What is Modernity?
Encyclopedie's frontispiece, full version. Engraving by Benoît Louis Prévost.
A while back I proposed that modernity was sort of petering out – this was incidental to the text of the piece that I was writing, and is a big idea to grapple with. I intend to start discussing it in this piece, but I don’t believe I’ll finish it here. However, a much more foundational question is “what is meant by ‘modernity’?”
Traditionally, the history of Europe is divided into three general ages: “Antiquity,” characterized as the complex of Greece, Grecian Macedonia, and Rome; the interstitial “Middle Ages” or “Dark Ages” that followed the fall of Rome; and Modernity, which follows the Dark Ages. This, of course, places the start of civilization with, roughly, the civilization that produced Athenian Democracy and Socratic Philosophy. It ignores the civilizations of the fertile crescent, which rose and fell largely before Greece emerged from their post-Mycenaean Dark Age, and only partially includes Ancient Egypt, which produced a remarkably stable civilization that lasted almost three millennia. I will return to this archaic period shortly.
It is my conviction, having done a little bit of light reading on the subject, that many people fundamentally misunderstand the Middle Ages. They believe it was a time of barbarism and savagery, where Europe was divided up between a series of petty kingdoms who warred endlessly with one another, and was mostly characterized by plague with a chance of witch-burning. This is a misconception: while there was certainly injustice and savagery in the middle ages, it was a remarkably complex society that featured low rates of literacy and a dearth of textual sources – and it is characterized as a time of religious fanaticism principally because the sources that we retain are clerical. Consider: if all you had of the twentieth century were sources produced by the Catholic Church, would it not seem to be a time obsessed with religion?
Image from the most impressive medieval artifact I’ve seen — the Apocalypse Tapestry of Angers, what is essentially a woven comic book depicting the Book of Revelation — it’s longer than a(n American) football field.
We need to think of the people of the Middle Ages as being both fundamentally culturally different from us and fundamentally psychologically similar to us. In many ways – at least according to some sources, – they seemed to view the world as enchanted and alive in a way that seems similar to Indigenous American Perspectivism as laid out by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, at least to my eyes. The world was inhabited by a vast hierarchy of visible and invisible forces that lie between humanity and the godhead, some of them inhabiting the physical world and some of them only occasionally interacting with it.
That being said, there are certain similarities that need to be kept in mind. In many ways, the things that drove people were completely understandable psychological drives. While their cultural understanding of fear and love and honor and dignity were different, they were still driven by these things. Within their cultural context, their choices make sense to us because their minds make sense to us. These beliefs may seem incoherent or contradictory, but if we accept them at face value, their actions make sense. That’s part of what makes the study of history possible. These are human minds operating in different cultures, not alien beings. Historian Carolly Erickson noted that the primary differences in the world view can be chalked up to the fact that, when reading these sources “our habits of mind . . . hamper us, accustomed as we are to equate realness with materiality; for us, what is unseen and immaterial is assumed to be unreal until its existence is proved by the verifiable data of the senses.”
She goes on to note that there are three principle difficulties when it comes to understanding the middle ages from the modern era:
“A different view of reality, then underlay medieval perception – a view we may compare to the altered reality of enchantment. It was characteristic of that view that throughout the middle ages the earth was conceived as embracing the geographical locus of unseen truths.” (underline added.)
“medieval people tended to perceive an all-encompassing multifold reality, knit together by a commonly held perceptual design. All-encompassing, because no part of experience of knowledge was conceived to be alien to the pattern of Christian revelation. Multifold, because it was a cultural habit to endow things with multiple identities. And in terms of a common perceptual design, because it was the mutually held network of beliefs, expectations and assumptions about reality that made medieval culture comprehensible to those who lived their mental lives within its bounds.” (underline added.)
The third issue that Erickson cites is the difficulty of finding secular sources, which was noted previously.
I’m going to have to revisit some of what I’ve written here after rereading The Medieval Machine (cover above,) because Gimpel depicts a world much more modern in its outlook — though this is, perhaps, a result of his Marxist orientation.
Note: for purposes of full disclosure, my sources for discussing the Middle ages include Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (relevantly discussed here ), The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception by Carolly Erickson (which I am currently reading,) and is haunted by The Medieval Machine by Jean Gimpel (which I am planning to shortly reread, but cannot directly quote at the moment.)
