Modernity

The term modern and its derivatives are not new, and they are ambiguous in their meanings, especially if one considers the globe's competing worldviews and cosmologies. Whereas modernity has had for some time a positive connotation in the West, particularly among the more educated classes, the same cannot be said about the notion as understood in other parts of the world, where, until very recently in their long cultural histories, the cardinal virtues of social and intellectual life have always been stability, continuity, and predictability. The very notion that “change is natural and good,” accepted almost without reflection by many citizens of Western nations for the last several centuries, has been wholly repugnant, even inconceivable, to those billions of Asians and Africans who devoutly followed the doctrines of Confucius, Buddha, Hinduism, or Islam. The famous Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” wryly captures this widespread human sentiment. This basic contradiction between worldviews, perhaps more than any other single factor, has sparked the repeated cultural and political conflicts among cultural zones of the world, where, in most other ways, life might have been viewed in similar, even sympathetic, terms. Thus, the concept of modernity is not of merely analytic or academic interest. Considered broadly, it contains one of the major keys toward understanding why geopolitical and cultural instability has become the standard condition of [Page 506]international affairs, particularly during the last two centuries. If static certitude characterized the ancient civilizations in Egypt, Persia, China, and India, dynamic shifts in actions and meanings identify “the way we live now” (to borrow Anthony Trollope's title from 1875).

The question of what exactly modernity means—when it began, how it has developed, where it leads—has perplexed intellectual historians for decades, if not centuries. A platitude holds that whatever is “modern” (“from the fifth century Latin term modernus which was used to distinguish a Christian present from a Roman, pagan past” [Smart 1990:17]) is always relative to any period of interest. For instance, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones seemed to its readers stunningly “modern” in 1749, so much so that Edward Gibbon in his Autobiography (1794) claimed that this “exquisite picture of human manners” would outlast the mighty Austrian empire in significance. The unrivalled eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica argued in 1910 that “the methods of fiction have grown more sophisticated since his day…but the traces of Tom Jones are still discernible in most of our manlier modern fiction.” Now, though, the novel (and famous filmed version) seems trapped in almost formulaic predictability, and as such bears the marks of an art form that is no longer in any ordinary sense “modern.”

Yet a purely relativistic viewpoint does not take one very far in understanding the concept, even if “that gallery of echoes called modern thought” (Durant 2001:24) proves to be entirely derivative rather than original in nature. There are indeed authoritative analyses, which over the years have proposed signposts on the road to (Western) modernity that still bear consideration, even after the ideological onslaught called “postmodernism.” John Herman Randall's beloved textbook, The Making of the Modern Mind (published in 1926 when he was 27), is one such standard interpretation. Whereas today even informed readers might cite 1500 as the earliest possible date for the origin of what is modern, Randall seconds Charles Homer Haskins's famous claim (The Renaissance of the 12th Century) that it began much earlier: “The chief pathfinder of this via moderna, William of Ockham [1300?–1349?], left his pupils in control not only in Oxford but in Paris itself, the former stronghold of the Thomists. The new modernism stood for a skeptical empiricism that completely demolished in the fourteenth century the great systems so carefully erected the century before. Gone were all the necessities of reason, all metaphysical entities and distinctions. Nothing could be accounted real in nature that was not an observed fact or relation between facts. Experience was the only test of physical truth” (Randall [1926]1976:211–12; emphasis added). It would seem that William of Ockham had anticipated the major premises of Francis Bacon's scientific method by 300 years and of Descartes's empirically based rationalist philosophy by 350. Moreover, his understanding of verifiable truth, often considered the hallmark of modern thinking, coincides with those common among Enlightenment philosophes 500 years after his death. During a time in Europe commonly thought to be trapped by the iron grip of Catholic orthodoxy, its two most important universities were home to viewpoints we would now see as distinctly modern.

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