Modernity
[1] By the late 19th and 20th centuries, modernist art, politics, science and culture has come to dominate not only Western Europe and North America, but almost every populated area on the globe, including movements thought of as opposed to the West and globalization.
[4][5] Wars and other perceived problems of this era, many of which come from the effects of rapid change, and the connected loss of strength of traditional religious and ethical norms, have led to many reactions against modern development.
In this sense, the term refers to "a particular relationship to time, one characterized by intense historical discontinuity or rupture, openness to the novelty of the future, and a heightened sensitivity to what is unique about the present".
In the 6th century CE, Roman historian and statesman Cassiodorus appears to have been the first writer to use modernus ("modern") regularly to refer to his own age.
In its early medieval usage, the term modernus referred to authorities regarded in medieval Europe as younger than the Greco-Roman scholars of Classical antiquity and/or the Church Fathers of the Christian era, but not necessarily to the present day, and could include authors several centuries old, from about the time of Bede, i.e. referring to the time after the foundation of the Order of Saint Benedict and/or the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Machiavelli argued, for example, that violent divisions within political communities are unavoidable, but can also be a source of strength which lawmakers and leaders should account for and even encourage in some ways.
[19] Machiavelli in turn influenced Francis Bacon,[20] Marchamont Needham,[21] James Harrington,[21] John Milton,[22] David Hume,[23] and many others.
[24] Important modern political doctrines which stem from the new Machiavellian realism include Mandeville's influential proposal that "Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits" (the last sentence of his Fable of the Bees), and also the doctrine of a constitutional separation of powers in government, first clearly proposed by Montesquieu.
[25][26] Starting with Thomas Hobbes, attempts were made to use the methods of the new modern physical sciences, as proposed by Bacon and Descartes, applied to humanity and politics.
[27] Notable attempts to improve upon the methodological approach of Hobbes include those of John Locke,[28] Spinoza,[29] Giambattista Vico, [30] and Rousseau.
[31] David Hume made what he considered to be the first proper attempt at trying to apply Bacon's scientific method to political subjects,[32] rejecting some aspects of the approach of Hobbes.
Postcolonial scholars have extensively critiqued the Eurocentric nature of modernity, particularly its portrayal as a linear process originating in Europe and subsequently spreading—or being imposed—on the rest of the world.
[37] This narrative marginalizes non-Western thinkers, ideas, and achievements, reducing them to either deviations from or delays in an otherwise supposedly universal trajectory of modern development.
[38] Frantz Fanon similarly exposes the hypocrisy of European modernity, which promotes ideals of progress and rationality while concealing how much of Europe’s economic growth was built on the exploitation, violence, and dehumanization integral to colonial domination.
In a 2006 review essay, historian Michael Saler extended and substantiated this premise, noting that scholarship had revealed historical perspectives on modernity that encompassed both enchantment and disenchantment.
Various 19th-century intellectuals, from Auguste Comte to Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud, attempted to offer scientific and/or political ideologies in the wake of secularisation.
[47] For Marx, what was the basis of modernity was the emergence of capitalism and the revolutionary bourgeoisie, which led to an unprecedented expansion of productive forces and to the creation of the world market.
Although the starting point is the same as Marx, feudal society, Durkheim emphasizes far less the rising of the bourgeoisie as a new revolutionary class and very seldom refers to capitalism as the new mode of production implemented by it.
[48]Critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman propose that modernity or industrialization represents a departure from the central tenets of the Enlightenment and towards nefarious processes of alienation, such as commodity fetishism and the Holocaust.
[49][page needed][50] Contemporary sociological critical theory presents the concept of rationalization in even more negative terms than those Weber originally defined.
[49][page needed][51] Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters.
[52]What prompts so many commentators to speak of the 'end of history', of post-modernity, 'second modernity' and 'surmodernity', or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its 'natural limit'.
[citation needed] According to writers like Fackenheim and Husserl, modern thought repudiates the Judeo-Christian belief in the Biblical God as a mere relic of superstitious ages.
Liberal theology, over perhaps the past 200 years or so, has tried, in various iterations, to accommodate, or at least tolerate, modern doubt in expounding Christian revelation, while Traditionalist Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and fundamentalist Protestant thinkers and clerics have tried to fight back, denouncing skepticism of every kind.
[64] Influenced both by Galileo's new physics and Bacon, René Descartes argued soon afterward that mathematics and geometry provided a model of how scientific knowledge could be built up in small steps.
[67][68] One common conception of modernity is the condition of Western history since the mid-15th century, or roughly the European development of movable type[69] and the printing press.
[78] Pope Pius X further elaborated on the characteristics and consequences of Modernism, from his perspective, in an encyclical entitled "Pascendi Dominici gregis" (Feeding the Lord's Flock) on September 8, 1907.
[citation needed] Of the available conceptual definitions in sociology, modernity is "marked and defined by an obsession with 'evidence'," visual culture, and personal visibility.
... both thought that modernity raised particular problems for being a believing Christian, and therefore for apologetics.Introduction á la phénoménologie, translated by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Lévinas.
