When was modernity born?
First wave in renaissance, then second wave in enlightenment, then third wave in victory e.g. takeover in leading states (dominant in the elite) e.g. US declaration of independence, French Revolution and 19th century in general. By 1950 modernity dominant paradigm globally.
Posted at x.com (Joe Henrich liked it!)
Sorry if I am “a day late and a dollar short” as Martin Brundle is fond of saying. I’ve spent the past 18 months leading a group of senior citizens in the Shepway and District u3a in a group called “Science, Philosophy, and Spirituality” on a quest to understand and question the Western Intellectual Heritage. We are approaching the end of this particular passage of work, and I would answer your question, @rufuspollock something like this:
Modernity has many parents across multiple global regions, but I would argue that it was born through the Atlantic and global maritime trade of the 17th century and came of age with the Enlightenment of the 18th century.
This perspective challenges the idea of a single birthplace or a sudden transformation, instead recognising modernity as an emergent process shaped by economic, intellectual, and technological shifts across interconnected global networks.
By the 17th century, global commerce was driving profound structural changes:
The material and economic conditions of the 17th century found their philosophical and political expression in the Enlightenment:
Modernity was never solely a European phenomenon:
Rather than pinpointing a single moment, I would argue that the 17th century provided the material and economic conditions for modernity, while the 18th century provided the intellectual foundations. This culminated in the Industrial Revolution, which accelerated and solidified modern structures.
Modernity, then, is best understood not as a European invention, but as a system that emerged from global networks of trade, thought, and governance, shaped by both cooperation and exploitation.
Terry
This is great @terrycd and very much agree there are various interwoven strands. Also this clearly varies across the globe - modernity is not evenly distributed (for good and ill!)
For my part, i’d probably focus more on the ideological/cultural aspect. Where did the core ideas and cultural practices of modernity take hold?
Hi Rufus - I’m tempted to create a kind of logic systemigram showing how concepts have emerged in different historical contexts from predecessors. I’m not sure whether to start from modernity and work backwards, or from the ‘axial age’ (or at least the anthropological precursors of history) and trace emergent concepts.
What would you see as the concepts that constitute ‘modernity’?
How would the following list grab you for starters?
1. Rationalism and Empiricism
2. Individualism
3. Secularism
4. Belief in Progress
5. Universal Rights and Equality
6. Democratic or Representative Governance
7. Technological and Scientific Advancement?
This list is great.
Here’s the best overview that we created which was posted in The Second Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction and was part of our original course.
For us the key features (which you have) are:
For me your (6) and (7) are implications of the above e.g. Democractive governance comes from Equality. (7) from rationalism and progress.
Also see our colleague Liam Kavanagh’s Shadows of the Enlightenment.
I love the diagram, Rufus, and I have read Liam Kavanagh’s “Collective Wisdom in the West”, which I think is the same book as “Shadows of the Enlightenment”.
The one area that I think might be missing from both of our lists is the role of “money”. When the chips are down, I think the “glue” that holds the human world together is the concept of “money” - the single concept which every culture with any pretence to modernity accepts, understands, and uses as a measure of value that forms the basis to a property owning democracy and measures of “the wealth of nations”, but is also the medium of exchange between people of different cultures at a much earlier stage of evolution.
I’ll try and spend some time on tracing the evolution of each of these components.
Hi again, Rufus.
I’ve been doing more work on your question, although only indirectly. It is part of a course I lead for my local u3a on “Understanding and questioning the Western Intellectual Legacy”. Here’s a document that looks at both the origins and development needs (as I see them) of six Enlightenment Ideals: https://insearchofwisdom.online/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/The-Future-of-Western-Thought.docx
I have also posted a related summary narrative on my Blog at: From the Enlightenment to Today: What They Did, Why They Did It, and What Has Happened Since - In Search of Wisdom
My hope is that these might move the discussion forward a bit.
@terrycd i’ve looked at the blog piece and looks good 
How long is the full essay? could you inline here or post it as a google doc? (I don’t have word) and it is easier to comment on.
For me, i think there are a few interesting directions to take this in …
Thanks for the encouragement. Here’s a link to the Full Essay (it’s only 1,000 words long since it is in the early stages of development". https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cc0OZqEvOYicXT5KoI9cfJqKSfSLzZQO0MNLSjOv2gM/edit?usp=sharing
The “defend, revise, expand” framework is one that I am developing as part of my paper for September’s “Ecologies of Hope” Symposium, for which I have had a submission accepted. It sits along with my summation of the evidence for why we need to change our paradigms now, and an ethical framework that I call the “Relational Responsibility Manifesto”. I’ve also saved that as a Google doc.
My outlier view is that most of what we associate with “modernity” really emerged during the Axial Age. That includes rationalism, capitalism, the idea of progress, and quite a bit else. It all got systematized in Early Modern Europe, but the raw ingredients spawned in various parts of the world centuries earlier.
