Modernity

Characteristics

Tom Murphy:

"What do I think we can say about modernity with a reasonable degree of confidence?

Modernity is a very new phenomenon on this planet: nothing of its kind has happened before.

Even extending the boundary of modernity to a 10,000 year run since agriculture began, its duration is exceedingly short on evolutionary timescales—even compared to our species’ existence of 250–300 kyr, which itself is short compared to many species’ lifetimes (i.e., modernity is uncharacteristic of humans).

The present hyper-active mode, characterized by science, is just 400 years old, and the industrial/fossil-fuel age is less than 200: a mere flash, contextually.

Modernity relies on non-renewable resources dredged out of the depths that are not integrated into ecological cycles and often create unprecedented ecological harm—the full extent of which we can’t possibly yet know. Even traditional agriculture chews up land on thousand-year timescales (much faster these days)—besides setting up ecological disconnection and objectification, money and capitalism, toxic social hierarchies and power concentrations, and human-supremacist religious and political regimes. For many materials, the prospect of depletion has become apparent after only a century or even decades of intense exploitation. The notion of maintaining current practices on millennium timescales is unsupported conjecture. Today’s practices and material profile represent a one-time stunt.

We have loads of evidence for rapidly declining ecological health, in virtually every measure. Accelerating biodiversity loss rates are consistent with the initiation of a sixth mass extinction. Modernity has every appearance of being grossly unsustainable. We’re sitting on such a glaring lack of evidence for other technological civilizations beyond Earth that it borders on evidence of there not being any (or at least rare in space and time: far short of a vibrant galactic civilization bombarding us with advertisements)."

(https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-10-01/evidence-please/)

The Six Relationships of Modernity

Venkatesh Rao:

"Let’s begin sketching out the contours of the modernity machine by tracing the evolution of six relationships among four classes to which I’ll give default modern names: the monarch, the oligarchy (upper nobility with large land-holdings of sufficient size to be politically consequential), the technocracy (including the knightly and priestly classes, overlapped in cases like the Templars), and workers (the peasantry).

Each of these relationships experienced a pivotal event between 1200-1400, which set it on a secular course to a different homeostatic equilibrium than the one that prevailed before 1200.

Monarch-Oligarchy

The Magna Carta (1215) is the best known reconstruction of the idea of a monarch from an individual with divine rights to a regular human, but there are comparable events elsewhere, such as in the decisive reining in of the hereditary Doge model in Venice, making it a precocious modern republic. It would take a few centuries of ascendant monarchism and declining feudalism, and the English Civil War in the 17th century, to truly lock in the new relationship, but it was established in its essential form by the mid-13th.

Monarch-Technocracy

Philip IV’s move against the Templars, who had steadily gained power through the Crusades as a monastic order protecting pilgrims, but had begun to grown independently powerful and wealthy by 1300, was the defining moment for two reasons. First, it acknowledged that political power could arise from codified knowledge (of military or theological varieties) as much as from land. Second, it established that this form of essentially technocratic knowledge was portable, allowing the knightly class to easily pivot from being tenants/clients of feudal agrarian estates to high-ranking court officials. So though the specific event weakened the knightly class, it established the pattern of highly flexible and mercenary technocratic loyalties. This would reach a peak of power in the wake of the Black Death, in the form of the mercenary companies, such as John Hawkwood’s White Company, and the Italian condotierri (mercenary generals). It is worth noting that this relationship evolved faster and further in the Islamic world.3

Monarch-Workers

There is no single event that can serve as a motif for the secular shift in this relationship, but a few interesting candidates include the Assize of Arms of 1252, requiring all English yeomen to become proficient with the longbow. This law, an ordinance amending an 1181 (ie pre-Magna Carta) Assize extended military preparedness requirements downwards from the knightly class to the working class, thereby acknowledging the importance of the knowledge capital of ordinary people. The longbow, notably, is a simpler weapon than the knightly crossbow. The Robin Hood and Swiss William Tell legends date to this era (though Tell was a crossbowman). A lesser-known candidate event: the War of Chioggia between Venice and Genoa (1378) similarly forced the general population to learn technical sailing skills.

