But what is the disease that affects our modern society?

These scars that the museum was supposed to heal were mainly aiming at communism - which is understandable. The Romanian Peasant Museum was placed, shortly after the fall of communism, in the building which had sheltered for several decades a museum of the Communist Party, our new national identity. The Communist Party exposed in the halls of the Museum by the avenue its own genealogy. The haste with which the Museum by the Avenue was given back to serve its initial purpose was meant to show a historical recovery against communist usurpation. But Horia Bernea chose the "Christian solution": "I thought it was good to open the halls of the museum of the new "peasant's museum" with a serene exhibit, with an exhaustive message and a balanced style. After two decades of huge destructions caused to the peasants by communism, a "political" tough exhibition would have been in order, a story of horrors suffered by the Romanian village. We didn't adopt this justified approach, but full of verdicts, an approach full of tensions and adversities. It wouldn't have been too Christian to give a vengeful answer to our new museum! We would have started our new life with a sad note, under the black light of revenge" (Bernea, 1996: 5).

"Our diseased present" does not add up to the Communist heritage, elegantly exorcised in a Christian way. It seems to have roots much deeper in time, even in the French Revolution, a past which is quite similar to that of Communist Romania. "France has never recovered from the Revolution's purifications", Bernea and Nicolau remark in an article of the Dilema magazine, written "at four hands".  France destroyed the most part of its noblesse and dignity, in favour of Ortega's "mass-man". Part of the essence that kept the French spirit from withering was destroyed. (apud Nicolau and Huluţă, op.cit.:53). Secularity which became scientific atheism has its origins in those early modern times. Therefore, the evil is much more deeply rooted, in Horia Bernea's opinion and for many of his competent admirers this can be named simply "modernity.? To this and to the "mass-man" it produces one can oppose the Authentic man.

Of course, Bernea was not an ideologist and the museum he imagined isn't a political statement. However, it is an ideology in act, which has had and still has an influence on Romanian society and which can be understood only if it is placed again in the context from which it was born: a sincere and deep critic of late modernity.

Therefore, what does Bernea have against modernity and why does he oppose it?

An important clue in this sense comes from Bernea himself, when he says that "the museum is about ranging, not order." Or, unlike "order"- a human creation -"rearranging" is already given, is a cosmic order that existed before man, independent from man. Therefore, "traditional man" would be the inhabitant of this world of "rearranging."