Flirting with Modernity(1)

Is it really over?

To be modern 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.

- Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982)

There is a story of a physics professor lecturing about the end of the solar system. He talks about radiation and predicts that the sun will explode within a few billion years. After he said this, an agitated man stood up and shouted down from several rows above: “Excuse me, professor, did you say the solar system will end within ‘a few billion years’?”. “Yes”, said the professor. “Oh, that’s a relief”, said the man, visibly calmer. “For a minute there, I thought you said a few million years.”

I think of this joke when I hear that modernity is ending. Cosmological time is not geological time, which is not evolutionary time, which is not historical time, granted. But still, reports of modernity’s death can feel exaggerated.

Sometimes we figure out who we are by noticing how we are different from the people we admire. In recent months, I have observed a coalescence of viewpoints around the deep story that modernity is ending, for instance, in the work of Dougald Hine, Bayo Akomolafe, and Vanessa Andreotti. I am not sure there is a name for this outlook yet, but I think of it as a kind of generative capitulation (Bayo), decolonial futurism (Vanessa) or regrowing living culture (Dougald). I have also noticed a pattern of neo-romanticism, often but not always Christian, for instance, in the work of Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist, Martin Shaw, and Sophie Strand.

These people are different, but they are all brilliant, and another thing they have in common is a fairly strong anti-modern sentiment. I tend to enjoy their writing and speaking, but at some moment it goes too far for me, and I find I want to highlight how much worse life has been and could be, to put a word in for the defence of the world that we’ve made, and highlight the beauty, dignity and joy of normal life.

Here is how I briskly defined modernity in my essay on metamodernism:

The term ‘modern’ is derived from the Latin modo and simply means ‘of today’, distinguishing whatever is contemporary from earlier times. Modernity refers to our contemporary civilisation built over the last 400 years or so through scientific, industrial and technological revolutions, but what makes modernity is not just method or machines. We are not, as sociologist Peter Berger puts it, ancient Egyptians in airplanes, not least because so many of us are future-oriented, at least in our younger years. Indeed Habermas’s description of modernity is precisely about that. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, he writes: ‘the concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun: it is the epoch that lives for the future, that opens itself up to the novelty of the future.’ As we open up to the future, and as the world changes, we change too. And so modernism, although voluminous and outrageously ambiguous, refers to the worldviews that arose from human culture stewing in the juices of modernity for decades. Modernism expressed itself in art, architecture and literature and evolved into political institutions and ideologies. Science is quintessentially modern but capitalism and communism are also modernist endeavours, and so is the organised aspect of religion and human rights law. Perhaps most relevant for current purposes is that modernism entails an irresolute process of secularisation and also the growth of civic and commercial institutions powered by bureaucratic and instrumental rationality and an exploitative relationship to nature. Modernism is therefore about presumed material and scientific progress, but it is often accused of wearing blinkers about its collateral damage. For instance colonialism, slavery and fossil fuels drove much of modernism’s so-called ‘progress’. In a related sense, in Habermas’s later work, Modernity: An Unfinished Project, he argues that modernity is characterised by the separation of truth, beauty and goodness; of science, art and morality. That separation of our value spheres was a source of fragmentation and alienation that lived on in postmodernism…

Now, I understand that if your children are starving in Gaza or you are being bombed in Ukraine, or living on a small island state grieving the inevitable loss of your homeland, or forced to work a job you hate, modernity does not look so great. My point is not that things are not so bad, but just to query whether modernity is the right target, as opposed to, for instance, something more specific like capitalism, or more general like the mental-rational structure of consciousness.

I’ve noticed that I don’t feel credible to myself, a creature of modernity, when I say that modernity is ending, which gives me pause. I have also been swayed by Bruno Latour’s book, We Have Never Been Modern. That class text includes the following important (if gnomic) statement on page 34 that speaks to how modernity protects and preserves itself:

A threefold transcendence and a threefold immanence in a crisscrossed schema that locks in all the possibilities: this is where I locate the power of the moderns. They have not made Nature; they make Society; they make Nature; they have not made Society; they have not made either, God has made everything; God has made nothing, they have made everything. There is no way we can understand the moderns if we do not see that the four guarantees serve as checks and balances for one another. The first two make it possible to alternate the sources of power by moving directly from pure natural force to pure political force, and vice versa. The third guarantee rules out any contamination between what belongs to Nature and what belongs to politics, even though the first two guarantees allow a rapid alternation between the two. Might the contradiction between the third, which separates, and the first two, which alternate, be too obvious? No, because the fourth constitutional guarantee establishes as arbiter an infinitely remote God who is simultaneously totally impotent and the sovereign judge. If I am right in this outline of the Constitution, modernity has nothing to do with the invention of humanism, with the emergence of the sciences, with the secularization of society, or with the mechanization of the world. Its originality and its strength come from the conjoined production of these three pairings of transcendence and immanence, across a long history.

There is a lot going on there, and Latour makes modernity sound like a kind of prison or hall of mirrors (which is consistent with McGilchrist’s critique). We have to be careful, though, to distinguish between the entrapment of the map from the prison of the territory. We are often constrained by our idea of what is possible, as much as by what is possible, but as I argued here recently, our maps and territories are so entangled that it is not trivial to tease them apart.

