Many philosophers and other authors use the term modernity for the state of civilization to which the later Enlightenment and the industrial revolution gave rise. The Enlightenment was fundamentally about the rise and presumed applicability of reason and empirical methods to the problems of knowledge and life. The industrial revolution brought these to fruition. Thus arose the Third Stage, in Auguste Comte’s sense (Law of Three Stages): “scientific and positive.”

This short piece is intended to spell out modernity’s chief components. The purpose here is to identify what modernity is, while sketching only the bare bones of a possible evaluation.

As I see it, modernity seems to involve the following propositions or assumptions:

• (1) Science / scientific method as the best means, conceivably the only means, of finding out what is true about the world, via hypothesis, testing, confirmation or disconfirmation, ongoing verification and continuing investigation.
• (2) Technology as applied physical science, producing a continuous stream of products capable of improving the material conditions of human life.
• (3) Commerce: the idea that human beings are fundamentally traders and that life is fundamentally transactional, which means the rise of business corporations alongside governments.
• (4) Liberal democracy: the idea that governments answer to the people as their institutions sensibly regulate commerce and both identify and promote public goods, given the general political-economic philosophy of classical liberalism and the cultural ambience liberalism gives rise to.  
• (5) Public education, both to communicate the achievements of civilization to date and socialize the next generation into a civilization based on rules of ordered personal and group conduct, with civic duties such as finding a viable occupation or line of work and participation in representative governance.  
• (6) Belief in progress: that all of these in aggregate, pursued diligently, generation after generation, will ensure that the future is, and continues to be, better than the past.

These seem to be central. There are a few add-ons and further developments.

(1) implies the slow retreat of religion and its focus on reward in an afterlife. Rewards can be had in this life. This is as much methodological and epistemological as it is metaphysical and theological. Modernity suggests relinquishing the psychological need for certainty which religion seemed, in the past, to supply. Science doesn’t supply certainty, only a steadily improving (one hopes!) sequence of theories in the various domains of inquiry. Its results are, however, reliable.

(2) and (3) combine in capitalism based on accumulation on property however obtained (even though Comte, author of the “stages” view mentioned briefly above, was a socialist). The capitalist mode of production, whether through the factory assembly line and, much later, automation, enabled us to accomplish more, more efficiently, with less.

The basic idea of these three, cumulatively, is that the world is rational, able to be understood by empirical-rational methods, its processes then put to use in improving the human societal condition: more effective methods of production, better safety, more efficient forms of transportation of both goods and people; improved health with medical discoveries (e.g., the germ theory), with better sanitation and hygiene; and finally, with technology applied to progressively better forms of communication with increasingly greater reach.

The institutions inherent in (4) may be messy but their messiness serves a purpose: prevention of power becoming consolidated in any one institution or person such as the kings of the past. Modernity’s best formulations propose continuous criticism of its institutions for the purpose of progress in specific areas such as reduction of discrimination against minorities and women, but remains non-Utopian. As civilization becomes more complex, (5) becomes a requirement; hence laws requiring school attendance and students learning materials that have been vetted by experts.

Finally, again, (6): to the modernist it becomes self-evident that the world of the present is objectively better — people are more prosperous, have more freedoms, are healthier, live longer, and are overall happier — than were their premodern ancestors. Today we live materially at levels unavailable to royalty during the feudal era. A presentation of what modernity is might conclude with a statement that the diligent application of the above methods and priorities has solved the most important problems of societal order and civilized living, leaving only matters of detail, specification, and the patient resolution of differences stemming from conflicts of interest seen as temporary and sometimes resulting from the personal idiosyncracies of individual players.  

Has this sufficed in bringing about not just adequacy but a sense of flourishing? Many of what William James calls the “healthy minded” (in his The Varieties of Religious Experience) have been at least content, recognizing that life is inevitably going to present them with problems to solve but that they are more than capable of rising to the occasion and doing what is necessary.

There have been, though, those “sick souls” (James’s term again) for which not only has none of this been sufficient, but that with the retreat of religiosity and any sense of the presence of, or service to, a Higher Power, that which is crucial to a fully meaningful and properly directed human life has been lost.

Hence Nietzsche’s “God is dead and we have killed him!” followed by his warning of an “advent of nihilism”; Dostoevsky’s infamous “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted”; and the rise of existentialism in both literature and philosophy running parallel to the seeming triumph of modernity in the post war years. Others expressed unease from different quarters, such as Freud, in essays such as Civilization and Its Discontents.

Absurdism, moreover, began as art abandoned representationalism, with Dada art in the 1910s and 1920s; it appeared in Albert Camus’s novels and philosophical works; and then, latently, in subsequent popular trends ranging from the Beats of the 1950s and their literature (think of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl”), the “tune in, turn on, drop out” of the late 1960s, and ten years later, 1970s disco (“Stayin’ alive … I’m going nowhere”) and punk rock (Johnny Rotten’s “we’re so pretty, we’re so pretty vacant! And we don’t care!”). Alienation existed. Its products captured the attention of entire generations. Sometimes it led to indifference to society’s supposed rules and a search for alternatives; sometimes it led to anger-fueled and borderline-violent rebellion that got in the system’s collective face.

That was all before the neoliberal era, the redistribution of wealth upwards, and the increasing sense in many mainstream observers — trained scholars, not literary figures, artists, or popular musicians — that something in modernity was broken at its core. In addition, the above says nothing about matters many observers deem pretty important: the impact of industrial civilization, its processes and its products, on the climate and on the ecosystem broadly.

My purpose here, though, has been to formulate as precisely as possible an account of what modernity has seemed to be, what it has tried to offer. While some of its purveyors held that scientific methods applied to the human condition could bring about a Utopia or its equivalent, realists have never been quite that ambitious. For completeness sake I’ve included brief statements of the unease and dissent from modernity that arose very gradually alongside it, without seeking to provide a diagnosis or proposed resolution.