AFTERnow

‘To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.’  

(Marshall Berman)

Historians (and perhaps our own common sense) tell us that, if we want to understand the society in which we now live and the nature of its problems, we also need to have some understanding of the forces which shaped it. This suggests that it is worth considering some key aspects of modernity, and the ways in which these have intertwined and changed, in order to understand the implications for individuals and social well-being.  

The Enlightenment was a period of intense philosophical development, over the course of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Across Europe, philosophers began to stress the use of reason and the scientific method as the best method for learning ‘the truth’. It also marks the period when philosophers and others began to reject traditional social, religious and political ideas. An emphasis on the development of reason as the basis for human perfectibility was a particular hallmark of Scottish Enlightenment thinking, which eventually spread throughout the ‘civilised’ world of Europe and North America. This, the Age of Reason (or Rationalism), marks something of a disjunction with the ‘traditional’ order of earlier forms of society, and underpinned the development of some key aspects of ‘modernity’ in which we are interested. 

For many thinkers, modernity itself is a progressive force, promising to liberate humankind from ignorance and irrationality. The word ‘modernisation’ has been used to describe the swift rise of powerful advances in technology and science, as well as the development of nation states, democratic political systems and the expansion of capitalist modes of production. Sociologist Anthony Giddens suggests that, at its simplest, modernity is a shorthand term for industrial civilisation (Giddens, 1991).  

Modern ideas about the world combined with modern political and economic systems, make modern society far more dynamic than any previous type of social order. Numerous social theorists tell us that modern society, unlike any which preceded it, is oriented towards the future rather than the past. People living in such societies are also arguably different in a number of ways from their ancestors. Few previous generations could have understood themselves, as we do, as complex biological machines, subject to biological competition (reproductive fitness) and social competition (through the market economy).

Multiple consequences flow from ‘modern’ understandings of the social and natural worlds, as well as from objective ‘modernising’ changes to those worlds. As key aspects of society changes, so do our value systems and our sense of our selves and purpose in life.

Subsequent papers in this section deal with some of these changes in greater depth.  This paper outlines the links between dramatic changes which have occurred in the world of work which impact in unforeseen ways on the way in which we create our identity within modern society.  In the paragraphs below we draw on the work of sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett, who have pointed to the transition from ‘solid’ to ‘liquid’ forms of modernity, and documented the effect of this shift on working conditions. More subtly, they have also docmented the emerging shift from a work ethic to a consumer aesthetic, which involves changes in the way we judge particular kinds of work. And still more fundamentally, they suggest that a new kind of person is required, in order to cope with the massive insecurities and anxieties induced by changes which touch most aspects of life.