HISTORICAL ERAS
Modernity in the Sequence of Historical Eras
Copyright 2008 by Paul Connelly
Related articles:
The Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Eras
When terms like modernity and postmodernism are bandied about freely in
academia and in the media, people are bound to ask at some point, &So when
did things switch over from modern to postmodern?& Or: &When did the
Modern Era begin and end?& Or: &What events marked the transition from
the Premodern Era to the Modern Era?&
Any answers to these questions are likely to be arbitrary, however buttressed
by scholarly arguments, perhaps even arbitrary to the point of whimsy. To the
many who still believe in the &march of Progress& view of history, the ever
upward path from the premodern to modern can be described as &barbarism and
irrational religious beliefs& are overcome somewhere between the 16th and
18th centuries by &humanistic civilization and rational science&, with an
annoying postmodern speedbump toward the close of the 20th century where
&pretentious academics in linguistics and psychology try to subvert the
validity of reason and authority but are discredited by their own excesses&. To
those waiting for a future of prolonged youth through anti-aging treatments (or
even virtual immortality), with robotic or nanotech workers ensuring that
humans all have &creative& careers with copious leisure time to fly about with
personal jet packs or nuclear-powered automobiles, this is a comforting myth.
As with many myths that are mistaken for actual history, it requires that a
large body of contradictory evidence and sad experience be ignored or wished away.
Without intending to be (entirely) whimsical, I offer the following chart as an
idiosyncratic timeline of some of the events that heralded the end of
one era and the beginning of the next. As an American my bias is plainly
toward events in the western world. Without doubt, over time the complicated
becomes even more complicated, the grandiose more grandiose, wealth compounds,
efficiencies in both killing and healing increase, and the powers of the
rulers (of both the visible and behind-the-scenes varieties) become ever more
god-like. But should we describe this as Progress?
Premodern Times
There is no good way to date the evolution of homo sapiens sapiens from
earlier homo sapiens variants as those became progressively less &archaic&&the
most common guesses range between 150,000 and 200,000 years ago, but the fossil
evidence is more suggestive in the 100,000 to 160,000 year range, and there
is the possibility that some of the early fossils may have represented &false
starts& that did not end up contributing to our lineage. I aimed
toward the middle of that latter range for an estimate of when our ancestors
may have finally become established, although it might have been wiser to leave
the origin in the mythical realm of ur-time rather than including it in the
timeline at all. [Note: Since this article was originally written, fossil
discoveries have provided more evidence for those who would argue for a much
earlier date for humanity's origin&even as far back as 300,000 years. If
correct, this leaves us with a bit of a mystery as to the lack of significant
cultural evolution over approximately 95% of our species' existence.]
At the early end of the timeline, one would hope that the division of the
Premodern Era between prehistoric and &ancient& (early historic) times is
noncontroversial. Some other choices may seem more obscure. The significance of
early bone tools in relation to the later prevalence of fish-eating is that
the tools include the first fish-hooks. The speculation now is that fishing
provided micronutrients in the early human diet that helped the brain complete
its evolution to the advanced state which produced the various &cultural
explosions& of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras.
Why mention the domestication of the horse, but not that of oxen or bees
or dogs? There is something unique about the horse's role as a living
extension of the human body for the very basic human function of locomotion.
In the case of dogs (or ferrets or falcons) used as hunting animals,
the activity is not so basic and the extension of human physiological
function is more abstract.
But why are the developments of writing or the plow more significant
than the invention of the wheel (or, much later, gunpowder)? The first two
are much more intimately tied to our notion of an economy based on surplus
production and sedentism, with its need for extensive recordkeeping of
material and labor exchanges, obligation and debt, as well as the resultant
changes in social status and authority accruing to those at the top of the
newly stratified societies developing in parallel. The wheel and gunpowder
are among subsequent crucial technologies for allowing the ruling elites
raised up by this economic and social system to extend their rule.
Some events are not included because their dating is subject to much
controversy (e.g., the Thera explosion) while others, especially military
triumphs and defeats, I tend to think of as having great importance to the
fortunes of the people alive at that time but having less and less impact on
long-term cultural developments over succeeding generations. Others concern
the lives of characters that verge on the legendary rather than
historical&although I did find it fascinating that Pythagoras, Buddha,
Mahavira and Confucius could all have been alive at the same time and that
some of them had the remote chance of encountering one another. At one point
historians might have included Lao Tse and Zoroaster in this group, but the
former has now been placed almost a century earlier and the latter almost
half a millenium beforehand&assuming that any of them really existed!
