Theories of Modernity

In an essay on “Two Theories of Modernity,” Charles Taylor distinguishes between cultural and a-cultural theories of modernization.

The former type of theory is “one that characterizes the transformations that have issued in the modern West mainly in terms of the rise of a new culture. The contemporary Atlantic world is seen as one culture (or group of closely related cultures) among others, with its own specific understandings, for example, of person, nature, the good, to be contrasted to all others, including its own predecessor civilization (with which it obviously also has a lot in common).”

An acultural theory privileges transcultural factors like the growth of reason, scientific consciousness, secularization, instrumental rationality, or the distinction between fact and value. In this context, the specifics of Atlantic/European-American cultural values are not the driving force for modernization. Modernization can happen in any other cultural where these modernizing factors arise. In short, “modernity in this kind of theory is understood as issuing from a rational or social operation that is culture-neutral.”

The dominant theories of modernization over the past two centuries have been acultural theories, which tell a story of Anyculture’s “coming to see” that this or that is the case – coming to see that nature functions by regular laws, or coming to see that religions are mythic.

Taylor thinks acultural theories are bad not only because of what they foreground but also because of what they screen from view. He writes, “What this view reads out of the picture is the possibility that Western modernity might be powered by its own positive visions of the good, that is, by one constellation of such visions among available others, rather than by the only viable set left after the old myths and legends have been exploded.” Acultural theories exclude “whatever there might be of a specific moral direction to Western modernity, beyond what is dictated by the general form of human life itself, once old errors shown up.” And this in turn means that acultural theories miss the possibility that “Western modernity might be sustained by its own spiritual vision.” Thus, attempts to explain the modern West ignore what is perhaps most central – the moral and spiritual vision that drove the way new technologies and social arrangements were pursued and adopted.

Of course, an acultural theory not only obscures certain possibilities in explaining Western/European-American modernity, but also provides a distorting lens for viewing other cultures. “Primitive” or “pre-modern” cultures are judged not simply different from Western culture, but inferior, backward, savage. They’re behind, bless their hearts, but when they grow up, they’ll look just like us.

Taylor suggests that acultural theories are adopted more for their political utility than for their explanatory power. Acultural theories of modernity lend themselves to easy evaluative stances, either for or against modernity. Pro-moderns say that we have “come to see” what our ancestors could not; anti-moderns are anxious about values that have been lost in the process. These are both acultural positions, and both of them underwrite a simplistic, politically charged stance: ” nothing stamps the changes as more unproblematically right than the account that we have ‘come to see’ through certain falsehoods, just as the explanations that we have come to forget important truths brands it as unquestionably wrong.” We avoid cultural explanations because they involve a recognition of a degree of cultural relativity, and we are afraid that acknowledging cultural relativity will make it impossible to make evaluative judgments at all. We prefer acultural theories because we prefer easy evaluative theories.