisingly—and sometimes stridently—conservative. Indeed, she seems to have affection for the word, provided that it can be redefined around the act of conservation. The purpose of the humanism for which she argues is to “preserve as we can the heritage we have received and that we enlarge and enrich it for the sake of coming generations,” a curatorial role that she once “assumed . . . was simply a thing civilizations did.” Humans may be the creators of art, architecture, and all that goes into civilization, but as curators they are responsible for more than the works of their own hands—for that which is created, or, in one of Robinson’s favorite words, given. Human dignity (what she later terms a “radical anthropocentricity”) runs through this recognition of givenness. For Robinson, humans are created beings yet also distinguished from the rest of creation by the ability “to stand apart from what we are and consider ourselves.”
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