Teaching Modernity

This article is the first in a series of responses to Episode 2.2 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.

In August 2023, Genealogies of Modernity hosted a colloquium to celebrate the second season of its podcast of the same name. The podcast and its associated publication showcase the plurality of conceptions of “modernity” that have existed throughout history around the world, challenging the idea that any one set of ideas and values can be definitively called “modern.”

In the colloquium’s keynote talk, Harvard historian Michael Puett explained that the paradigm of modernity perpetuates the myth that history has been an organized sequence of events that represent a linear progression, and that the age we are living in represents the most “progressive” of any that have occurred so far, just because it happens to be our present reality. He also pointed out that it may be the most unchallenged, and thus most subversive, assumption of our times, since nearly all his students believe it. He tasked those in attendance with figuring out how to convince specific audiences that “modernity” is a paradigm rather than a historical reality.

Zhou Fang, Court Ladies Adorning Their Hair with Flowers, 8th-9th century CE

Since I am a high school teacher, my mind gravitated toward how to sow the seeds of this idea into the minds of high school-age students. Social Science and English classes can point out the plurality of groups who have existed throughout history in every region claiming that their ideas are the most “modern.” This succeeds in showing students that people have disagreed on what it means to be “modern” over the years. However, it does not disrupt their fundamental assumption that the unfurling of history is linked to continuous progress, that the era they are living in is the real modern era, and that pre-existing groups simply didn’t know any better because they weren’t living in the students’ epoch.

To disrupt this assumption that “present-day” is synonymous with “modern,” students need to understand that anytime anybody calls anything “modern,” they are not really defining it as more recent than anything else, but rather making an evaluative claim that whatever they are calling “modern” is superior for some reason. The set of values and behaviors that are called “modern,” and the explanation given for why they are better, change depending on the historical context, motivations, and values of those who are engaging in the modernity discourse, but the ideological labor carried out at the discursive level is the same. The best way to show students how the term “modernity” is wielded in this way is to highlight the variety of lifestyles that exist parallel to each other in the same era, making it impossible to argue that any of them could be more “modern” because they have occurred more recently in history. Eliminating this rationale then underscores the remaining reasons, which are ideological, for why people consider one way of life more “modern” than another. In my Chinese classes, I created an activity to convey this idea that could be adapted to any high school World Language, English, or Social Science class, as well as to undergraduate Humanities and Social Science courses.

First, I gave the students a survey of ten questions. Each question presented them with two images, and they had to decide which was more “modern.” I picked pairings that I thought would lead to rich discussion and which were also mostly related to the East-West cultural divide we discuss so frequently in our class, such as a white man in a Western business suit versus an Asian woman in a qipao and a modern Japanese-style house versus a modern Colonial-style house. I also included some examples that were not relevant to our class themes, such as a group of Amish people in comparison to a math teacher in a tailored shirt and slacks.

Shen Zhou, Poet on a Mountaintop

Then, we discussed their answers. Most of them initially agreed that the more Western-style product in every response was the more “modern” of the two options. But then I asked them some questions. I pointed out that some women still wear qipaos and that Amish people exist in the modern era, so who are we to construe them as “not modern?” One student argued that Amish people recognize that they’re outmoded compared to everyone else, but I pointed out that most people wouldn’t judge their own chosen lifestyles as “outmoded.” Different, maybe, but different doesn’t have to mean that one chosen lifestyle is any more “modern” than another. I also pointed out that even within the Amish, different groups vary in how much they use technology and how they dress. Another student jumped to attention in an “aha” moment and pointed out that Hasidic Jews wear clothes also that seem old-fashioned to some as well, even though they live in perfectly contemporary communities in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The same student who had tried to claim that Amish people would recognize themselves as outmoded then changed his angle. Returning to the survey, he claimed that Western culture is more modern than Asian culture.

This student had no sooner made that comment than I could almost feel his classmates recoiling like he had just spat poison into the room. Realizing how he sounded, he tried to justify himself by explaining that Asian culture feels more traditional because people in Asia care a lot about tradition and devote a lot more time to maintaining ancient customs in everyday life than people in the Western world do. Some of his classmates thought this was a reasonable observation, until we continued discussing the survey and realized that in the Western world, too, people perpetuate old customs and habits into the present. The ubiquitous flip-flop has been around since ancient times. People continue to live in old houses, and they continue to build new ones in the style of old ones as well, because they like the aesthetic better. Everyone universally agreed that pizza was more “modern” than Chinese mooncakes, but then somebody looked it up and we learned that early versions of pizza have existed since antiquity.

Like any good conversation, this one went all over the place. It lacked the clearly defined lines and signposting of a formal essay. Still, by the time we were done, my students were questioning the idea of labeling things as “modern.” They realized that what might be considered “modern” is not necessarily new, such as pizza and flip-flops. Extending this insight, they also realized that almost all lifestyles in contemporary societies have ancient roots, so there is no intrinsic reason to think of any one lifestyle as more “outmoded” than another. Plus, lifestyles each adapt in their own way, such as Amish people who are comfortable using some newer technology, so there is no clear standard for measuring what makes some adaptations more “modern” than others. They realized that to call things “modern” or not is to make a subjective judgment that reflects the speaker’s own values and priorities.

I highly recommend this activity. It was a great way to get students thinking about the factors at play beyond where things happen to fall in the progression of history when people talk about what is “modern” versus “not modern.”

Gina Elia is a freelance writer who also teaches Mandarin Chinese in South Florida. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sangam Literary Magazine, Taiwan's CommonWealth Magazine, The China Project, and Geneologies of Modernity.