Modernity versus Postmodernity
October 28th, 2009by Vwadek P Marciniak
The western world has been blessed by the rise of creative new civilizations only to find that there are other developments that in time will replace the latest dominance.
If not enough to impress us with the dynamics of cultural evolution than we only need look at the birth of the Early Modern Western world with the creative impulses of the Renaissance followed by the Reformation, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment adding to the wonder of modernism that created the confused nineteenth century thinkers that eventually led to our own evolving postmodern world .An important note: the end of great historic civilizations like that of the Romans does not mean that its influence ended. Rather than completely disappearing when the Empire no longer dominated the headlines, it’s influence can continue. We still have Roman law as well Roman classics from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius let alone their brilliant architecture that we still study, are influenced by and find pleasure in. Try to image the University of Michigan football stadium without the Roman Colosseum as a model. The same can be said of other eras such as the Renaissance birthing of individualized artworks and the brilliant political philosopher Machiavelli who still is relevant today. The Enlightenment offered us a belief in progress and a capacity for human reasoning to understand as demonstrated by their creation of the Encyclopedia, both of which are fundamental for the functioning assumptions of modernity. We now have a growing “…agreement among most postmodernists that the Enlightenment must be seen perhaps not as a beginning point but as an ultimate defining moment of modernity and modernism.” It is this “…progress, depicted as the Enlightenment’s quintessential view of history, [that] dominated postmodernist discussions of history.”[fn.1.11B.FH]The examples are manifold but what follows should be seen as an introduction that endings of a great age does not mean an end of it’s influence on the future, but rather an introduction of elements that will follow. This can and should be said about the slow decline of the dominance of modernity. Here the end is not terminal but transforming. A brief review of some of the changes that have been and are now taking place this past century may prove helpful.
At the beginning of the last century we were a rural country with dirt roads, horses and buggies with waterways for greater distances. Thanks to the coming of railroads we were finally able to travel at a speed of the ancient Roman chariots, 25 miles per hour. About the same time (1863) London England finally matched the size of Rome’s ancient population with a million inhabitants, indications of what would follow on a planetary scale. Highways , telegraphs, telephones and finally radio would break our inherently isolated existence while movies, television and computers would completely alter perceptions that the modern mind hast yet to adjusted to. The historic dramatic differences between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries deserves serious attention.
Our Monstrous Modern Western Wold has offered developing technical, expanding and intrusive engineering with weapons of increasing destruction starting in 1914 with the First Chapter of the Great War and it’s annihilating toys; bigger and more powerful tanks, submarines, airplanes, cannons, machine guns and poison gases. Between 1914 and 1918 the world had completely changed with a new order where the term modernity quickly lost the efficacy of sensible reason. As we entered Chapter Two of the Great War with the Third Reich, Hitler and Japan’s desire for expansion, we ended in 45 with the atomic bomb and the developing of hydrogen bombs and the beginning of the Third Chapter of the Great War, which we still are engaged in with terrorists demonstrating how blind we’ve been these dozen decades thinking in terms of wars of nationalism. Beginning with twenty eight countries in the First Chapter it has only expanded into continued madness. This occurred with the modern assumption of the reasonableness of humans and belief in progress of the Enlightenment ended in the holocaust. Lest we forget, Einstein said: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift to unparalleled catastrophe.”
We now live in ” the huge secret empire built by the National Security State” as Garry Wills succinctly put it (”Entangled Giant” N.Y.T. Review 10/8/08). He stated further that “the whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch.” This power has not been limited to a particular party for as he noted we now “see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the un-accountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium.” We now have “The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the `war on terror’” - Power corrupts, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. This is not to say that the modern world was rosy before the First of the Chapters since a British psychiatrist had noted that “Daily we see neurotics, neurasthenics. hysterics and the like,’”(Phillip Blum, The Vertigo Years, 1900-1914) We have been on a mad road for some time.
Little wonder that increasing numbers have begun leaving the modern set of assumptions as they look to the idea that we live in a global world with global governments from the United Nations and I.M.F. as well global economies where nationalism is increasingly antiquarian and where too big to fail contributes to the nut-house of the powerful. As one thoughtful commentator put it: “During the twentieth century Europe’s hegemony disintegrated and gave way to a new global pluralism.” As we witnessed, “European, or Western civilization no longer is the sole model. Several alternatives are now available - the modified capitalism of the United States, the mixed capitalist-socialist societies of Western Europe, the varieties of socialism in Eastern Europe and East Asia, and the still undifferentiated embryos of the emerging societies of the Third World. This pluralism is a healthy development, making possible world-wide interaction and mutual stimulation.”[fn.2p.viiiS.PC] Diversity is the essence of postmodern thinking.
We live with accelerating motion on highways and in air flights; enclosing space beyond our planet while separating people into economic and racial groupings; electrifying both our homes and hands as we destroy our environment, create bubbles and collapses, offer crazy economic credit as we operate antiquated financial systems where too big is a norm followed by the cult of personality. Our housing bubble and credit addiction has been driven by raw greed and deceptively cheap credit. Little wonder this past century has witnessed the rise of alienation and estrangement This has been a Manipulative Modernity growing out of control. Ad hoc politics with economic and population explosions and a life in outer-space have slowly become new frames of reality with antiquarian political, social and economic games holding onto whatever can still be grasped. The literature of science fiction was created at the end of the nineteenth century when modernity was finding itself challenged and revolutionary views of time and space were often being encouraged and explored. Will we wake up?
