So much is made of ‘post’ modernity, and with phrases like ‘the crisis of modernity’ abounding; it seems necessary to have some sense of what is actually meant by modernity or the modern age itself. In its most trivial sense, of course, the modern is simply the new or the recent. Alternatively, in phrases like ‘Modern European history’, the reference is relatively arbitrary, and ‘the modern’ turns out to have started rather a long time ago. The question is whether there are characteristics of the social life, consciousness and structure of contemporary societies which still usefully distinguish the early 21st century and, for instance, the 17th century from what went before. Whether the 17th century is the relevant marker-point does not really matter—modernity appears to have begun at some stage during or after the concatenation of the Enlightenment, the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation—different analysts will chose their favourite point to make their detailed explication. Furthermore, whenever it started, modernity clearly accelerated in the 19th century with the Industrial Revolution and the urbanization of Western society. Modernity is also clearly a Western concept both because it is Western societies that are seen as the originator of things modern, and also in as much as they seem to value modernity very much more.
Part of the test of whether one has a truly modern consciousness seems to be whether the idea of progress itself is highly valued. If the recent is more or less automatically to be preferred to the past, in ideas, fashion and cultural habit, then one is fully modern.
If this is so, then we may indeed be seeing an end to modernity. Increasingly the recent is not automatically well-evaluated, and increasingly doubts are cast on both the possibility and desirability of endless progress. Sociologically it is probably safe to say, therefore, that a modern society is one with a high degree of individualism; a high regard for autonomy and privacy; a near sacredness attached to human rational endeavor and rational economic planning; a faith in science and the human capacity to control the environment and; master our own fates. A modern society is secular, free from the restraints of tradition and essentially utilitarian in ethics. The idea that the height of human civilization was at some stage in the past—the Greeks, the Italian Renaissance, a religious golden age, or any other option—is simply ridiculous to the modern mind. This modern mind appears to be increasingly perturbed, however, and there are signs in contemporary politics of conservative attempts to return to so-called ‘traditional values’. Much of the argument of ecological groups, after all, suggest the non-sustainability of technical progress. Furthermore, modern science is increasingly raises issues where an ill-developed but resilient moral sense, widely if inchoately felt, suggests real caution. Certainly the bio-sciences now cause worry as the idea of experimentation with genetic structures becomes more and more plausible. Modernity has often enough been declared as something that is tautologically impossible, and many more people might find themselves drawn to post-modernism, were it less theoretically impenetrable, than at any stage in the recent past.
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