What Does It Mean to be Modern?

Science and the Modern Condition

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) by Rembrandt van Rijn, Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague

I have always been fascinated by the subject of modernity and the distinctive experience of being modern as scholars use the term.¹ I have read many books about it and even written one myself. A few weeks ago I started thinking about some of them, and it occurred to me to ask ChatGPT to summarize a few so I could compare its versions against my memory. I found its summaries surprisingly accurate and fun to read. It did extremely well with authors I know intimately, summarizing the intellectual courses of their careers, canvassing their conceptual innovations and resources, and making connections with their influences. About authors that had faded in my memory, it was even more instructive to be reminded of their arguments and to learn interesting biographical details. And since the literature on modernity is so vast, there are many authors I’ve only encountered indirectly or had never even heard of until I searched for contributors from various directions. Reading about them in this concentrated form piqued my interest. I found myself collecting these five-paragraph intellectual sketches and using them to develop a new course of reading for myself about the subject of modernity.

Before long I came to realize that my survey might have value for others and that it would be possible in a month or so to assemble an AI reference work on modernity and its critics the conventional equivalent of which would take scholars years’ worth of effort. It’s so easy nowadays to publish a Kindle book on Amazon that I decided to start a work-in-progress with five hundred or so of these sketches summarizing views of modernity from every perspective I could imagine, while making it clear that I am the prompter and editor of the volume, not its author. My working title is Minding Our Time: An AI-Human Guide to the Thinkers of Modernity.

Anyone, of course, with access to AI could prompt an essay on any of the 500 plus authors I’ve included. The value I add to the product is the selection of the list itself, some stylistic shaping and editing, the removal of obvious mistakes (which were quite rare), and supplementary grouping of the authors according to their points of view or fields of expertise—economists, Islamists, feminists, and so on. AI helped me with this, but it needed a lot of help in turn.

A hybrid project like this raises a number of questions which I’ll take up in future posts and in the volume itself, but I hope it demonstrates, in a small way, that AI need not be an entirely destructive influence on the humanities. This project’s value, obviously, lies not in any authority it holds on its particular subjects but in the broad picture it makes available of what has been said about the modern condition by those who occupy it—its makers, its defenders, and its many critics. To clarify that picture, I am also writing an introduction in which I canvas in a concentrated form the responses to various aspects of modernity that the entries, taken all together, bring to light. I hope both the biographical entries and the introduction will light paths for readers’ interests. Here on Substack I am going to share the sections of the opening section of the introduction with you along with the one on science.

The Modern Condition

To be modern is to live in a world that has been transformed to an overwhelming degree by human effort, ingenuity, and aspiration. Premodern people largely had to accept the conditions that life and their traditions imposed on them. Inhabitants of the modern world, on the other hand, can trace many of the major conditions of their lives and ways of thinking to specific projects proposed by individuals in relatively recent times. They live among transformations for which other human beings are responsible. All of the analysts of modernity covered in this Guide are not only observers but also examples of this collective condition of modernity. They experience its remarkable results and suffer its drawbacks.

Modernity as a movement began in reversal, in grand gestures of leaving the past behind. Its spiritual precursor was the Protestant critique of Catholic medievalism, and it has never lost its critical spirit. Its enemies were the superstitions that kept intolerance and ignorance in place. Its great resources were reason and a belief in the freedom to change—the key instruments of enlightenment. These instruments, however, fostered high expectations that gave new impetus to critique. The inhabitants of modernity, accordingly, have been obsessed with the critique of their collectively self-created condition. Indeed, historical self-consciousness is one of modernity’s distinguishing features. For intellectuals, a major part of being modern is being obsessed with what to make of being modern.

The critical and self-conscious character of modernity was truly inspiring while it could be directed primarily against its chosen enemies and against the obstacles it was hoping to demolish. Its critique was accompanied by astonishing practical results—science, technology, industry, prosperity, a revolution in the distribution of political power, and the proclamation of universal respect for human freedom and dignity. Figures like Bacon, Locke, Newton, Adam Smith, and the American founders were prophets with exhilarating projects to sustain their aspirations, and the longterm results of their utopian proposals have altered much of the planet almost beyond recognition. But, while modernity still has its prophets, the dominant note has reverted to critique and, often, to lament. Modernity’s rhythm has been a swing from fulfillment beyond all expectation to deflation, regret, suspicion, and endless self-diagnosis. Below I have condensed the gist of modernity’s complaints about one of its major fields of achievement.