In broad terms we can see the historical premodern as a transition in
social behavior from the sufficiency economy of nomadic gathering and hunting
to the surplus economy of agrarian sede in religious
practices from animistic or pantheistic paganism into hierarchical
polytheism and e all in step with with a transition in
political systems from poorly organized tribalism to areas ruled by petty
thugs and gang leaders to city-states ruled by &god-kings& and more grandiose
thugs, thugs committed to providing order and protecting you from other thugs
on some minimal level. The sum of these developments is usually termed
Civilization. At its height in the Classical Age this odd collection of
societies ruled by kings, warlords, priests, oligarchs and demagogues
produced much exquisite art, the beginnings of philosophy and scientific
theorizing, and most of what we now consider organized religion, while
upholding the solid existing traditions of slavery, continual warfare and
skirmishing, massively unequal distribution of wealth, and urban populations
subsisting on a deficiency diet of &mainly grain&.
Most historians date the start of the Middle Ages much earlier than I have
in this chart, many to the 4th century CE and some to the latter part of the
3rd. The status of the Roman Empire at different points in its terminal decline
is usually the deciding factor for them. I looked at the death of Mohammed as
formalizing the conflict between Christianity and Islam that would occupy
the rulers of the Mediterranean countries for much of the next thousand years
(and that still occupies the minds of the ruling classes today, although now
cast more in terms of geopolitical &realism& relating to control of
petroleum). Attempts to find unity in the mystical traditions of both religions
continued up to the beginning of the modern age, with a series of actions and
reactions, e.g., the fall of the Moorish kingdoms of Spain to the Reconquista being
followed by the rise of the troubadors and the chivalric traditions of
courtly love being followed by the destruction of Occitania in the Albigensian
Crusade, etc.
Modernity Ascendant
With Tilly's defeat of the Bohemians fighting for the Winter King
at White Mountain, the impulse toward a mystical reconciliation was driven
underground for the last time and the Modern Era, the era of the scientific
rationalists and religious literalists, was ready to begin. What the Moors of
early medieval Spain would make of the Islamic regimes in Saudi Arabia or Iran
today would be almost as interesting to know as what the
trans-Pyreneean Christians of a slightly later period would think of today's
American televangelists and their &Christian Zionist& political counterparts
here and abroad. As with my late starting date for the Middle Ages, this date
for the beginning of the Modern Era may seem too late to those accustomed to
seeing some much earlier development chosen as the breakpoint between the
Premodern and Modern Eras, such as Gutenberg's printing press or Luther's
instigation of the Protestant Reformation or the defeat of the Spanish
Armada&but on the other hand this may seem like an early date to those more
accustomed to seeing modernity identified with the Enlightenment or Cromwell
or the Industrial Revolution.
In general we can see modernity as a rejection
of mysticism in favor of materialism, of superstition in favor of science,
of rulership by ecclesiastically supported divine right in favor
of government based on contractual legal principles, of human
inspiration and originality in favor of method and repeatability, of moral
agency in favor of reflex and conditioning as the determinants of behavior,
and of oral traditions in
favor of the printed word. In addition modernity is closely associated with
a secular faith in historical progress, in terms of scientific
and technological advances, expanding economies, and the realization of
utopian social possibilities. So it was indeed a fulfillment of the promise
of the printing press and of earlier Protestant science and industry to put
knowledge within the grasp of the &common man& and to make the acquisition of
wealth a positive social objective for all. And in large measure it was able to
maintain the myth of progress or rapid &upward& evolution thanks to the huge
deposits of fossil fuels, primarily coal and oil, that modern societies
were able to exploit.
A century and a half of the Modern Era was sufficient to bring forth new
movements in reaction against its ascendancy and these multiplied over time,
with notable examples including the Luddites, the Romantics (and various
related neo-Medievalists and neo-pagans), and, most significantly, religious
fundamentalists dismayed by attempts to apply scientific reasoning to the
study of religion. As it became evident that conceding the validity of any
portion of the modernist program of science and rationalism quickly led to
the questioning of all religious doctrine, the emphasis on extreme doctrines
such as Biblical inerrancy became even stronger: the only way to shut off
any dialogue with science was for religion to build an impregnable structure
of self-referential arguments whose contradiction by science and rational
thought was taken as badge of virtue and sign of strength rather than as a
fatal flaw. If the blessings of progress, or at least of increasingly
democratic government and of rapid scientific and technological advancement,
were as dramatic and as universally shared as the modernists liked to think,
then the message of such reactionary movements should surely have fallen
upon deaf ears and been scorned.
