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."
(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)