In many ways, on the surface, the people who inhabited the late antique world seem more comprehensible, because in many ways their conceptions of things are more familiar. Both Edgar and I read Alaric the Goth last year, and one could easily – though perhaps improperly – compare the treatment of the Goths on Rome’s Northern border to the USAian treatment of Latin American migrants on the southern border, and I’m certain that at least one person has imagined what a modern Alaric – Alarico? It’s an uncommon, but valid, Spanish name – might look like. However, as little as we want to accept it, we can read the collapse of Rome not as a rising tide of savagery but as the peoples of Europe trading one set of barbaric practices for another. Consider: Rome was a rapacious slave Empire, after the fall of Rome, slavery as a practice disappeared (replaced, admittedly, with Serfdom. However, I’ll be the first to admit that I would rather be a serf than a slave.)
In fact, if you look over the end of what Graeber, in his text, calls “the Axial age”, you see a decline of slavery in the large agricultural civilizations of Eurasia at around the same time (not exactly the disappearance, but a drastic curtailing.) He discusses the middle ages by noting that:
If the Axial Age was the age of materialism, the Middle Ages were above all else the age of transcendence. The collapse of the ancient empires did not, for the most part, lead to the rise of new ones. Instead, once-subversive popular religious movements were catapulted into the status of dominant institutions. Slavery declined or disappeared, as did the overall level of violence. As trade picked up, so did the pace of technological innovation; greater peace brought greater possibilities not only for the movement of silks and spices, but also of people and ideas. The fact that monks in Medieval China could devote themselves to translating ancient treatises in Sanskrit, and that students in madrasas in Medieval Indonesia could debate legal terms in Arabic, is testimony to the profound cosmopolitanism of the age.
Almost as much as the event I mention later, the fall of Constantinople, and the subsequent destruction of the Byzantine Empire marked the end of the Middle Ages. Photograph of the inside of the Hagia Sophia, taken by Mark Ahsmann and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
He notes, later, that modernity led to the return not just of slavery, but also a decline in the use of credit and a return to hard specie. This is something that Graeber notes over and over again: he refers to it as the “Military-Coinage-Slavery Complex”. He claims that this emerges several times – it independently emerged in the Mediterranean, in India, and in China – and played out differently in each of them (the Political and Religious collapse of the Buddhist Mauryan empire was the most dramatic, while China’s collapse was more of a hiccup, the Roman-Christian collapse in Europe really only took out Rome, leaving the Catholic church largely unscathed. The Byzantines seemed to follow along the Chinese model until the Ottomans came knocking.)
What about those archaic civilizations, though? Egypt and Mesopotamia?
While Mesopotamia is held to be an important case study in Graeber as to the collapse of the debt-slavery paradigm, and the situation as laid out in his treatment of these societies show societies that operated on credit but featured slavery, and showed that it was an unstable system, requiring periodic jubilees to release the enslaved and erase debt. He connects the emergence of this phenomenon to the improper cross-connection between the day-to-day economy and what he called “the human economy” (the specialized economy of ceremonial exchange for the “production of human beings”).
It is at this point in history that the concept of “Freedom” appears — articulated in the cuneiform Ama-gi, which means “Return to prior state” or “Return to one’s mother.” The crisis of this age was the destruction of families through debt slavery — something found not only in the Mesopotamian historical record but also in the Chinese myth of the origin of coinage. Clearly, though, this could only happen after it was decided that a person was something that not only could be bought and sold like a bushel of grain but by the same means as a bushel of grain, fundamentally differentiating it from older practices of dowry and bride price.
The innovation of the civilizations of nearer antiquity was the use of coinage, a refinement on the system of distributing spoils after conquest. I bring this up because of what Graeber notes about the emergence of the imperial societies of Antiquity. Graeber notes a similarity between the Athenian-Roman paradigm and the Anglo-American:
Athens and Rome established the paradigm: even when confronted with continual debt crises, they insisted on legislating around the edges, softening the impact, eliminating obvious abuses like debt slavery, using the spoils of empire to throw all sorts of extra benefits at their poorer citizens (who, after all, provided the rank and file of their armies), so as to keep them more or less afloat—but all in such a way as never to allow a challenge to the principle of debt itself. The governing class of the United States seems to have taken a remarkably similar approach: eliminating the worst abuses (e.g., debtors’ prisons), using the fruits of empire to provide subsidies, visible and otherwise, to the bulk of the population; in more recent years, manipulating currency rates to flood the country with cheap goods from China, but never allowing anyone to question the sacred principle that we must all pay our debts.
In short, Graeber proposes that the forces that led to the emergence of the Roman empire were remarkably like the conditions that led to the emergence of social democracy in the contemporary age: a means of ensuring that cross-class collaboration occurs by sharing the spoils of empire with the rank-and-file members of society.
