2.2: What is Modernity?
Lead scholar-producer: Ryan McDermott
I: What is Modernity? [0.00-7:07]
Ryan McDermott: What does it mean to be modern? In the previous episode, we saw how Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries used mountain climbing to define themselves as modern. But we also saw how humans have been enjoying mountains and climbing them for far longer than these Europeans realized. What made their attitude about mountain climbing modern was not the act itself, but the way they thought of themselves as modern in contrast to previous generations. In this episode, we’ll delve further into the various ways people claim to be modern and what’s at stake when they do.
So how about now? I took a microphone around the University of Pittsburgh and asked students what it means to them to be modern.
Alison: Hi, my name's Alison. And I think that being modern means living in this interconnected interdependent society that is almost completely reliant on technology.
Mark: I'm Mark. Used to read like a lot of Marx, so he would give an economic answer, separation from the land and separation from means of production.
Dominic: My name is Dominic. I think to be modern is kind of a search for identity in itself. It's like being prodigal, kind of a sojourner within your own culture. And I think the West who has largely defined maternity could probably trace this search back to the Protestant Reformation and after that, the Enlightenment, where everything is just constantly turning in and against the culture. And that division has kind of gone all the way down to the individual, where they can no longer identify with the structures around them.
Student: I feel like, I mean, it definitely is colonialism, clash of cultures, exposure to different ideas?
Susanna: My name's Susanna. And to me, being modern entails being both more connected and more disconnected than at any prior point in human history.
Student: Sufis communities in the 12th century. There's such a collective belief, everyone, it’s just implied you believe in God, you believe in Allah. It's like even people that are disagreeing with that, it's so implied, I don't know, there's different answers in terms of how secularization came apart and stuff, economic or whatever, scientific.
Keshav: My name's Keshav. And I think to be modern is to seek convenience even when it's not necessary. You know, everything has Bluetooth now. Headphones don't necessarily need to be wireless. So I think that's sort of the way that things are going now, for better or for worse.
Ryan McDermott: Wow. That was a wide variety of answers. One person defined modernity in terms of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of global capitalism. Another talked about secularization: the move from a world in which the existence of a spiritual realm felt obvious to a world in which faith is one option among many. Others talked about quite recent technological inventions.
One thing all of these accounts have in common, though, is that they use the word ‘modern’ as a marker of time. “Modernity” marks a difference between then and now, before and after; a dividing line on the timeline of history where one era ends and another decisively new era begins. If industrial society is modern, for example, then preindustrial society is premodern. But of course, each of these accounts draws that line in a slightly different place. If there’s some truth to each of them, then ‘modernity’ is a phenomenon with many facets and layers—not one event with one clear starting point.
The term "modern" does indicate a difference between now and then. But the difference doesn’t simply have to do with time—whether we’re living before or after that dividing line in history. It has to do with our experience of the world. Bluetooth and colonialism and secularization—these all have to do with some novel quality of our experience.
We use the term “modern” to express our sense that we are inhabiting a time in history that – to our minds – feels markedly different from the times that came before. But people were also expressing this sense back in the “ancient” or “premodern” world—in cultures that existed more than a millennium ago!
We can trace the word itself back to the Latin modernus, which we find as early as the year 490. In the 550s, the Roman intellectual Cassiodorus was engaging in what we might call “modernity talk.” He drew an explicit contrast between modern times and the olden days, meaning everything before the fall of the Roman empire.
[04:55]
In many senses, the present is radically different from the past. But one way in which we are not different from our ancestors is in our constant talk about how different we are. “Modernity talk” is a way of thinking that goes back centuries. It’s also a way of thinking that carries certain dangers. Here’s Michael Puett, a scholar we’ll be hearing more from in a moment:
Michael Puett: We are living in a world created by things that existed in the past. The world is absolutely haunted. To give an obvious example, is America haunted by its horrible racist past? Of course it is, horribly, and if one doesn't accept that and then work with it, you face the grave danger, which in America we faced repeatedly, of simply ignoring it and allowing it to continue. Now, my critique there would be to say the past always haunts us.
