Defining Modernity

Modernity and modernism, and all their fruits, are deeply opposed to the conservative vision. Conservatism seeks harmony, unity, justice, and dignity. Far from fragmenting life, it seeks to draw all together.

As we wrestle with our present twenty-first century day—its successes and its foibles—we conservatives will throw around terms such as modernity, modernism, post-modernism, and post-modernity, but we rarely define them. The same is true with terms such as progressivism and ideology. As conservatives, we know we oppose these things, but we often fail to understand exactly why we oppose them or how they shape the world around us. Here, I will explore these concepts and offer a context and definition for each.

Let’s start with modernity. Modernity is not the same thing as modern times, though some will casually connect these things. It’s perfectly possible, for example, to realize that certain cultures in the ancient world suffered from a form of modernity as much as twentieth-century Americans did.

While the best artistic expression of modernism—its horrors and its nuances—is T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, the finest exploration of the concept comes from the profound Germano-Italian scholar and priest, Romano Guardini. In a short 1928 book on education, originally not published in the United States, Father Guardini tried to pin down exactly what modernity meant. No easy task, to be sure. Most importantly, Guardini argued, modernity strives to compartmentalize everything, dividing and dividing and dividing everything into smaller and smaller bits. It not only compartmentalizes, it fragments. “No longer does the unity of the different spheres of man’s existence and of his activities seems obvious, a matter of course.” Instead, in modernity, “man begins to hesitate moving from one sphere to another, from the domain of faith to that of human culture, from the field of ethics to that of aesthetics, from philosophy to politics.”

In so doing, though, we begin to think of each sphere as radically separated from every other sphere. “Each sphere tends to find its own roots in itself, seeking what especially sets it apart from all other spheres. Each sphere seeks its own specific meaning and purpose, its own basic values, its authentic standards of validity and its corresponding norms by which all efforts in this sphere are determined; that is, it seeks its own, critically pure, methods.”

This, of course, is in direct opposition to the beginnings of ancient philosophy in Miletus, as each of the pre-Socratic philosophers sought unity, a discovery of the Urstoff [a German word meaning primary matter or stuff that derives from nineteenth-century philosophical debates] that holds us all together rather than what divides us. It also directly opposes what many scholars refer to as the Medieval Synthesis, in which Christianity—specifically through the Kingship of Christ as revealed on 3pm on Good Friday—held all things together, not only men, but man and God.

Further, Guardini explained,

The specific areas begin to emerge. Science recognizes nothing except what arises in methodical consequence from the quest for truth within its own sphere. For art there is nothing except what serves exclusively the realization of aesthetic values, the perfection of expression and form. Politics has no other aim but to maintain and increase the power and welfare of the state. In commercial life no standard and value are acknowledged which do not lead to the maximum in production and to saturation with material goods. Ethics as a pure “doing good for the sake of good” grows without taking account of any religious or secular concerns.

In consequence, unfortunately, “each domain asserts itself so emphatically that the unifying view of the whole is lost before each domain claim to autonomy.”

Often, such a compartmentalization becomes radically individualistic as when one claims something such as “well, that’s your ideology, and this is my ideology,” as though two persons could live in completely separate realities.

Should we then be surprised when we find something as heinous and sinful as racism—the willful dismissal of a person based on skin color and tone—rampant in modernity? After all, in our race to compartmentalize everything, we’ve also compartmentalized the human person. Rather than seeing each person united by the Logos and made uniquely in the image of God, we see merely the accidents of their birth. Rather than seeing the divine spark—the light that lighteth up every man—we see only the “facts” of a person, such as height, skin color, eye color, age, weight, hair color, etc.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of modernity comes from Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his bizarre and truly harmful proclamation that, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” And, once again, we’re left with “my views” and “your views” and no real truth to hold them together.

As conservatives, we—along with our Greek philosophical ancestors from Miletus, the Stoics of the Greek and Roman worlds, the Pauline Christians, and the Medieval Christians—seek unity and harmony. We seek to define a thing by what it is rather than what it isn’t. Imagine one of St. Paul’s most radical statements: We are neither Greek nor Jew, male nor female, bond nor free, but all one in Christ Jesus.

As such, modernity and modernism, and all their fruits, are deeply opposed to the conservative vision. Through the imagination, we seek to see that which holds all persons and all things together rather than that which divides all things. We desperately want to see what C.S. Lewis so brilliantly called the “Weight of Glory,” the divine within each of us.

Without stretching the argument too far, we can see that real bigotry is rooted in the Left and not in conservatism. Conservatism seeks harmony, unity, justice, and dignity. Far from fragmenting life, it seeks to draw all together. While it does not negate or deny individuality, it realizes that what is particular always has a context. Rather than seeing a mere individual, it sees a person.

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The featured image, uploaded by Alexey Akindinov, is “Painting by Alexey Akindinov: “Family. A child in time”, 70×80.3 cm, oil on canvas, 1995.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.