The subject of modernity is on my mind a lot these days. Over the past five hundred years an impressive civilization has been built. But it is not sustainable and it is at risk of collapse.
In 2008, Alain de Botton founded The School of Life and I discovered it soon thereafter. I continue to be very impressed by this initiative. Their books and articles are full of wisdom. I like the fact that they work as a team without identifying individual writers. There are no big egos on display.
Below is a selection of quotes from the book.
Introduction
Becoming modern has involved changes across many parts of our lives.
Secularisation… Progress… Science… Individualism… Love… Cities… Work… Nature… Speed...
Much of the transformation of modernity has been exciting; thrilling, even… But at the same time the advent of modernity has been a story of tragedy.... We can pick up on aspects of the catastrophe in seven areas.
1 Failure
...in perhaps the largest single indictment of modernity, suicide rates of advanced societies are up to ten times as high as those in traditional ones. Moderns aren’t only more in love with success, they are far more likely to kill themselves when they fail.
2 Neurasthenia
Also known as ‘American nervousness’, it was associated with living in cities, with being shaken by crowds, overstimulated by newspapers, exhausted by choice, cut off from nature and driven frenetic by expectations.
3 Nostalgia
Modernity has bred elaborate fantasies of ‘simpler’ lives on South Sea islands, in Native American teepees and Arabian medinas. These longings might not be plans for real-world action, but they are telling ways of letting out a sigh at the depredations of our era.
4 Envy
Modernity has told us that we are all equal and can achieve anything: boundless possibility awaits every one of us… The psychological burden of a so-called ordinary life is incomparably harder, even as its material advantages have become ever more available.
5 Loneliness
In a practical sense, modernity has connected us to others like never before, but it has also left us emotionally bereft, perhaps late at night, on our own…
6 Huts
Not coincidentally, many of the leading figures in the intellectual history of modernity have retreated to isolated dwellings in which to take distance from, and attempt to make sense of, the chaos…
7 Sentimentality
Modernity has stripped us of our primordial right to feel melancholy, unproductive, surly and confused… Though modernity may have made us materially abundant, it has imposed a heavy emotional toll.
1 Consumer Capitalism
The most significant aspect of modernity that separates it from every era previously known is a relatively humdrum and apparently inconsequential activity: shopping.
...human beings are exceptionally bad at distinguishing correctly between what they need and what they desire…
To the extent that we are drawn into any kind of expenditure that prevents us from flourishing and that cuts us off from sources of true nourishment, we are the victims of commercial seduction.
2 Advertising
There was another problem with modernity’s advertising: its relentless positivity, its refusal to countenance the creation of something that is as wise as it sounds far-fetched: a melancholy advertisement. The conditions of life are in essence tragic.
...what is tickling us unconsciously is a secret promise of the spiritual goods we ache for: a need for love and meaning, connection and calm, understanding and freedom.
3 Materialism
Good materialism suggests that material things can contribute to, but never replace, the arduous psychological work required to achieve fulfilment, connection, purpose and peace of mind.
Modernity... has encouraged us to have excessive faith in quasi-magical solutions originating out of material things.
4 Media
Of course, terrible things had always occurred in history, but never before were so many people exposed regularly to the very worst cases, carefully collated from around the world.
A lot of this information, when it reached one’s doorstep in the morning, was liable to feel urgent and alarming…
The newspaper has given birth to one of the most unexpected personalities of the modern age: the well-informed idiot.
The news we really need is that which speaks of the imperative to forgive, to reflect, to appreciate, to be grateful, to be still and to be kind; these are the true bits of news we should push everything else — the fires, the murders, the crashes and the crises — aside for in order to render them more solid in our minds.
5 Democracy
When modern societies are in the mood to vaunt their advantages, there is one feature they invariably single out and refer to with special reverence: we, at least, live in democracies.
One rigorous tradition criticised the democratic folly of allowing a mass of largely uneducated, penniless, aggrieved and inexperienced people — many of them inflamed by newspapers — to vote on matters of technical complexity and strategic importance.
The background problem was that ‘ordinary people’ were not quite as the early educated defenders of democracy had hoped.