Oligarchy-Technocracy

This too is a transition with no single clear marker, but perhaps the most important element was the growing challenge to the institution of primogeniture from the clergy (which was increasingly staffed by resentful younger sons acting through religious laws to constrain the power of their elder brothers). Through the financialized economy of indulgences, the clergy began to exercise a growing influence on oligarchic society — they made increasingly restrictive religious rules to govern the behaviors of the laity, and manufactured an economy of exceptions to ease them. The later story of how corruption relating to indulgences triggered the Reformation is well known, but what is fascinating is the length of the trajectory building up to it, and how strongly it constrained the oligarchic classes. Criticism of corruption in the clergy goes back at least to John Wycliffe (1330-1384), predating the Gutenberg Press (1450s) by a century, and Martin Luther’s 95 theses (1517) by nearly two centuries. I just learned that one of the earliest uses of the printing press was in fact the mass production of standardized fill-in-the-blank indulgences, which were bought in bulk by the nobility. So the Gutenberg press accelerated religious corruption before it played a role in religious reformation (a bit like how the introduction of textile machinery initially strengthened rather than weakened slavery in America, by driving up demand for cotton). This relationship is also important in that it significantly empowered women. One argument I’ve heard is that women began gaining property rights in part because childless widows could be persuaded to leave their land holdings to the church. More broadly, technocratic work was accessible to women. Nunneries rose along with monasteries for men.

Oligarchy-Workers

I haven’t thought this one through because relationships here are particularly varied and messy, but the defining moment here is clearly the Black Death, which suddenly gave newly scarce labor extraordinary bargaining power, leading to the terminal decline of anything resembling serfdom in Western Europe (though we find it persisted longer the further east you go towards Russia). The rise of cities is an important factor here, because even without being bonded to agrarian estates, the working class needed somewhere else to exit to. And something to do there that was not farming. Cities provided this outlet (urbanization played a similar role in Islamization in India4). Even more importantly, since urban economies were more cash-based, they turned the working class into a financial asset owning class that would eventually exercise considerable collective financial power, by financing debt for the upper classes. This is where stock markets begin. You find this trajectory in a particularly accelerated form in the history of Venice, which had no land-based agrarian estates to begin with, at least in the early era, and where even the poor could buy shares in voyages thanks to the emerging commercial technologies. So even though the Venetian shipping sector was a terrible work environment (many of the oarsmen in particular were galley slaves from Slavic regions), workers had a particularly strong position in relation to oligarchs and Doges.

Technocracy-Workers

This is perhaps the most interesting of the six relationships, since it would grow to be the most important one, and even in the 13th century prefigured modern patterns of manager-worker relations of the sort portrayed in modern workplace comedies like The Office. The Battle of Crécy (1346) is perhaps the landmark event here, when English longbow archers prevailed over the knight-dominated French army. Another element of this transition is the rising power of guild-organized urban workers, within an overall sumptuary economy based on status. Unlike the oligarchy, which gradually ceded power to the knightly technocracy (the “Professional Managerial Class” is far older than James Burnham would have you believe), the worker class arguably gained power at its expense. A good-deal of law-making agency appears to have shifted from the clergy to the guilds during this period (which had a religious character too, often featuring patron saints), giving the working class growing independence from the managerial control of the technocratic (priestly-knightly class). Though this would peak far later, in the 19th century, and get reversed in fully modern times due to the rise of an industrial technocracy, the historical pattern of knights on horses trampling rioting peasants and burning down villages during peasant rebellions would gradually disappear. On a narrow military front, this is also the era of the rise of a growing infantry advantage over heavy cavalry through a mix of technical and tactical advances. Eventually the infantry dominance exceeded that of the Roman era, through the diffusion of musket-power (muskets in the hands of infantry vastly amplified the longbow-over-knight type asymmetry).