Okay, but Modernity?
As an aside, before I continue, it’s moments like this that I am so upset that we don’t know more about the so-called Bronze Age collapse around 1150 BCE. What don’t we know? Image is the so-called “Mask of Agamemnon”, photographed by Xuan Che and used under a CC BY 2.0 license.
So up until now, I’ve talked about three general periods – the Middle Ages, Antiquity, and a pre-antiquity Archaic period. I’ve yet to really discuss Modernity in a piece about Modernity. There’s a reason for this: I view modernity, despite its strong continuity with prior ages, as marked by a distinct and pronounced discontinuity.
Modernity was, fundamentally, an accident.
Some people peg the start of modernity to the 1453 fall of the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire, or to the 1532 publication of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince or to Copernicus’s 1517 publication of his theory of heliocentrism. Instead, I propose that it must be the 1492 crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Christopher Columbus. Graeber points to the reintroduction of specie currency during the Ming dynasty (actually a sort of black market innovation,) which led to an immense hunger for precious metals in China, for which the Chinese offered what at the time were incredible luxury goods.
This wasn’t the first time Europeans crossed the Atlantic (Leif Erikson was the first European to set foot in North America, after all, and even after the destruction of the Vinland colony, European colonists lingered in Greenland and a bishop was periodically dispatched to them, a journey that often took up to five years to complete, round-trip, Erickson [the historian, not the viking] notes). What Columbus brought with him was not the attitude of the evangelist: he approached it with the attitude of a modern capitalist, viewing all of the lands he approached as his rightful property to extract value from.
It is notable — though this is contested — that Isabella I of Spain, a brutal monarch by all accounts, was horrified by Columbus’s behavior in the Americas and attempted to stop the reintroduction of chattel slavery. Perhaps this is simply whitewashing by later biographers, but I can easily see it being the case.
How, one might ask, did the “discovery” of the Americas lead to Modernity? And how is this an accident?
When discussing Columbus, it is necessary that we remember those people who suffered from his actions first, the Arawak-speaking Taino people, who are (potentially) extinct as a result. This image is a woodcut of a Taino Cacique (commonly translated as “chief”) in chains.
Let’s start with the second question: aside from the fact that pretty much everyone thought that Columbus was wrong, and that if there wasn’t a pair of continents waiting for him, his voyage would have ended with him sailing off to die in the middle of the ocean, there’s the fact that it’s entirely a coincidence that the one man possessed by the suicidal overconfidence to leap at this was also possessed by an utter willingness to exploit whatever he found — it’s a form of mutant epistemology. The fact that he succeeded is a historical accident, the fact that later “explorers” and monarchs leaned into this was a moral failing principally explained by the logic of debt: many of these foot soldiers were in debt to the crown, and the Spanish monarchs were in debt to Italian bankers, who were flinging that money eastward to buy Chinese luxury goods. The coincidence of the demand for specie from the East and the presence of untouched land to the ultimate west made it very profitable to be the middleman for that particular moment in history.
However, the ramifications of this are notable. I have no proof for this, but I find it notable that Pre-Columbian proto-protestant movements (of which there were many) failed, and the first one post-Columbus succeeded wildly. Before Columbus, you had a number of Protestant-like movements: the Waldensians, the Arnoldists, the Petrobrusians, the Lollards, the Fraticelli, the Hussites – all had traits which were later adopted by the Reformers of the 16th century. There was obviously a desire for reform among the populace, but I think that the adoption of Luther’s reforms by the nobility and Royalty was due to the 1493 Papal Bulls Inter Caetera and Piis Fidelum, which gave all of the Americas to the Iberian powers. Is it any mystery that this led to the wild political success of the first major heresy afterward, the publication of the 95 Theses, 24 years later?
Is it also any mystery that some of the most notable colonizing powers from outside of Iberia were England, Holland, and Denmark, which were the Protestant nations with maritime capability to do so? France, I will admit, is a bit of an anomaly here, though by the time they really got started with colonialism in the Americas they had had the whole business with the Hugenots (which I’m not getting into here. Americans tend to talk favorably of the Hugenots, but I’m given to understand they engaged in exhumation and post-mortem baptism, and were thus somewhat terrible neighbors).
We cannot also forget the pirate Vasco da Gama, who led to the formation of the Portuguese Empire, the first of these colonial Empires, in India.
So you had the European states, newly unshackled from religious control, drunk on the blood of two continents, and newly positioned to be major powers. They turned the Americas into a Horizon of Extraction, and then Africa, and India, and the Far East (to the extent that they could).
