“All that is solid melts into air”

The society and culture we inhabit today, at the start of the third millennium, appear at first glance to be the most secular that the world has yet known. As traditional conceptions of knowledge and religion appear increasingly redundant in the context of a postmodern pluralism, so an increasingly frenetic pursuit of this-worldly pleasures, along with an ever higher standard of living - with the attendant pressures not just to work harder and to play harder but, above all, to consume - seems definitively to have replaced that emphasis upon otherworldly and religious forms of comfort, or “salvation,” that was accorded social and cultural legitimation in precapitalist society. When Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in the middle of the nineteenth century they declared that the relentless logic of capitalist economics would ultimately dislodge “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions,” with the result that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” It was a statement that proved to be eloquently prophetic, not simply of modernity, but also of the paradoxical (and notoriously difficult to define) cultural and economic phase that has succeeded it, which can very generally be described as postmodern and late-capitalist. For what Marx and Engels so astutely anticipated was the advent of a hyperactive society of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation,” driven ceaselessly onwards by technological advance, in which the desire for the new is so intense that new fashions and new ideas “become antiquated before they can ossify into custom.”