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.