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Humanity fell into modernity like an animal into a trap.
Even though sin contributes to the construction of all societies, modern society is the favorite child of the deadly sins.
Modern society neglects the basic problems of man, since it hardly has time to attend to the problems it has caused.
To proclaim Christianity the “cradle of the modern world” is a serious accusation or grave slander.
Without the timely paralysis of Greek ingenuity, the technological trends of the first Hellenistic era probably would have anticipated the horrors of modernity.
The modern world resulted from the confluence of the following:
the demographic expansion,
democratic propaganda,
the industrial revolution.
Fear is the secret engine of the endeavors of this age.
Modern history, ultimately, comes down to the defeat of the bourgeoisie and the victory of bourgeois ideas.
The modern considers intolerable anything that lasts more than five years.
The only thing that embarrasses modern man is to confess admiration for an author who has gone out of style.
A modern man is a man who forgets what man knows about man.
Olympus, for a modern mind, is just some peak among the clouds.
Being truly modern is, in any century, a sign of mediocrity.
“Etre absolumente moderne” is the characteristic desire of the petit bourgeois.
Those who insist on being up to date with today’s fashion are less irritating than those who try too hard when they fear they aren’t keeping up with tomorrow’s fashion.
The bourgeoisie is aesthetically more tolerable than the avant-garde.
Those who proclaim themselves avant-garde artists tend to belong to yesterday’s vanguard.
Modern stupidities are more irritating than ancient ones, because their proselytes try to justify them in the name of reason.
For the progressive modernist, nostalgia is the supreme heresy.
The modern man accepts any yoke, so long as the hand imposing it is impersonal.
I don’t understand how those who do not reject outright the entire modern project, those who glimpse in it the seeds of some happy fulfillment, are not possibly Marxists.
The growing number of people who consider the modern world “unacceptable” would comfort us, if we did not know that they are captives of the same convictions that made the modern world unacceptable.
Let us not naively point out to the modern the vulgarity of the current world. That vulgarity is precisely what he loves and what seduces him.
The modern world is condemned precisely by all modern man points to in order to justify it.
What inspires enthusiasm in the modern, when it is not obviously disgusting, should at the very least be regarded with distrust.
A lack of confidence in the future of modern society, until yesterday reserved for the intelligent man, today overwhelms even the fool.
In centuries past, one could fear that modern ideas may turn out to be right.
Today we can be sure they will only triumph.
The word “modern” no longer carries automatic prestige but among fools.
Today’s reactionary enjoys a satisfaction that yesterday’s reactionary did not: that of watching modern programs end not only in catastrophe, but in ridicule.
By adapting to the “modern mentality,” Christianity became a doctrine that is easy to abide by, but offers little reason to do so.
Three characters, in our time, make it their profession to detest the bourgeoisie:
the intellectual- that typical representative of the bourgeoisie,
the communist- that faithful executor of bourgeois ideals,
the progressive clergyman- that final triumph of the bourgeois mind over the Christian soul.
To discover the countenance of Christ in the face of modern man requires more than an act of faith, but an act of credulity.
Those who ask the Church to adapt herself to modern thinking are in the habit of confusing the urgent need to respect certain methodological rules with the obligation to adopt a repertoire of stupid ideas.
The modern Christian lives in fear that a rebuttal is just around the corner.
That the history of the Church contains sinister and idiotic chapters is obvious, but a strong and sure Catholicism does not do penance by exalting the modern world.
The adversary of modern principles has no allies more loyal than the consequences of those principles.
The modern world will not be punished.
It is the punishment.
Ingratitude, disloyalty, resentment, and rancor are typical of the coarse soul in every era, but they characterize the whole of our present age.
Every day the modern machine becomes more complex, and every day modern man becomes more crude.
The modern mentality’s conceptual pollution of the world is more dire than modern industrial pollution of the environment.
Hell has sent two devils to alternately tempt modern man: stupidity and malice.
