By Aidan Mackie and Matt Stevenson
An Introduction to Modernism
All that is the modern western world is due to modernism. The continued belief in the ability to develop and advance technology so that future generations are better off has shaped this world, inspiring the ancient human desire to understand what is objective truth by separating fact and value and increasing the applications and understandings of science(Norgaard 1994).Though modernism can be extended to cover numerous fields, perceiving modernism through an ecological lense forecasts the continued advancement of both science and politics as humanity enters into Anthropocene, and in so humanity effecting the natural processes of the world on a global scale. Within An Ecomodernist Manifesto, modernization is described as “the long-term evolution of social, economic, political, and technological arrangements in human societies toward vastly improved material well-being, public health, resource productivity, economic integration, shared infrastructure, and personal freedom” (Nordhaus & Shellenberger 2015, 28). However, the Anthropocene reveals the damages modernization has caused with social injustices and climate change.
Context for Modernism’s Rise
Modernism refers to the process by which the modern industrialized world came to exist and to the new social organizations and life that emerged “in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence” (Giddens 1990, 1). Modernism came to be due to the rapid advancements of technology and society, taking the forms of the Agricultural, scientific, and Industrial revolutions, inspired by the the belief in a “scientific utopia of making the unsafe consequences and dangers of decisions ever more controllable” (Beck 2006). As well as the sweeping impacts of the Enlightenment which led to the abandonment of religion and the Catholic Church in dominating Western thought, the Laws of Nature “allowed the first Enlightenment thinkers to demolish the ill-founded pretensions of human prejudice” (Latour 1991, 35), attempting to separate science and culture and emancipating the control of the Catholic church over knowledge, which grouped all aspects of society under its influence.
Although the foundations of modernism date back to the seventeenth century, the formation of defining modernism did not become prevalent until the twentieth century. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, modernism in scholarly texts starts a drastic rise at the beginning of the 1900’s and expanded drastically throughout the century.
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When framing the concept of modernism, understanding reactions is key in contextualizing it. One such reaction is the postmodern movement which “refers to a shift away from attempts to ground epistemology and from faith in humanly engineered progress”(Giddens 1990). Within Jean Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard reacts to the assumed certainty of science. According to Lyotard, postmodernism can be defined as a “period of slackening” (Lyotard 1983, 71) . This proposes a hands off approach, taking our foot off of the this period of modernization. Another aspect of postmodernism is deep ecology, a stark contrast from modernist thought. While deep ecology emphasizes respect, the connectedness of the entire world, and decreased infiltration of humans into the natural world, modernism explores attempting to separate the world into manageable divisions understood by experts. By understanding postmodernism, it becomes easier to grasp what modernism is.
Modernist thinkers tend to embody that of “hierarchists”, whose “world is controllable” and that “nature is stable until pushed beyond discoverable limits” (Thompson 2000). Advances in conditions of living in the developed world has led to these beliefs, as “average life expectancy has increased from 30 to 70 years” and humanity making “extraordinary progress in reducing the incidence and impacts of infectious disease” and becoming “more resilient to extreme weather and other natural disasters” (An Ecomodernist Manifesto 2015, 8). Humanities ability to alleviate environmental and ecological pressures through dams, genetically modified organisms, and medicine to name a few reveals modern capacities to create a malleable destiny.
Exploring Modernism’s Deficiencies
One of the first problems that arise when looking at modernism is the fact that there is no strong definition of modernism. All the definitions given allow for very wide ideological differences along what modernist thought is, as it is so expansive in its implications. When referring to modernist definitions, Latour’s presentation “Fifty Shades of Green” outlines the fact that when dealing with modernism: “There are many definitions and most of them tend to mean either contemporary, or westernization, or globalisation, or even economisation” (Latour 2015, 2). This shows that while modernism can be conglomerated through multiple other processes, there is no exact definition and it is left to interpretation, therefore needing to be defined in increasingly specific realms of knowledge. The interdisciplinarity of all aspects of modern society necessitates a thoughtful and strong comprehension of everything the developed is, an understanding that will always be attempted to fulfill.
This interdisciplinarity provides another problem with modernism. In attempting to approach realms such as science as unbiasedly as possible, it subsequently ignores the connections between the realms. Approaching knowledge this way neglects the interconnectivity that will always exist between them(Latour 1991). When looking at the spheres of influence like politics and religion, modernists neglect the fact that science, religion, and politics are intertwined, and this is obvious when you look at the front page of a newspaper (Latour 1991). John Muir, who has been so influential in inspiring environmental action, once proclaimed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Attempting to break knowledge into hyper specific parts can completely look past this.
Another critique is such a reliance on the progression of technology. Our increased advancement attempts to account for everything that can go wrong with the natural world that would harm humanity, however it is “increasingly occupied with debating, preventing and managing risks that it itself has produced” (Beck 2006). Although modernism has obviously led to amazing progressions and success for humanity, there is unchecked belief in technology always growing, replacing, and fixing past technology as well as undertaking the extreme power of the natural world. Within Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene, “the solution to the unintended consequences of modernity is, and has always been, more modernity — just as the solution to the unintended consequences of our technologies has always been more technology” (Nordhaus & Shellenberger, 2011). As technology continues to try and catch up with itself and solve its problems, this wandering into the future where an events repercussions are not possible to understand is dismissed. Hope is continually placed in the rapid advancement of technology as being a good thing. And although it has led to a better condition of humanity, there is not a firm understanding in what will continue to happen as climate change, the mass extinction of species, and we continue to rapidly change the Earth.
Conclusion
The main points of modernism entail rationalization and power over nature. By looking and analyzing the basic points these ideas make sense with the success of modernity in creating a world in which humanity is less dependent on the Earth, and more dependent on human creation than it was before due to the rise of the Industrial, Agricultural, and Scientific Revolutions. The rapid advancing of technology and society has characterized humanities time since the Enlightenment.
In our opinion, modernism in the eyes of environmental scholars should be taken carefully. Though modernism has led to increased abilities to understand and harness the natural world, it is also one of the main reasons human caused climate change exists. By pushing on this arrow of forwardness and progress, it accelerates directly into the belief of technology as our savior. Hopefully, actors like ecomodernists will effectively be able to mitigate problems in the modern world through the implementation of sustainable development and equality and respectfulness on our Earth. Understanding the scope of modernism is not an easy task, but the attempt must be made to find some type sustainable future.
Beck, Ulrich. “Living in the world risk society.” Economy and Society35, no. 3 (2006): 329-45.
Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. 1990.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. 1991.
Later, Bruno. “Fifty Shades of Green.” 2015.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Nordhaus, T., and M. Shellenberger. “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” 2015. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5515d9f9e4b04d5c3198b7bb/t/552d37bbe4b07a7dd69fcdbb/1429026747046/An Ecomodernist Manifesto.pdf.
Norgaard, R. Development Betrayed. 1994.
Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus. Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. United States: Breakthrough Institute, 2011.
Thompson, M. “Understanding Environmental Values: A Cultural Theory Approach.” Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 2000.