Is the Talk of Our “Modernity” Just an Empty Boast?

Social progress and the rise of the humanist ethos

Paradoxically, “modern” is perhaps the most useful and the most useless concept.

“Modern” means “up to date,” “cutting edge,” or “progressed.” So, when we say we’re modern, we’re flattering ourselves, and we’re viewing our mores as having improved on those of earlier societies.

The problem is that every society can view itself as being better than earlier ones, if only because this judgment might be made in ignorance, as knowledge of how our ancestors lived naturally degrades over time. Even if ancient polytheistic societies viewed the world as a series of stable, interlocking cycles that aim to approximate a flawless mythic past, those societies could have judged themselves as having better incorporated those ideals than had rival societies.

Indeed, anthropologists call the cultural aspects of all human history “behaviourally modern,” compared to what they presume to have been the relative primitiveness of prehistoric tribal life.

This relative sense of “modern,” then, according to which every society can say it’s more advanced than some other one, is almost vacuous; at least, this sense is self-congratulatory and thus partly subjective.

But there’s an absolute sense, too, which is that the era we’re living in, beginning in Europe in the fifteenth century CE is “modern” in a special way that doesn’t apply to any other era. Can that judgment be sustained, though, and if so, what’s the meaning of this kind of modernity?

At the center of this absolute assessment of our period would be the Scientific Revolution. Broadly, we might say science is optimizing our interactions with the environment by reasoning to solve problems. But this kind of reasoning became systematic and institutional in the period in question, when the Church lost power in Europe to control the narrative, and scientists could let the observed facts speak for themselves.

Yet that institution didn’t arise from nowhere. Science as an institution is based on an ethos of humanism, which presaged the Scientific Revolution in the Italian Renaissance. What does it mean, then, to be a humanist?

It means that people are deemed autonomous and intrinsically valuable, that we should assign things value based on our judgment and thus needn’t defer to the dictates of religious elites; moreover, it means the lower classes needn’t be dismissed as being beneath the contempt of the upper class. Instead of “Christians” and “pagans,” or “royals” and the servile classes (peasants, women, slaves), there are human persons.

At first, this humanism was only inconsistently applied to male merchants who used humanist ideology to promote emerging capitalist and democratic practices. Just as the ancient Greeks thought proto-humanistically only of the minority was entitled to vote because only they were deemed rational enough to moderate their impulses to make democracy viable, the early “modern” humanists hadn’t yet shaken off medieval prejudices, such as those of patriarchy and imperialism.

Humanism was used to empower entrepreneurs and business tycoons at the expense of priests, monarchs, and governments. More precisely, with mercantilism, the royals and legislatures outsourced far-flung explorations and businesses to semi-private enterprises, such as the East Asia Company. Eventually, with the turn to constitutional monarchies or republics throughout Europe and North America, males who excelled in cut-throat competitions were deemed the pinnacles of humanity, so effectively, there wasn’t yet, in the late-Renaissance and early modern periods, an objective, universal conception of “humanity” or “personhood.”

However, as scientists applied their methods inward in studying the human body and mind, they discovered the basis of human equality. All humans, including men and women, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the religious and the irreligious, have a brain and a genotype, as well as specific mental faculties, such as consciousness, reason, autonomy, imagination, conscience, ambition, and so on.

What fuelled the Scientific Revolution, then, was this dawning sense that our species is naturally special. This was revolutionary because prior societies were elitist: they promoted the interests of a minority of nobles or freemen, or of a kingdom against those of peasants, women, slaves, or foreigners. Humans were deemed inherently unequal, a presumption used to justify the social hierarchies that emerged as effective ways of governing complex, sedentary societies.

Absolute modernity is a type of society that’s based on the discovery of personhood, of the set of basic traits that makes all the members of our species roughly the same. After all, what was discovered was the fact that all humans have the same phenotype, genotype, and mental depth.

But that’s not enough for the ideology of humanism. Humanists don’t say just that we’re physiologically the same in certain respects since they add to that observation a value judgment, one that science can’t justify: we’re supposed to be special and precious in virtue of those shared traits.

All people are supposed to have inherent rights and privileges, and these are assigned not by any deity, but by rational reflection on nature. According to early modern philosophers from Rene Descartes onwards, personhood is a good and precious thing. The human brain sustains the mind, which comprises the faculties that produce the cultures to which we prefer to adapt.

