Since the beginning of human history, religion had been the most defining element of society. It literally sat at the pinnacle of all civilizations and defined a people, their culture, architecture and way of thinking. However, about 300 years ago, there was a huge paradigm shift. The Age of Enlightenment. Science and religion were at loggerheads, and God was replaced with “self” as the focal point of society.
The Age of Enlightenment is the very definition of modernism. A movement that – right at its conception – matrixed traditional beliefs with modern ideas. This new way of life influenced literature, visual art, architecture, dance, and music. This is simply called the New Age in our time today.
Values
Modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding what was holding back progress and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end. Thus, even in art, Modernism fostered a period of experimentation after questioning the status quo. Modernists did not believe in uniform values; they cared little for social norms and instead were occupied with a lack of identity, lack of faith, and cynicism.
Roger Griffin observes that modernity produced a longing for a “sense of sublime order and purpose” in a world where the sacred canopy had been torn apart by secularization and fragmentation. In this vacuum, movements and ideologies that seemed unrelated began to flourish with near-religious devotion: Expressionism, Futurism, vitalism, Theosophy, psychoanalysis, nudism, eugenics, utopian town planning, architecture, modern dance, Bolshevism, organic nationalism—and, in the end, even the cult of self. What once appeared fringe soon became the cultural norm.
This also gave rise to new concepts such as Individualism, Symbolism and Absurdity. It was more about what an individual thought about a certain idea – for instance, polygamy – not necessarily about what society thought. The individual determined his morality rather than the collective whole. Every petty yardstick in society was challenged and seen as a social construct. We still see it till today as people doubt that Jesus even existed although He is one of the most documented people in history. Perhaps, even what was thought to be cast-in-stone common knowledge were now challenged as being fluid; God, gender, rights, morality, to mention but a few.
Beliefs
It started as Christian Science, a religion that sought to fill the portholes when science and religion combined path. However, the patch didn’t last. Religious fundamentalists believe in the superiority of their religious teachings, and in a strict division between righteous people and evildoers. This belief system regulates their thoughts, but also all conceptions regarding themselves, others, and the world.
The core of every religion is its belief systems. Existing religions now needed a modern touch or a simple abandonment. “Traditional” religion became formalism; excessive adherence to prescribed forms from authorities. The modern man thought that was questionable. This gave rise to liberalism. Liberalism took the more “flexible” approach; a world of logic, physical matter and no eternal consequences for one’s willful actions. Pseudoscience has reduced man to a piece of insignificance – just a composition of gases and atoms – leaving him with no defined purpose.
The “modern” man reduced religion to mere forms — ceremonies, rituals, and outward observances stripped of inner meaning. Ethics, too, became formal, grounded in the shell of moral law without wrestling with motive or consequence. Modernism, born out of applying critical methods to the Scriptures and the history of doctrine, shifted the focus. It diminished the weight of historic creeds and dogmas, and instead exalted the humanistic side of religion — stressing man, while sidelining the eternal.
For the first time in history, people were not looking to God for definitive answers; they grew skeptical of their religion and religious faith. Modernism basically showed a society that was rebelling against tradition, while realism simply showed how society dealt with the normalities of life. Realism talked about the traditions of characters, how they lived, and what they dealt with.
Expression
Modernity defined itself by its own standards — technological advancement, systems of governance, and socio-economic shifts. To embrace modernity was to see one’s generation as breaking into new realms of knowledge and organization, making the immediate past appear obsolete or outpaced. Voices like David Hume, hailed as one of history’s great philosophers, embodied this spirit by urging philosophical agnosticism toward almost everything, yet granting man a fragile sense of certainty and a huge lack of identity.
In modernist literature, man is assured that his own sense of morality trumps. Modernist fiction spoke of the inner self and consciousness. Instead of progress, the modernist writer saw a decline in civilization. Modernism was a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. This is because society is heading to a place with no structure, no universal basics, no fundamentals, no yardstick and no acknowledgement of a Godhead.
Where is society heading? … to be continued