| Few words are more commonly used in our
modem world than the word modem itself. The modernity of manufactured articles,
of institutions, of attitudes, of works of art is constantly brought to our
attention. We ourselves may well be judged by whether we are modern or not; indeed, many people go to considerable lengths to make quite certain that they will be accepted as modern — modern in their dress, their behave-iour, their beliefs. And yet, we may ask, must not earlier generations have felt precisely tile same? Surely men throughout history must have recognized themselves as modern. Surely innovators like Julius Caesar, Peter the Great or Oliver Cromwell saw themselves as breaking with the past, as establishing a new order. (Must they not also have shared our awareness of the significance of what is modem?) What is modem is distinct from what belongs to the past and men in earlier times must have experienced this sense of distinctiveness. Men cannot escape, arid never have been able to escape, from an awareness of change. But reflection will tell us that our awareness of change, our sense of distinctiveness, is very different from that of our distant ancestors. Change for us is more, much more, than the change brought about by the passing of time, by important events or by the actions of outstanding individuals or groups of people. We make use of change and are our selves a part of a process of change. Change for us has become modernization and modernization implies both direction and consciousness. Change is something we seek, something that has no end. This consciousness of change and this desire to direct change derives from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. The term revolution is usually applied to an historical event, an event we can place in time. We can normally speak of a time before the revolution and a time after the revolution. But the Industrial Revolution, although it had a beginning, has never come to an end. It is a process which cannot stop. It is a process which effects more and more people in more and more ways. We may argue that it is a process directed by men and this would be true if we look at the details of the process. But the whole process is, as yet, beyond control. We can decide the direction of modernization to some extent but we cannot decide to halt it. This has led to a disturbing situation. What we boast of as modern or up-to-date today, will be old-fashioned or out-of-date tomorrow. The noisy insistence that something is modem often conceals fear of the knowledge that it will inevitably soon be superseded. Again, the very fact that modernization has one direction only and involves every member of society permits only two attitudes: acceptance or rejection. The desire to change or modify the world we live in implies acceptance, since the world is a world of change. Rejection of modernization may, therefore, lead to a sense of the world as unreal and meaningless, and this, in turn, to a breakdown, either individual or social. |