What makes you modern? We know that modernity means technology, industry, cities.

But is there a modern attitude? A modern psychology?

What sets us apart from pre-moderns? Can we even imagine what a traditional attitude might feel like?

Traditional life was circular. We were tied to the land day after day, month after month – the idea of improvement, or of relationships with a wider world, were largely non-existent.

How did we get from this to this?

The philosophers of the Enlightenment – Kant, Marx, Mill, and Francis Bacon – were motivated by a powerful idea. That we could rationally understand the world, and use the world to shape history.

They were all, in varying ways, about ordering the world, putting things in their place, making it predictable, usable.

So what makes up this modern attitude?

Think about a world before clocks, before maps, and zip codes, before calendars, and timetables. What would it have been like? Well, time and space were one and the same, they were intertwined. The sun went up, you moved to the field and began to plough. Life was predictable, circular. Each day was largely the same. The clock changed this.

The clock disconnected time from space. It represented time abstractly. It standardised time, so it was the same for everyone.

A map does something similar. It represents space in a universally recognisable way.

The sociologist Anthony Giddens calls this the separation of time and space.

Clocks, maps, rulers, and calendars mean people can think more precisely about when and where, then share that information with others. It means you can communicate when and where in a way other people can understand.

What’s significant about this? We can plan with each other. We can synchronise our activities.

For the pre-moderns, planning and synchronisation were difficult. You could roughly say when the sun is at its highest, or where it will be four days from now, but these modern inventions were a game changer.

They make time and location communicable, universalisable, and standardised.

As clocks were developed, medieval merchants began using them in town squares with bells to call others to market or laborers to work.

Medieval cartographers had been more interested in experiencing locations from many angles so that they could get a feel for an area to depict a location ‘truthfully’. Ratios and measurements weren’t important.

Only with the Enlightenment do we find a concern with a single ‘objective’ perspective. An ordered grid and a specific ratio meant coordinates could be fixed in place and distances accurately measured. This was the period when the Mercator map – the world map as we know it today – was first produced.

Military leaders paid fortunes for accurate maps. An author said that Rockefeller ‘bent over a map and with military precision [planning] the capture of strategic locations on the map of East Coast oil refineries’.

Balloon travel and photography of the earth from the air shattered people’s subjective perceptions of the world. Radio compressed time and space so that people everywhere could listen to the same thing.

As time and space compressed in on itself, Flaubert became fascinated by the implications for art, writing, ‘everything should sound simultaneously, one should hear the bellowing of the cattle, the whispering of the lovers, and the rhetoric of the officials all at the same time’.

The cartographers, explorers, colonisers, and printers of the Enlightenment produced maps on a massive scale. The British Navy won the battle to define time zones. Like the clockmakers, they removed a place from its physical place and represented it so that it was communicable. Our modern understanding of history, with dates and times, is also only possible if we can communicate those dates and times to one another in a universally agreed way.

These things, more than anything else, allow us to understand one another and plan. I can only organise transport and building if I can communicate times of arrival, and point to where we should meet. Trains only make sense if I know what time they’re leaving and when they’re coming back.

What does this mean for our modern attitude? We think more long term, in standard measurements that we must learn, and we do this in tandem with others.

Giddens uses another phrase to describe this: the disembodying of social systems.

These time and space tools means we can organise things with people that we wouldn’t be able to without.

We can say this should happen, there, at that time. We should plan activity – plan to do something – at that point. After the hands on the clock have spun around this many times.

Before we could only do this in the village with people we knew – meet me at the oak tree tomorrow morning.

But the time and space tools lift activity from the immediate social context; they dissembled us.

Giddens writes: ‘the level of time-space distinction is much higher than in any previous period, and the relations between local and distant social forms and events become correspondingly “stretched.”’

I can communicate to someone half way around the world that I’ve never met the exact time and place to meet anywhere else and at any other time.

What does this mean for our modern attitude? We think more globally, we can think about planning with more people.

How is money similar to clocks, maps, timetables and calendars, and other disembedding tools? Well, in the same way, money is disembedded from time and place. It’s an abstraction.

Imagine a world with no money. A farmer friend gives you some meat and you register that he did you a favour. This involves trust. It involves knowing the person. It involves being local. This dynamic falls apart with strangers.

Money depersonalises.

However, like time and location, it requires standardisation. Everyone needs to be reading from the same script, understand the system, have trust that everyone will accept the currency.

What does this mean for our modern attitude? We no longer think in terms of value of people, but filter everything through money.

Okay, so we’re focusing a lot on abstraction; using symbols, tokens, plans or machines to represent time, space, and value so that we can standardise, communicate and plan together.

We all use abstract systems. When you get on a plane, not only are you reliant on clocks and timings and maps and money, but there are a whole system of plans and blueprints that go on behind the scenes in the booking systems, the engines, the control towers.

In fact, everyone makes use of experts, relying on what they do without asking too many questions. Professionals – lawyers, architects, doctors, pilots – are consulted by ‘laypeople’.

I might understand and communicate some of the phenomena that allow me to fly across the world, but abstract systems quickly become complex. I know what time the plane leaves, I know it uses engines, I know where on the map I’m going.

But the pilot knows the exact path, the airport knows the take off schedule, the engineer understands the blueprint for the engine.

Pre-moderns are experts in their locations – everyone shares a general knowledge base, there is no need for specialists. I am an expert in my own house. However, I know little about the building codes that built it, the medicine the doctor prescribed me.

Whether we’re getting on a plane or investing in a pension or using a bridge, making a phone call or turning on the tap, they’re all developed by abstraction, by professionals who know more than us, and require us to accept that they just work.

