The Tragedy of Development

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Part One

Introduction

Berman’s book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air, is about modernism, which he defines as “a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world” (p. 6). “To be modern,” he says, “is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are” (15).

He claims that the paradox of modernism is that it is hopeful yet destructive. The book is partly a way for him to argue that the ideals inherited from the 18th Century Enlightenment period, “the collective hopes for moral and social progress,” are worth fighting for, worth untangling from the ills of capitalism which they have for decades veiled (p. 9). It’s no secret that he engages with and appreciates Marx’s theories given the title of the book is a quote from The Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society… Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Not typically thought of as a modernist figure, Berman points out that he describes the modern condition well (21). To simplify Marx a bit, planted within the seeds of the bourgeois revolution was its own demise. This sort of paradox of modernism is a key point that Berman illustrates.

But aren’t we past modernism, well into a postmodern age? Not quite, Berman argues. And while he’s saying this over forty years ago, his argument might give us pause affirming that modernism is dead or, at the very least, that it should be dead. He agrees that some recent versions of modern theory have led to uninspiring conclusions. Various forms of late 19th and early 20th Century futurism have proclaimed a faith in technology to usher in a universal unity that is completely devoid of culture, debate, and politics. And other early 20th Century social theorists, Weber a prime example, saw modern, capitalist life as all encompassing and technology as a shackle that would nearly destroy free will.

Goethe’s Faust

To understand the nuances of modernism, Berman begins with an analysis of Goethe’s Faust (1831), whereby Goethe “...expresses and dramatizes the process by which…a distinctively modern world-system comes into being” (p. 39). The story of Faust is one that represents the tragedy of development, not just for oneself but for the world:

What this Faust wants for himself is a dynamic process that will include every mode of human experience, joy and misery alike, and that will assimilate them all into his self’s unending growth; even the self’s destruction will be an integral part of its development (p. 40). 

Berman sees this story as a powerful allegory of modernization that began with the industrial revolution. Goethe was writing, he explains, “through one of the most turbulent and revolutionary eras in the history of the world [1770-1831]” (p. 39).

The Dreamer

To tell this story, the main character Faust experiences three stages. The first one is The Dreamer. Faust is introduced as a smart man who has achieved a lot but is unsatisfied (p. 41). His commitment to intellectual study has left him isolated. Alone in his room on the verge of suicide, he is saved by a vision that reminds him of the joy of childhood (p. 44). 

He re-emerges into his community, called by church bells that remind him of his own childhood. Seeing old faces and reigniting old connections, he remembers why he retreated from social life, having felt guilty for his medieval medical practices that likely killed more people than he saved (p. 46). He again feels the schism that drove him away initially, between “the solidity and warmth of life with people” and “the intellectual and cultural revolution that has taken place in his head,” creating a distance between his reality and his aspirations.

Later he is visited by Mephistopheles, the devil with which he will make a pact, the famous Faustian bargain. With the help of Mephistopheles, he sees the creation of the world in a new light. The world did not just begin from nothing, it was made through creative destruction. And not just that, it came with a bargain. For God to exist, so would “sin, destruction, [and] evil” exist as well (p. 47). If Faust wants to create anything good, he realizes, he understands it will require destruction, maybe even a lust for it. He should not shield his intellectual aspirations from the “little world” he ran away from, but use that world as a tool to create something greater.

The Lover

The Lover, Faust’s next stage, marks the most important point in Faust’s metamorphosis, containing both his growth and the beginning of his downfall. Exploring again his local village he meets and falls in love with Gretchen. Faust is drawn to her “childlike innocence, her small-town simplicity, her Christian humility” (p. 53). But both of them will come to find that their inner aspirations are too much for this “little world.” And for purposes of the story, Gretchen will also come to represent everything wrong with an insular, devout, and morally strict—yet also judgmental—village.

Like twin flames their love grows fast and strong but is eventually too much to be controlled. Gretchen falls into a fantastical stupor, and her obsessiveness drives Faust away, only to later learn that she is pregnant. Her short-lived love affair with an outsider is frowned upon by her peers. Once her impiety becomes more well known, she is shunned by her village and even her family, making her a martyr upon which the village’s own sins and suppressed immorality are projected. She is sentenced to death. The drama of her wrongdoings and the extreme nature of her sentence begin to slowly erode her community and others like it.