The European Modernity Machine (EMM?) can be understood as the restructuring of these six basic relationships, and through this restructuring, a reshaping of each of the four kinds of minds in relation to each other and to their shared circumstances. Like a set of lapping discs, the four kinds of minds smoothed each other out, and began to work together in recognizably modern ways.

...

If you run this machine for 700 years, you get various end-game states connected surprisingly smoothly to opening positions:

Monarchies have all but disappeared. Even in the case of de facto modern monarchs like Putin or Xi, or Trump if he gets his way, the above-the-law power of monarchial figures is a pale shadow of what it was before 1200.

Oligarchies have evolved from large-scale landholders with serfs and client technocrats (knights and priests) on their lands to modern monopoly capitalism employing educated classes from universities. Though we commonly make use of hyperbole along the lines of “user-generated content is sharecropping on oligarchic feudal platforms,” what we have today is a pale shadow of the way it used to be, where peasants could be physically whipped and even executed by lords, and even knights and priests could be beaten into submission with crippling debt.

The technocracy has evolved radically. Technical knowledge based on science has replaced military and theological knowledge as the source of power, but the distance is not as large as you might think. In modern technocratic power, the distinction between hard-edged scientific knowledge and softer ideological paradigm knowledge is blurry. We have “alt facts,” and arguments about whether knowledge about climate and vaccines is “science” or “religion” precisely because the fundamental social structure of knowledge as held by technocracies has not changed at all. Institutionally and organizationally, we are as much in an age of appeal-to-ecclesiastical-authority as ever. The nature of the “indulgences” economy may have evolved from being based on religious sins to being based on bullshit-priced “carbon credits” and “land acknowledgements” but it is still an economy of indulgences. The so-called virtue-signaling economy is at least 800 years old at this point.

Finally, the working class, despite the perennial gloom of socialists, is the only class to have made steady, secular gains at the expense of the other three, and computing technology has steadily driven the advantage further. All politics today is working-class politics. If you used ChatGPT today to answer a question you might previously have consulted a technocratic expert for, congrats, you’re continuing a story that began with yeomen practicing with the longbow in the 1250s. That oligarchs own the data centers, or that technocrats created much of the data that trained the AI models, should not obscure the fact that the big winners are the working class.

This then, is the picture of the emergence of modernity we see repeated worldwide, with minor differences. A scheme of 6 basic relationships being launched on a trajectory of secular change over 700 years. A trajectory that is surprisingly smooth and unbroken, despite the effect of calamitous events and noisy confounding factors.

This is why, when we look back to at least some minds from the 1200s, not only can we recognize ourselves in the mirror, we can recognize our world in the mirror."

(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine)

History

European Modernity

Venkatesh Rao:

"I want to return to the European story as the reference case, if not the prototype, because the emergence of modernity is easiest to map out there. Here, I’d argue that the pivotal event was Philip IV’s decisive strike against the Templars in 1307, followed by the relocation of the (French-pwned) papacy to Avignon in 1309. The run-up to this event, and the aftermath, effectively created the European edition of what I want to call the modernity machine, which emerged in roughly similar forms worldwide, through the next couple of centuries.

The main elements of the modernity machine (European edition) are:

A secularly shifting balance-of-power configuration of political actors governed by negotiated contractual relationships that systematically favored previously weaker parties, rather than theological axioms

The beginnings of what we’d call a technocracy in the form of the culture of medieval knights (the rung below the Baronial class which negotiated the Magna Carta) as well as the clergy.

The beginnings of secular pluralism, in the wake of the Crusades, which prefigured the modern patterns of religious co-existence that would get fully worked out and realized via events like the Reformation (and comparable events worldwide) and the Peace of Westphalia.

The beginnings of accountability to individuals, via mechanisms besides popular insurrections and revolts, most clearly visible in the rise of free cities as a category of geographic organization distinct from agrarian estates or royal courts.

All this started about 300 years before most people assume it did.

This scheme is roughly similar to, and compatible with, the one Francis Fukuyama sketched out in The Origins of Political Order.

