What is modernity?

Question

What is modernity?

Answer 1

It's a misinterpretation of the word modernizing or modernization or past tense modernized.

It means to get rid of old technology or equipment in favor of more efficient and usually more productive techniques and machinery.

Speaking of society it could mean removing old buildings and replacing them with new or the common line of thought has changed from what is has been for decades.

Answer 2

The ability of the individual to accept progress.

Answer 3

The best way to learn about 'modernity' is in regard to post-modernity.  It is somewhat complex involving philosophy, art, literatur, architecture, technology, etc.  Philosophically it is considered to be funded Descartes, the primacy of reason, objectivity of nature (man's ability to discern nature as an 'open book'), and foundationalism.  There is the notion that history/humanity is caught up in a momentus progess toward a kind of enlightenment with reason (and the benevolence of knowledge) as the guide.  Postmodernity is critical of these assumptions (or metanarratives)

Answer 4

Different people take different views but most of the social theorists contrast it with pre-modernism.   Here are a few of the best known ones:

1. Max Weber:  

Modern society:  rational culture, bureaucratic structures

Pre modern: traditional culture,  monarchical or feudal structures

nb traditional cultures = use 'how has it always been done' as the guide to living

rational cultures = use 'what is the 'most efficient'way as that guide

2.Durkheim:

Modern - urban industrial society - privileging individualism, where we are all strangers,  doing different jobs, but society still held together by our interdependence

Pre-modern - agricultural society, more community based leading same lives , knowing everybody in our  community,.  society bonds are much stronger because society is held together by people's similarity.

Benefits of modern- freedom of thought greater tolerance of difference.

Benefits of traditional society - less danger of loneliness and of 'anomie' (which means not knowing what the cultural rules are which can lead to feelings of being  morally adrift for  modern people)

3. Foucault:

Modern society: governed by medicalised discourses

pre modern: governed by religious discourse

i.e we divide people today into normal/pathological in contrast to the good/evil  divisions of pre modern era

4. Marx:

Modern society:   has the clearest set of class relations: you either have capital and can employ labour to increase the value of that capital or you only have your labor to sell.

Pre-modern society: these class distinctions were overlaid by feudal obligations and political and religious hierarchies so that the economic basis of social differences were not so sharply obvious.

However when modernism is contrasted with post modernism the contrast is usually like this:

Modernism - based on (a)belief in social change as 'progress' and (b) with scientific rationality we can understand more and more about the world

Post modernism- moves away from both of those positions:

(a) there is no historical trajectory nor any one way road to clear improvements

(b) there is not one way to interpet the world  but several different ways - often this is labelled as the relativist approach to knowledge and morality.

underpinning this change to post modernisn is the economic move from the

modernist focus on 'production' =  'I am defined mainly by the work I do, how I earn my money'

to post modern consumerism 'I am defined by my life style, how I spend my money'

Answer 5

The opposite philosophy of people who reject the technology, mind-set, beliefs, & norms of modern life. they think it's inferior.  they think that everything about the past is what we must no doubt cling to. Modernity is not clinging to that.

Answer 6

Modernity is simply the sense or the idea that the present is discontinuous with the past, that through a process of social and cultural change (either through improvement, that is, progress, or through decline) life in the present is fundamentally different from life in the past. This sense or idea as a world view contrasts with what I will call tradition, which is simply the sense that the present is continuous with the past, that the present in some way repeats the forms, behavior, and events of the past.