A basic distinction between tradition and modernity pervades both the scholarly community and commonsensical readings of world history. Such understandings typically include the claim that traditional societies are governed by ritual, understood as the largely unquestioned external norms, customs, and forms of authority that regulate individual lives. In contrast, modern societies are seen as valuing individual autonomy, such that norms, customs, and authority are only accepted through the conscious choice of the rational individual. Fundamentalist movements, according to this line of reasoning, represent a rejection of the modern world and an attempt to return to a traditional world of ritual.
I would like to argue that almost every aspect of this framework is wrong. It is based upon a misunderstanding of ritual, a misunderstanding of earlier societies, a misunderstanding of our current situation, and a misunderstanding of movements like fundamentalism. It also leads to a potentially dangerous normative goal—namely, that what we and indeed all societies need is just more individual autonomy.
Most social scientific writing on modernity, modernization, and, paradoxically, multiple modernities have developed their arguments within this paradigm. This paradigm goes back to Clemenceau’s famous quip of a century ago: “la revolution est un bloc,” which implied that the different components of the revolution—democracy, rule of law, rise of a middle-class, values of political liberalism, secularization, etc.—could not be separated out. This view continued to characterize theories of modernization and modernity in mid-century; stressing the necessary linkages between the cultural, economic, political, and social programs of modernity. Current theories of multiple modernities advocate, of course, a different, more “modular” model that stresses the possibility and, indeed, practical disaggregation of different aspects of what we have come to see as modernist political, social, economic, and narrative orders and very different models of implementation of these different components in different ways.
I would like to argue that almost every aspect of this framework is wrong. It is based upon a misunderstanding of ritual, a misunderstanding of earlier societies, a misunderstanding of our current situation, and a misunderstanding of movements like fundamentalism. It also leads to a potentially dangerous normative goal—namely, that what we and indeed all societies need is just more individual autonomy.