Quotes About Modernity

Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'.

Modernity, in contrast, is based on the firm belief that economic growth is not only possible, but absolutely essential... Modernity has turned 'more stuff' into a panacea applicable to almost all public and private problems, from religious fundamentalism through Third World authoritarianism down to a failed marriage... Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet.

hence few try to understand what they have signed up for. Like when you download some software and are asked to sign an accompanying contract that consists of dozens of pages of legalese—you take one look at it, immediately scroll down to the last page, tick 'I agree' and forget about it. Yet in fact modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

Since there is no script, and since humans fulfil no role in any great drama, terrible things might befall us and no power will come to save us or give meaning to our suffering. There won't be a happy ending, or a bad ending, or any ending at all. Things just happen, one after the other. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause. If modernity has a motto, it is 'shit happens'.

Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.

we need to take full responsibility for the crimes and failings of modernity, from genocides to ecological degradation.

This escape clause has been the salvation of modern society, for it is impossible to sustain order without meaning. The great political, artistic and religious project of modernity has been to find a meaning to life that is not rooted in some great cosmic plan. We are not actors in a divine drama, and nobody cares about us and our deeds, so nobody sets limits to our power – but we are still convinced our lives have meaning.

Modernity is a deal. All of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born, and it regulates our lives until the day we die. Very few of us can ever rescind or transcend this deal. It shapes our food, our jobs and our dreams, and it decides where we dwell, whom we love and how we pass away.

Modernity is a deal. All of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born, and it regulates our lives until the day we die. Very few of us ever rescind or transcend this deal. It shapes our food, our jobs and our dreams, and it decides where we dwell, whom we love and how we pass away.

Nothing is born of nothing, least of all knowledge, modernity, or enlightened thought; progress is made in tiny surges, in successive laps, like an endless relay race. But there are links without which nothing would be passed on, and for that reason, they deserve the gratitude of all who benefited from them.

The great Enlightenment principles of modernity—liberalism, secularism, rationality, equality, free markets—do not provide the kind of tribal group identity that human beings crave and have always craved. They have strengthened individual rights and individual liberty, created unprecedented opportunity and prosperity, transformed human consciousness, but they speak to people as individuals and as members of the human race, whereas the tribal instinct occupies the realm in between.

The modern rule is that every woman should be her own chaperon.

One element of French anti-Americanism thus results from an undifferentiated aversion to everything Anglo-Saxon and English in general. With the French it is not so much the kind of skepticism about modernity (money, capitalism, trade, markets) that dominates German resentment of America.

An alternative modernity worthy of the name would recover the mediating power of ethics and aesthetics. This would be accomplished not by a return to blind traditionalism but through the democratization of technically mediated institutions. Power

The only shibboleth the West has is science. It is the premise of modernity and it defines itself as a rationality capable of, indeed requiring separation from politics, religion and really, society. Modernisation is to work towards this.

'Streetcar' is no longer about the moment at all. There is no Blanche DuBois anywhere; south, north, east or west. We don't have Blanche DuBois at the moment. But we have Willy Loman; everywhere we look we see Willy Loman. We are Willy Loman. We're on Facebook; we need to be known; we're selling all the time.

I think there is some kind of disillusionment in the West about the gains of modernity and of economic growth and it takes a form of skepticism about the gains of prosperity generally.

I much prefer the modern world.

People say I am a classic designer. I don't try to be classic, but I do try to be simple and elegant.

I would say that my idea of style and my taste are the same as when I began: They express my deep appreciation of all that is simple and linear... I always want to keep up with the times but without altering the essential characteristics of my philosophy.

I came up the old-fashioned way - tea boy, cutter, focus-puller, cinematographer - but I wasn't myself old-fashioned.

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason.

There's no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general cultural-medium.