This point is centrally relevant to the contention that modernity is ending, because that can mean the story of modernity has exhausted itself, the idea of modernity is ending, the epistemic hold of modernity is ending, the lived reality of modernity is ending, or the bureaucratic institutional logics of modernity are ending, or some mixture of all of these things.

It’s not clear what it would mean for modernity to die, nor exactly where it would die first; in our political and economic logics, in our hearts and minds, or somehow both simultaneously? For instance, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (Andreotti) puts it like this:

“The end of modernity may not manifest primarily as economic or ecological collapse, but as a global mental health crisis where the structures of modernity within us start to crumble.”

I cannot quite fathom the transition. We don’t know how long that transition will last, nor quite what it might lead to, nor whether it will be better or worse, but the premise is that it will be qualitatively distinct and transformed. Maybe ‘transition’ is not the right word. Some speak of the ‘the weirding of the world’, and that may be better.

Some believe the case for near-term societal collapse is strong, but others question what that means, how we might adapt, and to what extent collapse might be unevenly distributed. World War III could break out tomorrow, and maybe it’s already baked in, but this betweening process from one epoch to another may take decades or even centuries to unfold, depending on whether the transition in question is primarily cultural, systemic, paradigmatic, ontological or metaphysical. That’s an open question I explored in five flavours of betweenness.

However deep or long the transition may be, the claim that we face a metacrisis rather than just a set of crises or a polycrisis is premised on the idea that modernity - a world epoch - appears to be ending. In Beyond Progressivism, John Milbank puts this version of metacrisis like this:

“So we continue to live in the end of history, because the dominant mode of culture and technology remains Western, albeit in a terminally decadent mode of the latter. At the same time, this seeming finality is also not just a crisis but metacrisis. Today, we are not so much subject to passing tensions, potentially resolvable, as to the ultimate emergence of tensions latent in the very foundations of the modern.”

However, ‘the very foundations of the modern’ are not themselves modern as such, and go back to pre-modern times or even the Axial age. This is partly why I seek clarity on exactly what we believe is ending when we say modernity is on the way out. Perhaps, just as the political spectrum is a kind of conceptual zombie that we still use to make sense of politics even long after it stopped making sense, modernity is a zombie epoch that will live on long after it has died.

In Vanessa’s extraordinary book Hospicing Modernity she juxtaposes those who propose soft reform for modernity (techno-optimists seeking methodological tweaks) and those who propose radical reform(remaking modernity epistemologically and by improving social relations) with those who think modernity is entirely beyond reform (because it is co-extensive with structural violence through capitalism, nationalism, racism, colonialism, patriarchy etc).

I sympathise with the latter group. I’ve spent more than half my life with Siva, an Indian woman brought up in a former British colony, so I have learned, as if by osmosis, why many think that modernity and colonial exploitation are co-extensive. I also experienced the genocide in Gaza supported by Western powers, as a kind of nadir, and the end of any pretence of democratic idealism or superiority.

On the other hand, I am not sure I belong in that latter group that feels modernity is entirely beyond repair. Perhaps I have motivated reasoning as a bourgeois white guy in London who doesn’t adequately recognise his complicity in the violence of the world. That may be true, but I am not sure what would follow if it is. When I read Frederico Campagna saying that some are “born into the ending of a world” I can see myself saying that line as if trying on appealing new clothes, but I don’t entirely feel it.

Yes, I have become weary and wary of the idea of progress, not just that we fail to acknowledge progress’s shadow, but that the idea may even be incoherent, and that this is the root cause of ecological degradation, and deeper than merely the problem of indefinite economic growth.

Yes, some significant degree of ecological collapse seems inevitable, and it could be cataclysmic much sooner than we tend to imagine.

Yes, we expect way too much from rationality and technology, and AI is as likely to enslave us as liberate us.

Yes, capitalism is not merely ‘effective but problematic’, or ‘good at creating wealth but bad at distributing it’, but perhaps inherently violent and exploitative.

And yes, I think losing contact with the present by orienting ourselves towards a valorised future is problematic, and I have developed my case for transformation in The Flip, The Formation and the Fun.

However, I don’t feel I am ‘without a world’. I still live and enjoy a modern life, and I am not sure the idea that modernity is ending is entirely intelligible.

While I don’t expect modernity to last forever, it will be with us for decades, and even if and when it does end, it will remain with us in patches or sedimented form, just as the pre-modern world is today. I am still thinking about this, but I feel the challenge is to recognise how modernity continues to have a hold over us, and to free ourselves from its worst constraints without wishing it all away. That might mean unlearning modernity, but in the meantime, I might try to flirt with her a little longer.

I envisage at least three more posts to deepen this inquiry. First, on Zak Stein’s idea that we are ‘in a time between worlds’, then a reflection on Charles Peguy’s a-modernism, and then an update on metamodernism, which I think captures these equivocal feelings about modernity well. These posts may not arise in quick succession due to other commitments, a wayward muse, and fear of conceptual overload, but I’ll link back to this post when I get to them.

For now, I’ll play you out with a famous song by Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, Shallow, which begins with the line:

“Tell me something, girl, are you happy in this modern world?

Or do you need more? Is there something that you’re searching for?”