Late moderns, who have accepted the essential premises of modernity-the essential goodness of humanity, human perfectibility, human autonomy relative to all other authorities divine or human, the universal fatherhood of God, and the universal brotherhood of humanity-struggle to understand the sort of religious commitment that not only permits and condones but even requires the religious murder and martyrdom. Most late moderns live in such a closed universe that the four jets that crashed on 9/11 came literally and figuratively out of the blue. That elixir is a powerful cocktail many that late moderns refuse even to consider in their analysis of why the 9/11 hijackers did what they did. On 9/11 we witnessed the effect of the toxic combination of ancient grievances combined with a triumphalist eschatology and the will to murder and to die to make a point. Still, after 9/11 our anxiety is only partly driven by the social fluidity enabled by rapid technological change. Who knew that just 7 years later, when the public began using the Internet, how much more quickly social change would occur? I remember Bob Godfrey talking in 1986 about the influence of television on social change. By 1947 television was assuming the form it has today. It is no coincidence that Auden wrote about anxiety just as television was coming into existence. There is a sense in which the late industrial age, the early days of the high-tech age marked the onset of anxiety. In the 1940s Auden wrote a poem with that title. One way to characterize the post-9/11 world is as “The Age of Anxiety.” This is not a new label. Of course, the closer one inspects anything, the more complex it becomes, the more the particulars come to the surface and they, in turn, make it more difficult to speak about universals, that which unites particulars. They give us a way to think about a period of time and a starting point for understanding it.
The 16th century is “The Age of Reformation” or “The Early Modern Period.” The 18th century is “The Age of Enlightenment” and 19th century is “The Industrial Age” or “The Age of Westward Expansion.” The 20th century has been characterized as “The American Age.” It all depends upon at what one is looking and from where. Historians like to characterize periods of time.
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