Science and Its Discontents

Science has not removed all the “inconveniences of nature” in a single generation, as Francis Bacon predicted, but it has gone a long way toward keeping his promise that knowledge collectively pursued would be a great source of technological power. It has brought the utopia of convenience to billions. But there have been consequences. To start with the most obvious, science has not provided sufficient understanding of human psychology to offset the abuses of the power it provides. It gives world-destroying weapons to creatures with brains only moderately raised toward enlightenment, and they use them on a massive scale. As we look into the future, the balance between creation and destruction remains unstable.

One of the major complaints of modernity’s critics is that science, by achieving what Max Weber described as “the desacralizing of the world,”² has undermined the religious and moral resources that might limit its destructive applications. Religious curbs to freedom have taken on new, secular forms while the removal of religious rituals and consolations fuels new destructiveness.

Others see science’s power to explain all aspects of human life in material terms as undermining their very meaning and value. Such meaning as experience can now offer depends entirely upon assertions of the human will, which are often self-interested and always provisional, multiple, and subject to dispute. Yet there seems to be no place to escape the whimsically intrusive influence of the human hand. Romantic escapes into nature are a symptom of this problem rather than a solution. Intellectual systems of suspicion are another symptom. If such meaning as society can offer is nothing but a contrived system of myths, then paranoia is the only alternative, and the modern self starts looking like a feeble connection of potent technology with cartoonish myth, as portrayed in the works of Thomas Pynchon.

The detached perspective of science also derealizes the lifeworld presented by our senses. It frames everything as matter to be manipulated. Most ironically, at the same time as it enhances human power to a god-like degree, alllowing the human being to pose as what Freud memorably called a “prosthetic God,” science sharpens the perennial threat posed by determinism to human freedom and responsibility. The great, all-reforming initiative of human agency that is modernity looks in its own mirror and see the reflexes of a vastly complex causal system, with human decision-making just one local set of links in the vast chain of particles.

Another way of describing the result of this derealizing tendency is the emergence of what the Austrian Robert Musil so brilliantly portrays in The Man Without Qualities—subjects who cannot think of their own reactions and feelings as truly their own. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is the prototype. He is contemptuous of the people who are stupid enough to take their own resentments seriously, yet he is tormented by resentment all the same. His greatest fear is being absorbed into the utopian regime of predictably administered modern happiness.

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all to the dream of science is that many modern writers resent even science’s fulfillment of Bacon’s utopian vision. The world of perfect convenience lacks the savor and excitement of struggle and adventure, which sports and games and even art cannot make up for. Another aspect of the problem is that implementing the results of science has meant putting social life on a more and more rule-governed basis. As Weber observed, the efficiency of the modern world depends on rationalizing and bureaucratizing human relations, excluding the charismatic appeal to ultimate principles and values. As portrayed in the writings of Franz Kafka, the bureaucratic world acquires an enigmatic complexity and facelessness as daunting to understand as God or nature had once been.

To many, bureaucratically administered happiness seems less than authentic, lacking in the risk that generates vitality. As Aldous Huxley’s World Controller puts it in Brave New World, “Happiness is never grand.” The behaviorist B. F. Skinner, in his novel Walden Two, insists that utopia must be a “world without heroes,” a world in which heroic action is no longer required, and in the title of a later work he makes clear where the mental adjustment to this condition would take us—Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

And while science, in company with technology and bureaucratic rationality, is the basis of all these problems, in modernity even its promise to deliver truth has come into question. It is more definitive in what it discredits than what it proves. Its ultimate account of the constituents of matter and their behavior remains involved in paradoxes, and philosophers dispute if anything at all can be pinpointed as the method of science. Is there is any reason to be committed to the existence of the quarks and charm and other theoretical entities posited by physics? Is there is any principle or finding in science, or even in logic itself, that is not subject to revision? Do science’s grand paradigms succeed each other in a rational progess of accumulation? Philosophers wonder. The power of pseudo-science has often proved catastrophic while the mark that separates it from “real science” remains a mystery.

Still, very few of modernity’s critics, even the religiously committed ones, want to give up the fruits of modern science or its benefits as a powerful and profound way of understanding so much of the world. There are some aspects of modernity which critics do consider to be reversible, but science is not one of them. Rather, the most common hope is that its way of thinking can be made less intrusive, less reductive, less alienating, and less opposed to the needs of the spirit.

1. While modern in our everyday vocabulary means recent or up-to-date, for scholars it means roughly post-medieval, ie. beginning around 1500. It is associated with the emergence of print culture in the west along with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, trans-Atlantic exploration and colonialism, the scientific and industrial revolutions, democratic politics, the rise of the middle class, capitalism and its socialist and communist alternatives, individualism, and the eventual dominance of a secular outlook.

2. Weber’s word Entzauberung is usually translated as disenchantment, which captures the German sense of removing the ma