In effect, humanism was the democratization of the rights and privileges that had traditionally been reserved for the noble class. Prior to absolute modernity, only the rich and powerful nobles were typically deemed persons, or especially favoured by the gods. Only they deserved their education, luxuries, and liberties. Everyone else was considered closer to an animal than a person. Women and enslaved persons were treated like livestock, as private properties to be sold, abused, or disposed of at will by the upper-class males.

By contrast, early humanists said effectively that the middle class of merchants (the more industrious peasants) were just as inherently “noble” and dignified as the royals had been. Merchants or ambitious peasants were people too, and the extra advantages that were supposed to have been due to divine favour were bogus. By the logic of a slippery slope, this assessment was eventually extended to everyone who shares the same basic biological and psychological features as industrious individuals.

Yet humanists could no longer appeal to the religious rationale for their value judgments. If the ancient and medieval royals were favoured by the gods, and the gods were now slain by reason, as Friedrich Nietzsche said, what makes our inner commonality sacrosanct? Here, humanism was invented rather than discovered, in that humanists felt and dictated the value of this commonality. Humanists discovered the facts but not the value of personhood.

The political philosopher Leo Strauss recognized this aspect of absolute modernity when he said that whereas the ancients guarded knowledge in an elitist fashion, modernists distribute it democratically, the difference being one of trust in our nature.

The ancient elites were cynical and fatalistic, having little confidence in their ability to improve their social conditions because their governing concern was rather the terror of succumbing to the indiscriminate ferocity of wildlife outside the fragile, newly constructed walls of civilization. Ancient societies struggled just to preserve the advantages of the agricultural and early cognitive revolutions (the advents of language, writing, and social hierarchies). Social stability was their driving concern.

It took the demonstration of Christendom’s gross flaws in the exacerbation of the Black Death, and the accidental rediscovery of the naturalism and protohumanism of ancient Greco-Roman texts in Europe in the Renaissance, for absolute modernists to promote progressive, Promethean self-confidence as a sustainable ethos. Whereas the ancients trusted mainly in the divine favour of the ruling class, not in themselves as human individuals, modernists gambled that human nature was itself godlike, and that all the members of our species are equally gifted by nature.

Strauss was a conservative elitist, so he scoffed at modern optimism. Nevertheless, this rise of broad-based self-confidence that led to liberal philosophy, skeptical science, rapacious capitalism, and egalitarian democracy was the stuff of absolute modernity. The contrast was between the elitism that prevailed all around the world for thousands of years, in feudal monarchies, and the egalitarianism that sparked enormous cognitive and social progress across Europe and its colonies at a particular point in world history.

Graeber’s and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, then, makes for a curious comparison in this context since they show, ironically, how modern individualism was inspired by the egalitarianism that was found in Indigenous American tribes. Again, the burden of managing sprawling city-states and civilizations imposed oligarchic social hierarchies, whereas prehistoric tribes were bound to be more egalitarian because they couldn’t afford to subdue any of their members or to reinforce any budding inequality with material disadvantages.

Those earlier tribes had relatively few members, so they all had to pull their weight; moreover, the tribes kept mobile in following the animal herds that sustained them. Consequently, these nomadic hunter-gatherers often prided themselves on their independence. Their societies were practically anarchical and proto-democratic.

But whereas prehistoric nomads were likely pragmatic humanists, modern humanists are ideological. Still, what’s ironic about modernism is that we’ve returned in this sense to our species’ starting point. We deem ourselves equal not because a nomadic lifestyle forces this egalitarianism on us, but because we learned we’re roughly equal as a matter of fact and because despite the collapse of early civilized rationales, we still need a mythos to justify our activities.

Absolute modernity is the choice of humanism for a mythos that celebrates the democratization of the ancient elites’ rights and privileges. As the men and women behind the wizard’s curtain all along, humans generally became the virtual gods that once allegedly favoured just the elites from behind the scenes.

That irony is the essence of absolute modernity, and if late-modernists or “post-humanists” such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan have doubted the existence or merit of human nature, the irony lives on in the creativity of those doubts, which only trickster gods could formulate.

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