Modernity is the world produced by this. All of the world’s material wealth was suddenly hyper-concentrated, to put a refinement on Graeber’s model (which he puts forward as cyclical). Wealth concentration leads to a focus on specie currency, and the ascendance of specie currency leads to an emphasis on materialist and pragmatic philosophies. The “enchanted” world of the Middle Ages is disenchanted, the dreaming night of transcendent religiosity is banished by Deleuze and Guattari’s “vigilant and insmoniac rationality.”
Full disclosure: I re-encountered the term “Kingdom of Ends” while trying to figure out how I feel about Disco music. (It’s not my favorite, but I do feel like listening to it, from time to time, it turns out.)
Let’s talk about the philosophy of the age. I haven’t read Immanuel Kant in about fifteen years, but I can review a few notes. In many ways, there’s a perversity to him: he lived in a materialist age, but he was, himself, an idealist. He proposed that the ideal society would be a “Kingdom of Ends”, where each person was considered to be an end-in-themselves, they should be treated well because they are human. That is the only reason that needs to be given. However, we should assume that this means that he saw the world around him as the opposite: it was a “Kingdom of Means” where human beings were used instrumentally as a means-to-an-end. This is reflected in the subtext of many enlightenment philosophers who discussed the rights of human beings, which Graeber notes that “[t]hose who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.” Or, I might add, that we can be tricked or coerced into surrendering them.
Materialist philosophy – and I say this as someone with a principally materialist outlook – is strongly correlated with a tendency to view other people as a means to an end. That is, that human lives have value only insofar as they have a utility to us and that, insofar as they are not useful, they have no value.
“Say, mate, have you ever seen the mills
Where the kids at the looms spit blood?
Have you been in the mines when the fire-damp blew?
Have you shipped as a hand with a freighter's crew
Or worked in a levee flood?”
—The Sheep and the Goats, Henry Herbert Knibbs. If you think that I’m exaggerating about reducing people to means, remember that child labor laws are necessary.
This same era saw the enclosure of the commons, the start of Malthusianism – and thus the seeds of lifeboat ethics – and the emergence of capital as a force in the world. It saw the emergence of the Nation-State, which led to the French Revolution, Napoleon, and everything that followed from that. It saw the colonization of the Americas with attendant genocide and enslavement. The beginnings of industrialism, with its “dark, satanic mills” that started the process of poisoning the world. Ultimately, we can see this in the Holocaust.
We should not see the emergence of fascist movements as a reaction against modernity, any more than we should see the emergence of neofascist movements as reactions against the subsequent “post-modernity” (which is, fundamentally, just a branching vector of modernity which we are following for a time). It is, instead, a culmination. Because, while it celebrates tradition and wants to return to a prelapsarian moment of perfection, this is just rhetoric meant to serve an end: the social pathologies of modernity have always said that they are returning to a prior glory, and justifying atrocity after atrocity on those grounds. Do not forget, the Spanish, British, and French colonial empires justified their actions by hearkening back to Roman glory.
Traits of Modernity
If you accept the origins of modernity as laid out above, then certain things follow from it. At the moment, I’m not completely committed to these ideas, but I’m having trouble dispelling them, so I’m provisionally coming along with them.
Francisco Goya’s “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (no. 43)”, and what Deleuze and Guattari were responding to with the aforementioned quote “It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.” The painting, though, depicts the basic idea of the Enchanted World.
First and foremost among the ideas that follow is the idea that the world is viewed in purely instrumental terms. This is part and parcel to the idea of disenchantment: an idea I’ve encountered several places (that source says it was popularized by Max Weber, and that’s as good an origin as any, I suppose), including in the Owls at Dawn podcast’s discussion of Giorgio Agamben, in the Regrettable Century’s and Red Library’s shared discussion of the book The Enchantments of Mammon (link is to part 1, there are 8 in the feed. It’s a long book), and in a patreon episode of Trashfuture where one of the hosts, Riley, discusses Peter Watts’s book Blindsight. According to this theory, we lived in an Enchanted World, once, as per Erickson, because we could not explain natural phenomena, so we invented mythologies to explain them. Scientific reason allowed us to explain these phenomena, leading to a withering of the old mythologies: there was now no agency in things like thunder or the growth of plants or the motion of the sea, it was all the product of blind natural forces. According to many refinements upon this theory, there was a parallel re-enchantment, where the logic of the market, and of credit, infused the whole of the world, though it was a partial, incomplete enchantment, leading to the position of Capital as a religion with sin but no redemption, and no god but many priests.
