What it means to be “modern”

William F. Buckley was the one, I think, who said (paraphrased) that the problem with most liberals was that they couldn’t say what future state of affairs would so satisfy them that they would become conservative of it.

I thought of that upon reading this:

A hundred years ago ‘to be modern’ meant to chase ‘the final state of perfection’ — now it means an infinity of improvement, with no ‘final state’ in sight and none desired.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (via Rod Dreher)