The following essay/list goes through a number of contradictory answers to the question “what is modernity?”. It is adapted from my notes for the latest episode of the Between Jerusalem and Athens podcast, a new series in which I discuss various cultural and philosophical questions with Hermes, a Hellenistic pagan and Platonist.
The introductory paragraphs give my own perspective, but skip ahead to the list for the fun part.
The episode can be found here: betweenathensandjerusalem.libsyn.com/identifying-modernity
No era is monolithic, but there are some which, because of the rapidity of the changes endured, incline us to think of them as uniform, idealistic wholes. Despite widespread disagreement on when modernity begins, what it is, whether it is good or bad, the plain fact that life looks different today than yesterday makes it almost inevitable that we will tend toward stark, stereotyped contrasts between Modern Man and Traditional Man. Whatever its merits, whatever its vices, neither traditionalists, modernists, nor postmodernists escape from this framing.
How we answer these questions often says more about our positive claims about the world than about modernity itself. I am a traditional Catholic. I’m inclined to understand the period in terms of a loss of the fundamental categories I believe are common to both traditional Philosophy and to Christian Theology. Insofar as I believe there is such a thing as Modern Man, I suppose his experience is defined by a scattering of what was once unified in an intelligible whole: the order of the Intellect and the Passions is replaced by a war between Thought and Feeling; the harmony of social classes is replaced by a revolutionary dialectic; the unity of Faith and Reason gives way to endless conflict between Science and Religion; the Soul as the substantial form of the body is painted over with unresolved dualism; in place of ordered liberty we are offered the choice between absolute freedom and the absolute state.
‘Modernity as False Dichotomy’ is appealing to me because of my commitment to the Catholic faith in general and to classical realist philosophy in particular, but someone with opposite commitments will come to an opposite judgment. Such diverse characters as the postmodernist and the anti-rationalist pagan may see modernity not as fragmentation, but as a totalizing, reductive tendency toward universalization. Rather than a loss of a unified Wisdom first articulated in the Scriptures and the Philosophers, modernity becomes the culmination of these errors: the philosopher’s commitment to know reality through universal Reason eventually terminates in reductive Rationalism, erasing the diversity of Experience; the Christian revelation of a true God terminates in a universal flatness of faith, erasing the particular, local, often racial knowledge of ancient paganism. I have no trouble accounting for this in my own interpretation. I need only say they are caught in the imaginary conflict between local and universal, between rationalism and irrationalism. The one is easily resolved by the classical distinction between Natural and Human law, and the latter by an account of knowledge that is not merely quantitative. To me, they are ensnared in the false dichotomies of the very thing they claim to criticize. To them, my commitment to universal truth means that I am at best professing what was only a precursor to the fully Modern. We cannot resolve the question by examining the facts of modern history because those facts take on opposite meanings for us. If we do not have the same opinion of the Spanish empire, for example, it is not because we disagree about what really happened.
Believing that God formed human nature, I also believe the distinction between Modern Man and Traditional Man is ultimately false. The only way to escape from modernity is to stop believing in it, to deny that we are somehow different, that the movement to a new period of history means that something is required for the good life other than what was required in the past. Even still, our circumstances are often so changed today that we cannot wholly avoid the question. With this in mind, I offer a list of 10 popular accounts of the spirit of modernity, with short proofs for and against. I do not mean to suggest one answer is as good as another, nor that all are equally fallacious, but only to show that our interpretation of our age is dependent on more fundamental beliefs about the nature of the world and the good of human life.
1) Modernity is the loss of tradition
YES: Modernity, as opposed to contemporaneity, implies a separation from the past. The entire reason we started referring to this period as modern, and still refer to ideas, movements, and inventions hundreds of years old as modern, is because they cut us off from the past. We do not refer to the invention of the windmill or to the various political shifts of the Middle Ages as modern because they happened within a culture that retained its traditions, whereas changes in our age have been revolutionary, either by accident or by design.
NO: A sharp contrast between traditional and modern obscures the fact that earlier people often were critical of their own institutions and customs, and sought to change or improve their lives. Even civilizations lasting thousands of years such as that of ancient Egypt went through radical changes in production, social organization, and religion. Further, people today are as jealous of their own modern political and cultural traditions, of protecting their institutions of democracy and liberty, as any past society was of its own.