Gretchen’s demise is a turning point for Faust. Having become genuinely interested in other people and found himself in a community, he realizes on Gretchen’s death bed that she was merely a tool for his growth: “...he could take what he needed for his own development and leave the rest” (p. 56).

While Faust might be perceived as having corrupted poor Gretchen, he only set into motion her own striving for self development and eagerness to escape her small life. As a marginal outsider, Faust was as much responsible for the devolution of her village as the conditions that fostered Gretchen’s rebellion and ultimately the village’s implosion. Berman reads this as an allegory for Marx’s description in The Communist Manifesto, of how “the bourgeoisie…put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations” (p. 59). While Marx decries the “naked, self-interest” of capitalism, he’s under no illusion that the old feudal order was also exploitative, in its own way: “In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, [capitalism] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” Berman sees this as well and reads Faust’s story as an important critique of our now-idealized visions of idyllic, small-town life, or what Ferdinand Toennies popularized as Gemeinschaft in 1887 (p. 60).¹

Having lost Gretchen but realized she was only a step on his journey, he explores the world with Mephistopheles.

The Developer

The Developer is Faust in his final and most depraved stage. Lost and bored after gallivanting across the world and through history with Mephistopheles, Faust discovers a new fixation while pondering the ocean. Why shouldn’t humans harness nature’s power, he wonders: “such elemental power unharnessed, purposeless!” (p. 62). He jumps with excitement, renewed by a vision to harness Nature’s energy to build something new and grand, to use it to transform society into something better.

He begins by seizing on the labor power of the surrounding villages and builds a modern utopia, forming new cities, constructing dams to irrigate the land, building canals for shipping, and so on. He manages his workforce with an iron fist, driven no longer by those nostalgic church bells but by the sound of shovels (p. 65). His hunger in this moment appears never-ending, trading one vision for another as a means to fuel an endless journey.

He sees his work as a great accomplishment, a success for both himself and the community he has built. His work has built “a new kind of community…that thrives not on the repression of free individuality in order to maintain a closed social system, but on free constructive action in common to protect the collective resources that enable every individual to become tӓtig-frei [free for action]” (p. 66). It's important to recognize that his accomplishments are supposed to be commended, Berman argues, despite his use of unsavory means. But he learns that this accomplishment comes with a great cost that destroys him.

His last fall from grace and his ultimately fatal self-inflicted blow, comes from his destruction of an older couple and their village that represent everything good about the village life he has slowly destroyed. With a church and chiming bells, their village even represents what originally pulled him out of his isolated stupor, what brought him to this point and time. But to fully commit to his mission to change the world, he can’t tolerate a relic of his quaint past. He gives the order to remove the couple and raze the village, which is carried out as a death sentence. This creates a conflict within himself but also resolves his original motive. There is nothing left for him to develop, nothing else left for him to do.

Faust has transformed village life into a new modern society, but with it he has destroyed his reason for living, he has pronounced “a death sentence on himself” (p. 70). By ridding village life of its last obsolete couple, Faust in turn made himself obsolete. And so his story ends.

Epilogue

While we might be quick to associate Faust’s tragedy with the perils of capitalism, Berman argues Goethe likely saw more parallels with ambitious developments that had more roots in socialism (p. 72). Large scale projects were in Goethe’s time well outside the financial capacities of businesses. They would be pitched as state projects with the intent of bringing “steady jobs and decent incomes” to the working class (p. 73). Goethe was personally enthralled by the proposal for the Panama and Suez canals. Berman calls this the “Faustian model of development:”

This model gives top priority to gigantic energy and transportation projects on an international scale. It aims less for immediate profits than for long-range development of productive forces, which it believes will produce the best results for everyone in the end.

But some historical figures have been architects of “pseudo-Faustian” developments that, instead of tragedies that come with pros and cons, only come with losses. The development policies of the Soviet Union, Berman explains, were more focused on the “symbol of development” that they failed at the “reality of development,” the White Sea Canal in 1931 being a prime example (p. 76). Millions were killed for standing in the way because they refused to give up “the land they had won in the Revolution barely a decade before” (p. 77). When finished, the canal didn’t even achieve its goal. Because Stalin was so obsessed with the symbol of the project, he pushed for it to be completed along a timeline in which it was impossible to dig it deep enough for shipping freighters. As a waterway that could only handle tourist steamers, it was “a triumph of publicity” only (p. 77).

