The Three Kinds of Modernity

Series: What Has Modernity Done to Us?

When people use the word modernity, they mean at least three things.

Modernity 1: “These Days”

The first just means something like “these days.” Modernity is that which is contemporary to us. You can see it in phrases like “modern technology” and “modern medicine” and “the modern age.” Into this category go all the forces of “modernization”, i. e. globalization, electrification, urbanization, industrialization, and all the other metrics and trends that we use to measure how “developed” a nation is, how modern. 

Modern 2: What Came Before Post-Modernity

The second way we use it is to describe what came before postmodernity and after premodernity, roughly the cultural, societal, and intellectual movements in the West between the years of 1600-1950.

In this case, the term refers to a period of time and the distinctive ways of thinking and living that were common during that time. The prefixes “pre-” and “post-” point to the fact that each era of history is related to its chronological neighbors. Modernity rose out of pre-modern times. Postmodernity reacted to the modernism that preceded it. Cultural movements grow up like human generations, each one rebelling against its parent, correcting it, fulfilling it, and going astray in new ways. On and on the pendulum swings. 

Modern 3: The Prevailing Consciousness in the West

You can think of modernity in the third sense as the prevailing consciousness today which conditions all human ideas and actions. It is the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, the system, the way of life and thought that has come to dominate the West. It is the air we breathe and the water we drink. It is the plausibility supersystem in which we live and move and have our being, the thing we think before we think we are thinking. 

Modernity-as-prevailing-consciousness is distinct in several ways. It is characterized by, among other factors:

• Optimism toward the powers of technology to deliver a better world.

• A belief that there is a “right way” for everything and that all things should be brought into the realm of technique. (Sociologists have called this the “McDonaldization of reality.)

• A sense that science is the best path to true knowledge. Epistemology must be grounded on the material.

• A shift of the existential center of gravity from the heavens to the earth. Meta-narratives remain, but they are viewed differently. The gods no longer impose ironclad meanings, but rather, meaning rises up from human meaning-makers.

• Enshrinement of the primacy of the individual, especially in the West. The individual reigns in the philosophical sphere (“I think therefore I am), in the political (“…endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…”), in the moral (the individual is free to do anything that doesn’t harm another individual), in the spiritual, in the rational (“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”) And on and on it goes. 

Modernity in this sense is true of almost all Westerners (an increasingly true of everyone else in the world). It unites people across the other divides that might separate them. Even the most polarized and entrenched groups from the Left or the Right will still believe that the world can be improved by rendering all things countable, for instance. They will both still reach toward instrumental rationality when something goes wrong (a habit captured so elegantly in the phrase “There’s an app for that”). As I said in the last post, we are all moderns now.

Why Does It Matter?

These distinctions might seem like splitting hairs, but they aren’t. If we are talking about modernity in the second sense (what came before postmodernism), then we can draw distinctions between modernity and its successor with statements like: “Modernity used grand meta-narratives to organize life, but postmodernity held that all metanarratives were mere power plays,” or “Modernity prized reason above all, but postmodernity is the age of feeling.” 

However, when we are talking about modernity in the third sense (that of the current prevailing consciousness) it will have characteristics of both modernity in the second sense and what is meant by postmodernity. Both cultural movements have contributed to the mélange that is the contemporary consciousness.

Just because culture changes doesn’t mean the artifacts and engines of the previous era are replaced. Rather, they abide, producing ever new forms and manifestations as time goes on.

One might look to Silicon Valley and the many digital products of its colossal workshops as an example of this. In many ways, it is a product (and cause) of deepening postmodernism. It has given the world tools that seem to be inherently decentralizing, have given credence to the idea of a plastic identity, and have given a voice to the many marginalized narratives that would have been drowned out in an earlier age.

On the other hand, it could also be seen as the apogee of modernistic belief in the application of technique taken to the nth degree. New forms of digital utopianism are arising at the bleeding edge of the techno-revolution that are producing an optimism in the application of human reason unseen since the world wars.

Modernity 1 (contemporary life) is also related to modernity 3 (global consciousness) in the sense that the former gives rise to the latter. David Wells put the connection this way:

“If modernization is the social organization which has brought this about, modernity is the language that those who are modernized now speak. The external shaping of our world by the process of modernization typically creates an internal world of diminished cognitive horizons; appetites for affluence; a definition of meaning in terms of material possessions; an ethic which equates what is efficient (or what is self-serving) with what is morally right; and the relocation of all meaning from the outside world of creation and the public world of human organization to the inside, private world of intuition and of the self. This is modernity.”

Understanding the Times

In 2005, writer and cultural critic, David Foster Wallace, gave a commencement speech that started with the following story:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes 'What the hell is water?’”

These distinctions are important because modernity has done its work so deeply and so thoroughly that we don’t even know its name. It is the water we swim in, the language we use, the ubiquitous glow of our screens, the amount of time we spend in our cars, the threadbare relational ties between us and our neighbors. And it all feels so normal. It is hard to imagine, let alone pursue, a life that is significantly different. If someone held one out to us like a drink of water, we might say, “What the hell is water?”

Each age has its own unrealities. If we don’t know the distinct unrealities of the modern age, how can we find them when they are present in our churches, our communities, and our own lives?

If we do not know the contours of our cultural moment, how will we be able to live well inside it? If we don’t know how we got here, how will we know where “here” is? How can we live in such a way that God, who is Reality Himself, can be known and seen and embraced beyond all the unreal distortions?

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Read more from Andy on The Darking Psalter (commentary, translations, and poetry about the Psalms) and Three Things (a monthly digest of worthy resources to help people connect with culture, neighbor, and God.)