Ryan McDermott: Humans have always asked, how are we different? How are we modern? But just because we live further along the historical timeline doesn’t mean we’re separate from the things that happened further back. In this series, we invite you to set aside that chronological notion of “modernity” as a point on the timeline. We invite you to think instead about the kind of experience that the word “modern” is meant to reflect. And we ask how to deal with this fact that modernity talk denies, that we are always haunted by the past.
Ryan McDermott: Welcome to Genealogies of Modernity. I’m your host, Ryan McDermott. In this episode, we hear the story of how several ancient Chinese rulers laid claims to modernity. These centuries-old stories help us understand what is at stake when we think of ourselves as modern. We see how modernity talk claims to overcome history but also threatens to lock us into the patterns of our history – not resolving our past errors but repeating them. Finally, we look forward to some new ways of thinking that help us redress the past precisely by inviting us to dive more deeply into it.
II: Modernity in Ancient China [7:07-18:55]
Michael Puett: Hello, I am Michael Puett. So I work on Chinese history, Chinese religions, Chinese anthropology, and among my interests is to try to rethink a lot of our understandings of the world, our understandings of history, our understandings of ethical and political theory, if we take the Chinese experience and materials from the Chinese past.
Ryan McDermott: Michael is going to take us back almost exactly 2,200 years.
Michael Puett: So Empire arrives in China literally in 221 BCE.
Ryan McDermott: To put this in perspective, this is a century after the death of Alexander the Great. At this point in the Mediterranean, the Roman Republic had expanded to control most of modern-day Italy and was clashing with Carthage in the Punic Wars for control of the Mediterranean basin (that's when Hannibal famously crossed the sea and the Alps with elephants).
So while Rome was building an empire, Empire arrived in China in 221 BCE:
Michael Puett: And the reason for that specific date is one state, called the state of Qin, successfully defeated the other states of what was then China. And when it defeated them, the ruler, instead of simply saying, “I'm going to begin another dynasty” explicitly, on the contrary, said, “I'm going to break from the past.”
So previously there had been three dynasties and had he simply begun another dynasty. He would be the beginning of the fourth dynasty, and he would've called himself a king. He would have sacrificed to his ancestors who would hopefully support him in maintaining the dynasty. On the contrary, he said, “I will not take the title of King because I am greater than any of the kings in the three dynasties period. In fact, I am breaking the entire dynastic cycle. I am going to completely destroy the past. I am beginning a completely new era. In this new era, I am proclaiming myself the first emperor.”
Ryan McDermott: Of course, "Emperor" is the English translation of the Roman "Imperator," and it's particularly associated with the Roman rulers who claimed divine status under the title "Augustus," starting with Octavian in 27 BC. But Michael says the parallel to the Qin First Emperor is actually helpful.
Michael Puett: A more literal translation would be, I am the first August, God, my descendant will be the second after that, the third for 10,000 generations. In other words, there will not be a diagnostic cycle. This new empire, the Qin, will last forever.
[10:04]
Ryan McDermott: If your empire is going to last forever, there will be no more history. Because history is all about change. And if there will be no more history, then you have no need for the past. In fact, the past would only get in the way. We're going to hear about two ways to make a claim to modernity. This is the first one: you claim that the past was irrelevant because you have now mastered the vicissitudes of life and have established an eternal order that is immune to change. We can call this an "end-of-history" claim.
Michael Puett: So when the first Emperor tries to create this new system, it again is based upon a claim of complete rejection of the past, meaning, among other things, he has said to have burned the books of antiquity, so you literally could not even learn about the past, to emphasize that this was going to be a new era.
Ryan McDermott: And how long do you think this new era actually lasted? A hundred years? Two hundred years?