Unfortunately the performance of nations
based on contractual relations between government and an informed and
reasonably literate citizenry came in only slightly better than that of
monarchies based on divine right. Wars were still frequent, famines
not uncommon, and national economies were beset by bankrupting levels of debt
and cycles of inflation and deflation&mitigated only by abundant natural
resources for those lucky enough to have access to them, thanks to fortunate
accidents of geography or (just as likely) outright theft. The witch burnings and mass
murders instigated by earlier religious zealots were matched, as technology
progressed, by the indiscrimate killing of aerial bombing, slave labor camps,
gas chambers, and medical &experimentation& on helpless victims.
Immediately preceding the 40 year reign of High Modernism, the Second
Boer War, Boxer Rebellion, Philippine-American War, and Russo-Japanese War
collectively gave ample notice of the type of carnage and of the prevalence of
atrocities that would ensue, in the new mechanized warfare and in conflicts
between state militaries and guerrilla or native resistance forces.
World War I was sufficient to drive many intellectuals to nihilism and complete
demoralization. By the end of World War II in 1945, firebombing and atomic
weapons had made it obvious that no similar large scale conflict could occur
without causing massive numbers of civilian deaths&possibly to the point
of total human extinction. Yet within two years military budgets were bulking
up again as world leaders proclaimed the inevitability of a new Cold War. The
penultimate day of 1947 witnessed the death of Alfred North Whitehead, the
spiritual father of the Postmodern Era, destined like Moses not to see the
new world that his heirs would inhabit.
The Postmodern Arrives
Modernism had acknowledged some of the issues that frutrated the
realization of its program with concepts such as the Unreliable Narrator and
the Unconscious Mind. Where Milton had proclaimed that Truth and Falsehood
should grapple in a free and open contest, since Truth would surely be the
victor, modernists began to recognize that this was not the result that was
obtaining in practice, and modern works of art increasingly came to focus
on the anxiety produced by this realization. Although Falsehood had
always included delusions and lies in addition to error, the power of the
first two turned out to be greater than rational discourse allowed for.
And Truth and Falsehood could scarcely grapple on an equal footing in the
press when the Falsehood was headlined on page 1 and much later retracted
(the Truth) in fine print on page 28.
Novels began to deal with the psychological difficulties
of finding the truth in the words of individuals with some type of (not
always immediately evident) psychpathology, but then branched out to make
reference (in the &noir& crime literature, for instance, or in Huxley's
Brave New World) to the perversion of truth by elements of the state
apparatus and its patrons in the economic elite. The audience for these
works did not have to look far to find real life examples. Ordinary people
became accustomed to a more or less constant barrage of exaggerations and
falsehoods thanks to the nascent public relations and advertising industries,
while military service in World War II gave millions a crash course in the
use of jargon to either obscure meaning or simulate meaning where none
existed. And in the academic world, theory gave itself over to grandiosity
too readily, and at its most grandiose became totalizing, dangerously
intoxicated with its own claims to all-explaining universality.
As Orwell finished his work on 1984 in 1948, the primacy of the
printed word, already somewhat weakened by the popular acceptance of radio
and motion pictures, would receive its gravest wound from the new mass
popularity of television. 1984 would complement the earlier works
of Huxley and the noir novelists by pointing out the unreliability of
language itself, the ways in which carefully crafted language could make
some ideas not just unspeakable but even unthinkable, and the extent to
which power relations privileged some language constructs and expressions
over others, making the free and open contest of ideas envisioned by
Milton (and others, like Thomas Jefferson) seem almost hopelessly utopian.
And, as later explicated by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong, the medium
used to convey ideas was itself a critical aspect of the language not
separable from the supposed &content&&and this also privileged
certain types of ideas and narratives over others, made some ideas and
stories not so much unthinkable as automatically forgettable. The
television culture melded the &secondary orality& of radio with a highly
compressed language of visual symbols in a way that undermined modernism's
enshrinement of the printed word and made its sequential presentation
seem tiresome and inefficient.
Postmodernism revealed that information was the true coin of the
realm, not gold or silver, and that this had been the reality for a very long
time. As in the famous (and probably apocryphal) story of Nathan Rothschild
and the news of the outcome at Waterloo, inside information could make its
possessors outrageous amounts of money. It was also crucial in battle, or
in the mock warfare of political infighting or business rivalries. But when it
came to money, power, armaments and soldiery, you could never have too much,
while with information quantity was only a virtue in combination with
quality, relevance, timeliness and privileged access. The converse was
that you could put your rivals or those you sought to dominate at a
disadvantage not only by depriving them of information, but by flooding them
with too much information that was inaccurate, irrelevant, dated and
redundant.
