I am doing some research for a book I am currently writing. The research deals with the meaning of Modernity. Mexican thinkers are obsessed with reaching Modernity, but very few explain what it means. This attitude is reflected by what Octavio Paz once wrote: "We pursue Modernity in its unending metamorphosis and we never are successful to grab it [...] It is the instant, that bird that is everywhere and nowhere. We want to grab it alive but it opens its wings and it vanishes, turned into a bunch of syllables" (Stockholm Speech, 1990). Since I did not want to spend a lot of time to go into depth about the subject, I purchase a book authored by Alexis Nouss, who tries to answer this very question, titled precisely La Modernidad.
Nouss gives us a historic and literary view of what the word has meant in different ages and circumstances. But before I reveal some of those findings I will explain what is the perception of Modernity that I've gotten along the years, primarily from the Mexican lens. First of all, when Mexican intellectuals speak of Modernity, they turn to either Europe or the United States. To Europe for intellectual conventions; to the U.S. for standards of living, political and economic structures. The comparisons of those modernities with the Mexican case are varied and often whimsical. The choice also falls on what they think is best, but I always felt those comparisons were artificial, opinion which became solidified as I understood better the history of both Europe and the United States. And it so happens, and I see this more with the comparisons Mexican thinkers do with the U.S. -- a case which I am more with familiar, for I lived there for over 20 years -- that these comparisons are indeed superficial and without understanding how those things Mexicans admire of the U.S. were brought into existence, or they have a twisted and often biased understanding of their origins.
The second opinion I had about how Modernity hoisted itself unto all the spectrum of Western culture was one of turning something new, and doing away with the old. It is a never ending Oedipus Rex complex from which Occident never seems to get satiated from committing patricide and incest. Each phase of European history is a violent cycle of getting rid of the old, and beginning again without looking into the past. There is more substance to those sentences, which right now will be left unexplained. Although there is a sense of always going forward, what people call "progress," there is also a huge sense of subconscious insecurity in Western ethos.
Now, one of the most interesting findings about how the word Modernity became coined has to do with the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Nouss explains that one semantic direction has to do with, "a relationship, of rupture or continuity, with a referential past... 'Modern' from the Latin modernus, appearing by the end of the 5th c., a period that marks the transition from Roman antiquity to the Christian world. Modernus derives itself from mode, which means "recently, just now," and in its origin from "exactly," formed from modus, 'measure'" (Nouss, pp. 9,10). Contrary to contemporary popular wisdom, modernus marked the transition from Greco-Roman civilization to a Christian one, and its subsequent Dark Ages. This is not a small change of paradigm.
-- Nouss, A. (2009). La modernidad. Mexico: Publicaciones Cruz O. My translation from the Spanish text.