Berman claims that more advanced industrial countries have “followed more authentically Faustian forms,” but he offers no examples as proof of concept (p. 78). I would think Berman would have a lot to say about the New Deal here—especially the Tennessee Valley Authority which used public dollars to construct huge infrastructure projects and stimulate a rural economy but famously displaced hundreds of thousands of people—but it's surprisingly absent. Because isn’t that the ultimately Faustian bargain: displacing people for the so-called greater good? The tragedy, as Berman explains it, is that the havoc a development causes—in this case many people and families displaced—comes with undeniable benefit to many more people, not just in this lifetime but many to come.

It’s in the observations of “pseudo-Faustian” developments, and even in the duality of “authentic” Faustian developments, that I can see how postmodernism, as a critique of modernism, comes into play. While “pseudo-Faustian” developments seen in places like the Soviet Union are easily critiqued, who is to say that the modern aspirations of collective well-being are worth it when the cost is certain and irreparable harm to a minority of people? And especially if, all the while, capitalism still perpetuates inequality behind promises of progress?

The spirit of the 1960s was not pro-Faustian, as Berman explains. He describes the social air of the 1960s as pastoral, referring to it as the Golden Age, in the words of Gunther Stent (The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress). Stent described people of the time as “fulfilled but exhausted” (p. 80). Typifying this outlook were of course California hippies happy to pursue a hedonistic lifestyle and live in the moment, something Faust was explicitly reprimanded for by Mephistopheles. People of this mindset abhorred the idea of endless progress. In an age of “stable abundance, leisure, and well-being,” what was there to strive for?²

But this 1960s pastoral age, as Berman calls it, would not last. The 1970s brought with it an energy crisis and subsequently “waves of disenchantment, bitterness and perplexity” (p. 82). Bernard James typified this change in viewpoint in his aptly titled book, The Death of Progress, in which he states, “we live in an over-crowded and pillaged planet, and we must stop the pillage or perish” (p. 82). For very different reasons, the 1970s also saw a calling for an end to Faustian development. Big planning was out, degrowth and sustainability was in.³

What Berman finally argues in the last part of this section, however, is that a complete reordering of the economy around new, small-scale systems—in fact, any structural economic reordering—is inherently Faustian, both in its ambition and its likelihood to come with costs. I’d like to emphasize the last part because too often liberals pitch ideas for social, political, or economic change as if they don’t come with any growing pains.

Reorienting our cities so they are more walkable and bikeable is a good case in point. It’s not an inherently liberal proposition, but it tends to lean that way. Taking road space away from cars and using it to widen sidewalks or build lanes exclusively for bikes or buses is often argued to be paradoxically good for cars. Bike lanes and bus lanes are more space efficient since they can move more people with less space, so once people begin biking and taking transit more, those left in cars will be left with less congestion and faster trips. This makes sense in theory, but it doesn’t address the fact that 1) people won’t instantly swap their car for a bike or bus ride, and 2) most cities need to see drastic redevelopment before places are close enough to bike to and there is enough density to support transit. The goal of building more walkable and bikeable cities is great for many reasons but the path there is far from smoothly paved and will likely come with undesirable consequences.

If Faust is a critique, Berman says, it is also a challenge, for we don’t need “man for the sake of development, but development for the sake of man” (p. 86). How we make development work for us, in full view of the consequences and whether they are worth the end goal, is a challenge. And this challenge is as relevant to Goethe’s age of industrial and social revolution, as it is to the 1980s in which Berman published this book, and as it is to today.

1. Meaning community, Gemeinschaft is opposed to Gesellschaft, meaning society. These were observational distinctions for Toennies, but they took on idealistic descriptions in public discourse. Berman’s critique here mirrors Sennett’s in The Fall of Public Man. Gemeinschaft is alluring in its simplicity but ultimately destructive as an ideal type that defends itself against society, diversity, and ultimately outsiders.

2. This obviously glosses over many tumultuous moments in the 1960s.

3. I’m endlessly fascinated by how old most “new” ideas seem. Degrowth feels like a recent idea but obviously has roots in the 1970s.

Thumbnail art: “Mephistopheles Flying, from Faust.” 1828. Eugène Delacroix. Art Institute of Chicago’s John H. Wrenn Memorial Collection.