The importance of communications intercepts and code-breaking to the
outcome of World War II underscored this, and Bletchley Park gave rise to
the computer as a tool for transforming and &managing& information. The
Postmodern Era began in the midst of this new focus on the possibilities
of programmed computer systems, with the research and development of Claude
Shannon, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener and others. At the
same time, the invention of the transistor would eventually make possible
the use of integrated circuits to drastically shrink the computer in size
and make it a ubiquitous appliance instead of the latter day version of a
vast temple idol, closely guarded by a priesthood of Management Information
Systems professionals.
But if information was paramount, it was also in many ways more
provisional and less clearly the carrier of truth or falsehood. The
systems context became more crucial, and decontextualizing &facts& became
a favored means by which those in control of the mass communications
apparatus neutered them, made them forgettable &noise& and random
&outliers& rather than parts of a coherent pattern. And, as the Devil
could reportedly quote scripture for his own purposes, scientific
researchers from Stalinist Russia to the laboratories of Wall Street's
&Big Pharma& and oil corporations could cook statistics to serve their
political and economic masters. In theory this would all be set to rights
by further research and independent replications (of which far fewer were
attempted than the popular scientific press let on), and in some notable
cases this did occur in a very short timeframe. But for others only a
very long run would turn up evidence of wrongdoing or gratuitous
overinterpretation, and, as Keynes remarked, &In the long run, we're all
dead.& Had he known, he might have added, &In the long run, we're out
of oil.& To the current technophile both outcomes look disagreeably
similar.
If the postmodernists took a somewhat more unfavorable turn in
relation to the mythology of science, they tentatively turned to regard
the mythology of religion less unfavorably. In denying mysticism the
modernists had at first tried to arrive at a rational model of religion
which retained at least a few of the core principles. But as this
process launched offshoots such as Deism, Unitarianism and the
&T&bingen School& of Bible criticism, it found few adherents and
evinced limited appeal even among so-called thinking persons. The late
modernist thinking person was much more likely to be an atheist, one who
could look at religion and say, simply, &There's nothing there.& But
the postmodernist was less sure. It seemed that there was something
there, based on what the analyses and metaphors of comparative
religionists like Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell suggested. Perhaps it
still was all in the mind, but it said something basic and important
about the mind, if so, and could no longer be dismissed as mere wish
fulfillment or delusion or simple anthropomorphism. Perhaps the subject
of mysticism was something real, and mysticism could not be cut from the
human psyche and metaphorically tossed overboard. Indeed even atheistic
scientists in some disciplines sounded more than a little mystical as
they described their new understandings of the universe.
The era of High Modernism had introduced the West to mind-boggling
numerical expansions of scale beyond the Europe-centered, Earth-centered,
millenium-centered, human-centered frames of reference&they made the
average person's view of the world seem limited and quaintly provincial,
with the new timeframes of billions of years of existence and the new
prospects of life evolving not on hundreds of worlds among thousands of
star systems but on countless planets among billions of galaxies. A few
people found this exhilirating, but most found it incomprehensible and a
bit unnerving. And there were a number of others who found it fascinating but
ultimately depressing, frightening, even monstrous. While the existentialists
took this view but insisted on the need to squarely face the grim reality,
not everyone was convinced&to some this was asking more of humans
than the human psyche could withstand. H. P. Lovecraft summed up this
position: &We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of
black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The
sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will
open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position
therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the
light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.& The vision of human
insignificance conjured up by science not only produced the outright denial
and return to regressive fundamentalism and know-nothingism foreseen by
Lovecraft, but it also infected the political sphere with a much deeper
pessimism. The once high hopes for a utopian solution to human ills,
especially those aggravated by (if not the direct result of) massive
imbalances in wealth and power, began to fade. An ordinary person could
no longer calculate a regime's powers as being a multiple of his or her
own, not when such powers included the ability to destroy all life using
barely understandable technology. As a result, citizens began to see
themselves as helpless against the enormously powerful but unaccountable
and secretive bureaucracies that determined policy and carried out covert
operations. Modernism itself disdained this &paranoia& as irrational (which,
by definition, paranoia was), but in the postmodern worldview it came to be
seen as a quite possibly appropriate response, at least some of the time.