2) Modernity is the sovereignty of the individual ego
YES: Individual rights do not exist in any ancient legal code. Nor do ideas such as self-actualization form the basis of human development before the modern period. Individualism in the modern sense would have been interpreted as pride or hubris in past societies.
NO: Heroism implies individualism–the cult of the great man, the will to excel above one’s peers. The moral leveling of utilitarianism implies a loss of individuality, not its rise. The cult of equality has scratched out the dynamic, living face of Man, reducing us to a mass of gray. The very term “the masses” places us in a period of large scale impersonal manipulation, showing itself to be a faceless parody of The People.
3) Modernity is egalitarianism
YES: It is only in modernity that the goal of a classless society has been proposed, and it has lead to wide spread death in the name of equality. Only the modern ideologue obsessed with the dream of absolute equality could continue the pursuit of this goal despite centuries of mass murder. What we kill for proves what we love. All ages have their massacres, only ours has committed them in the name of the brotherhood of man.
NO: If previous societies did not propose classlessness as an end, the strong authority of custom and law ensured that those within a given class were more or less indistinguishable. It is in fact tradition that levels the differences between men, and modernity that allows the specific and individual to flourish. If you are born a peasant, born a miller, even born a king, you may not be equal with everyone in your society, but you are cut down to an equal height with all within your class. It was the rigorous belief in hierarchy that flattened the bulk of humanity; it is modernity that allows true difference to flourish by liberating us from the accidents of birth.
4) Modernity is the technological domination of nature
YES: Technology is not merely a tool, but a way of knowing and experiencing the world. The man who has understood trees as resources can never see the forest of his ancestors; the man who has known the clock can never know the hours of prayer; the man who has known the telephone, the highway, and the newspaper will never know distance, isolation, and a sense of place as his ancestors did. Modern machines are not merely more efficient tools. Once we accept their use they pull us helplessly along to their own ends, irreversibly changing our experience of the world and ourselves.
NO: Technology is only modern because we allow it to disrupt social order rather than incorporating it into custom. Not long ago children were taught proper phone etiquette. The phone changed some behaviors but did not cause social disintegration because it was adapted organically into existing systems of manners. The smart phone, by contrast, was developed in an age that had already accepted a loss of manners. It was built by people who believed that authenticity required liberation from custom. Without this social fact we would have developed new norms about appropriate phone use in public, or at certain times of day. It has been disruptive because we had already accepted that we wanted to be disrupted. The same is true of all technology.
5) Modernity is the replacement of virtuous leadership by managers
YES: We only think about how to arrange society so to avoid conflict and provide material satiety, not to make men of character. We no longer look to leaders to provide us with moral examples nor to judge based on their own habits of Wisdom and Justice, but only to frame policies that properly arrange the parts of society as one properly assembles a machine.
NO: The oldest written law codes all concentrate on the punishment of such basic crimes as murder and theft. Those actions that most directly harm others or harm the social order have always been the primary targets of the law. Even where ancient legal codes sought to enforce religion and custom this still had the secondary purpose of creating a cohesive society. Thus, not every infraction against religion was punished by law, but only those that were thought to degrade society. The only difference today is that we know we are working for these ends. To avoid conflict and provide safety and comfort have always been the main purpose of law.
6) Modernity is the reduction of reality to a material causal framework
YES: The laws of the physical world are reduced to material and efficient causality. Matter is understood only as quantitative extension. Nature is a machine. Qualities are not real. Religious belief is either lost or is relegated to the private sphere of feeling. Only what can be measured is finally real, all else is sentiment. This is what we believe, and even our new theologies grounding faith in the dynamism of experience accept the principle that it is measurement that makes a claim objective.
NO: People have always accepted plain, material explanations of the world where available, the only difference is that today this process has advanced much further. Those Roman emperors who came from the military were more likely to believe in the necessity of ritual for victory than those drawn from intellectual classes. In late Confucian thought there were debates about to what extent literal belief in the ancestors was necessary to maintain the imperial court. Even within ancient religion people were skeptical and open to material explanations. Modern history is full of religious revivals. These revivals are as much a part of our age as skepticism was a part of the past. Not every ancient Roman believed military victory need be literally attributed to the gods, while a modern person today is still quite likely to affirm “things happen for a reason” no matter what the professors are teaching.
