If the core narrative of modernity, or industrial-technological society, is progress, a belief that technological development means socio-economic improvement, then the heart of antimodernism is a realization that “progress” has an underbelly—that technological industrial development has destructive consequences in three primary and intertwined areas: nature, culture, and religion. So antimodernism is a fundamental counter theme implicit or explicit within modernity, which is often expressed in terms of a growing recognition of cultural disintegration as a direct consequence of industrial modernity. It is an expression of the “dark side” of modernity.

So argues Arthur Versluis in Antimodernism in Telos (Winter 2006). He says:

there is ...a spectrum from “soft” to “hard” antimodernism. Hard antimodernists seek to leave modernity behind or to overthrow it, whereas those closer to the “soft” antimodernists only criticize it or, if they are a bit stronger in aim, hope to transform modernity into something else. Much of what we will discuss under the general heading of antimodernism, particularly in the forms it took in the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, was more along the lines of reformist efforts or critiques....We see this soft antimodern tendency in the emergence of the craft movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris. Driven by a strong anti-industrialism,
Ruskin, Morris, and other less well-known English figures encouraged a movement toward handwork and cottage industries, toward printing and woodworking and textile manufacture, in a way that was consciously
opposed to mass production. They imagined a new non-industrialism that could be based on quality of life, not quantity of production.

There, modernity has no hold—even if modernity and industrial technology alone provide the means for these virtual realms. In some respects, then, cultural antimodernist trajectories play into and even support the modern industrial-technological enterprise because they offer “escapes” from it rather than a transformation of it.

For Versluis a good example of hard anti-modernism is is ecological antimodernism, with its swsweeping indictment of modernity:

One can understand this indictment rather easily when one recognizes the extent and magnitude of industrial society’s destruction of nature. Consider, for instance, the annihilation of entire mountaintops in coal regions of the eastern United States. In the early twenty-first century, it has become common practice for large corporations to simply blow up the tops of mountains, extract the exposed coal, and, in the place of green mountaintops, generate devastated lunar landscapes whose detritus and lack of vegetation mean that sometimes thousands of people are driven from their homes, rivers flood and wash away whole valleys, and so forth. In the face of these practices, and the general incapacity of ordinary people to effectively oppose such destruction, one can understand how ecological radicalism would develop.