For me, modernity starts with Galileo and Descartes. The reason I pick those two is because the represent the beginning of a new epistemological paradigm which involved two key factors. The first was a willingness to abandon all ancient and scholastic philosophy and start again – a deep conviction that moderns could surpass the ancients. The second was the splitting of reality into two realms – matter (which could be measured) and mind (which could not). This division began the process of shattering the theological synthesis which had held Western society together since the fall of the western Roman empire. The golden age of modernist philosophy began with Kant, who crystallised this distinction into the concepts of phenomena and noumena. On one level this made more sense than the mind/matter distinction, because it is much harder to argue with. The concept of “the material world” is derived from phenomenal experience, but in modern materialism “material” surely has to refer to a “noumenal material” realm which we have to presume exists “beyond the veil of perception”. There is no such confusion possible with “phenomenal” and “noumenal” – it is clear what they mean.
But Kant’s absolute split – and claim that we can know nothing at all about noumena – was responsible for a schism in Western thinking which has ultimately led to the total shattering of Western ideological systems. Philosophy was split between idealism/continental and materialism/analytic, and science remained in contact only with the latter. That it was possible for the golden age of German idealism to happen at the same time as the golden age of materialistic science, even though these the two paradigms are completely incompatible, indicates that something must have been seriously wrong.
And so it was. Nietzsche represents the beginning of the end of modernism, and the beginning of the beginning of postmodernism. This was a new epistemic paradigm based on the idea that everything is a perspective and there’s no objective truth or reality. It is the ultimate conclusion derived from Kant’s claim that we can know nothing about noumena, and as a result postmodern antirealism ended up in totalised conflict with science (postmodernism and science are totally incompatible, because they start from directly opposing assumptions about the nature of knowledge and reality).
I believe the new paradigm needs to involve a new understanding of how we ended up in this situation. I think we need to go back to Hume and Kant, and ask what the CPR might have contained if Kant had been working with quantum mechanics instead of classical Newtonian physics. The reason this is so important is that unlike classical physics, quantum theory actually implies a division of reality based on observation/non-observation. But instead of noumenal and phenomenal, the division is between the uncollapsed wave function and the collapsed wave function.
This opens up the possibility of a new integrated cosmology – a new way of understanding metaphysics and epistemology. A new way of defining truth and reality which allows us to bring western ideologies back into contact with each other again. Which is exactly what we need.
I don’t think that is an outlier view. at all – i certainly agree with it
One would definitely trace the seeds of modernity back to the Axial – in the diagram the curve is above the axis 
And both Wilber (et al) and many academics talking about modernity would do so). But we are talking about the very first proto-exemplars e.g. Socrates etc.
However, it is with the Renaissance was when it really started to emerge in proper pockets and become a widespread cultural phenomenon – see the work of Henrich here in WEIRDest people.
I’m a Henrich fan too. Note, though, Henrich is not explicating “modernity”, more like Western-specific psychology. There is a complex interplay between personal psychology and social circumstances, so they look overlapping. But analytical distinctions are useful, especially for calibrating potential change programs going forward. Quite a few of my fellow travelers in environmentalism for example are keen to hospice or compost “modernity” I suggest we ought to be rather precise about differentiating what we keep and what we convert to fertilizer.
One basic distinction is between the material and the ideational. Looking over the full thread above, is modernity more about structures (i.e. global maritime trade and capitalism) or is it more about ideation (i.e. Newton, Descartes, Bacon)? How we handle international supply chains is a very different question than how we handle experimental physics. It’s tempting to perceive one big gestalt encompassing all of it all at once, but is that really telling us more than that 17th century events and processes happened in the 17th century?
My preferred approach is to unpack the various systems layer by layer, establishing origins and process models for each and every one of them (distinctly) and then considering overlap and interplay - not as logical necessities - but more as contingencies that may well be negotiable on different terms as we chart course into the future. “Capitalism”, for example, includes dozens of self-perpetuating flywheels, some of which might prove quite difficult to live without, but others of which are effectively predatory and cancerous. Sheep and goats - which is which? Likewise for the State. And other social systems. This analysis gets much, much bigger … my current point is simply to sketch out a reference frame for how that larger analytical process might unfold.
On the “beginning” of any of the cultural paradigms … When I read this on metamoderna I instantly resonated that each paradigm has different growth points in different spheres of life — and indeed in different individuals of course. So, along with “Hanzi” I’d say that “Modernity” isn’t a single thing that grows all together, but a trend that you can see in different areas of life and different people at different times.
Let’s look deeper! Here’s the graphical representation from that post, which made so much sense to me:
Let’s. There is a lot in this chapter, so as a jumping off point, just this section on the specific thread topic here.
“The Modern metameme: Beginning around 1500 CE, but in some aspects found in its proto-variant as early as 500 BCE. Blossoming only in the 19th and 20th century. Still the most prevailing metameme today. Characterized by rationalistic and scientific thought, notions of progress and material growth, and emancipation from arbitrary religious and political control.”
