Two Theories of Modernity

Abstract

There seem to be at large in our culture two ways of understanding the rise of modernity. They are in effect two different takes on what makes our contemporary society different from its forebears. In one take, we can look on the difference between present-day society and, say, that of medieval Europe as analogous to the difference between medieval Europe and China or India. In other words, we can think of the difference as one between civilizations, each with their own culture. Or alternatively, we can see the change from earlier centuries to today as involving something like development, as the demise of a society and the rise of the modern. And in this perspective, which seems to be the dominant one, things look rather different. I want to call the first kind of understanding a cultural one, and the second acultural. In using these terms, I'm leaning on a use of the word culture which is analogous to the sense it often has in anthropology. I am evoking the picture of a plurality of human cultures, each of which has a language and a set of practices that define specific understandings of personhood, social relations, states of mind/soul, goods and bads, virtues and vices, and the like. These languages are often mutually untranslatable. With this model in mind, a cultural theory of modernity is one that characterizes the transformations that have issued in the modern West mainly in terms of the rise of a new culture. The contemporary Atlantic world is seen as one culture (or group of closely related cultures) among others, with its own specific understandings, for example, of person, nature, the good, to be contrasted to all others, including its own predecessor civilization (with which it obviously also has a lot in common). By contrast, an theory is one that describes these transformations in terms of some culture-neutral operation. By this I mean an operation that is not defined in terms of the specific cultures it carries us from and to, but is rather seen as of a type that any traditional culture could undergo. An example of an acultural type of theory, indeed a paradigm case, would be one that conceives of modernity as the growth of reason, defined in various ways: as the growth of scientific consciousness, or the development of a secular outlook, or the rise of instrumental rationality, or an ever-clearer distinction between fact-finding and evaluation. Or else modernity might be accounted for in terms of social, as well as intellectual changes: the transformations, including the intellectual ones, are seen as coming about as a result of increased mobility, concentration of populations, industrialization, or the like. In all these cases, modernity is conceived as a set of transformations that any and every culture can go through--and that all will probably be forced to undergo. These changes are not defined by their end point in a specific constellation of understandings of, say, person, society, good; they are rather described as a type of transformation to which any culture could in principle serve as For instance, any culture could suffer the impact of growing scientific consciousness; any religion could undergo secularization; any set of ultimate ends could be challenged by a growth of instrumental thinking; any metaphysic could be dislocated by the split between fact and value. So modernity in this kind of theory is understood as issuing from a rational or social operation that is culture-neutral. This is not to say that the theory cannot acknowledge good historical reasons why this transformation first arose in one civilization rather than another, or why some may undergo it more easily than others. The point rather is that the operation is defined not in terms of its specific point of arrival, but as a general function that can take any specific culture as its input. To grasp the difference from another angle, the operation is not seen as supposing or reflecting an option for one specific set of human values or understandings among others. …