ABSTRACT
Introduction The term modern has been used for many centuries to distinguish a new social order from previous ones, and ideas of the modern are most commonly defined through their opposition to the old and the traditional. This ‘oppositional definition’ has taken many forms. In post-Roman Europe the term modernus was used to distinguish a Christian present from a pagan past (Johnston et al., 2000), while in the late seventeenth century the quarrel between the ‘Ancients’ and the ‘Moderns’ spilled out from a debate over literature to embrace ideas of religion and social issues, causing the term ‘modern’ to enter widespread public usage for the first time. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the term modern acquired another meaning, this time denoting a qualitative and not just a chronological difference from pervious eras. To live in a modern age denoted not just newness but also progress and betterment. Linked to the Enlightenment search for rational scientific thought, the idea began to emerge that humans could change history for the better, and that progress could be controlled and ordered – rather than history
being done to people in a manner that was preordained
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this notion of modernity as progress held sway (see also Chapter 32). Rapid changes in economy, technology, culture and society meant that, in Europe at least, each generation could claim to be qualitatively different from previous ones. Stephen Kern, for instance, summarizes the changes that were taking place at the end of the nineteenth century:
From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless, telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream of consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought.