In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, its a deterritorialization followed by a partial reterritorialization (as they state, what Capital deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other.) We took the old map and applied it to a new territory.
I’m leaving aside Capitalist enchantment for now, but the idea that all things are explainable – even if they are not necessarily yet explained – holds some merit, I believe. It fits with the world that we see, where just about everything is a resource to be monetized and a place from which we can (Should. Must.) extract value. Everything is a vein of gold ready to be mined, including other people.
This is the subtext for just about everything: all things in the world are either a tool or an obstacle. Of course, another major part of this – the mask that the fascist movements made the mistake of taking off – is that we aren’t allowed to say this. Only by wearing this mask is the extractive attitude anything like sustainable. Slavery is only conceivable as valid if self-ownership is a right that all people possess: because, if it is a possession, then it can be taken away. The coin in your pocket is also a possession, after all.
Can you imagine that they think that this bullshit is supposed to be inspiring? We’re all supposed to be inspired, and to aspire to be entrepreneurs, who are defined as “willing to work 80 hours a week, to avoid working 40 hours a week”. This looks like an Inspirobot reject.
So we have disenchanted instrumentality and disavowal. What else makes up modernity?
Part of me wonders if alienation is an aspect of modernity. After all, unemployment as a phenomenon only seemed to emerge around the start of the modern era. No real mention is made of it before the 16th century, around the time of enclosure: it seems to have emerged with the return to specie currency in the Tudor period of England, though this is a matter of documentation, and it could very well have been an issue before then. Unemployment is a highly visible aspect of alienation as a social phenomenon: people literally prevented from working due to the unavailability of work to be done. The problem was only exacerbated by industrialization. This led to a real paradox: in one of the most “productive” and “wealthy” societies the world had ever seen, people were literally cut off from the means to support themselves. Certainly, before then, vagrancy happened, but it seems that no one would be prevented from working if they had a desire to do so (the relationship between abolitionism and labor, as discussed in White Trash and A People’s History of the United States as well as in American Nations [which will be in a later review. Interviewed by Patrick Wyman here.], is somewhat interesting here but beyond the remit of this piece..)
Because of this, we can see the seams in the essentialism that is so pervasive in the world today. One of the principle arguments against support for the unemployment and universal basic income is the idea that people would simply become slothful pleasure-seekers. The historical origins of the phenomenon of unemployment offer one counterargument to this. The other major counterargument is that almost no one who makes this complaint predicts that they would become slothful pleasure-seekers if given full access to the resources necessary to survive. It’s the problem of intersubjectivity all over again: the pervasive brain-bug that I act freely, and others simply play their assigned role in the drama of my life.
I don’t normally do music as an addendum, and when I do, I don’t really do more than one, but I also had to include something by Richard Dawson — a British folk singer who works in a medieval mode, singing about the drudgery of working at Amazon. Fitting, no?
And if some did, so what? Why must we insist that it is necessary for someone to toil for the right to be alive?
This actually might be the core of it. At root, the social-psychological character of modernity is the solipsistic belief that each and every one of us is the main character in the stories of our lives and all other people are merely players, acting out their role.
So Why Worry?
If I have such a negative conception of Modernity, you might wonder, why am I experiencing stress over the possibility of Modernity burning out, of it being over? To this I would respond that my negative position is merely a rhetorical one. I recognize the benefits of modernity. I have led an amazingly privileged life. However, we rarely hear an honest, left-wing critique of the concept of modernity, and I wanted to try my hand at it.
My worry is that, as alienating and bad as things are now, that the cessation of modernity might be followed by merely swapping one savagery for another. We like to believe that the world is growing less brutal and less violent, but the moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice: there is no arc. There is no absolute, inevitable progress. Everything that we get, we need to push for, fight for, argue for. It’s possible that the world might be a better and more just place if the modern era had never happened, but it has happened. If it is undone, it will most likely be undone through a great deal of suffering.
The character of the exmodern era is, as yet, unset. It will be necessary for all of us to do our best to ensure that we are building a better and more just world, even if we don’t understand what that world will look like or how it will function.
End Note: with my treatment of Christopher Columbus, I don’t want to fall into the trap of “great man” (or “great monster”) history. However, we cannot underestimate how having the wrong person in the wrong place can send history ricocheting off into an unexpected direction — the same way that a piece of grit can cause a cascading failure in a machine. While history is principally about the interplay of material forces, it cannot be overstated how unfortunate it is that Columbus was the one to make that particular voyage.
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