You are not doomed to reproduce what your ancestors have done. The son will not be like his father, the daughter will not be like her mother. She can invent something new. I think that is the best message of modernity.
What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.
Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer.
Modernity is a desert, and we are jungle monkeys. And so new evolutionary selective pressures are coming to bear upon the human situation, new ideas are coming to the fore. Psilocybin is a selective filter for this. The wish to go to space is a selective filter for this. Just the wish to know your own mind is a selective filter for this.
ISIS says they want to go back and reject modernity? Well, I think we should help them. We ought to bomb them back to the Stone Age.
If one looks at the works of Newton to Einstein, they were never scientists in the way modernity understands the term.
The scientific and societal achievements of the modern age are undisputable. But after the French Revolution, modernity increasingly emancipated itself from Christian roots, thereby becoming rootless itself.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization
Modernity widened the distance between the sensational and the relevant.
When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.
Modernity has reneged on its promise to young people to provide social mobility, stability and collective security. Long-term planning and the institutional structures that support them are now relegated to the imperatives of privatization, deregulation, flexibility and short-term profits.
It is so true that in liquid modernity freedom was, so to speak, let off the leash, and for a quite a number of years the freedom of choice was "in principle" unlimited. One result was the weakening of inter-human bonds, particularly inherited bonds, and the counterfactual assumption that individuals must and can fend for themselves.
And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill.
Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.
Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.
Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption through modernity.
What modernity requires is not that you cease living according to your faith, but that you accept that others may differ and that therefore politics requires a form of discourse that is reasonable and accessible to believer and non-believer alike. This religious restraint in politics is critical to the maintenance of liberal democracy.
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.
Modernity is not about dress codes.
