I’ve been trying to sort out a few defining features of modern society. One thing seems clear: even now, it has not fully escaped the framework inherited from agrarian life. That is why, when faced with new problems, so many people instinctively reach for old pastoral or village-style answers. But not only can we no longer return to that world; in many cases, that idealized version of it never broadly existed in the first place.
From settlement to rules
Under early human living conditions, people moved within very limited ranges. Language barriers also restricted the exchange of information, so useful survival strategies and accumulated experience were hard to pass on widely, whether across generations or across space. Short life expectancy meant most energy went into staying alive and reproducing.
In small hunter-gatherer communities, there was relatively little need for elaborate shared social rules. That changed once humans domesticated crops and animals—though it is not easy to say who domesticated whom. Crops and livestock may also be understood as having spread their own genes by drawing humans into a more stable relationship with them. In any case, mobility gave way to settlement.
Once people settled, society developed finer divisions of labor. A village needed ritual authority, defense, production, healing, and other functions to sustain itself. This kind of specialization has its own momentum: once it appears, it benefits the group as a whole, and the structure tends to reinforce itself. Of course, there was never only one possible pattern. But when settled communities entered into conflict over interests, the patterns that survived were usually the ones more favorable to group survival. The behavioral rules embedded in those patterns are one origin of what later becomes social morality.
Even so, politics and economics at that stage remained deeply constrained by nature. Most social rules leaned either toward the needs of agricultural society or toward commercial exchange. Human horizons gradually expanded, yet diversity rooted in kinship and locality could still endure for a long time. Only later, through the interaction of more efficiency-driven technologies and institutional rules, did modern industrial society emerge.
Industrial society and the rule of strangers
Industrial society pushed specialization and efficiency to extremes, and eventually spread its influence across the world. Along with it came a relatively universal set of rules for dealing with strangers—rules that no longer depended primarily on kinship ties, clan structures, or the unspoken codes of familiar communities.
Geographic limits were weakened by transport and information technology. Countries came to follow common industrial standards. Language itself moved toward practical uniformity in certain areas, as with the universal use of Arabic numerals. Law also moved toward shared principles for regulating relations between people who do not know one another personally.
Modern society is largely a continuation of this industrial pursuit of specialization and efficiency. The pastoral dream is mostly a beautified filter placed over agrarian life by those carrying old agrarian habits and sentiments into industrial society. A few people may indeed live that way, but it cannot sustain everyone.
And in every era, there are always early beneficiaries who climb aboard first and then want to weld the doors shut behind them. From their point of view, how most people live scarcely matters. The solutions they offer are often detached from reality and useless for understanding modern development or solving modern problems, so they are best ignored.
The machine of specialization
As specialization deepens, the production and consumption of goods are no longer completed by one person. Human beings become more tightly embedded as parts inside a larger social machine. People no longer need to know how the things they depend on are made; they care mainly about what those things do.
This gives rise to occupations with obvious purpose-specific identities. A psychotherapist is supposed to solve psychological distress. A nutritionist is supposed to provide the best dietary plan. A financial advisor is expected to deliver stable returns. An economist is expected to foresee economic crises. A scientist is expected to make controlled nuclear fusion possible.
But many newer professions, although they have developed their own jargon and insider language, do not necessarily solve the problems they claim to solve. Often, what they really provide is a professional aura that gives modern individuals a sense of certainty. After all, when people encounter questions beyond their own knowledge, they seem to have little choice but to seek out experts and trust them. They have largely lost the confidence to explore other fields of knowledge for themselves.
This tool-like, purpose-driven role assigned to individuals by specialization often creates confusion. Modern people struggle with probabilistic thinking in science and quickly translate probabilities into crude judgments like useful or useless. When an infectious disease appears, modern systems of specialization can rapidly produce vaccines. But if someone still gets sick after vaccination, public opinion will often magnify that fact, even though vaccine effectiveness was never going to reach 100 percent in the first place.
Growth as the hidden operating system
Modern society’s obsession with efficiency mainly serves the growth phenomenon—or growth theory—that has dominated since the Industrial Revolution. People often confuse recurring patterns with actual laws. They simply project past experience into the future without paying attention to the historical conditions that made that experience possible.
Modern society functions like a machine whose energy supply has mainly come from fossil fuels. In just a few centuries, it has released back into the atmosphere carbon that plants spent hundreds of millions of years fixing there. With technological progress, alternative energy sources seem possible, including renewables and nuclear power.
But solving the power problem is only half the story. The goods produced by the machine also need to be consumed. The demand that sustained this consumption was built not only over the past few centuries, but more specifically on the population explosion that took off after World War II. Near-exponential population growth created enormous demand and enormous room for inventing new demand.
Now, however, it appears increasingly likely that global population growth will come to an end within a few decades as development proceeds. In many developed countries, if one excludes new immigrants arriving from higher-fertility developing countries, population growth effectively stopped long ago.
Perhaps modern society will continue to manufacture new engines of demand. But the reality is that the growth of global wealth is far below global GDP. A large share of the products and services being produced are quickly consumed rather than accumulated. This helps create a worldwide atmosphere of consumerism. New technologies, especially personalized recommendation systems, keep digging deeper into individual desires and meeting them.
