Flirting with Modernity(1)

There is a story of a physics professor lecturing about the end of the solar system. He talks about radiation and predicts that the sun will explode within a few billion years. After he said this, an agitated man stood up and shouted down from several rows above: “Excuse me, professor, did you say the solar system will end within ‘a few billion years’?”. “Yes”, said the professor. “Oh, that’s a relief”, said the man, visibly calmer. “For a minute there, I thought you said a few million years.”

I think of this joke when I hear that modernity is ending. Cosmological time is not geological time, which is not evolutionary time, which is not historical time, granted. But still, reports of modernity’s death can feel exaggerated.

Sometimes we figure out who we are by noticing how we are different from the people we admire. In recent months, I have observed a coalescence of viewpoints around the deep story that modernity is ending, for instance, in the work of Dougald Hine, Bayo Akomolafe, and Vanessa Andreotti. I am not sure there is a name for this outlook yet, but I think of it as a kind of generative capitulation (Bayo), decolonial futurism (Vanessa) or regrowing living culture (Dougald). I have also noticed a pattern of neo-romanticism, often but not always Christian, for instance, in the work of Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist, Martin Shaw, and Sophie Strand.

These people are different, but they are all brilliant, and another thing they have in common is a fairly strong anti-modern sentiment. I tend to enjoy their writing and speaking, but at some moment it goes too far for me, and I find I want to highlight how much worse life has been and could be, to put a word in for the defence of the world that we’ve made, and highlight the beauty, dignity and joy of normal life.

Here is how I briskly defined modernity in my essay on metamodernism:

The term ‘modern’ is derived from the Latin modo and simply means ‘of today’, distinguishing whatever is contemporary

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