The disappointment of modernity

Just musing here – this needs some proper research, but I don’t think I’m wrong. A few things I’ve watched and read recently have got me thinking about modernity in its application to both politics and our daily lives. Modernity itself is a contested concept, as is its application to politics, but I think we can draw some broad contours.

Modernity was characterised by a view towards rational progress and the application of science and technology to social needs. In countries like the US, this was sometimes flipped so that science and technology drove social needs, e.g. the development of suburbia and the suburban lifestyle around the car (James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere explores this and related areas, as does his contribution to an interesting documentary called The End of Suburbia). In the Third World, starting with the era of development, countries were encouraged to ‘develop’ by industrialising to look like the West or the USSR, depending on their sponsor (remember here that while modernity and development are often associated with capitalism, Marxist development was emphasised the industrial just as much). Of course, the political class in those countries needed a nationalist project after colonialism and were themselves seemingly infatuated with modernity both for the purpose of ‘catching up’ to the developed countries and, I think, often for its own sake.

You can see this in pop culture as well – watch films from the early days of computers, for example, and see how they were depicted: very powerful in not only their computing capacity but in a problem-solving and societal sense; and everything from wise to evil, but mostly wise.

Decades on, what has happened? There is debate over when modernity ended in the socio-political sense, but there is certainly less faith in scientific progress – in fact, in some areas there’s a backlash against science and mistrust of it. This is especially noticeable in climate change, though that of course comes with its own economic – and therefore political – baggage. It’s interesting to see, though, how easily doubt has been spread on both the science and the scientists. In other areas, development is a dirty word in much of the world, at least in its original sense. Communist modernity failed, and its capitalist counterpart is coming under increasing pressure in much of the world. There are movements towards localism and specificity over globalism and ‘one-model-fits-all’. The extreme version of neoliberalism is no doubt responsible for some of this, but any dominant ideology is also in the position to carry the can for other failings.

What comes next is, as ever, the question. It’s obvious to say there’ll be increased friction, but how will this play out in local and regional contexts? Could it be increasing demands for political and economic ‘sovereignty of the people’ and an attendant international cooperation built on egalitarian and non-interventionist principles? Could it be global war against the backdrop of increased competition for scarce resources? Hobbesian, Lockean or Kantian ... Whatever the outcome, I doubt it’ll involve a reassertion of the neoliberal order – its champions are fading. That’s for another post though.

Finishing off by going back to pop culture, some of the best artistic depictions I’ve seen on this are at www.lostamerica.com – you can clearly sense both the expansive optimism and the profound loss and desolation in many of the pictures.

Anyway, comments as ever welcome. Am I way off track here?