Michael Puett: Sadly for him, that did not quite come to pass. In fact, the Great Qin Empire fell very soon thereafter, less than 20 years thereafter, another Civil War emerges. A ragtag group eventually wins the ensuing civil war and proclaims a new ruling power called the Han, certainly not as powerful as the Qin was. It did rule, but in a great deal of instability, for quite a bit of time until you get to the second century, Before the Common Era. And a very young emperor, he was about thirteen, comes to the throne. His name is Emperor Wu.
Ryan McDermott: And now we come to our second modernity moment—our second way of claiming to be modern.
Michael Puett: And Emperor Wu decides to keep the title of Emperor, as you can see by the fact that we're calling him Emperor Wu.
So he is explicitly saying, I will continue this new Imperial era that the Qin introduced, but unlike the Qin claim, that I will completely wipe out the past, which, at least according to Emperor Wu, was one of the reasons that Qin failed to gain the support of the population, he, on the contrary, said, I am going to actively build in the great things of the past into this new empire. Most significantly, he actually began the process of bringing Confucians to court who were scholars of the text associated with Confucius, which were calling on people to return to the last of these three dynasties, the Bronze Age dynasty called the Western Zhou Dynasty and Emperor Wu’s move here is basically to say, I'm going to both continue the Empire of the Qin, and I will do so by building upon the past, integrating the past into this new modern world.
And there, I might add, his success was extraordinary. Now, he also claimed he was going to create an empire that would last forever. He didn't, but he did create an empire that lasted for four centuries. It became the model for all of the later empires. This was seen as an extraordinarily successful empire, and in that sense, that new vision became the basis for much of later Chinese political theory and political institutions.
Ryan McDermott: When Han Emperor Wu came to power, he thought that the First Emperor had made a mistake to try to erase the past. He saw that it would be a stronger move to claim the best parts of the past for the new era he was founding. But how do you go about claiming the past? How do you get history on your side? One way is to write a very big book.
Michael Puett: So when the emperor, Emperor Wu, is consolidating the first Emperor's Creations, and trying to, instead of rejecting the past, but claiming to be building upon and fully integrating absolutely everything in the past, right at the moment this is going on, his uncle compiles this massive encyclopedia. It's a text called the Huainanzi, and it purports to be an encyclopedia of all possible knowledge, and if that sounds extravagant, it goes much further. The claim is we are going to pull together everything that has ever been thought and build it into a single system to show where it fits in, and to show as well that we, the authors, and by implication the Liu clan who is now running the Empire, we understand how everything fits together.
[15:18]
Ryan McDermott: Wait a second, I thought encyclopedias were a modern invention. Wasn't the first encyclopedia compiled by the French Enlightenment philosophers in the 1750s and 60s?
Well, Michael Puett sees profound parallels between the ancient Chinese encyclopedia and European Enlightenment philosophy. In the early 1800s, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel tried to systematize all of world history and culture. His goal was to show how what he called the world spirit was progressively working toward ultimate freedom and peace. Puett compares Hegel and the Huainanzi:
Michael Puett: If we're looking for other examples of things like this in world history, let me give an obvious one. So right at the beginning of what in Europe would be a self-proclaimed emergence of modernity, you get figures like, say, Hegel. And the Huainanzi reads a lot like Hegel. Hegel’s move is basically to say, I am going to build these encyclopedias that will explain the entire development of everything leading up to and, most importantly, culminating in the current moment.
And this is what the Huainanzi is claiming for Emperor Wu's reign. This is a final culmination of all possible knowledge and the culmination, meaning we just from now on will live in this culmination. It's a perfect end-of-history argument.
Ryan McDermott: Not all modernity talk asserts such a radical break with the past. We saw at the top of the episode that a milder, humbler kind of modernity talk simply recognizes certain profound differences of experience between the present and the past. But here Puett is identifying two ways to equate modernity with, essentially, the end of history. The Qin First Emperor wanted to do it by erasing the past. By contrast, the Han Emperor Wu and Hegel claim that the modern moment has mastered and sums up the totality of the past. You can either end history by negating it, or you can end history by containing its every possibility. And if we can comprehend all of history, including all of the conflicts and violence of history, then we can move beyond the wars that tore apart dynastic China and 17th and 18th-century Europe and establish an age of changeless, perpetual peace.
