Though that government, like that of his son, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was authoritarian, women inclined to modernity prospered.
Under the pressures of modernity, war and authoritarian rule, it has fragmented.
The present and previous pope wanted the world to believe that relativism was the great curse of modernity and an ever more authoritarian church the only answer.
But his veneer of modernity disguised a determined and authoritarian temperament, and he was totally committed to John Paul's conservative moral agenda.
In that case, the Brexit vote will begin to look like an aberration – not the start of a powerful new trend toward nationalism, protectionism, and de-globalisation, but the end of a backlash against modernity by an unstable alliance of social authoritarians and laissez faire market liberals.
Liberal modernity, religious fundamentalism, tribalism, powerful sectarian divisions and failing authoritarian regimes are some of these strands, and against this background counterterrorism is but one tool among several — and not the dominant one any longer.
It was primarily a new authoritarian and anti-Semitic right, hostile to parliamentary democracy and threatened by modernity, that engaged in homicidal politics.
Here, defiantly looming out of the faint outlines of the vast archipelago on the coast of China, Hong Kong seemed to me more than ever the apotheosis of capitalist modernity: a strange utopia, already prefigured by Singapore and Dubai, city-states where free enterprise coexists frictionlessly with authoritarian politics and ersatz culture.
