ABSTRACT
Technology-intensive production, the most fundamental component of modernization and modernity, may be troublesome in many ways. With regard to anonymity, Berger invokes Durkheim's concept of anomie or cultural deregulation. The complexity of the modern world is something that most of us have come to take more or less for granted. Relativism precludes the rejection or condemnation of anything, an impossibly flexible compromise that limits civil and scholarly discourse in ways that prevent useful and defensible conclusions. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, yields a hopelessly rigid commitment to one and only one perspective, religious or otherwise, with the permanence of interlocked conflict taking the place of any mode of accommodation. The fact that modernization and modernity have not lived up to their economic promise is not only cause for discontent, it's a painful fact of everyday life that is routinely denied by politicians and receives too little attention from social scientists and other scholars.
