Maybe Real Modernity Has Only Just Started
The feeling of modernity, originally described by writers well over a century ago, is today shared by more people than ever.
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.1
This quote is from the opening pages of Marshall Berman’s book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982), which I recently started reading. It is such a compelling look into what modernity is all about through the eyes of writers, artists, and other thinkers of the last two centuries. Through their words, we can learn what it means to be an individual living in ‘modern times’ and also feel a deep connection with how the past was lived.
I open with this quote because modernity is defined by a radical contradiction. It’s much like the old story of Faust. In the German tale, Faust trades his soul with the devil’s agent Mephistopheles for worldly growth. As Berman argues, a similar Faustian-like bargain lies at the heart of modernity: there is both this historic, limitless potential while also this tragic, immeasurable loss.2 These two poles loosely define the contours of modernity and its development, while there also being no real way to slow it down.
Contemporary life is full of such examples. I covered a leading one in my piece, The Social Recession. The internet, while providing us with unprecedented access to knowledge, has also spurred an equally-unprecedented decline in friendships, trust, and intimate relationships. It’s yet another Faustian bargain so typical of modernity.
This contradiction is a trope that has repeated itself in so many earlier, modern contexts. To give one example, the social effects of the internet so closely resemble how early modernists spoke of the new city life: its ability to both inspire and uproot you. In the 18th century, Jean-Jacque Rousseau likened it to a “social whirlwind” (le tourbillon social). As he wrote in New Eloise (1761) through the character of Saint-Preux:
With such a magnitude of objects, I am getting dizzy. Of all the things that strike me, there is none that holds my heart, yet all of them together disturb my feelings, so that I forget what I am and who I belong to.3
The book resonated so strongly among the growing number of city dwellers that it became a bestseller. It might as well have been written about online life today.
We’re Not Living in ‘Post-Modernity’
For some reason, talk of modernity seems a bit passé today. The “early modern era” is commonly understood as starting with the Enlightenment. In philosophy and art, “modernism” is associated with the early 20th century. In urban studies, “high modernism” is a mid-20th-century architectural style said to represent a limitless belief in the ability of science to conquer nature and better life itself.
Such ideas and their offshoots have largely been relegated to history and are not evoked today in any constructive sense. After the 1980s, many scholars began to speak of “post-modernity,” as if we had outgrown that old modern phase and exhausted its energy. Nowadays, we have many other qualifiers for modernity: liquid modernity, late modernity, second modernity, or even economic processes like modernization, just to name a few.
But as Berman argues, modernity is not just a phase that comes to pass. We are not living in ‘post-modernity.’4 Modernity is more like a centuries-long story with an arc. This arc bends toward the undoing of many socio-cultural allegiances that people historically held, leaving us in the end just with ourselves as individuals — naked, dislocated, and more and more in flux.5 The modern sensibility is that “social whirlwind” Rosseau so aptly described centuries ago.
Of course, the processes behind modernity are incredibly destructive. It so often breaks apart social belonging and traditional life. But to a discerning eye, this same stripping away may also allow one to see reality with more sober senses. It was the artist, the poet Charles Baudelaire, who first associated this sensibility with modernity along with its potential. In The Painter of Modern Life (1863), he viewed the coming age as that which is “eternally changing and present, [...] ephemeral, and always in transition.”6 It was also this modern sensibility that made a young Fyodor Dostoevsky provocatively declare in 1849: "look beneath your feet [Russia], you are standing on the brink of an abyss!"7
Modernity As a Universal Experience Is Only Just Starting
I cannot help but feel that these sentiments press on more of us nowadays than ever before. I recall my friend telling me something her mother said, which was along the lines of “eventually, within the next few decades, people will get tired of this.” It sounded so out of character that it surprised me. But while it may sound like a passing comment, consider the context.
Her mother lives far outside the West, in a rural area outside any major metropole. Visible development has come exceptionally quickly, jumping from electrification straight to the internet in a generation. Still, she can’t help but feel some exhaustion. While a new world is now accessible to her to some degree, being constantly inundated with what is beyond one’s actual lived experience produces an opposite feeling of invisibility. As the world opens up, maybe a nagging feeling settles in as new expectations enter: “can’t my life be so much better?”
This latent angst is so characteristic of the modern sensibility, so aggressively visible today across so many vastly different contexts.8 So, to "get tired of this” can be therefore interpreted as — “I am exhausted by the speed at which things move and its noise.” “We are spinning too fast, I feel disoriented, invisible, and lost.” Or simply, “I am getting tired of this modernity.” The feelings described by the earliest modernists are now far closer to being universal, and the idea of modernity itself really deserves a reassessment.
Yet somehow, right when its defining features have seeped into virtually every facet of social life, discussions on modernity today have largely disappeared. But if we take the words of those few artists and writers who saw the glimmers of it long ago, what preceded us might actually have been preliminary stagehands at work. Only now has the stage been set for feelings of modernity to emerge as a universally intelligible experience. There's a strong case to be made that the internet is finally allowing for such a shared sensibility. It is creating a quintessentially “modern” space of social engagement and a common point of reference for all. Close to 5 billion people are interacting with that space now. So, as I titled this short essay, maybe real modernity has only just started.
It’s because of this perspective that I can never shut the door on the future entirely. While the modern bind means that great turbulence is undoubtedly ahead as social dislocation deepens, it also means the door is also wide open for some great unknown potentiality.
Marshall Berman. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Penguin: 1982), pg. 15.
Berman, pg. 39-40.
Berman, pg. 17.
As a note, Berman really hated the term “post-modernism” and found it to be a nonsense term for those that have just unfairly given up on the future.
One of modernity’s great drives, and that which is responsible for its greatest tragedies, is that its ever-growing complexity also inadvertently deepens atomization, leaving us alone as individuals. This means historical memory, social bonds, and feelings of home become disoriented and often lost.
The beginnings of “modern Russia” can be traced to a growing stratum of disaffected, socially dislocated, and university-educated young people who found no place for themselves in Czarist Russia. Dostoevsky was one of them. I cover this in my piece, Too Many Wannabe Elites: A Story of Russia (and Possibly America). Check it out if you haven’t already.
I think this angst can, in many ways, be measured. For example, across all democracies, 2019 was the highest level of discontent with democracy on record since the Centre for Democracy at Cambridge University started conducting the survey in 1995. Strangely, there’s been no follow-up study done since the pandemic.