What does this mean? It means modernity requires faith, requires trust in people we don’t know. It also requires us to always be learning. To choose an expert system to contribute to, to be the person in the know about. Because not everyone can learn everything, it requires choice.

It also means that it’s not the individual that matters, but the overall routine, the set of processes, the abstract system. Getting on a plane is to take part in an activity that requires engineers, mining, weather predictions, food, suitcase production, coordination between countries. Everything is taken out of the hands of any one single individual or group. Our lives become truly global in that one thing on one side of the world effects many things on the other. Global events effect local events – we’re pulled around like puppets.

Giddens writes: ‘The most intimate – say, nursing a child – and the most distant, most general – say a reactor accident in the Ukraine, energy politics – are now suddenly directly connected’.

It also effects what we think about, what we read in the news, what our conversations are.

Giddens says: ‘When the image of Nelson Mandela may be more familiar to us than the face of our next-door neighbour, something has changed in the nature of our everyday experience’.

You can be closer to a person on the phone on the other side of the world than you are to the person in the same room not talking you.

What happens when these disembedding tools and abstract systems become complex? What happens when building a house is no longer as simple as finding local stones and building a shelter? Things start to require specialised knowledge, knowledge we don’t all have. This requires trusting that someone else knows what they’re doing. Trust is integral to modern life.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes trust as, ‘confidence in or reliance on some quality or attribute of a person or thing, or the truth of a statement’.

In fact, trust is everywhere. Cars, traffic lights, medicine, food, television, internet, taps, drugs; none of us know how every part of these things work. Even doctors don’t know how pharmaceuticals are produced.

But what’s the other side of trust? Risk.

Trust always involves risk, it’s weighing up the risks and trusting that the outcome is worth the small risk in placing the procedure in someone else’s hands.

Like our disembedding tools and systems, trust involves an absence from local tradition. The person or the process is not always there in front of you, things are going on behind the scenes, where you can’t monitor them.

We have no real idea what’s going on with our money when we put it in a bank or a pension fund, but we trust that the professionals know what they’re doing.

Flying seems ridiculous, impossible, scary, but we trust that the airlines and pilots understand what’s going on more than we do.

Modernity means we must interact, more than ever, with strangers. Giddens says that, ‘the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems’.

He continues that, ‘Codes of professional ethics, in some cases backed by legal sanctions, form one means whereby the trustworthiness of colleagues or associates is internally managed’.

We trust professionals to manage every part of our lives – haircuts, providing food, providing us with news and entertainment – yet if this trust is broken, for whatever reason, we might choose to keep our money under the mattress or drink bottled water or cut our own hair.

The idea of risk as we know it is a very modern one. It was first used by European explorers navigating the globe and thinking about insurance and profit. Book-keeping was integral, weighing up costs and predicting gains. Risk became central in banking, investment and insurance, using mathematical modelling to think about probability and uncertainty.

Traditional society was full of danger and unpredictability, but their idea of risk was very different. Traditional societies were circular, the seasons repeated in the same way. Modern society, on the other hand, is about moving towards something, improving, picking goals. That means choosing which risks to accept, who to trust, which systems to use.

Think about something as simple as choosing which job offer to accept. There are so many unknowns about the people, the ways they work, what tools and software they use. In every choice, there are elements of weighing up which risks are smaller and what the relative gains might be. Modern life is a huge pros and cons list.

We are no longer only affected by things in the neighbourhood but by things half way around the world.

Okay, let’s recap quickly.

We use disembedding tools like clocks and rulers: we think more long term, in standard measurements we must learn, and we do this in tandem with others. We think more globally, we can think about planning with more people. This all helps us plan with others.

We no longer think about swapping with or helping neighbours but filter our relationships through money.

We rely on disembedded abstract systems. These are sets of plans and rules and processes and blueprints that are professionalised, in, for example, the architecture profession or the air travel profession.

Finally, this requires trust and risk. It means modernity requires a faith in all of this. We leave it to the experts, who might, if asked, communicate to us why we should use their services and ‘trust’ them.

So how does this determine our attitude and psychology?

Let’s return to our traditional life.

What does it mean to be traditional? As we’ve seen it means accepting the routine and experience of previous generations, tilling the field in the same way, in a way that’s embedded into time and space around you, in your immediate surroundings. Social life is dominated by that simple circular process.

But modern life is based, at its heart, on improvement, getting better, trying to progress. For our attitudes and psychologies it requires constant reflection, or reflexivity, examining, interpreting, absorbing new information. It requires choosing, based on calculations – whether subconscious or not – which expert systems to use and trust, and also which ones to join, to get a qualification in, to specialise in.

Okay, but is this all there is? Modern life also seems to be chaotic, unpredictable, an anxiety-inducing age.

Giddens also refers to a concept he calls ontological security.

That is the confidence people have in the continuity and consistency of their self-identity. The reliability of the systems, codes, people, and ideas around them. The security they feel getting on a plane, choosing a bank, trusting the news, deciding on a career. Who am I? When will the nuclear bomb hit? Is this job secure? Is this vaccine safe? Will this plane crash? Will my pension plan appreciate?

These questions are bound up in trust. If the choices we make around us seem to work out, we seem to become happier or progress in some way – we have ontological security.

What’s the opposite of this, though? Angst? Dread? Ambiguity? Undecidability?

Our faith in these modern ideas relies somewhat on someone being in control, knowing what they’re doing, having a plan.

Do you feel that’s the case?

Maybe we’re not modern at all. Maybe we’re postmodern?

Sources

Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity

Anthony Giddens, Runaway World

Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity

Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity’s Discontents

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity