Three Developments in Modernization

Norman Cantor has argued that three developments in particular have given birth to the growing sense of nihilism in art, architecture, literature, dance, theater, and rock music.
 
First, biotechnology, which built on the discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA, has succeeded in driving home the idea that human life is defined by impersonal genetic codes rather than personal choices. This perception has greatly diminished the sense of human significance.
 
Second, astounding advances in computer science and technology have reproduced or surpassed many of the tasks that were once thought to be defining marks of human uniqueness.
 
Third, new communications technology has not only brought news, sports, and entertainment from around the world into American living rooms each day but has also given vast new power to multinational corporations and forced the last pockets of Marxism into desperate disarray. Like computer technology, the new communications technology has expanded human capability and increased human efficiency, but it has diminished human stature. We have been dwarfed by our own inventions and in many ways have become irrelevant to their workings. For these and many other reasons, we have come to feel small, empty, unspecial, meaningless.

 - David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

The Process of Modernization

The process of modernization is driven by four main realities: capitalism, technology, urbanization, and telecommunications.
 
1. Capitalism emerged as a defining force in Europe following the collapse of the old medieval synthesis, but it did not effect evident changes until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when industrialization got under way, and it did not reach its full intensity until technology became both ubiquitous in society and indispensable to the functioning of capitalism. At the same time, however, capitalism has developed a profound dependence on the sorts of freedom typically provided by democratic societies. But in societies that have afforded rights of free association, unrestricted travel, and a belief in the propriety of the capitalist economy, capitalism has successfully reorganized the social structure for the purposes of manufacturing, production, and consumption. It has concentrated populations into cities and produced massive systems of finance, banking, law, communications, and transportation. In short, it has changed the shape of our world, how we relate to it, where we live, how we experience our work, and the values and expectations that we bring with us in order to be adaptable to and successful in this public sphere.
 
2. Technology is, of course, essential to modern capitalism. Its importance lies not simply in the fact that it facilitates the production of knowledge, makes possible medical and engineering breakthroughs, and is now indispensable to all modes of production. Equally important is the fact that it also rationalizes all of life. People who live in technologically logically dominated societies are prone to think naturalistically and to subject all of life to a calculus of benefits - to assume that whatever is most efficient is most ethical.
 
3. Modernization has also been driven by the stunning growth of urbanization, which has now spread beyond the West to become a worldwide phenomenon.  During the twentieth century, this trend has been amplified in America by mass migrations of peoples from Asia and Central and South America. They have brought with them their own ethnic identities, cultural habits, languages, religions, and values - all of which have been brought into close proximity to one another in our cities. The new multicultural environment has produced a secular ecumenism and a powerful demand for pluralism, for mutual tolerance, for private space in which to hold one's beliefs, live one's own lifestyle, do what one wants to do. Thus far, the Constitution seems to be securing this much for each person, within the boundaries of the law, but it seems to be producing an encompassing relativism as well.
 
4. Finally, modern telecommunications has made us all citizens of the whole world. Television is perhaps less a window on the world than a surrogate eye that preselects what images of the world we will be exposed to. Still, we have become witnesses of an extraordinary range of events that daily shape and shake the world. Television gives to us a psychological transcendence of space, both physical and cultural, linking us to other people around the world. The bonds that television creates, unlike those that once prevailed in the small towns of America, are entirely synthetic - even if it doesn't seem that way. The communion that television provides - the communion of common voyeurs - can seem as real as that of a local neighborhood. And television also produces mass communal reactions to material that is bound to any specific context, to wholly homogenized information, to the fads and fashions and disconnected sound bites of mass culture. It spins out information in such abundance as to rob most of it of any value.
 

- David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: 

The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams, 1994.

 

The Description of Modernity

…depicted in the first two chapters of No Place for Truth.
 

somewhere between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century lies a great historical divide. The period before that could be called the Age of the West; the new period he calls simply Our Time. On the other side of that line, Europe was the center of the world, politically and economically; now America is. In the earlier period, there was a sense in which Judeo-Christian values were at the center of culture, even if they were not believed in personally. Now, however, there is no such set of values. Rather, they have been displaced and replaced by a loose set of psychological attitudes, which are now referred to as modernity.' This new period, Our Time, is not restricted by geography. It is not the civilization of any one group of people, in any one place. It is not political in nature. The soil from which it springs is that which capitalism and democracy produce, and it especially depends on technology and urbanization. But it may be found virtually anywhere that the requisite conditions are present.

The Enlightenment world that has characterized much of modernity was an optimistic one. It was based on a strong confidence in human reason and its ability to solve humanity's problems unaided. This confidence, in turn, was based on an illusion, however, according to Wells-an illusion that an impersonal force was at work in the world promoting only the ends that the Enlightenment envisioned. This has not proven to be the case, however. For the fruits of this Enlightenment have been far from positive in many cases. Violence is present in our society in many forms. The powerful run roughshod over the weak. Many of the unborn never have an opportunity to live. Industry pollutes the earth. The elderly are encouraged to die and make room for those coming after them.
 
What shapes the modern world is not powerful minds but powerful forces, not philosophy but urbanization, capitalism, and technology. As the older quest for truth has collapsed, intellectual life has increasingly become little more than a gloss on the processes of modernization. Intellectuals merely serve as mirrors, reflecting what is taking place within society. They are post-modern in the sense that they are often disillusioned with the emptiness of the old Enlightenment ideals, but they are entirely modern in that they reflect the values of the impersonal processes of modernization. 

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

Ten Features of Modernism

Modernism can actually be clustered into two general types, a more moderate form and a more extreme form, which I term soft modernism and hard modernism, respectively.
 
