Reflexive Modernity
Grappling with a changing world
The last essay in my Thanksgiving sprint of writing, this one’s also a more theoretical one! While this week has been super fun, expect the volume of writing to slow down as I go back to Boston and start doing other stuff. Also, I recently helped Dave Backer, a super cool professor who studies critical education finance among other things, do the background research for and write one of his more recent posts from his great blog, “Schooling in Socialist America,” where we talk about the school district budget crisis in Newberg, Oregon. You can check it out using the button below!
What is “modernity?” When the hosts of this podcast I love, “The Sociology of Everything Podcast,” posed this question, I was a bit caught off guard. After taking a couple of social theory courses in college, I had come across the term modernity a ton of times. But how would I define it? I found myself unable to think of an easy definition.
In the episode of the podcast that I was listening to, Eric Hsu and Louis Everuss talk about Anthony Giddens’s definition of the term. According to the description of his book on the Stanford University Press website, Giddens describes modernity as the “modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence.” Eric and Louis explain this as the advent of science as a dominant logic of progress and frame of viewing the world. More specifically, they talk about how Giddens sees “reflexivity”1 as a defining feature of modernity, this idea that we are constantly iterating upon our understanding of the world through science. For Giddens, this means that sociology has the power to change the world because it can stimulate reflexivity that shapes how people understand society, in a sense reshaping the social reality that we live in.2
Giddens’s commentary on a reflexive modernity reminded me of Baruch Spinoza’s thoughts on free will. Spinoza lived from 1632 to 1677, so according to Giddens’s definition of modernity, he would have been right at the start of it! I took this excellent cognitive science course during my first year of college that discussed how modern psychology can affirm or challenge influential philosophical ideas, and Spinoza’s take on free will was one of the philosophical ideas we covered. I can’t remember his exact quote that my professor showed in his lecture but the gist of it was, “the more you learn about science, the less you believe in free will.” For Spinoza, the belief in free will was a lack of awareness of the causes of one’s actions. Every action is caused by a combination of previous actions, Spinoza argued.3 Spinoza’s claim about the relationship of science and one’s thoughts on free will was emblematic of Giddens’s concept of reflexive modernity, about how fundamental concepts such as free will could be destabilized through the reflexive practice of science.
One of my hot takes at that point in my life was that there was no free will. Just think about it, I would tell my friends, imagine everything that was and is happening in the world as a web of causality! We may believe that we have free will and that we are making choices, but all of those are the product of all that has happened before us. Even the very thoughts and desires that I have are products of things that have happened before. Any action is a necessary product of everything that has preceded it! Well, if there’s no free will, then what’s the point? Some friends would ask me. Why would I do anything? At that point I would grin. You’re still assuming you have free will! You don’t even have the free will to choose how you react to this information!
I would go on to read some of Nietzche’s take on free will4 and The Illusion of Conscious Will by Daniel Wegner, whose title gives away his take on the issue. I became more and more set in the belief that free will was just an illusion. I would die on a hill for this point, challenging and probing people to search for any arguments that could persuade me otherwise. Not like I had the free will to do otherwise!
Then, one fateful day a couple of months ago, I was chatting with my good friend Alejandro, a brilliant physicist who’s getting his PhD at MIT in something very smart. Basically, this man studies quantum physics. Alejandro told me that a new breakthrough in quantum physics has led us to know that at least one of the following premises are false: (1) things happen when we don’t measure them and (2) stuff happens because of stuff around it causes it (which can be a result of other stuff around it causing it, etc.). What?? Basically, they did some experiments with quantum particle stuff that, if true, completely upend the fundamental nature of how we understand causality.5 My entire intellectual crusade on free will is based on the notion of the chain of causality! I felt a weird sensation at that point -- curiosity, skepticism, then resignation -- basically the stages of grief of being wrong. I’m still waiting for a more definitive update from the field, but it appears that I went through what Giddens would refer to as the defining feature of modernity: reflexivity through science.
It’s pretty easy to get caught up in the glamour of progress and discovery in Giddens’s conception of reflexive modernity, but to me I see it as equally destabilizing and scary. In an increasingly secular society where concepts you thought of as fundamental are in flux or could be upended at any given moment, how do you find meaning and solace? Earthseed, the religion that the protagonist of Parable of the Sower comes up with, would tell us that God is Change and we should seek to shape God. Many other religions and belief systems teach us to embrace temporality and change, such as Buddhism. I remember reading a poem by the Japanese poet Kenko that emphasized the impermanence of cherry blossoms being beautiful in of itself.
It seems that a natural reaction to this, though, is to seek stability, to seek static categories and structures that we can fall back upon. That we can build meaning from. Conversations about transgender issues often remind me of this tendency. I remember reading an analysis after the election that talked about how out of touch many of the Democratic party’s stances had become from the majority of the electorate. One issue that they highlighted was transgender rights, for example. A majority of Americans do not support transgender participation in competitive sports, particularly with regard to transgender women. This topic could be an essay in of itself (which I’ll probably end up writing someday) that covers a whole range of considerations, such as what age an individual decides to transition, testosterone levels, and what I view as a generally problematic attitude towards competitive sports. Beyond all of the philosophical and biological debates, it seems that there is something fundamentally wrong about fully accepting transgender people as the gender that they identify to many people. Especially for the liberal-but-not-progressive people I talk to, even once we’ve exhausted all of the logical reasons why we shouldn’t allow transgender people to do things like participate in sports or use certain bathrooms, it seems like there is some sort of sacredness to the boundaries of gender that transgender people cross.
The reconceptualizing of traditional gender boundaries is in line with Giddens’s reflexive modernity. Research, representation, and discourse have challenged long-standing beliefs about gender that countless people have policed themselves and others by. Perhaps this is the inevitable march of modernity, that the reflexive nature Giddens talked about will slowly but surely transform how we understand the world. I wonder too, if such reflexive change has been accelerating with the advent of technology, capitalism, and globalization. If so, how will we keep up? What does it even mean to keep up?
Either way, it’s not like we have the free will to do anything about it! Then again, maybe we do…
Up Next
The next essay in my auto-ethnographic memoir series is “On Covering,” in which I explore the various ways in which I have sought to hide parts of my identity throughout my life. It drops tomorrow at 8am EST. This one was really challenging to write in a lot of different ways but I’m really proud of it, so excited to share with you all!
Shoutout Bourdieu. Because that was a big thing of his. Not because it’s connected to Giddens’s conception of it. Maybe it is. I don’t know. Shoutout Bourdieu.
Bro just wanted to feel like his work was important lol.
Interestingly enough, this view didn’t lead Spinoza to reject the concept of God. Instead, he construed the concept of God as the chain of causation itself, that God was EVERYTHING! Now that I can get behind!
Spoiler: he doesn’t believe in it.
Here’s a further elaboration on the debate from the physics goat himself if you’re interested: “Most physicists believe the Copenhagen interpretation which says that 1 is not true, that is measuring/interacting with something changes the system, but there are other interpretations (many-worlds/Everret or pilot-wave theory) that might give up on 2 instead.”