We are all modernisers today. We have no idea what being modern means. But we are sure that it guarantees us a future.
For nineteenth-century Positivists, modernity meant a new version of medievalism – a hierarchical technocracy in which science replaced religion; for Marx and the Webbs it meant an economy without markets or private property; for Francis Fukuyama, it meant a worldwide free market and universal liberal democracy. Each of these quite different visions has been seen as the very essence of modernity. All have proved to be fantasies.
We think of modernity as an idea in the social sciences, when actually it is the last hiding place of ‘morality’. Believers in modernity are convinced that – natural disasters apart – history is on the side of Enlightenment values. After all, that is what being modern means, is it not?
In fact, there are many ways of being modern, and many of failing to be. It is not for nothing that a number of the Expressionists were among Nazism’s early supporters, or that Oswald Mosley gave press interviews seated behind a black steel Futurist desk. The Nazis were committed to a revolutionary transformation of European life. For them, becoming modern meant racial conquest and genocide. Any society that systematically uses science and technology to achieve its goals is modern. Death camps are as modern as laser surgery.
A feature of the idea of modernity is that the future of mankind is always taken to be secular. Nothing in history has ever supported this strange notion. Secularisation has occurred in a few European countries such as England, Sweden and Italy. There is no sign of it in the United States. Among Islamic countries, only Turkey has a well-entrenched secular state; in most others fundamentalism is on the rise. In India, Hindu nationalism has eroded the secular state. In China and Japan, where the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic idea of religion has never been accepted, secularism is practically meaningless. Despite these facts, twenty-first-century modernisers talk in the dated accents of Marx and the Positivists, nineteenth-century Europeans who mistook their parochial hopes for universal historical laws.
Theories of modernisation are cod-scientific projections of Enlightenment values. They tell us nothing about the future. But they do help us to understand the present. They show the lingering power of the Christian faith that history is a moral drama, a tale of progress or redemption, in which – despite everything we know of it – morality rules the world.