The Experience of Modernity

Written by Marshall Berman

1800s/french-revolution-tutorial/v/frenchrevolution-- part-1 Marshall Berman in his book: ‘All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity’ (Penguin 1982) describes modernity as a dynamo, building, destroying and then re-building with unchecked insatiability.

centres . . . few people, especially in New York [are] prepared to do that.” New Yorkers identify themselves and their city with progress, and so the world beloved by Berman’s family and tens of thousands of their neighbors was destroyed “in the name of values that we ourselves embraced.”
This is the overwhelming cultural current in which we all live. From the latest rise of Islamic terrorism from eastern Mosques to the malaise and alienation we feel in our Western churches: this is the riptide that joins us both. And it is disorienting. One may experience it as “alienation” one moment and as “freedom” the next. Its effect is omnipresent. I hear it in the guitar stylings of Jimi Hendrix--the way he sweeps effortlessly along the frets, touching his fingertips down lightly here or there just long enough to tap on or half bend a note which races off again--and in the anthropology of psychologist and one-time co-founder of the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm. In Fromm’s last book, To Have or to Be (Abacus 1976), he argues that two ways of existence are competing for “the spirit of mankind”: having and being. The having mode looks to things and material possessions and is based on aggression and greed. The being mode is rooted in love and is concerned with shared experience and productive activity. The book ends by asking about the new man and the new society.

So then, have we come any further than the 1960’s? Is John’s apocalyptic city of the world, Babylon, really so apocalyptic, or is it the air we breathe, the way we dress and the political discourse of our nations? Fundamentalism is not an option; the church can’t hide from this. Some meaningful response has to be spoken into the gale, some way of properly saying “Kingdom” into the pod-casts & smart-phones of the world. Some way of making words
“I believe that communication and dialogue have taken on a new specific weight and urgency in modern times, because subjectivity and inwardness have become at once richer and more intensely developed, and more lonely and entrapped, than they ever were before. In such a context, communication and dialogue become both a desperate need and a primary source of delight. In a world where meanings melt into air, these experiences are among the few solid sources of meaning we can count on. One of the things that can make modern life worth living is the enhanced opportunities it offers us--and sometimes even forces on us--to talk together, to reach-out and understand each other.”

[In response to post-modernism’s absolute dismissal of all grand narratives.] “Have we really outgrown the dilemmas that arise when “all that is solid melts into air,” or the dream of a life in which “the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all”? I do not think so.
“[There is] a widespread and often desperate fear of the freedom that modernity opens up for every individual, and the desire to escape from freedom [Erich Fromm] by any means possible.”

“There is a mode of vital experience-experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils--that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience ‘modernity.’
Berman goes on to say that his desire in this book is to recover the history of modernity so that our own contemporary experience will be enriched and perhaps guided into the future. The experience of previous generations with modernity, both positive and negative, has been far richer than our own, he argues. We need to re-examine our situation and come up with better, more hopeful solutions. For example, in the past people understood the danger of being circumscribed by technology and the overwhelming power of social forces of organization, “but they all believed that modern individuals had the capacity both to understand this fate and, once they understood it, to fight it. Hence, even in the midst of a wretched present, they could imagine an open future. Twentieth-century critics of modernity almost entirely lack this empathy with, and faith in, their fellow men and women. . . . Modern man as a subject--as a living being capable of response, judgment, and action in and on the world--has disappeared. In the opinion of the modern intelligentsia:

The masses have no egos, no ids, their souls are devoid of inner tension or dynamism: their ideas, their needs, even their dreams, are ‘not their own’; their inner lives are ‘totally administered,’ programmed to produce exactly those desires that the social system can satisfy, and no more. The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobiles, hi-fi sets, split-level homes, kitchen equipment.
Berman sees this opinion as a rejection of earlier visions of history as restless activity, dynamic contradiction, dialectical struggle and progress. The responses tended to simply into three groups based on attitudes toward modern life as a whole: affirmative, negative, and withdrawn.

All these visions and revisions of modernity were active orientations toward history, attempts to connect the turbulent present with a past and a future, to help men and women all over the contemporary world to make themselves at home in this world. Virtually no one today seems to want to make the large, human connections that the idea of modernity entails. Hence, discourse and controversy over the meaning of modernity, so lively a few decades ago, has virtually ceased today.
The modernisms of the past can give us back a sense of our own roots. They can:

(1) Help us connect our lives with people throughout the rest of the world who are living through the trauma of modernization.
Illuminate the contradictory forces which inspire and torment us, such as:

(a) our desire to be rooted in a stable and coherent person and social past which conflicts with our desire for limitless growth (economically, socially, psychologically, etc.) a growth which enriches the future while destroying the solidities of the past.
(b) our desire for clear and solid values to live by which conflicts with our desire to embrace the limitless possibilities of modern life and experience which often call such values into question, producing a constant negotiation of personal and political alliances and hostilities.

Modernity at the most personal, and most social levels is a maelstrom torn paradoxically between the nihilistic commodification or even destruction of all and the developing creative powers and critical abilities born of humanity’s assertive protest and a desire to transcend.