We may have learnt how to be free at the ballot box. But we are still only at the beginning of knowing how to be free in the depths of our own lives.
6 Family
...John Bowlby (1907–1990), a psychoanalyst, and possibly the most influential figure in our modern understanding of childcare and relationships.
Parents had always known that their primary task was to ensure their children’s safety and welfare, but modernity changed our collective understanding of where this safety and welfare might lie.
Modern childrearing practices have come into direct conflict with modern capitalism.
We have been reluctant to admit that operating in certain areas of a high-pressured modern economy might not be so compatible with having a family.
We have very demanding ideas about the needs of families and very demanding ideas about work, efficiency, profit and competition. Both are founded on crucial insights; both exclude the other. We deserve a lot of sympathy.
7 Love
Romantics believed that true lovers would understand each other intuitively, without needing to use words… Romanticism became the official religion of modernity… Along the way, Romanticism became the single greatest obstacle to our ability to have successful relationships; it became a disaster for love.
No wonder if the modern age has not only obsessed more about love than any other, it has also failed to help us embark upon and sustain relationships in which we can possibly succeed.
8 Sex
Artists and philosophers described battles within each good person between desire on the one hand and chastity on the other.
The priority for all those educating the younger generation was to help them to make the right choices in the battle between vice (almost always a beautiful woman) and virtue (almost always a decent but vacillating man).
But arguably, modernity has complicated rather than eased our relationship with sex.
We need a new language with which we can own up to how outlandish and frightening, mesmerising and wicked sex is and will always remain. That would be true liberation.
9 Loneliness
Modernity is surely a lonelier place than the world that preceded it.
Romanticism didn’t just make single people feel freakish; it massively increased the pressure on anyone already in a couple who couldn’t lay claim to extreme contentment.
In 1921, Carl Jung, in his book Psychological Types, had introduced the terms ‘extraverted’ and ‘introverted’ to divide humanity... The modern world belonged firmly to the extraverts...
We should dare to believe that we are in solitude not because there is anything wrong with us but because we are noble of spirit...
10 Work
For most of our time on Earth, work had been no fun at all…
At its best, work allows us to park what is most valuable about us — most creative, sensible, kind, perceptive — in an object or institution that is more stable and accomplished than we are… All this said, there is so much that can stop us from finding the work that would help us flourish.
The pain of modernity here, as in so many other fields, is that we have raised expectations without teaching ourselves how we might meet them; we have left ourselves unaided in a painful intermediate zone between expectation and reality.
11 Individualism
The modern world is snobbish… But stripped to its essence, snobbery merely indicates any way of judging another human whereby one takes a relatively small section of their identity and uses it to come to a total and fixed judgement on their entire worth… according to the job snobbery at large in the modern world, we are what is on our business card.
No wonder that the consequences of underachievement feel especially punishing… A society that assumes that what happens to an individual is the responsibility of the individual is a society that doesn’t want to hear any excuses...
...the modern world has made the psychological consequences of failure harder to bear… It has also made it imperative for psychological survival that we try to find a way of escaping the claustrophobia of individualism...
12 A Quiet Life
The modern world makes sure that we know at all times just how much we might be missing. It is a culture in which intense and painful doses of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) are inevitable.
The quiet understand how much can be drawn out of a single experience, if one takes the time to turn it over in one’s mind… We feel the need for so many new experiences because we have been so poor at absorbing the ones we have had.
We have probably already had enough excitements for many lifetimes. We have seen enough people, gone to enough places, bought enough things. We need to stop the forces of the modern world from continuing to draw us away from our true home. There is no centre, there is no party to which we have not been invited. There is just us, here, now, somewhere on the pale blue dot, doing our best, surrounded by unobtrusive beauty, with a too-often unknown need to rejoin the silence and reopen our minds to vastness — and, along the way, to start going to bed earlier.
13 Busy-ness
...some of our most productive moments will have little in common with the scenarios envisaged by the modern religion of hard work.
...some of our greatest insights come when we stop trying to be purposeful...
