The entrance into modernity is a painful and traumatic business for everybody. Two world wars and endless local conflicts have been fought over it. Russia is going into a tailspin right now because a neighbor who is entering into modernity faster than Russia is prepared to do freaks the whole country out. And before you condemn the stupid, terrified Russians, tell me where your country was in 1914 and 1939. I’m guessing it was either in the exact same place or about to get there.
The US was always much better at modernity than everybody else. Anti-colonial struggle, Constitution, separation of church and state, participatory democracy, individualism, capitalism, industrialization, women’s rights, workers’ rights, sexual revolution, mass culture, technology, education, science – it was always ahead, always rushing head on into modernity, the very modernity that everybody else feared so much. The US fought its big anti-modernity vs pro-modernity war back in the 1860s and, as a result, wasn’t that interested, that emotionally involved and passionately invested in the two world wars. Why worry and fret if the decision to become modern was made long before others started to awaken to the inescapable push of modernity?
And then something happened. It was as if by the end of the XXth century the country had reached the limit of its capacity to tolerate modernity and got scared of its own comfort with it. Great efforts started to be made to roll back all of the great advances achieved since the XVIIIth century. Modernity’s greatest project – and its greatest success – seems to be giving up on it.
Of course, it’s all useless. Time can’t be turned backwards, and just like every effort the world has seen of stopping modernity’s triumph, this one will fail, too. It’s up to us whether the price we pay for this resistance is as high as what others paid for it.
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