Modernity is dead

Dear Habermas, you’re messing me up. I thought modernity was over already – and postmodernity was in full force. What the what?

I didn’t have to search at all to find the golden nuggets in this week’s reading, by Jurgen Habermas, entitled “Modernity: An Incomplete Project.” It is that he rejects the idea that modernity is over with, and pleads with us not to give up on it. After multiple paragraphs of describing what he thinks modernity is, Habermas argues it isn’t a lost cause, writing, “I think that instead of giving up modernity and its project as a lost cause, we should learn from the mistakes of those extravagant programs which have tried to negate modernity” (Habermas 1996, 106).

Habermas didn’t write this piece a hundred years ago – he wrote it in 1996. I wonder if he would’ve had a different perception after the advent of the personal computer. Either way, he pushes readers again the “irreconcilable antimodernism” (Habermas 1996, 107) society has moved further and further towards.

The saddest part of Habermas’ piece was the last paragraph, where he laments, “I fear that the ideas of antimodernity, together with an additional touch of premodernity, are becoming popular in the circles of alternative culture. When one observes the transformations of consciousness within political parties in German, a new ideological shift becomes visible” (Habermas 1996, 108).

This last paragraph brought with it a near-visible wave of unintended frustration – not for the idea that modernity might be dying – but because of our current political climate. All the things that frustrate me are enclosed in this sentence. From my understanding, people who are antimodern or premodern either want the world not to advance, or want the world to go back to what it was a while back.

Political movements like that of Donald Drumpf Trump in the United States, or the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, which gained incredible traction in the most recent German election, pushing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party into third place. Both of these movements are both antimodern and premodern, meaning in some areas, they don’t want the world (or their specific countries) to innovate or change from what is already there (antimodernism), or they would like to revert to an older ideology that hasn’t been socially accepted in a while (premodernism).

Sorry to break it to you, Habermas, but modernity is dead.

Generated by Fodey.com, Original Text/Art by me!

I genuinely think the antimodernism movement, where people are rejecting revolts for societal improvement, is alive and well. This doesn’t mean that these sentiments are the dominant sentiments in our culture or society, but they are significant enough to create worry that Habermas’ view of modernism is no longer alive and well.

So the mystical question is – is that postmodernism?

Peace,
-UA191