151123 PKU6 VALUES and WORLDVIEWS Mdernity
Modernity as a Touchstone Concept
Introduction
Terminology
Use of these terms in this Course
Multiple Modernities
Conclusion
Introduction
Because modern appears very often in WCwCC and indeed in modern life itself – in
China as well as in the West – clarity requires direct attention to the words employing
that root. Modernity may be a Western phenomenon by origin, but Western models
apply in other parts of the world only to a limited extent. Existing pre-modern cultural
environments and traditions always affect the nature of reactions against them. For this
reason, WCwCC emphasizes multiple modernities as the most viable concept available
for comparative purposes.
Terminology
All the prominent terms in English employing modern as their root are likely to cause
confusion. There is nothing new about that in the sense that English, since the 16 th
century, has used such words to refer to the present or to very recent times. But the
present always moves on, and yesterday’s modern practices sooner or later seem
outmoded, hence no longer “modern.” As a result, Western usage of the various words
in this semantic field tends to split in one of two directions:
A. (free floating) The modern as (anywhere, any time) the new, antitraditional, or innovative.
OR
B. (historically bound) The modern as the new, anti-traditional and
innovative ideas that emerged in Europe and then elsewhere in the
Western world once the medieval view of the world as unchanging
began to break up under challenge.
The first definition offers little help in the context of this course, because all cultural
practices come under criticism and challenge sooner or later. This concept ultimately
takes the form of “post-modernism” [link: post-modern overview], implying that there are no
certainties left in the world.
The second definition is more relevant but requires further refinement. If European
and American modes of modernizing are taken as definitive models, then modernity
equates to Westernizing. This view, though widely held among uneducated people in
many countries, seriously oversimplifies the concept as used herein.
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Use of These Terms in This Course
In the interests of clarity, this course must impose some order in its own usage, even
though differing uses continue to occur elsewhere.
The first task is to distinguish among three major variants incorporating this root:
modernization, modernism, and modernity (This last is habitually italicized in this course as an
important substantive concept with specific implications which are spelled out below) .
Modernization
In accordance with the dominant Western usage in the social sciences, this term is
defined here [link: modernization as socioeconomic concept] as a fundamentally economic
process tied to industrialization which affects many wider aspects of life since the
industrial surge that began in Britain in the late 18th century.
Modernism
In accordance with the dominant Western usage in the humanities disciplines, this
term is taken here as identifying innovative movements in various arts which emerged
mostly early in the 20th century, as in “modernist” literature, painting, or music. These
terms have largely become attached to these historical movements, requiring other
terms to be assigned by scholars and critics to later developments that seemed
distinguishably different. One such term is “post-modernism,” when it is used in a
narrow sense pointing to one or another of the arts.
Modernity
The largest and most vague of these three labels, this term is here taken as
identifying a large-scale transformations of the Western world over many centuries that
now affect most parts of the world through a process of globalization. The processes of
modernity are vast, ultimately unlimited, because they tend to call into question
whatever inherited traditions prevail at any given time. Hence, though it may have many
different beginnings in different domains of Western civilization, it has – at least so far –
no end in sight.
Implicitly, modernity calls into question established orders and values – any or all of
them. If this process were ever to become complete, the state of civilization might be
closer to anarchy than to any known type of order. Thus there is no certainty that
modernity could ever be complete as a civilizational process. Instead it may imply ongoing tensions between innovative and tradition-oriented ways of looking at life. The
issues vary from one time and place to another, but recognizably similar tensions
persist.
“Post-Modernism”
This term enjoyed considerable currency in the late 20th century aiming at defining a
new stage in Western cultural evolution. The implication was that “modernism” was over,
replaced by more critical and decentered manifestations of culture. In their celebration
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of a new perspective, Post-Modernists attacked many Western touchstone beliefs,
among them key Enlightenment values like Iiberty/freedom and equality/social justice
[link: text]. Still older beliefs also were also attacked: the idea that things have central
defining essences, an “essentialism” that began as long ago as the ancient Greeks.