I find Hanzi’s metamemes heuristically interesting, but in the end, my main reaction to them is to deconstruct, deconstruct, deconstruct until everything is stripped bare, then build it all back again. That sort of process gets me focusing quite a bit on proto-variants of the Axial Age. Of course, that overlaps with Hanzi’s Postfausitian, so that one needs deconstructed also.
In the end, to me “Postfaustian” and “Modern” end up sounding more like periods than processes, and processes are what I’m really after. On a process level, “Modern” really needs to start with commodity money, with roots deep in the Bronze Age. Core capitalist processes do not suddenly appear around 1500 CE. They had thousands of years of ramp up time prior to that. Likewise science. Likewise rationalism. As for “progress” - linear time imbued with meaning makes its debut in the apocalyptic imaginations of the Hebrew prophets, carried forward by all the Abrahamic religions that followed them. The projection of such transcendental hope into a quest for more material utopias is perhaps the signature invention of the European modern era - the analysis of this projection being one of the leading themes for one of my early inspirations, Eric Voegelin.
Although I never tire of unpacking history like this, the main 2R business with these topics is to diagnose current cultural maladies and to suggest potential regenerative approaches. Something certainly happened in Europe around 1500 CE that is radically unsustainable in our current situation. WWI and WWII were rather unmistakable signs of such radical unsustainability - these Euro-centric cataclysms arguably bracketing the historical chapter that began with European global colonizations. Unfortunately, the current global situation looks more and more like everything that went wrong with Europe, writ larger. In a nutshell, I’d say the marriage of high technology to competitive power politics is the literally smoking gun for the processes that most need addressed. I’d argue that European materialism of the modern era occurred for the simple reason that materialism provided palpable benefits for all to see. Current skepticism about the future of materialism flows from more recent observations of materialism’s equally palpable harms.
In my analysis above, I am very definitely not throwing “science” and “reason” out the window. They both pre-dated the Westphalian balance-of-power-based-on-a-perpetual-arms-race system, and I very much hope they post-date it as well. By continuing to embrace science and reason, I’m certainly not ruling out any of McGilgrist’s right-brained faculties and virtues. Indeed, the latest and best human science seems squarely directed at the reinvigoration of intuition, aesthetics, emotion, faith, and spiritual striving. On the spiritual striving front, progress-as-economic-development hits a dead end at planetary boundaries. Progress-as-alignment-with-divine-telos is more consistent with how the idea emerged in the first place.
Yes. See also this diagram from the Second Renaissance 101 course back in Autumn 2023
Different paradigms are alive at the same time.
Also as emphasized by spiral dynamics we have multiple paradigms alive within each of us and within our societies – and different parts can be active (and activated) at different times.
That’s good … what “Hanzi” is pointing out is not just that different paradigms are alive at the same time (no doubt) but that paradigms emerge at different times in different areas of life. That goes beyond that formulation in the 2R course, and, I would say, significantly more helpful for orientation, particularly in trans-disciplinary contexts.
The metaphor that occurs to me is complex waveforms. Like in this simplified example:
One would have to theorize civilizational-level cultures as being at least as complex as large symphony orchestras. Imagine all the overtones! One note explanations for anything social tend to fail for this reason - they lack the means to model either harmony or discord.
Waveforms are generated through cyclical processes. Cycles run on different frequencies. The resulting composite waveform aggregates inputs on all these frequencies. Metamemes must be at least that complex.
Is modernity sounding dissonant? My recommendation is to decompose the waveform into its components. Quite a few of the cycles that compose modernity are perfectly pleasant and serviceable on their own. If two cycles clash, it’s possible to consider tuning or recalibrating either. Different orchestrators might prefer different approaches to that.
Love the analogy with music! Particularly as one of my favourite hobbies is singing, generally a cappella. And it’s one of the things I feel is missing from Hanzi’s chart: music as a whole. @RobertBunge would you be up for exploring the corresponding musical paradigms? Or have you done so already, or do you know of anyone else’s convincing treatment?
Although I don’t play or sing (in public) a few years ago I developed a fascination with music theory, following all the leading YouTubers on that topic. (Adam Neely stands out). My driving playlist is mostly classical. Why anything is in the key of something, and does it matter which key and why, are questions I never tire of.
In the field of cultural analysis, lately my reading of McGilchrist points out the likely origin of human speech in music. That aligns with other authors who derive the origins of culture in play, performance, and auditory experience generally. Music is surely more primal than writing or any sort of rational thought.
Going post-post-modern with all this, I like “harmony”, “vibration”, “resonance”, and “frequency” as pan-cultural categories to unify various spiritual approaches and to unite spirituality in general with the sciences. It’s pretty clear from particle physics, for example, that matter is basically energy resonating on specific frequencies. I consider prayer, meditation, and devotion as special types of listening to pick up vibrations and frequencies from sources beyond rational conception.
So yes, I am very interested in applying musical metaphors to cultural analysis. I’m also speaking very literally when I point out that systems have cycles, and macro systems benefit (or suffer) from the harmonics or discords of the micro systems that compose them.
