The Myth of Modernity in 2020

By: Ella Brady

In Paris, Capital of Modernity, David Harvey analyzes modernity in Paris in 1948, a year of violent revolution. Harvey uses Balzac’s realist writings to illustrate the archetypes that defined the era. Balzac’s documentation of Paris produces a “modern mythology” that encompasses the Parisians pathologies and class relations. His work unveils the delusions that engulfed Paris due to revolution. The year of 2020 presented the same notion of “modernity” and archetypes. Our perception of 2020 was shaped by Balzac’s myths, making 2020 a year of modernity. The three myths I will discuss are,  modernity as a break from the past, utopianism, and intimacy, 

“One of the myths of modernity is that it constitutes a radical break from the past,” says Harvey. In other words, the perception that the past has been left behind by “creative destruction” to usher in a new age is delusion.

Such delusion gripped Paris in 1848. Tension in politics, literature, and economic relations resulted in explosive violence. Romanticism was denounced in favor of realism. People see those shifts as symptomatic of a greater shift, rather than the other way around. But, Paris details the slow transition of social and political climates that facilitated the “break”.

It is tempting to view 2020 as a radical break. Society is conducted differently. The obvious culprit is coronavirus, which forces people to isolate. Equally important was increased support for BLM, which shifted understanding of the magnitude of racism and politics in the United States.

We are under the same delusions of a radical “break” as Paris.? Racial tension in the United States goes back to its founding, and it was never going to be tolerated forever. Activists have taken steps to where we are now for a long time. Current ideas about race seem radical and new, but many events that sparked them the tipping point of what was long building up.

The pandemic changed the way we use technology, but technology has been shaping and changing our lives as long as time. We have utilized technology like zoom and facetime in similar ways since the very first telephone, and always adapted technology to our needs. Using zoom for our daily activities is different, but it is not radical.

The second myth is more relevant to early 2020. “Balzac often invokes idyllic pastoral scenes from the earliest novels.” Paris in 9148 was rife with protest and failing aristocracy, so Balzac used kitschy nature scenes to represent order. In early 2020, the global warming crisis prompted a relation towards nature that mirrors Balzac’s. It was no longer a wilderness to be tamed and domesticated, but an ideal of peace and beauty too fragile to survive chaotic politics and corporate wickedness. “Modernity” and capitalism are the murderers of the ideal scene. Greta Thunberg’s words ring back “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words...all you care about is money.”

But nature is not the idyll that urban anxiety wants to make it. The exacerbated chaos in our social and political lives tempts us to see nature as a contrast, but we are only under the same delusion as the Parisians. Nature is grim and disorderly.

While Thunberg’s message is ultimately correct, her notion that there is a good/evil dynamic is fantasy, like  Balzac’s diad of order/chaos.

Common sentiment is that zoom is an invasion of privacy. A class or work team can see your house, messes, family members, and private belongings. I have heard abstract objections to zoom as well. It brings the classroom into personal space. It bars differentiation between personal and public life. 

Balzac imagined the destruction of privacy as deadly but necessary, the ultimate dilemma of modern man.” In many of his stories, his character’s decisions to reveal their personal space is fatal, but before they die they achieve “intimacy”, the space between private and public that results, for Balzac, in ecstasy. While we do not use Zoom for ecstasy, it is intimacy that is desired when we endure zoom and facetime for a diluted interaction. Those who express a desire to have their camera off, their space unpenetrated, and their room unseen are expressing the same affect as the Parisian bourgeoisie that wanted to avoid intimacy.

We say that 2020 was a year unlike any other but there’s nothing new under the sun. 2020 was a year of modernity, but it held the same archetypes that existed centuries ago.