7) Modernity is the reduction of everything to the practical
YES: The modern aesthetic is barren. Food is prepackaged and no longer beautifully arranged. Houses are mass produced and no longer drawn from materials in their natural environment. Ethics is no longer based on first principles or on high and challenging ideals, but only on what helps us accomplish our own subjective goals and pleasures.
NO: People today are much less practical than in the past because they are much more productive. They have much less need to think of what must be done just to live and much more freedom to think about what makes life worth living. Modern production has not chained us to practical concerns but liberated us from them. Yes, perhaps there is a fine example of an intricately carved axe handle in a museum, but the person who used that axe was engaged more by the need to work to avoid death than by the contemplation of his lovely tool. Men need recreation, beauty, love, and much else that goes beyond mere physical survival, and we have much more of those things today. Rather than having one or two finely made goods in an otherwise poor and wasting home, we have access to all the greatest art, music, and literature of history, things that would have been reserved to rare occasions or to a cultural elite in the past. If my axe is now mass produced and unadorned that is only because I am less absorbed in the practical, because I’m less likely to need the tool daily to ensure my survival. I’m much more likely to be able to fill my life with the contemplation of fine music and beautiful paintings than almost anyone in the past, and the modern age has also equipped me with an aesthetic philosophy that teaches me to value these impractical wonders which would only baffle my practical-minded ancestors.
8) Modernity is excessive rationality
YES: We are taught to believe anything that cannot be either derived from first principles or proven scientifically is fantasy. Feelings, or any greater sense of Mystery, is relegated to the realm of the irrational, and disconnected from reality. Customs and traditions whose necessity cannot be demonstrated rationally are rejected as superstitions. Even those philosophies that retreat into subjectivism assume this principle in fleeing from it.
NO: It is traditional thought that views reality as essentially intelligible, that believes the Intellect can in some way (even if imperfectly) understand Being. It is modernity that believes reason only touches the outward phenomena. It is modernity that has declared metaphysics impossible and ethics a matter of sentiment. Modernity is not an excessive rationality but a retreat into the irrational, a denial that there is any final coherence between the forms of the mind and the forms of the world.
9) Modernity is fragmentation
YES: There is no unification. We have the individual vs society, science vs religion, empiricism vs rationalism. We have ‘is’ vs ‘ought’ forever severing our apprehension of the world from our motives for action.
NO: It is specifically the modern period that tends toward systematization, toward excessive unification. This is true in philosophy– the early systems of the rationalists and then of the German idealists– but also of the totalizing modern state. It is tradition that allows for legitimate fragmentation because it is an organic, living whole, which resists absolute systematization.
10) Modernity is the loss of religion
YES: Atheism was rare in previous societies. Even when people did not fully believe the established religion, a sacred view of life still defined one’s social relations and duties. By contrast, even the most ardent believers today generally accept an indifferent, secular law as the foundation of their public life.
NO: Modernity is the rise of true religion, which is always interior and spiritual. In past ages religion was defined by exterior demands such as rituals, moral laws, peculiar diets and clothing. This divided people from each other, causing them to concentrate on material differences while blinding them to their common ascent toward the divine. Exterior religion also separated them from God, causing them to worry about laws pertaining to their bodies rather than seeking the kingdom within. Yes, there has been some loss of belief today, but this has only been the loss of life in the dying branches of dogmatic religion as humanity embarks on a more universal spiritual path.
Every YES and every NO on this list represents an idea I have encountered in some capacity. This is not a scholarly blog, and I make no effort to provide citations proving anyone has thought these thoughts. The list is in no way exhaustive, nor are all the arguments mutually exclusive. Most of us who have considered this question in the past will recognize all or most of these ideas in ourselves, our friends, or in the books we read. The vast majority of these 20 responses I believe are half-truths, but many believe them to be the whole truth. I will count myself as having done well if putting them together on a single list helps to unwedge the more crude conceptions from someone’s mind.