It is hard to wrap your mind around the fact that the temporal distance between 1300 and 1700 is longer than that between 1700 and 2025 (400 vs. 350 years). In 1300, while there is some science-ing in the modern empirical, experimental sense going on, especially in the Islamic world, there are no true scientists. Not even pre-scientists in the Leonardo Da Vinci or Giordano Bruno mould. There are no secular philosophers in the sense prototyped by Spinoza. Philosophy at this time would have meant Thomas Aquinas.

In technology, metallurgy for armor, and horse-breeding technology are improving, but even the earliest industrial technologies, such as the seed-drill, are in the future. And though the dominance of heavy cavalry and associated weaponry is notable and visibly different from Roman era technology, it is important to note that the essential unit — the heavy cavalry knight — dates back to the Persian cataphracts of antiquity. The gap, even in horse-breeding and metallurgy, is a matter of incremental advances and geographic diffusion of horse technology and metallurgical capabilities, not qualitative leaps. The seeds of industrial technology are just beginning to get planted in Europe, in the form of the arrival of gunpowder, so did not play much of a role in the early stage.

This then, is the milieu in which the modernity machine took shape in Europe. "

(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine)

Hanzi Freinacht on the Phased Deployment of Modernity

Hanzi Freinacht:

• "Emergence of modern art, 1400s:

In Northern Italy we have Masaccio (1401–1428) who was one of the first to use linear perspective in his paintings, and in Flandern we have Jan van Eyck (1390–1441) and Robert Campin (1375–1444) who pioneered the oil painting technique to produce realistically looking lighting. Although the Renaissance also was a time of social change and new humanist ideas challenging the doctrines of the Church, which among other things led to the Reformation, it was primarily an era of artistic advances. Proper Modern philosophy would only emerge in the following centuries.

• Emergence of modern philosophy and science, 15–1600s:

René Descartes (1596–1650) is widely considered the first modern philosopher. He was the founding figure of continental rationalism, later advocated by Spinoza (1632–1677) and Leibniz (1646–1716). This was opposed by the empiricist school of thought on the other side of the English Channel, consisting of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), George Berkeley (1685–1753), and David Hume (1711–1776).

This is also the time of what has later been called “The Scientific Revolution” which consisted of a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science, with the 1543 publication of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium of Copernicus (1473–1543), which put the sun in the middle of the solar system, often cited as its beginning, and the 1687 Isaac Newton (1643–1727) publication Principia which formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation widely considered its culmination. Scientific institutions were established in London, the Royal Society, in 1660, and in Paris, Académie royale des sciences, in 1666. As you can see, the Scientific Revolution was in many ways the forerunner to the Enlightenment, which in turn came into being as Europeans (mostly men of upper classes) tried to grapple with the social and metaphysical implications of the clockwork universe implied by science.

• Modern entrepreneurship, late 1700s — 1800s:

This is of course the time of the (first) Industrial Revolution which began in Britain with the introduction of coal powered steam engines in textile production. Thomas Newcomen invented the first commercially successful steam engine in 1712, which James Watt vastly improved upon in 1776 — the same year that Adam Smith, also known as the “The Father of Capitalism”, published his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations, which is widely considered the first modern work on economics. (And the same year as another modern development, the American Declaration of Independence). Modernity spreads into society at large, as a form of enactment.

• Modern politics, 1800s — early 1900s:

This is the period where we see the development of the modern state in Western Europe and North America. This development can be said to have started after the Napoleonic Wars with its lasting legacy of Code Napoléon and the consolidation of centralized nation states. The 19th century is also the time when European states began constructing modern bureaucracies (which had already been pioneered by the Chinese 2000 years earlier however). This period culminated at the end of the First World War with the abolishment of monarchies (or reducing them to mere figureheads) in Europe, the introduction of universal suffrage in many countries, and the establishment of the first socialist republic in the USSR. In many ways, however, it wasn’t until after the end of the Second World War with the defeat of fascism and the founding of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 that the modern political order had finally been established.