As the film Strange Days posed it, &The question is not 'are you
paranoid?'&the question is 'are you paranoid enough?'& This is a
typically postmodern formulation in its humorous implication that what is
evidence of psychpathology on one level can become evidence of sanity when
taken to the next level, based on sufficient inside information&provided
that can be trusted! Inside information differentiates the knowing classes
(those &in the know&), who are able to manipulate, from the ignorant mob,
who can only be manipulated. In Philip K. Dick's The Simulacra this is
literalized as two formal classes of society, the geheimnistrager (the
bearers of the secret, i.e., of the inside information) and the befehaltrager
(the carriers-out of orders). The Ges are at least aware of, and often
participate in the creation of, the absurd explanations and spectacles that
the Bes accept as the truth of their society, or at least the only truth
that they will be able to understand. In the novel's logic (as in the
roughly equivalent situations in Dick's other three &political& novels,
The Man in the High Castle, The Penultimate Truth and Dr.
Bloodmoney) not only are the media and &culture& wholly complicit in the sham reality
being created to keep the Bes in line, but the Bes themselves are also
partly complicit in allowing the Ges to foist this fake version of
reality upon them. This is in marked contrast to a nonfiction work
published in the same year, The Paranoid Style in American Politics by
Richard Hofstadter, which takes the modernist view of &conspiracy theories&
as by definition evidence of psychopathology on a political level. (But, as
we later discovered, it was acceptable to believe in conspiracies involving
those on the margins of society, but not ones involving those highly placed
in the centers of political and economic power.) Dick's novels are firmly in
the postmodern camp, certainly thematically if not (from the literary critic's
more doctrinaire viewpoint) stylistically, with the influence of Dick's vision
carrying over most obviously to Baudrillard and his &hyperreality&.
What has yet to become clear is whether postmodernism can provide, if not
a program for attaining a better social order than the increasingly
tottering one bequeathed to us by the modernists, then at least a sufficiently
integrated toolset to enable us to survive the vicissitudes of the
collapse of the modernist project, and to take advantage of any opportunities
presented by it to &land& in a society of communities or collection of societies that are
more sustainable, more peaceable, more resistant to subversion and takeover by
thugs and sociopaths, and more conducive to human happiness&all in an
environment that will be poorer in the material resources that we have hitherto
considered necessary and &not negotiable& (as one former U.S. president put it).
At a time when we will probably need multi-skilled and mentally flexible
citizen-inventors, we will be suffering a massive hangover from the previous
half century's hyperspecialization of the consumer-citizen as the equivalent of a
lever-pressing Skinner Box subject&a plight foreseen in E. M. Forster's
story, &The Machine Stops&. The early Whole Earth Catalog project took on
the problem in a typically postmodern fashion by focusing not on counterculture
ideology but on (as its subtitle proclaimed) &Access to Tools&. That category
broadly encompasses everything from composting toilets and diaper rash curatives
to computer networks and encryption software, from firearms and farm implements
to the psychology of mass media manipulation and methods for penetrating the
persuasive masquerade of the sociopath.
We are aware, as were the founders of the U.S., that almost any system of
government staffed by good people will produce mostly good results, and that
systems of government which allow extreme concentrations of power are bad
because we can't guarantee that only good people will be in charge. One cannot
imagine men like Madison or Jefferson viewing the post-World War II
&national security state& and its &need to know& obsession with secrecy and
its banal consumerist social discourse, with anything other than strong
condemnation. But we can add to that awareness the late modern realization that
concentrations of power (primarily but not completely via concentrations in
wealth) anywhere in society, not only in government, will corrupt the
political process. There is some protection in better systems and forms of
government, but it can never be other than partial at best. And the perversion
of language and flattening of discourse by those who gain access to the levers
of power can progressively create even greater concentrations of wealth,
power and, perhaps most significantly, control over access to and
dissemination of information, until a society is wholly given over to thug rule
again, with criminals, megalomaniacs and sociopaths ascendant, although
perhaps wearing the smiley face of &friendly fascism& for a time. The necessary
skepticism toward language and how it is employed is nowhere more called for
than when those in power conjure up &threats& (to one's physical safety,
economic well-being, or psychological security) against which the citizenry
must be protected by wars, expanded police powers and the criminalization of
behaviors or even beliefs and attitudes, all for supposed &moral& (or sometimes
&health& or &safety&) reasons. As the Age of Petroleum ends, we will have to decentralize
and relocalize much of our social and political infrastructure, learn to
husband our resources much more frugally and make use of them more fairly,
become tolerant of more diverse social forms, and rely far less on government
to solve problems that are superfluous to human survival. Those most heavily
invested in and benefiting from the current political order will naturally
resist this with all the considerable means at their disposal. Whether the
Postmodern Era has staying power, or whether it is a brief discontinuity before
a descent to a new feudal age and a return of unquestioned mass subservience
to thug rule, is the question to which, at this time, we await an answer.}