By Dr. Charles N. Steele

But before we start cheering, a few words on the topic. 

Modernity is a valuable philosophical framework—a mindset, if you like. It lies between the premodern and the postmodern. Yet what is modernity, exactly?

It begins with epistemology. Modernity’s position on epistemology implies something for moral values and ultimately about metaphysics—the fundamental nature of the world.

Modernity recognizes reason as the tool of cognition. It’s how we know, and how we distinguish that which is from that which is not. Reason involves logic, including identifying first principles and deducing from them. It also involves the empirical: observing and systematically learning from what we have observed.  

Modernity holds that knowledge must be justified. It cannot be forced to a predetermined conclusion, but requires freedom to operate. Reason occurs in the mind—and the only minds we have are the minds of individual human beings. It is the capacity of an individual man or woman. Thinking is done by the individual, and no one else—not by a collective tribe or nation.  

So, modernity first values the individual, not the collective, and in particular defends the individual mind from compulsion by the collective or by other individuals claiming to speak for the collective or for God. 

Freedom of thought and speech are distinctly modern moral principles. This focus on the individual and freedom of the individual is a corollary of modernist epistemology. The recognition that slavery is a deep evil is a modern conclusion—not found in premodern or postmodern thought. 

What we learn from this modernist approach is that the world is bound by laws. Reality is objective and intelligible if we study its elements (including ourselves). But we cannot know everything; our knowledge is imperfect. This uncertainty is abhorrent to the premodern mentality, while objective knowledge is abhorrent to the postmodern. 

Contributors to modernity include a list of intellectual heroes like Machiavelli, Da Vinci, Galileo, Samuel Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Robert Hooke, Newton, Locke, and Hume. But there are many others, like Aristotle and Plato who taught the primacy of reason, and Aquinas and his followers who developed their arguments. 

The list especially includes the Torah, which begins with individual choice, agency, and responsibility. It also includes scholars of the East, like Confucius, and India’s earliest writers display modernist thought as well, according to the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. And it includes Jesus Christ, who speaks to the individual—to each person—not with force but with argument, limiting Himself by each person’s free agency: one can choose to accept and follow Him, or not. 

Critics of modernity will point out that these heroes disagree with one another on a multitude of points. It’s true—but should we insist on unanimity? This is impossible by the very nature of modernity’s epistemological project.

Finite individual minds, free to observe and to reason, have limited and distributed knowledge. There will be differences and disputes. There will be uncertainty. This disturbs the pre-and-postmodernists, who desire single, unified doctrine and can tolerate no dissent.

It is sometimes said that the move from premodernity to modernity was the replacement of mythos with logos. That is not a bad way of putting it. For premodernity, correct belief is doctrine accepted on authority, rather than knowledge justified by reason. Postmodernity, on the other hand, is a wholesale rejection of reason. Friedrich Nietzche was a great pioneer in this, yet offers nothing to replace it except nihilism and universal skepticism. This is embodied in Critical Theory, which deconstructs, criticizes, and condemns everything, elevating a radical subjectivism in which language and truth are social constructs and tools of oppression by which one group rules another.

Both pre-and-postmodernism reject individualism. It is sometimes said (mostly by premodernists) that postmodernism offers an extreme individualism and illustrates why individualism should be rejected. The claim is made because the postmodern view denies any objective moral standards or even objective metaphysical reality, and purports to unshackle the individual from them. They claim, for example, that there are as many genders as you can imagine. But this is farcical individualism that denies freedom of thought and discourse, demanding conformity, as Herbert Marcuse also says. The connection between the pre-and-postmodern is illustrated by the South American doctrine of Buen Vivir, enshrined in the Ecuadorian constitution, which combines allegedly traditional Amerindian tribal philosophy with postmodern criticism of capitalism and individual rights.

Why then should we cheer for modernity against these contenders? 

Well, human freedom and flourishing is at stake. Only with modernism is slavery revealed to be the great evil it is. Only from modernism can we really understand the various aspects of this world.

Science—our means of knowledge of the external world—and technology—our discovery of ways to use this knowledge to help shape the external world—and capitalism—our system for discovering and advancing ways to devote these to serving human purposes—are all fruits of modernity.  

“Science—our means of knowledge of the external world—and technology—our discovery of ways to use this knowledge to help shape the external world—and capitalism—our system for discovering and advancing ways to devote these to serving human purposes—are all fruits of modernity.”

Modernity is often accused of placing the material above the spiritual. Yet the fruits of modernity have lowered child mortality from the 50% of the premodern world to under 1% in the most advanced nations. Maternal death from childbirth has decreased by orders of magnitude.  The premodernist romanticizes an imaginary period in the past when everything was ‘better’. 

When was it? The time of Aristotle, before his emphasis on reason could take root and blossom (say 400 B.C.?) when the Earth sustained a population of only one-tenth of a billion?  Or perhaps the time of Aquinas, before his natural theology could work its mischief, with Earth supporting only half a billion? In the modern era, the Earth now sustains eight billion souls, better fed with less abject poverty than any time in history. 

Under modernity, mankind has thrived to the point where postmodernists debate whether man is a parasite on the Earth or an infection of it. We are neither, of course. But possibly we may not be restricted to Earth if pre-or-postmodern mindsets do not derail us.

This is really what is at stake, and it’s why I celebrate modernity. I hate poverty—it does not elevate people’s souls to be chronically hungry or helpless in the face of disease. I value the survival of women and children, and I rejoice in the collapse of child and maternal mortality. The advance of science and knowledge is thrilling, and man’s potential to become an interplanetary species is riveting. This is individual freedom and human flourishing coming to fruition—and it is for these reasons I give three cheers for modernity.

Three cheers for modernity!

If you agree, please join me in hip, hip, hooray!