• Modern morality, after 1945 (still ongoing):

It has only been after the end of the Second World War, and with that the defeat of regressive modern faustianism in the form of fascism, that a truly modern morality has begun to dominate — and then, only in the most developed parts of the world. Only quite recently have values such as secularity, plurality, and tolerance been embraced by a majority of the population in this part of the world. The majority of the world’s population remain largely religious and still subscribe to Postfaustian, and even Faustian, codes of morality."

(https://medium.com/@hanzifreinacht/the-6-hidden-patterns-chapter-1-4ed7bec011f3)

Futures

The emergence of Post-Modernity: 2025 in a 1300 mirror

Venkatesh Rao:

"This longue durée view of the evolution of modernity allows us to view contemporary events in a particular historical light. Adopting Barbara Tuchman’s distant-mirror methodology, what are some correspondences we can draw?

Again, though there are half-a-dozen parallel stories to be told here, I’m going to focus on one — the American story in 2025 onwards, analogized to the Western European story 1200-1400.

First off, I think we’re at the beginning of a new long arc. If 1200-1900 was the arc from early modernity to modernity, the arc from roughly 1960 on is going to be a similarly long one from modernity to post-modernity. Given technological acceleration, it might take 350 years instead of 700 for the wound-up clockwork machine to wind down, but it won’t happen in 5, 10, 30, or 100 years. The world has accelerated, but not by that much. And there are rate-limiters in how fast new sorts of mind, harboring a new consciousness can diffuse.

This means that just as we currently view “modernity” as being visibly born in the 17th century but really born in the 13th, I suspect future generations, in say the year 3000, will view “postmodernity” as having been visibly born in say 2500, but really being born right now. And just as I have characterized what happened in 1200-1400 as the birth of psychologically modern humans, I suspect what we’re seeing the beginnings of what will eventually be recognized as sociologically modern humans, who can associate with each other in ways far more complex and technically sophisticated than we can imagine. To them, we’ll look like primitives, but recognizable ones, with our “social media”, “follows”, “likes”, “AI friends”, and “crypto” trading. We won’t look entirely like children.

Trump’s shock-and-awe action against DEI programs feels something like Philip IV’s move against the Templars. But as in that case, it’s a temporary reactionary reversal of a longer-term trend that is pointed steadfastly in the opposite direction. Most of the secular gains in social justice made by the arc from 90s era “PC” to 2010s “Wokism” are not going to get reversed that easily or at all. There is far more historical momentum behind this trend than people realize, whatever the fates of current champions.

The much debated ongoing Fall of Woke feels uncannily like the corruption-driven collapse of the 13th century technocracy, with its economy of priestly indulgences and unaccountable patterns of warfare (arbitrary knightly warfare then, social justice warfare today). The parallels are uncanny. The self-appointed religious authorities of today similarly went from catalyzing reasonable and popular shifts in consciousness to capturing institutions and political careerism within a generation. The mission of protecting the weak and vulnerable (in the case of the Templars, protecting pilgrims to the Holy Land) got derailed and transformed into a program to capture the assets of weakened incumbent powers. The Fourth Crusade getting diverted to sack Constantinople (1202-1204) is a good motif for what happened to Woke. The story of the Templars took 200 years to unfold (1118-1307). The story of Woke unfolded in 35 years (counting from Crenshaw’s 1989 intersectionality paper). As in the case of 1202 Constantinople — an obsolete city in thrall to a regressive monarchy desperately in need of a refresh — the institutions that were targeted for capture and extraction by a derailed moral mission mostly deserved it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the moral mission derailed in ways that are hard to condone.

Reactionary tendencies are at a peak now, as they were through much of the birth of modernity, 1200-1400. Many events during that period could be interpreted as attempts by incumbent powers to restore patterns of societal organization from early medieval era or antiquity. Then as now, these tendencies scored several notable victories and temporary reversals, to the point that the traditionally recounted history reads like a glorious record of temporary reversals of “decline.” But the overall direction is unmistakeable: Modernity continued to win. The six core relationships continued to shift in the same general direction. Absolute monarchies enjoying the presumption of divine authority steadily lost ground to contracted relationships with other classes. Oligarchies lost ground to technocracies and working classes. Technocracies lost ground to working classes.

