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/)

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)