Michael Puett: He's saying, We ought to have achieved this and had no subsequent two centuries of wars in the early 19th century. We didn't. So in essence, what he's saying to his readers is stop trying to rethink things. Stop trying to question the world. Stop trying to come up with new isms, accept that we really have reached the end of history. And if you accept it, the wars will finally be over. And that I think is what's so intriguing about these modernity claims, and I think that's in essence what the Huainanzi was trying to do, too. It's trying to say don't fight anymore, don't have ideological battles anymore, don't have actual wars anymore, accept that Emperor Wu is now presiding over the final integration of everything.
III: Back to Modernity Theory [18:55-24:10]
Ryan McDermott: Strong modernity claims like Hegel’s and Emperor Wu’s can be quite attractive: if only we could just overcome history and put the conflicts and suffering of the past behind us! And even if that’s not possible–and you can count me a skeptic–there’s certainly a lot of truth in the modernity talk we heard at the top of the episode. The past isdifferent from the present, in so many ways. It’s legitimate to speak the language of modernity. But there are limits to the usefulness of modernity talk. Let me give you an example:
I work in a Gothic skyscraper called the Cathedral of Learning. Parts of the building resemble a medieval European cathedral. But it’s also 40 stories tall, which would be impossible to achieve without steel, a very recent invention. In 2023, I walk corridors built a century ago modeled on monastic cloisters built a millennium before that.
The Cathedral of Learning is a great image of how the past occupies the present and the present occupies the past. It gives the lie to that common conception of time we often fall into, the conception of time as purely linear.
[20:06]
Michael Puett: There are many ways of constructing the past and one of the most dangerous ones is the one that has sadly become, and tellingly so, completely predominant in this self-proclaimed modern world we're living in, which as you said, is one of absolute chronology based upon a linear conception of time, which means by definition we can't learn anything from the premodern period, right? By definition, that's in the traditional past. It might be, again, fascinating and intriguing from an exotic perspective, but things have simply changed so much.
Ryan McDermott: Think about those timelines in your middle school social studies classroom. The timeline tells us that the Qin First Emperor is a long way away in linear time from the construction of the Cathedral of Learning in 1929. But the timeline obscures how it is that I can sit in my office in the Cathedral of Learning and learn from the Qin First Emperor. Linear time reduces everything to pure chronology. It’s unidirectional. You can only go forward, never back, and one point on the timeline can never meet with an earlier point—or learn something from it.
Michael Puett: So we've seen already two versions of modernity, which, as we'll see momentarily, share a great deal, but they have slightly different ways of dealing with genealogy in the past. So the one model is the one we've seen in China with the First Emperor, which is the claim that everything that existed before I'm going to reject. So, I am greater than the past. Everything that existed before is lesser and indeed really should be destroyed.
Now, that's being said by the First Emperor, but of course, this is a very typical move that's made in 19th, 20th to now 21st century Euro-American thought, where the claim there is we are living in a modern world. We have completely broken from the past. The past is something we will call tradition. Insofar as it is tradition, it's nothing we could actually learn from. Right? We can put an Egyptian mummy in a museum and it's nice and exotic, but we're not gonna learn anything from it. And that's often how we tend to think of as tradition. So we don't literally burn the books, but we have rendered the books being something that we can learn nothing from. So we have broken from it.
Ryan McDermott: Even in a liberal society that frowns on book burning, there are other ways to render the past inert. The second approach to modernity doesn't try to forget the past, but it assumes we can totally encompass the past, keeping whatever is good, discarding whatever was bad, relaunch a society that includes none of the conflicts or troubles of past ages.