Information technology has also broken older hierarchical distribution systems and concentrated profits in the hands of a small number of technology companies, worsening inequality. Once global population stops growing—or inequality becomes even more severe—weakness on the demand side is bound to appear. And that would directly undermine the growth logic on which modern society has been running.
Capital moves, but it does not stay loyal
Yet this growth logic is deeply embedded in the economic operation of modern society. The development of finance has enabled capital to circulate globally.
Where capital arrives, it can invest in factories, create jobs, improve infrastructure, and produce visible prosperity. But the moment it no longer sees sufficient profit, it moves on without hesitation to the next low-cost, high-return location.
In an earlier period, this process was more constrained within national borders and could help advance entire domestic industries. In a globalized and informationalized world, however, capital is guided much more by cost and return. That is why many countries—especially small ones—do not possess a complete industrial structure. Instead, they are embedded in global supply chains. Production in any specific category tends to concentrate in the few regions or countries where profit is highest, while scale continues to push down marginal costs. This, too, is driven by capital.
Capital always chases profit. But if enough industries and regions across the globe become unable to generate sufficient returns because of constraints or risks, capital will eventually lose its historical role on its own.
At present, modern society has still not produced an economic operating model or a model of technological development that lies beyond the logic of growth. The dollar-centered global system of value circulation is already being shaken by new technologies and by resurgent conservatism. Modern society needs an answer to that.
The family is no longer what it used to be
At the same time, the family—the basic unit of social life in many older frameworks—is also coming apart.
From clan-based living in agrarian society to the nuclear family of industrial society, people carried their idealized vision of family into the modern world. But modern production has stripped away the family’s role as a unit of shared production and left it mainly as a unit of shared consumption. That transforms the family into an economic unit and a legally recognized reproductive unit, more like a legal construct inserted into modern society than an organic necessity.
Love and kinship, from the individual’s point of view, are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for the modern family as an institution. Yet they remain crucial for keeping family relationships alive. Once emotional bonds fracture, what often remains is only economic linkage and legal obligation.
A growth-oriented society must constantly generate new consumable needs, and those needs are typically directed at the individual: personalized news, games, and other tailored experiences. The more time individuals spend immersed in their own curated worlds, the less time they have to manage family relationships and maintain emotional ties.
At the same time, many of modern society’s newer forms of demand do not rely on physical strength. That gives women—long placed at a structural disadvantage—a more equal position in income and production, instead of confining them to family roles through economic pressure. Over time, family members who once had to endure unfair treatment will awaken to the fact that they no longer have to.
And if technology advances far enough that basic material needs such as food can be obtained from society almost as effortlessly as air, then people who once stayed together merely to get by or to tolerate each other’s flaws will choose to leave. Fragile families that were already close to breaking will break. Consumer society, guided by individualized demand, will only make this more common.
From family unit to individual unit
Religiously and ethically, modern society is still deeply attached to the sense of security associated with family structure. But the more likely outcome is the opposite: large numbers of nuclear families dissolving as individuals become clearer about their own needs.
The image of a happy four-person household may turn out to have been only a temporary transitional form during a high-growth phase of modern society. In the later stages of demographic growth, the basic economic unit may continue shifting from the family to the individual.
Institutions responsible for raising the next generation may eventually be handed over much more fully to social welfare systems. Otherwise, what remains is an educational arms race of internal competition, in which both parents and children suffer. The result is a society full of people trained in dragon-slaying techniques even though there are no dragons.
In a sense, nine-year compulsory education already belongs to this kind of modern welfare arrangement. In the future, compulsory education may well expand to cover everything from kindergarten through university. For modern adults, the parental role may become a brief stage lasting only a few years, after which everyone resumes pursuing their own development. Family would then return to what it fundamentally is: a structure held together by emotional bonds, surviving or dissolving according to how its members sustain those bonds, no longer coerced by economics or morality.
A system full of patches
Modern society keeps generating reflection on cultural diversity and on the relationship between the individual and the collective. Society shapes how individuals think, but individuals in turn reflect back on modern society’s problems: the rise of nationalism, environmental protection, climate change, social exclusion and discrimination, equality of opportunity, population aging, war and violence, rumor transmission, economic crises, financial crises, and artificial intelligence.
A large share of these problems originates in flaws within the way political and economic systems have been constructed. Technological development has amplified some of them. In other words, the system needs patches.
Modern societies may differ conceptually in ideology or development model, but ultimately they are all trying to build or choose an arrangement acceptable to most people and capable of dealing with problems that emerge through development. If a problem becomes serious enough, modern states will put aside disagreements and respond together, because these systems are fundamentally about managing development and its consequences.
And the problems produced by development have their own internal logic. They do not adapt themselves to whatever social structure currently exists.
No system solves everything
Modern society is only one segment in a larger historical process. It will inevitably produce many temporary phenomena and temporary problems. Some are transitional and disappear naturally once a certain developmental stage has passed. Others must be solved; otherwise society regresses, perhaps to the point where there is nowhere left to retreat and civilization itself begins to fail.
Most human knowledge, in the end, has been distilled in order to solve real-world problems. In modern society, no existing system can provide a perfect answer to all existing problems. So there is little point in exhausting ourselves with arguments over which current system is right, wrong, superior, or inferior. Better to solve the problems first. Later generations can decide what memorable name to give the solution.