...there may be a lot of avoidance going on beneath the outward frenzy. Busy people evade a different order of undertaking. They are practically a hive of activity, yet they don’t get round to working out their real feelings about their work.
14 Ugliness
One of the great generalisations we can make about the modern world is that it is, to an extraordinary degree, ugly.
There are at least six reasons for the ugliness.
The world became so ugly because we forgot to argue that a concern for the visual realm isn’t an elite pastime: it belongs to mental health. At its most acute, the places we live in determine the sort of people we can be. In a degraded environment, however safe and rich our material lives, our spirits will sink.
The challenge is to remember our longing for beauty and to fight the forces of modernity that would keep us from acting on it.
15 Education
Given the extent of the emphasis on utility in the education system, it remains surprising for many modern citizens to reach middle age (or earlier) and discover that rather a lot appears to have been missed out in the curriculum. Despite the years of dedication and examination, the modern citizen is apt to look back and wonder with a mixture of irritation and sorrow why so much of what they needed to know was never taught to them at school.
In a future curriculum designed for flourishing rather than productivity — and for satisfaction in life rather than success in school — we might be guided to understand who we are and what our true enthusiasms might be, so that we could marry up our skills with the causes and projects that fundamentally matter to us.
Until around 1955, most great social problems were at root caused by a lack of liberty; liberty was needed to free us from the church and tradition, from bad laws and archaic parents. But since then, most grave problems have arguably not been caused by an absence of liberty so much as by a superabundance of it.
16 Perfectionism
...the quest for perfection — uncritically held up as a collective goal by the modern age — carries grave dangers. We may all have perfect moments, we may all pull off perfect feats, but no one who has ever walked the Earth can ever have a perfect life.
The Buddhists... For them, too, life was a conclusively imperfect journey, marked by suffering, riddled with delusion and fallacy.
To believe in human perfection isn’t a bracing way to achieving ever higher standards; it’s a path to breakdown and, at moments of serious mishap, suicide.
The modern world has done us an enormous service in encouraging us to raise our ambitions; it is in danger of creating mass psychosis by failing to remind us clearly enough that we are also — invariably and continuously — silly, mistaken and beautifully ridiculous.
17 Science and Religion
According to a standard heroic secular account, at the start of the modern age and in just a few short decades, science was able to defeat religion through rigour and brilliance — and thereby forever liberated humankind from ignorance and superstition… But it may not be true.
We can, in other words, look to science for the sort of ideas we used to seek in religion, and that could assuage some of the ills of modernity. At least seven big ideas can be found...
1 Perspective: the scale of the universe
2 All is vanity: The Second Law of Thermodynamics
3 The resilience of life: five mass extinctions
4 Forgiveness: evolution
5 Beyond the ego: mind and body
6 Scepticism: sensory frailty
7 Our existence: cosmic gratitude
18 Nature
Modernity had made us mentally unwell — and nature held some of the cures. What, then, might the therapeutic benefits be? At least five themes suggested themselves.
Conclusion
1 The agonies of freedom
Modernity has blasted open our confines and rendered us ‘free’ at every level. We can choose whatever job we like, marry whomever we please, divorce at any time, live anywhere, question anything, obey no one. It sounds pleasant and in some ways it is, but it is also a heavy, sometimes intolerable, burden.
2 The agonies of happiness
The official religion of modernity is happiness.
We know in our hearts, and at 4 a.m. when we wake up in a panic, what life is really like — the despairing, anxious, always unsettled, always fretful and always questioning business it is. The next stage of our evolution will be to take what we know of ourselves and build a society around it, a society that has the courage to accept its true psychological complexity.
3 The agonies of technology
...we know we’re in a transitional period while we wait for the laboratories to build their prototypes. The particular agony of modernity is to see the shape of a better future, to understand that our pain isn’t essential, to spy the rescue ship on the horizon — and yet to know that we will be dead by the time help arrives.
4 The meaning of life
Modernity may be a time of confusion, yet the trajectory of a necessary future is clear: not just to continue to suffer in recurring cycles, but also — in ever more detailed ways, in line with our highest potential — to illuminate a little more of the primordial darkness; to understand our way out of the perils of modernity.