Michael Puett: Now, I would say it is also dangerous, the second form of modernity that we have seen in the Huainanzi and Emperor Wu, looking back to China. So again, beginning with China, what we've seen with the Huainanzi is not a rejection of the past, but rather a statement that we totally and completely control the past and we can build a single narrative genealogy that explains everything precisely by giving everything that happened in the past its proper place subordinate to us, and, when it was a good thing in the past, leading to us.
So there you're in a sense, seemingly taking the past more seriously, but you're not really. You're thinking of the past only as being, at best, a good precursor to modernity. Anything that is not, you render to a lesser level. So you seem to be taking history more seriously, but I would argue, no, you really are not taking it seriously at all.
IV: Hauntings and Humility [24:10-31:55]
Ryan McDermott: Museums have glass cases and signs warning you not to touch the artifacts. To the contrary, Puett says, touch the artifacts! Get involved! Establish relationships with the past! Puett’s inspired by ancient Chinese ideas about what happens to us after we die, and how the living relate to the dead. Because in ancient Chinese religion, the ancestors might be dead, but their spirits are still active in our world.
In ancient China, when you die, your spirit is released to deal with all the things you couldn't resolve in this life. As a newly deceased spirit, you might be confused, vindictive or rash and you forget that you are the parent to your children. These are the spirits that haunt houses. This is the stuff of horror movies. The people who are still living have to figure out how to deal with you. They need to get you on their side. This is the purpose of the rituals of ancestor worship—visiting the graves of the dead, leaving food for them, burning incense for them, and so on.
Michael Puett: In China, the concern is that you're trying to deal with a series of highly capricious spirits. So this can include recently deceased humans who can become very dangerous ghosts, actively angry at us, jealous at us for going on with our lives, and exactly as you said, our goal with ritual is to try to connect with them. So to try to connect with them, making them into ancestors that will be supportive of us for the very distant spirits above trying to make them into gods and goddesses who will be supportive. So if this is successful—and of course it's never seen as being successful for too long—but when it's successful, you create a world of genealogical continuity where all of these potentially dangerous and capricious powers become related to us in these deep lines of genealogy.
Ryan McDermott: We can learn from this disposition to the past in order to avoid the pitfalls of those two attitudes about modernity we identified in Chinese imperial history: the idea that we can erase the past, and the idea that we can master it.
Michael Puett: So let's begin with this ritual theory that says, you said, dealing with, wrestling with these dangerous ghosts. If I personally don't happen to believe in ghosts, and my students don't happen to personally believe in ghosts themselves, can we learn anything from this? And the answer is absolutely. I mean, what they often mean by ghosts are the things that haunt us. So, you know Confucius, even as a famous statement where a disciple says, “So do these spirits actually exist?” And this answer is, “I have no idea. But you do the rituals as if they're present, meaning who knows? But that's not the question. It's the work you're doing with the past that matters.” And therefore, how would we do it? Well, Let's do the same things that they are trying to do ritually and ask ourselves, what would it mean to do that in the modern world?
Ryan McDermott: These are obviously huge questions. Answering them will require looking at the past from lots of different perspectives, through lots of different lenses. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do here. This podcast draws on the insights of literary scholars, art historians, philosophers, theologians, just plain historians, and others to help us see more clearly how the past is still with us, and how we might work with the past to repair its wrongs and discover new resources for flourishing in the future. Doing that work might require some new kinds of modernity talk—the kind that can be genuinely liberating. It will also require rejecting other kinds of modernity talk, the kind that claims to have totally mastered the past. And rejecting those claims will require one more thing: a different disposition in ourselves. To cultivate this understanding of the past as radically different from us, but also still with us and shaping us–that requires the disposition of humility.
Michael Puett: I think part of what comes with modernity talk is this incredible self-assertion that can be incredibly dangerous. It comes with the hubris that I can dominate the past, I can reject the past, I can… and a lot of our claims of individualism, et cetera, come out of that. And yes, I think humility is part of the ethics of trying to push against that. Because again, we need to know these are constructions. Every construction we give is going to be dangerous, and we need to have the humility to realize that instead of being proud of our constructions, to realize, no, I'm constructing something that might actually be incredibly dangerous. And to have the humility to see the dangers that you're actively a part of creating.
