As an antithesis, modernism offers a new paradigm whose main characteristics are humanism, empiricism, rationalism, individualism, and independence (free) from the influence of religion. Humans in this era do not want to be governed by faith. As a result, the standardization of truth often refers to rational-empirical-positivistic thinking. And the product of this thought is the birth of science and technology.
Sayyed Hossein Nasr, for example, stated that due to the modern society that is too devoted to science and technology, they are in a spiritual crisis. As a result, they experience emptiness, anxiety, disorientation, unhappiness, and ultimately suicide. (Ahmad Sidqi, The Face of Sufism in the Modern Era; Between Challenges and Answers, p. 7).
Emanuel Wora also stated that the spirit of modernity gave birth to an unstable reality that could open up great opportunities for humans to fall into the experience of fracture or division at the external level (social life) as well as at the internal level (within humans). (Emanuel Wora, Perennialism; A Critique of Modernism and Postmodernism, p. 50)
Several characteristics characterize this reality. First, the separation between the concepts of ethics and epistemology with the world and the body (material reality) put forward an instrumental view of the two factors (world and body).
Second, discontinuity is when new patterns of life that have emerged in the modern era are replacing or eliminating all old practices with traditional nuances. Third, the revocation of the central position of Divine reality (God) in human life and the world.
Meanwhile, Donald Walters stated that due to the conditions of modernity, humans began to feel the need for a solid basis for their morality, which was not obtained from the physical sciences. And in the end, they admit that it takes a power that transcends reality to reunite them, namely to return to traditional science (mysticism). (Donald Walters, Crises in Modern Thought: Exploring the Advancement of Science in Philosophy and Natural Law, translated by B. Widhi Nugraha, p. 10)