Please begin by asking yourself what the word Modern or Modernity means…how do you understand this notion? Is it a period of time? Is it clock? Is it a plane? A vaccine? A printing press? Is it progress? Is it capital? Take a moment and think about its meaning. Now that you have some understanding of how you perceive this term, I want you to forget that for a second and ask yourself: when you hear the term modern or modernity is there an aspect of it being positive or negative, or is it amoral?” Despite many perceiving the notion of modernity as a period in time, I am going to consider modernity as a worldview. A lens through which a person, an institution, or a state understands reality. You might consider it a heuristic to reality. To walk through how to process this notion of Modernity, we will have to look at some seemingly unrelated topics, yet I can assure you they are most certainly embedded within Modernity. So, I will be throwing many topics out there and hopefully, eventually, leading you to see this web of connectivity.
The term “Modernity” is quite the ambiguous concept. Scholars have argued the usefulness and possible uselessness of the term itself, but lets examine Anthony Giddens’, a British Sociologist, notion of Modernity. He has worked extensively on the term and its usefulness in discussions of self-identity, communal-identity, politics, history and more. For Gidden’s Modernity is roughly equivalent to “the industrialized world in Post-Feudal .” But what does this really mean? I like to think of Modernity as such: Modernity is a colonial, Post Traditional, disembedding way of thinking that was birthed from the Enlightenment which perpetuates a general sense of western culture by having faith in progress and reason. Clearly there is much to unpack here. I’ll balance between Giddens and my own interpretation and work through each of the major concepts in this definition.
Giddens describes “The Industrialized world” or Industrialism to refer to the social relations implied in the widespread use of material power and machinery in production processes. This also involves a second dimension of Capitalism, which refers to a system of commodity production involving both competitive product markets and the commodification of labor power. Furthermore, Modernity ushers in an era of ‘total war’ (WWI) wherein the potential destructive power of weaponry, signaled by the existence of nuclear armaments (WWII), becomes immense. As a side note, Foucault’s notion of surveillance, or the panopticon, refer’s to another aspect of Modernity, wherein the perceived ability to categorize and understand the world around us is thus the ability to conquer it. In my opinion, this is an especially dangerous fallout from the Modern world-view.
By colonial, I mean the Nation-State, which is the political determination of Modernity, seeks to expand its influence and world power by acquiring more territory, resources, and subjugation of groups of people considered to be “traditional.”
By Post-Traditional I mean that which is not traditional! This disjunctive syllogism is not all that helpful yet, but what does this negation imply? Yes, I regret to say it, it is the duality that is important, I will “unpack” the significance of this duality later, but for now let us understand ‘post-traditional’ as a separation of time and space. All societies and cultures have a way of reckoning time and space, where as “pre-modern” groups use day to day activities and the situatedness of place where as “modern” societies have no privileging of place and understand history, dating systems, time generally to be universal and global. This drastically changes the face of social relations and relationships with the land from “pre-modern” to “modern” societies.
Now, what is a “disembedding way of thinking?” We have to examine what we can call, “disembedding mechanisms” or phenomena as the “lifting-out” of social relations from local contexts to their rearticulation to a global arena. Lifting out meaning the tremendous acceleration of distanciation which modernity introduces. Giddens divides disembedding mechanisms into two categories of abstract systems, symbolic tokens and then expert systems. Symbolic tokens are the media of exchange that have a standard value and thus interchangeable across contexts. Expert systems bracket time and space through modes of technology which have validity outside of individual practitioners and clients. Some examples of disembedding mechanisms might be: Money….medicine…clocks…science…transportation…engineering…buildings…food…and especially how we understand social relations in your family or on the job, or within the state.
Finally, Modernity has a faith in reason and progress. This means that there is radical doubt with all claims of knowledge. This involves that all forms of knowledge take the form of a hypothesis. This means that claims that very well may be wrong are open to revision and may even be abandoned at some point. This makes modernity a reflexive institution or heuristic. However, this requires a source of authority that manifests a sense of trust in achieving some sense of ontological security. Let us consider this a “leap of faith” which practical engagements demand, but also keeps faith in the modern system. I suppose now we have a clear view of how dangerous it is to disrupt the sources of authority or rather, how the source of authority lends it self to particular styles of government: authoritarian or otherwise. A meritocracy or democracy maybe.
So, now that we have all these terms bopping around in the atmosphere, let’s again look at the duality of “modern and the non-modern.” A duality that is necessary for the very notion of modernity to make any sense at all. To highlight this duality, lets examine how it might apply to notions of religion. J.Z. Smith develops the notion of Locative and Utopian religions. Locative meaning: an emphasis of territories with boundaries, interconnectivity, and regarding order and disorder as equal. Whereas, on the other hand, Utopian world views emphasizes frontiers rather than specific places, individuality, and disorder as in need of ordering. Furthermore, I would like to examine the Utopian necessity to order the disorder. Essentially to be the panopticon, and how this then transpires when Utopian/Modern/disembedding and Locative/pre-modern/embedding ideologies clash in reality. Post-colonial and race studies Scholar, Barnor Hesse, explains this deadly phenomena, “…we would need to consider how in the hegemonic modernity discourse the manifold presence of ‘Europeanness’ is rendered on the basis of its onto-colonial elaboration of a ‘non-european’ that appears only incidentally and ephemerally colonized. It considers the ways in which an established yet indeterminate geographical Christian entity coalesced as ‘Europe,’ becoming culturally, economically, and politically marked “white” in relation to its designations and marking of a “non-european.” Or as I would as, “the other.” This is necessary facet to the functioning of a Modern State, something I argue in my work on the ‘Banality of Racism.’
What does this mean? I will only provide you with further questions to consider. How does it function is race relations, relations with native folks? How might modernity be a false concept? Do we think that all indigenous peoples are honestly “not modern?” Modernity is an all encompassing, universal, global term. It consumes all it touches. Fredrick Cooper thinks we ought to discard the term and instead use more specific concepts such as colonialism, globalization, capitalism and so on. If I spent so much time describing all these different and vast notions that make up modernity itself, why not simply concentrate on those notions themselves? However, I can’t help but see how intertwined and inseparable all these notions, institutions, and worldviews are. I think modernity offers us a figure head to focus our ire towards in creating a more just society…But does justice even have meaning anymore? By questioning the World-view of modernity, we can open the doors to questions many concepts we take for granted…’Freedom’…’justice’…’capitalism’…’democracy’…’rights’…’humanity’…’terrorism’…’extremism’…’communism’… for whom are these terms used and for whom are they used against? How have these terms been used to manipulate and dominate and subordinate groups or “the others” to accomplish or suppress particular political, social, and economical goals? How often do you hear politicians claiming the “necessity of history for progress.” Politicians will claim that “Slavery was a necessary evil for the prosperity and progress we have today,” a necessity of modernity maybe. Modernity insulates itself against criticism by forming decorative narratives wherein the modern state is doing the right thing in the name of linear everlasting progress all of which is based on a worldview symbiotically connected to colonialism and slavery. So I will leave you with one final question, Is modernity a positive, negative, or amoral worldview?
Considerations & Fictions 
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