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.
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.
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