Driving the Modern Dream: Contemporary Japanese Modernity in Theoretical Perspective

Modernity is as much a state of mind as it is a material condition. As such its quality can most clearly be described as a transformative ethic that has as its engine pushing it forwards and outwards the positivistic and economistic rationalism that is capitalism. That is to say, with capitalism as its mechanism and its fuel, modernity seeks a progressive and linear transformation of the human experience into a rationally and reflexively ordered lifescape that can be pro-actively controlled and manipulated for the purposes of providing an ever more comfortable, fulfilling, liberating, challenging, and complex life for its human architects. Mediating the mental and the material aspects of modernity are the institutions and organisations which individuals and groups construct in order that they might express their consciousness through the process of creative adaptation. In other words, institutions and organisations are the social mechanisms by which people not only create their environment out of the mental images they have developed but also are the method by which people accommodate themselves to the circumstances of their lives. For at the heart of modernity is the individual's moral responsibility to discover his or her authentic inner consciousness and substantiate it in lived experience.