Troubles With Modernity: The Struggle To Comprehend Modernity

Since 1500 CE to the present, modernity has altered civilization in its ways of life involving values, attitudes, scientific, technological, and political aspects of a society. Modernity can be seen as rejections of the past, more specifically, a transition from tradition to the new. Along with any change, there are critiques regarding its usefulness and value in the world; individuals such as Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Ferdinand Toennies developed their own criticisms. Modernity has created various issues including the loss of individuality, alienation and exploitation of people, and the rise of a Gesellschaft society. Max Weber was concerned with modernity’s adverse effect on individuality and freedom as he feared the modern industrial world would threaten them. The Industrial Revolution transformed rural, farming cultures into industrialized cities that brought rationalized institutions. Rationalization replaced the tradition, emotion, and religion that existed during the pre-modernity period. It was interchanged with motives of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control “through substituting nonhuman technology for human judgement, and the irrationality of rationality” (Ritzer 51).

These four motives focused less on individuals and their well-being, and more so about industrial advances in society. Weber looked as this as harmful because he saw it as individuals being “controlled and constrained in the interests of the effective functioning of the bureaucratic organizations” (Kivisto 57). People became machine-like leading to dehumanizing attitudes. As a result, Weber’s term the “Iron Cage” ignited, which led to a loss in a “sense of individuality, creativity, and freedom” (Kivisto 57). The Iron Cage forces people to follow the rules and procedures that have been set in place by machines and bureaucracy. As a result, people lose who they are in the rules that they are forced to follow. Throughout modernity, Karl Marx has discovered a presence of the alienation and exploitation of people due to a capitalist society. The social relations of production create a society of different classes; one dominates, while the other is subservient. 

The dominate class consists of those who “own and control the forces of production-including the human forces” (136). On the other hand, those in the subservient class are workers, means of production, and those that contribute their labor; often under the authority of the dominate class. Marx refers this back to exploitation because the capitalists are in control over the production process and bargaining wages, which affects the laborers’ wages. Subsequently, the laborers end up earning a “subsistence wage”, which happens to be particularly low. The capitalists get to keep the rest of the profits to themselves while the workers are being paid the bare minimum. Additionally, Marx critiques modernity for the alienation it creates to those with no control over the productivity. Marx claims there are four ways that workers are alienated: “forced to sell their labor and do not own what they produce, they are alienated from the product of their labor… kills the creative spirit, workers cannot find satisfaction in their labor…alienated from their distinctively and uniquely human potentials or powers-particularly the power to create and enjoy beauty-which are dulled or remain undeveloped in a capitalist society…and alienates workers from each other, inasmuch as it makes them compete with one another for jobs and wages” (140). Not only do workers feel alienated, but capitalists share these feelings as capitalism keeps them “from being fully developed, kind, and caring human being and makes him or her instead a cold and callous calculating machine” (140). Ultimately, workers and capitalists are both alienated from themselves, each other, and development of their human powers. Ferdinand Toennies claimed that modernity causes a loss of community, ultimately shifting to a Gesellschaft society; furthermore, this transition has resulted in an increase in loneliness and narcissism, as well as a decline in empathy. 

Toennies discusses in which the periods before modernity were Gemeinschaft, meaning there was an importance on community and working for the common good; whereas, modernity developed a society that behaves like “a mechanical aggregate and artifact” (Kivisto 91). More specifically, Toennies disputed the success of modernity by explaining that “Gemeinschaft, exemplified by the powerful bonds of kinship and tradition, was seen as gradually disappearing and being replaced by Gesellschaft, characterized by the weaker social ties of associations established to a considerable extent on the basis of self-interest” (Kivisto 89). Individuals began drifting away from the important assets that once existed in a community and have transformed into a society with only self-interests in mind. The loss of community-like attachments greatly affected social relationships, which led people to become lonely. Toennies explained the loneliness people experienced began to cause serious problems including crime, suicide, out-of-wedlock births, and mental illness, which still occur to this day. Additionally, modernity has supported people becoming more narcissistic. 

People have begun to crave admiration and only care about their own success, rather than the common good. Furthermore, people have separated themselves from considering other people’s hopes and feelings that they have become less empathetic as they focus on themselves before anyone else. Ferdinand Toennies used the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to embody the negative transition from tradition to new. Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Ferdinand Toennies are all very critical of the modernity period. Although some think it is helping and bettering society, these three individuals have made strong points regarding its negativity; these include people losing their individualism, feelings of alienation and exploitation, and a Gesellschaft society. The likelihood of reversing modernity seems impossible, which unfortunately means society continuing to get become more damagingly affected from modernity.