Where we hear today the words “order, authority, tradition,” somebody is lying.
Preciosity, the baroque, modernism, are noble failings, but failings in the end.
The old society possessed the tact and capabilities of the old peasant who, without agronomists, nor technical books, nor statistics, proceeded to do, slowly, what needed to be done.
The old society was organized in order to allow for and favor the excellent. The new society is organized to ensure production of the mediocre.
In the modern era one must choose between opinions that are either anachronistic or vile.
Given the rapid obsolescence of everything in our age, man today lives a psychologically shorter period of time.
Nothing so quickly becomes obsolete as that which is boldly modern.
Modern man is never prepared, either morally or intellectually, to slip and fall with the greatest possible dignity.
Modern man never escapes the temptation to identify what is possible with what is permitted.
Adapting to the modern world demands the hardening of one’s sensibility and the debasing of one’s character.
The typically modern solution to any problem always scandalizes one who was born with a sensibility for human excellence.
Everything is voluminous in this age.
Nothing is monumental.
In a truly civilized society, most modern customs would be crimes.
Modern souls do not even become corrupted; they only rust.
In order for anything to be deemed “modern,” it must spring from a starting point of pride. Something is modern if it seems to allow us to evade the human condition.
He who lives in the modern world does not have trouble believing in the immortality of the soul so much as believing it exists at all.
To modern man, everything that is physically possible soon seems morally plausible.
Modern society only outperforms past societies in two things: vulgarity and technology.
Modern man is not moved by love and hunger, but by lust and gluttony.
Modern man imagines that it is enough to open the windows in order to cure the disease of the soul, and does not think it necessary to take out the trash.
Certainly there must be a modern painter who uses fecal matter for his ochre pigment.
The highest and the lowest used to belong to the same species.
Today they belong to different species.
Today there is no characteristic in common between what has worth and what prevails.
The loneliness of modern man in the universe is the loneliness of the master among silent slaves.
The tragedy of modernity is not the tragedy of reason defeated but of reason triumphant.
When the modern mind is not engaged in some economic routine, it only oscillates between anguished politics and sexual obsession.
The commotion of modernity does not make it more difficult to believe in God, but it does make it more difficult to sense him.
Modern man has imprisoned himself in his autonomy, deaf to the mysterious sound of waves that beat against his solitude.
Let us tremble if we do not sense, in this abject modern world, that with every day our neighbor is less and less our fellow man.
Each day modern man knows the world more and man less.
Every truly “modern” man who does not commit suicide at the age of forty is an asshole.
The noise of the modern world deafens the soul.
Modern man does not love, but seeks refuge in “love”;
does not hope, but seeks refuge in “hope”;
does not believe, but seeks refuge in a dogma.
Modern man treats the universe like a madman treats a fool.
The ugliness of the modern world has required titanic effort.
More than the immorality of the modern world, it is its increasing ugliness that inspires one to dream of the cloister.
The modern’s hand withers what it touches.
Modern man inverts the rank of problems.
When it comes to sex education, for example, everyone pontificates, but who worries about the education of the sentiments?
The sight of the modern worlds is so disgusting that ethical imperatives are becoming clearly evident.
The ugliness of the modern face is an ethical phenomenon.
It’s hard to imagine that the modern world may one day have the charm of the past.
The vulgarity of the modern artifact will allow for easy identification by the future archaeologist.
The works that belong to an era are those which agree with the public mentality of the moment. The truly excellent works of the 20th century are not “modern.” Proust is not “modern,” nor is Yeats. “Modern” is cacophonous poetry and the experimental novel.
One no longer needs a refined sensibility to detect the ugliness of the modern world; eyes will suffice.
Posterity is not going to understand what an achievement it is merely to possess good sense in this insane age.
The modern world seems invincible.
Like the long extinct dinosaurs.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Antique end-papers from the Bergen Public Library. source