In the specific case of the West, an interesting analogy can be made between Islam in 1200-1400 and China today. Then, as now, the entire story can be told from the “Other” perspective. There is an Islamic story of the birth of modernity to be told that would closely parallel the one I’ve told about Europe in rough outline here. But in the Western story, that parallel story of modernity being born appears in a very different light — as the story of a demonic force taking shape beyond threatened borders. There are uncanny parallels between how America talks of China today, and how Europe talked about Islam in the wake of the Crusades. In both cases, there is reluctant acknowledgement that the demonized other (really, a parallel evolutionary story) had things to offer and teach. It is only recently that Western understanding of the Islamic legacy is beginning to recognize the original elements, beyond merely conveying Greek classics through time from the West to itself. I think we’ll see something similar in how we narrativize China’s role in shaping the birth of post-modernity. It will be tempting to reduce it to low-cost, uncreative “execution” of genius visions from an era of Western ascendancy, but this comforting narrative is already showing signs of severe strain (go catch up on the Deepseek discourse for a sampling).

Though the arc is new, the secular trends look like they’re pointed in the same direction — towards continued devolution and decentralization of power. Despite apparent (and mostly unsupported by empirical data) swings back towards hierarchy and centralization, we can expect that in the longer term, the secular trends will reassert themselves, leading to increased leverage of a further evolved technocracy over the oligarchic and monarchic layers, and of a postmodern working class over what remains of the technocracy.

In the 1300s, the seeds of what would become the Reformation took root (you can look around and try to spot the John Wycliffe of Wokism — so far I see no candidates). On the military technocracy side, knightly codes of chivalrous conduct, and the ideal of courtly love arising to mitigate what was effectively medieval rape culture (courtly love was a kind of #MeToo mechanism of its time) both gathered momentum in the 13th century. The Arthurian legends grew popular. Women and religious minorities steadily gained security and political agency over the 700 years, despite periods of backsliding and retreat. Secular increase in technocratic power was the biggest driver of this, and can be expected to remain so.

Quite a few people, including those on the Right (suffering a kind of victor’s paranoia perhaps), are calling the peak on Trumpism and its rhymes worldwide. But if the Philip IV vs. Templars story is any guide, these dynamics are simply not that quick to unfold. Even the contemporary rise and fall of Woke took 35 years to play out. Reactionary Right tendencies are only about a decade old. While the historical model does suggest that the monarchic-oligarchic reactionary ascendancy will eventually falter and reverse, there is no good reason to think it will happen in 4 years. A more plausible time-frame is 20-50 years. Not long enough for the Right to accomplish a full Return to the Bronze Age, but long enough that navigating the return to secular historic trends will both take longer, and a lot more work than anyone realizes. Rebuilding the broken Progressive machine along new lines, after first cleansing it of accumulated corruption and bankrupt philosophies, is not a one-election-cycle task. It is a generational task.

The rise of AI is perhaps best understood as a working-class positive singularity, as centuries of accumulated technocratic knowledge, in one fell swoop, is gifted to the working classes. It might be compared to the introduction of longbows in our reference period. The models that have been open-sourced are already good enough to permanently weaken the technocratic class’s monopoly on knowledge capital. And inevitably, as hardware costs plummet in the next cycle, the “estate” of compute hardware required to run at least inference, and a good deal of fine-tuning class training, will be within reach of individual working class members. It would strain my finances, but I can already afford to buy enough hardware to run a personal state-of-the-art inference rig (in knowledge terms, I’m probably best described as a lapsed and fallen technocrat) and practice archery with it every Sunday. In 10 years, basically anyone will be able to do the same.

The impact of crypto is less mature, but is again empowering the working class disproportionately at the expense of the other three classes. The “ownership” economy has meaningfully shrunk from homes, cars, and retirement funds to a much smaller consequential unit, and one that is portable beyond national borders. Here we might make an analogy to the early use of the Gutenberg press to print indulgences (religious shitcoins?), with the actual print revolution yet to come.

(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/the-modernity-machine)