Israel Centeno

Modernity is a loaded word, heavy like an unfulfilled promise. Across centuries, it has meant many things: to some, the triumph of reason; to others, the betrayal of the gods. In its most general sense, modernity has been understood as the process of rupture with the traditional world—with its theocratic hierarchies and cyclical worldview. It is the age of linear time, of progress, of faith in man, in science, in the nation-state, in technique.

Its beginning is debated: some trace it to the Renaissance, others to the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, or the Enlightenment. For some, modernity is born with the mechanical clock; for others, with the social contract. Its founding myth lies in the idea of emancipation: freedom from dogma, ignorance, and servitude.

But that narrative has been contradicted by history. Modernity, in its triumphant advance, also brought colonization, scientific racism, exploitation of bodies and lands, total war, concentration camps, the atomic bomb, the factory, the algorithm.

Modernity brought totalitarianism and democracy, populism and nationalism. It unleashed the ideals of universal rights while engineering new systems of surveillance and control. It birthed the liberal republic and the concentration camp. The same rationality that imagined the social contract also optimized the efficiency of genocide. Modernity is a double-edged legacy: it gave voice to emancipation and tools to silence it. It is both the printing press and the algorithm that feeds disinformation. It is both revolution and repression, both utopia and catastrophe.

After postmodernity—a time of fragmentation, skepticism, dissolution of the subject and of meaning—what remains of modernity?

Multiple Modernities: A Geography of a Fractured Idea

Today, speaking of modernity implies acknowledging that there is not just one. There are multiple modernities—unequal and contradictory.

In Western Europe, modernity is a melancholic memory: associated with the welfare state, with a faded Enlightenment utopia, with humanist values in crisis. It is a legacy that weighs heavy and to which many no longer know how to respond.

In the United States, modernity is still a promise of expansion, of markets, of technological innovation. There, the modern ideal blends with faith in digital progress and the permanent reinvention of the self. Silicon Valley is its new Vatican.

In Latin America, modernity has been experienced as a failed import, an imitative chimera that never fully arrived—or arrived brutally and selectively. It was an urban model imposed on the periphery, coexisting with ancestral practices, structural informality, and a “half-modernity” that lives alongside the archaic.

In Africa and parts of Asia, modernity intertwines with the wounds of colonialism. It is both aspiration and trauma. In some areas, it is still synonymous with electricity, potable water, literacy. In others, it means dispossession, extractive mining, and savage urbanization.

In the Islamic world, Western modernity is often viewed with distrust: as a body without soul, a rationality without God. Many current movements arise as identity-based resistance to a secularizing modernity, perceived as aggression.

In the margins, in exile, in the gray zones, modernity is a broken promise—or a promise yet to come. In Venezuela, for example, many remember it as a time when elevators worked and libraries were open. A past better than the present, still dreamed of as future.

From Where Is It Seen, From Where Is It Lived?

Modernity is not the same when seen from the center as from the periphery. It is not the same for those who built it as for those who endured it. It does not mean the same for those who live in a smart city as for those who carry water in a jerrycan. Modernity is not just a system of ideas, but an embodied experience: it can be smelled, felt, suffered, lost.

Nor is it the same for those who lived it, as for those who never reached it.

In this sense, modernity has become a relational and displaced category: it is less about whether we are in it, than about where we narrate it from, what part we were given, what promise was denied us.

What Remains? What Comes Next?

After postmodernity, what remains is not a return to modernity, but a critical revision. There is no longer blind belief in progress. No longer the expectation that technology will redeem man. But neither has a new founding myth been found.

Perhaps what is needed now is a modernity with memory, a modernity aware of its own ruins. A modernity that does not impose itself as dogma, but listens. A modernity that, instead of erasing differences, learns to coexist with them.

A humble modernity, if such a thing is possible.

Globalization as a New Mask of Power

If modernity was a promise—of emancipation, progress, reason—globalization was its exponential multiplication, its leap into virtual space, its claim to ubiquity. In the name of globalization we heard talk of interconnection, planetary villages, free markets, global citizenship.

But today, from many latitudes, globalization appears as another failure—or worse: the revelation of a well-sold lie. It did not equalize opportunities. It did not close gaps. It did not connect everyone symmetrically. What it did was widen chasms, standardize consumption without democratizing access, and deepen asymmetries between center and periphery, North and South, the included and the discardable.

From Caracas, Lagos, Nairobi, La Paz, or Cairo, globalization is not experienced as a party, but as a VIP event one cannot enter. And most gravely: as a linguistic trap, a narrative built from power centers that names as “progress” what for many means uprooting, debt, hunger, or forced migration.

And what does this have to do with modernity?

Everything.

Modernity, in its beginnings, was also a form of control: of time, of the body, of historical narrative. Globalization renews that vocation, but with more sophisticated tools. Instead of colonizing with ships, we colonize with data, with external debt, with consumption algorithms, with Netflix and Google Translate. With treaties that favor some and condemn others. With invisible walls that do not appear on maps but divide as violently as ancient empires.

The Abysses

We live in a world where inequalities not only persist but are digitized and normalized. A child learning via TikTok on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa sees the same content as another in Berlin. But one has access to a life of rights—and the other does not.

Globalization has homogenized the way we desire—but not the way we reach those desires. This is one of its greatest frauds: it globalized frustration, but not justice.

What to Do?

It is not about rejecting every form of modernity or globalization, but about unmasking them—understanding from where they are imposed and with what ends. It is about demanding a critical reappropriation of the modern, a reading from the margins, from broken bodies, from those who do not access the hegemonic narrative but resist with their language, their memory, their way of naming the world.

And it is also about remembering that history is not over, that dominant stories can change, that another modernity is possible: one not built on corpses or exclusion, but on justice, listening, and radical plurality.

Unequal Desire and the Mirage of Global Equity

Desire is not the same for everyone, even if the object of desire is shared. This is one of the deepest paradoxes of the contemporary world. The same phone, the same brand of clothing, the same university or Schengen visa ignites different passions in Berlin than in Havana, in Oslo than in Tegucigalpa. Desire is not universal—it is situated, historical, and shaped by the abyss.

The promise of global progressivism, in its most naive or arrogant forms, has been of equity without differences, a utopian leveling that ignores the material, spiritual, and symbolic conditions of the world’s diverse latitudes. They speak of inclusion, but only include what fits the format. They speak of equality, but first demand the renunciation of all deep identity. And when equity fails—because it cannot arrive without symbolic or material violence—then the answer is more control, more censorship, more compulsory pedagogy.

What is presented as “equality” is often a sophisticated form of neo-postmodern-colonialism, where the imposition is not language or flag, but desire—a list of what one must want and how to live to be “modern,” “progressive,” or “worldly.”

But desire, where it is genuine, resists. There are peoples who desire something else. Who desire without wishing to belong. Who imagine life beyond the algorithm, the race for success, political correctness, or the latest HBO series. And for that, they are seen as a threat.

The globalization of desire without the globalization of the means to achieve it is an inexhaustible source of systemic frustration. And that frustration does not produce revolution—but despair, resentment, flight, or cynicism. It becomes global psychic illness. A historically distributed digital trauma.

The only way to resist is not to homogenize desire, but to recognize it in its singularity. To assume that the ideal of equity must be born from below, from living contexts—not imposed from academic salons or philanthropic platforms. Otherwise, we keep sowing the same paradox: a promise of justice that breeds new forms of exclusion.