The Competing Narratives of Modernity in Jack London's The Iron Heel

Prominent works such as Fredric Jameson's A Singular Modernity (2002), Rita Felski's The Gender of Modernity (1995), and Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982) suggest that conceptualizing the modern era is as tricky in our own time as it was for Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in 1860, when he published his seminal work on the subject, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.¹ Burckhardt and most scholars since have generally agreed that western "modernity" is characterized by the emergence of humanism, which, in its retrieval of ancient Greek and Roman thought, propounded the belief that empiricism and rationality advanced human thought beyond the intellectual sluggishness of the Middle Ages. Anchored in humanism, modernity challenged the power of the pre-modern Church and gave rise to, among other things, mass literacy, greater technological innovation, capitalism, individualism, and Protestantism.² But if humanism is by most accounts the driving force behind modernity, how unanimous is the consensus on the definition of humanism?

On the one hand, we can define humanism in terms of temporal progression—that is, as the steady forward trajectory of rationalist and positivist principles. This trajectory of modernity is one that I call, for lack of a better term, "simple humanism," and it has as its main idea the belief that as science and rationality advance in western societies, the dominance of religion and other faith-based epistemologies recedes. Though not necessarily implying that the western world is on an inevitable progression toward atheism, simple humanism holds that there is little if any intellectual exchange between reason or science on the one hand and religion or myth on the other. Simple humanism found some of its greatest amplification among Enlightenment deists such as Matthew Tindal and Thomas Paine. Not all deists subscribed to the oft-cited notion of a cosmically removed "watchmaker" God, but by and large they eschewed "revealed" religion in favor of the belief that reason and science disclosed whatever worldly truths are available about God's existence. Putting great stock in the possibility of human perfectibility, deists further argued that humans were able to use their God-given gift of rationality to address political, social, and scientific challenges.³

At odds with simple humanism is a view of modernity that charts western history not as the emerging triumph of distilled rationalist principles, but as the dialectical give-and-take between rational-based and faith-based epistemologies. This view, which I call "complex humanism," maintains that religion has not receded as much as it has adapted or accommodated itself to the demands of modern life—a point made aptly by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). For instance, the book shows how a "calling"—essentially an empirically unverifiable directive from God—becomes for a Protestant not a personal invitation to an ascetic life, but to a life of material fulfillment based on the deployment of rationalism and capitalist production. "Thus," Weber explains, "Protestantism could only be considered historically to the extent that it had played a part as 'harbinger' of a purely rationalist philosophy."⁴

Like his contemporaries Weber and Burckhardt, Jack London confronted the intricacies of defining modernity, especially in his 1908 socialist utopian novel The Iron Heel. The novel famously employs two narrative structures, and through them it gives voice to both simple and complex humanism. The more immediate of the two narratives is that of Avis Everhard's manuscript, which details the events of her radical husband Ernest, who leads an ill-fated proletarian revolt against the oligarchic and proto-fascist Iron Heel in the first decades of the twentieth century. The incomplete narrative ends with the year 1932 as Avis and her comrades are about to initiate the ill-fated Second Revolt. The second narrative is furnished by Anthony Meredith, the twenty-seventh-century scholar who has recovered Avis' manuscript and supplies it with a provocative foreword and extensive footnotes. By this time in history the Iron Heel has been extinct for four hundred years, superseded at last...