The rise of the modern age, which we can claim to have truly started in 1781 with the American Revolution and then also in Europe with the French Revolution of 1789, represents the abandonment of the belief in the power of theological models and its subsequent usurpation by the supremacy of the ideological. Up until the French Revolution religious belief had defined human history; as the modern era progressed, through industrialisation, capitalisation and then into the twentieth century, theological belief dwindled and stagnated, becoming a cultural petit four with little philosophical power over the populous in general. Theology and ideology are the two primary ways of measuring the progression of man through time. Theology provides a constant cultural id to the pre-modern existence; it gave man the existential solace of a belief in something beyond the sufferings he experienced in his everyday life. As the living conditions in the modern western world got better there was less need for the kind of grand schemata that was offered by religion. Thus, to fill the void left by faith, ideologies begin to take root; they place man as being fully in control of the creation of his own existential definition by actively demanding of man to make the utopian visions of theology into an earthly reality; this is the new historical progression of the modern era. In the modern era time is measured by the progress of man’s achievements, the goal of progress becomes progression itself, it is no longer defined by a development to a promised land that exists only beyond the corporeal.

This modern progression provides a framework for the revolution as the method of achieving it. The revolution is the implement of modernity. When the sans-culottes started demanding bread and prosperity (utopia) they set in motion the French Revolution. Then when the sans-culottes start demanding Terror and Vengeance (dystopia) we see the actuality of the French Revolution, the very first act of modernity was to turn the dreams of utopia into a reality of dystopia.

In the novels of Lewis Carroll we have a movement into a world in which the normal laws regarding probability and logic are suspended in order to illustrate the illogical and absurd nature of the real world that Alice leaves behind. On her adventures through the Looking Glass and also in Wonderland, Alice meets certain characters that pose ontological questions to themselves and her, but because in these magical realms there is no normal logic there can be no logical answers to those questions. The novels are both theological and ideological; Alice must struggle through the existence she is forced to endure in order to reach the promised land of normal life – this is both an affirmation and inversion of modernity. Alice only has Alice; she must struggle to make things better, to return to the real world of Alice; but this real world exists outside of the existence she is stuck in inside the books; it is thus also a theological fable about god and heaven and the tribulations of man. Wonderland and the world through the Looking Glass are both modern and pre-modern, this paradox creates their absurdity; we can transpose our reading of Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass onto the current situation in Iran in that is also paradoxically modern and pre-modern.

So then, Iran, in 1979, almost 300 years since the first tremors of modernity began to be felt there occurred an Alice-like inversion of its founding principles; in the Islamic Revolution of Ayatollah Khomeni we are witness to an alternate pathway of modernity, whereby the assumption that modernity is about a replacement of theology with ideology is confused; the Islamic Revolution and the system put in place as a result of it is a Religious ideology, fundamentalism more or less. Revolution, the implement of modernity, has here been historically appropriated for the purposes of theology, the leftovers of the pre-modern, there is an anomaly in the chronological superstructures of the development of the Western world whereby a ghost from its past comes back to haunt it, it shows it its own distorted reflection.

The current situation in Iran opens up a vast field of land upon which to form historical and philosophical assumptions about the state of modernity, especially in relation to the intersections between the theological and ideological ideas of progress. Revolution is naturally cyclical, it is in the name, and one cycle of revolution brought a theological system of governance into creation just as another can replace it. Revolution and the modern age cannot be permanent, in order for there to be progress there must be another revolution, an act of creation that unites man with god, a return to the origin in order to move forwards. This is how Modernity operates, it built in its own demise as a necessary by-product of its being able to exist.