The ambition to declare a new stage in Western development may now seem
premature, but in a wide range of disciplines Post-Modern thought has played an
important role in challenging earlier Western credences. When this study endorses the
idea of “multiple modernities,” as will be clear just below, it takes into account the PostModern tendency to free concepts from one “essential” meaning. Post-Modernism helps
us to recognize and legitimize the multiple modernities in the world today. This liberation
from earlier Western conceptual constraints greatly aids comparative studies.
Because nearly everything viewed as “Post-Modern” is framed negatively, against
modern or, more narrowly, against Enlightenment ideas [link: the Enlightenment], the
movement that goes under this name is hard to summarize. Perhaps the best approach
is to look at the Internet (WWW, the World-Wide-Web) as a structural model which
epitomizes the characteristics of a typical postmodern worldview [link: text]. In summary,
the Internet has no center and no one is in charge of its content. Hence, despite
censorship efforts in China, the Internet is inherently directionless and within it
“knowledge” blends into “conviction” or “point of view.” If we look at the world in this way,
the range of diversity widens, even as it becomes more and more difficult to
demonstrate which alternatives are legitimate.
Multiple Modernities
The West may have been the first civilization to encounter this complex phenomenon,
but it does not provide an infallible model for what a modern world should be like.
Inevitably, the nature of the preexisting traditions called into question by modernity will
have a powerful effect on what develops in each civilization once it is exposed to major
challenges to its traditions. Globalization does not imply world-scale uniformity but
rather the gradual diffusion of modernity processes throughout the world.
Modernity as a reaction against earlier static worldviews (an interpretation derived
ultimately from Max Weber [link: Max Weber]) implies that modernity cannot be Western in any
exclusive sense. Traditional China, for example, never espoused a worldview similar to
that of the Greeks with their insistence on a fundamental unchanging reality hidden
under changing appearances. Instead the Chinese tradition saw change itself as the
central “reality” [link: Yijing]. Therefore, once China experienced serious challenges to
traditional views, beginning most dramatically in the early 20th century, its modernity has
distinctly Chinese characteristics.
In China, the traditional worldview that was open to challenge involved all the
political, social, economic, and cultural aspects of the Han Dynasty, which had
remained largely intact for centuries [link: classical correspondences]. In short, modernity
must be seen as significantly different in China as compared to the West, not merely in
the time frame affecting major developments but in its very substance. Nothing that
happens in the West is obligatory for China because of the great differences between
them, differences in where they are coming from, in where they are, and in relation to
where they will likely choose to go.
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For such reasons, WCwCC adopts the idea of multiple modernities that has gained
prominence among Western thinkers at the beginning of the 21st century. This approach
insists that there is no fixed or obligatory model for modernizing. Therefore ethnocentric
projections of home experience onto other cultures or civilizations are inappropriate no
matter where they may originate.
[Recommended reading: Multiple Modernities, vol. 129, No. 1 of Daedalus: Journal of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000).]
Conclusion
Modernity is an elusive but indispensable concept, called on here to enable
comparisons between civilizations that from their beginnings differed greatly from each
other. This course, because it conceives modernity as a process of calling into question
of inherited ideas and practices, allows both civilizations conceptual space for carrying
out their own processes at their own pace. This approach aids comparisons but at a
price. Modernity began in the West roughly half a millennium ago, but in China only in
the late 19th century. As a result modern sections (Encounters labeled x.2) have an
embarrassment of riches to choose among on the Western side of the comparison,
while the Chinese texts may seem skimpy in comparison. This imbalance is
nonetheless preferable to what many Westerners do without thinking twice about it:
identifying modernity with Western Enlightenment ideas and values [link: the Enlightenment].
Imposing those Western preoccupations as a concept of modernity would only subject
Chinese phenomena to ethnocentrically Western concerns. Our goal here is to
understand Chinese civilization, including its modernity, on its own terms.
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