Ryan McDermott: Now, we don't hear a lot about humility in the humanities these days, and that’s understandable, because one of the chief motivators for scholars is to expose the machinations of power and to critique oppressive structures. Humility must mean deferring to authority, right? It seems like the opposite of questioning authority.
[29:48]
Michael Puett: Part of what I find so powerful about Confucian thinking, and this is equally true, by the way, of Daoist thinking, is their view of humility is precisely about changing the world. And so it's often, as you said, misread as meaning just accept the world as it's given. Actually, it's all about changing the world. It's all about training you to change the world. But the argument is if you try to change the world in this overly strong, aggressive way, you probably will either be utterly unsuccessful or you'll be successful for a brief period, but then there'll be such resentment against you it will undermine everything you're trying to do.
So to give an example, the Laozi will use terminology like you're trying to learn to lead by seemingly following, you're seemingly doing nothing, and yet everything is being done and what they mean. And what they mean by this, you know, Confucius will say, Xun just sat still and the world became ordered around him, he literally did nothing, which is what Laozi is playing on. And what both of these are getting at is to say you are leading, but the way you're leading is not the typical western management style, “I'm the powerful one here, follow me,” which only builds resentment over the long run. It's rather, you're changing by connecting with people and shifting patterns, altering trajectories. And humility is the key part of that, because only if you're humble can you actually really make these connections, as opposed to the kind of self-aggrandizing, overt form of power and control, which, from this perspective—and I think it's often quite true over time—only breeds more discontinuity, resentment and often very intense anger. So actually, yeah, humility is all about learning how to really alter the world.
V: Conclusion [31:55-36:00]
Meredith Green: Hi, my name is Meredith Green. And I feel like to be modern is to be faced with the consequences of past generations’ choices. And also carry the burden of both coping with them and trying to do better.
Ryan McDermott: If we want to really alter the world, we have to recognize how the ghosts of our ancestors are still with us and, as Michael Puett suggests, we have to be humble enough to work with them.
Michael Puett: We are living in a world created by things that existed in the past. The world is absolutely haunted. To give obvious example, is America haunted by its horrible racist past? Of course it is, horribly. And if one doesn't accept that and then work with it, you face the grave danger, which in America we faced repeatedly, of simply ignoring it and allowing it to continue. What we are saying is, and I'll use again Chinese terminology, instead of trying to work with all of the ghosts that indeed are products of things humans have done, we will try to actively ignore them and claim that we've created this complete break. It's a new world. The past does not haunt us at all. Now, my critique there would be to say the past always haunts us.
Ryan McDermott: There is, in fact, a flip side of modernity thinking, a tool that offers powerful ways of recognizing how the past haunts us and how we might begin to work with its ghosts. That tool is genealogy.
In one sense, slavery was a profoundly effective modernity claim. It successfully cut off hundreds of thousands of people from their families and their pasts. But in the next episode, where we consider some of the legacies of slavery and racism in America, we see how genealogical thinking can help restore some of those ties and afford new ways to relate to the past and its wounds.
What makes genealogical thinking so powerful and so necessary is that it inherently challenges modernity thinking. Unlike linear timelines, genealogies help us visualize how the past remains in relation to the present. Wherever we encounter a modernity claim to a complete break with the past, genealogical thinking uncovers the “lineage” or “ancestry” of this phenomenon. It shows how it does descend from older phenomena and connects us, for better or worse, to the past. But genealogy also does more than keep us tied in to old patterns. It recognizes the possibility for change even as it avoids those false claims to have overcome the past entirely. And, as you’ll hear, a lesser-known use of genealogy is precisely to help us discover where those possibilities for change may be found—to help us recognize opportunities for reconciliations of past ruptures and for new relations of flourishing.
End