Soft modernism shares with its forerunner, premodernism, belief in the rationality of the universe and in human ability to know and understand the truth. Both believe that inclusive explanations of reality, or in other words, integrative metaphysical schemes or worldviews, can be constructed.
 
Hard modernism goes beyond its soft counterpart, however, by excluding anything other than this. On the terms of hard modernism, reality is limited to what can be experienced, thus excluding supernaturalism of any kind. Knowledge is restricted to what can be known through reason and experience, excluding any sort of intuition. What is not logical is not considered real.
 
Several salient features of modernism should be noted.
 
1. Naturalism. Reality is believed to be restricted to the observable system of nature. Its immanent laws are the cause of all that occurs.
 
2. Humanism. The human is the highest reality and value, the end for which all of reality exists rather than the means to the service of some higher being.
 
3. The scientific method. Knowledge is good and can be attained by humans. The method best suited for this enterprise is the scientific method, which came to fruition during this period. Observation and experimentation are the sources from which our knowledge of truth is built up.
 
4. Reductionism. From being considered the best means for gaining knowledge, the scientific method came increasingly to be considered the only method, so that various disciplines sought to attain the objectivity and precision of the natural sciences. Humans in some cases were regarded as nothing but highly developed animals.
 
5. Progress. Because knowledge is good, humanly attainable, and growing, we are progressively overcoming the problems that have beset the human race.
 
6. Nature. Rather than being fixed and static, nature came to be thought of as dynamic, growing, and developing. Thus it was able to produce the changes in life forms through immanent processes of evolution, rather than requiring explanation in terms of a creator and designer.
 
7. Certainty. Because knowledge was seen as objective, it could attain certainty. This required foundationalism, the belief that it is possible to base knowledge on some sort of absolute first principles. One early model of this was found in the rationalism of Rene Descartes, who found one indubitable belief, namely, that he was doubting, and then proceeded to draw deductions from that. An alternative was empiricism, the belief that there are purely objective sensory data from which knowledge can be formulated.
 
8. Determinism. There was a belief that what happened in the universe followed from fixed causes. Thus, the scientific method could discover these laws of regularity that controlled the universe. Not only physical occurrences but human behavior were believed to be under this etiological control.
 
9. Individualism. The ideal of the knower was the solitary individual, carefully protecting his or her objectivity by weighing all options. Truth being objective, individuals can discover it by their own efforts. They can free themselves from the conditioning particularities of their own time and place and know reality as it is in itself.
 
10. Anti-authoritarianism. The human was considered the final and most complete measure of truth. Any externally imposed authority, whether that of the group or of a supernatural being, must be subjected to scrutiny and criticism by human reason.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Tenets of Postmodernism

This modern period has, in turn, given way to the postmodern, and its ideology to postmodernism. This represents the convergence of several movements in different intellectual disciplines.
 
In many ways, the beginning inspiration was from the French school of literary criticism known as deconstruction. In history, there is the new historicism, in which history is not merely the objective discovery of the past, but actually creates it. In philosophy, neo-pragmatism holds that words refer not to objective, extralinguistic entities, but to other words. Certain basic motifs have emerged, countering the modern view. Although these will be described at greater length by several of the thinkers we will examine, they can be briefly summarized here.
 
1. The objectivity of knowledge is denied. Whether the knower is conditioned by the particularities of his or her situation or theories are used oppressively, knowledge is not a neutral means of discovery. 
 
2. Knowledge is uncertain. Foundationalism, the idea that knowledge can be erected on some sort of bedrock of indubitable first principles, has had to be abandoned.
 
3. All-inclusive systems of explanation, whether metaphysical or historical, are impossible, and the attempt to construct them should be abandoned.
 
4. The inherent goodness of knowledge is also questioned. The belief that by means of discovering the truths of nature it could be controlled and evil and ills overcome has been disproved by the destructive ends to which knowledge has been put (in warfare, for instance).
 
5. Thus, progress is rejected. The history of the twentieth century should make this clear.
 
6. The model of the isolated individual knower as the ideal has been replaced by community-based knowledge. Truth is defined by and for the community, and all knowledge occurs within some community.
 
7. The scientific method as the epitomization of the objective method of inquiry is called into question. Truth is not known simply through reason, but through other channels, such as intuition.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Rise of Postmodernism

The current dissatisfaction with modernity, intellectually, has appeared in a wide variety of disciplines. One of the first was architecture, where modernism had attempted to develop a homogenized style that broke with the past and its indigenized designs by attempting to universalize, to belong everywhere because it did not belong anywhere in particular. Postmodern architecture broke with this by having many styles, reflecting interests of both the past and the present. It is one expression of our multiculturalism. But because it is not driven by any hard ideology, as was modernism, in its eclecticism it really does not have any definite purpose at all.
 
In the old Enlightenment belief, there was confidence in the possibility of rational, objective scholarship. This has been rejected by postmodernism, intellectually. In the absence of any assent to a body of universal truth, even those conclusions that are presumably objectively discovered by scholars are seen to be only results of these scholars' interests and dispositions. Given the belief in relativism, there is great difficulty in insisting on the universal validity of one's findings. Even science, thought of as the paragon of objectivity and rationality by the modernists, is seen not to be exempt from this relativizing influence. Thomas Kuhn has shown that what scientists observe is very much affected by their anticipation of what they are looking for and what they consider possible. In literature, deconstruction holds that words do not have any meaning in themselves. They mean only what we want them to mean. These same phenomena can also be seen in postmodern theology.
 
Wells asserts, however, that the relationship between the modern and the postmodern is more complex than we sometimes recognize and acknowledge. The very fact that we insist on being postmodern, rather than merely antimodern, indicates a desire to transcend the recent past, which in turn reflects belief in progress. And this in itself is a clearly modern conception. Thus, even postmodernism has not fully freed itself from modernism.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.