The Vietnam war was a fine example of the divergence between the modern and the postmodern world view. Robert S McNamara, the Pentagon chief director, supervised the escalation of this disastrous War. Trapped in a modern view of power with a war directed from this nineteenth century point of view, he had thought that extreme bombing would solve the crises, a mind set perhaps appropriate for 1814 or 1915 but not today. He finally noted he was wrong and placed a toe into a postmodern world when he became the head of the World Bank where he felt improving global lives was a more promising path to peace than building more arms and armies. This was the same man involved in the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 and the Cuban missile episodes eighteen months later which was the closest we came to a nuclear confrontation. He learned that the modern warfare of the late nineteenth century as expressed in the First Chapter of the Great War no longer applied, notwith- standing all the wars that have followed. This is an interpretation of the madness that has occurred since the end of the Second Chapter of the Great War and beginning with the Third Chapter of the same - i.e. 1945/46: the story of a society that refuses to see the historic transformation that has occurred since the beginnings of the last century and exploded since the mid-forties. Today we live with a chief executive in charge of the secret empire built by the National Security state. Thank you for an atomic driven cold war.
Americans in general are not fond of history since they think that anything over six months old is ancient. Even antiques should be 100 years old to technically be such while history is older than antiques. It is from here, however, that we will first review a short political and social-scientific frame for this analyses.
First we have two terms that have no meaning in our daily debates regarding politics in the twentieth-first century. One is conservative which has its basses in the writings of Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century followed by that of Edmund Burke at the time of the American Revolution. Not only are these ides out of date so is the term liberal which was a child of the thinking of John Stewart Mill who in the nineteenth century argued for small government and individual rights. We will not even deal with the irrelevance of Marx and Engels. Today the use of left and right of center would be considerably more accurate. The theory of individuality, on the other hand, is applicable in it has become a large part of a postmodern mind where social controls are not necessarily applicable. Earlier in this past millennium we discover “a September 1973 Harris Poll found that 61 percent of Americans cited `the inability of government to solve problems’ as a high-priority complaint, and 71 percent faulted the federal government for failing to improve conditions or for making them worse.”[p. 86S.PC] Ironically, the implications have not and may not be recognized for some time.
It is not only political labels like conservative and liberal freely thrown around that are meaningless if not confusing, it is also the assumptions people apply to dated attitudes regarding the universe we live in. We inherited our modern view from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century where Galileo, Descartes and especially Sir Isaac Newton who offered an organized unity for a universe consistent with the much older religious one, a universe that was orderly whether by divine grace or new deity of reason. A little earlier in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon “… boasted that we have`the power to conquer and subdue nature and to shake her to her foundations.’ The goal of the new science said Bacon, was to `establish and extend the power of dominion of the human race itself over the universe.’”[fn.3p.99R.ED] This powerful force of optimism would come to dominate the modern mind of motion. It was “…Newton, who provided the mathematical formula for reorganizing the natural world.”[p.101R.ED] Additionally “Newton discovered the mathematical method for describing mechanical motion.”[ibid] As every school kid learns, Newton offered us his “three laws: a body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion remains in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force; the acceleration of a body is directly proportional to the applied force and in the direction of the straight line in which the force acts; and for every force, there is an equal and opposite force in reaction.”[p.102R.Ed] Movement became a fundamental concept as we entered the world of modernity and even more in the postmodern world.
This introduces us to one of the great revolutions that transformed thought and understanding. This was brought about by postmodern physics and astronomy directed by thinkers like Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Niels Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity . The universe like life is uncertain as with the new idea of the existential where the random nature of events inhere even if not being welcomed in our daily confused lives. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earth quakes as with birth and the actual moment of death cannot be absolutely predicted although we do have that one certainty - death. It has been noted correctly that we now have “the `sequestration of the life of the body into dead things’ in the name of technological and material progress [which] only draws humanity further into the realm of the death instinct.”[p.371R.ED] The reason in part for this is because “it is the gnawing of death, which the baby first experiences upon the initial separation from his mother, that has, up to now, driven so much of human progress. The history of civilization for Freud, Brown, and other psychologists is little more than the projection of the death instinct out onto the external world.”[pp.371-2R.ED] As we look around at our world we see that “We are no longer surrounded by living nature, but, rather, by dead artefacts.”[p.372R.ED] The postmodern mind accepts this confused state of being while most modernists might call it insanity. Living is an open door and not a closed box with comforting walls which in itself is a new challenge to knock down. We are always at the beginning even as we draw our last breath. Heisenberg suggested we begin living when we accept death as the neighbor hanging onto our shoulders. It was the counter- culture after the Second Chapter of the Great War that noted the operative word for living was “a happening” since no one sees around the next corner.
The visual arts from the Theater of the Absurd, (e.g. Waiting for Godot) to Surrealism offers perceptions that make little sense to the modernist while normal for the postmodernist. We except a little madness as part of a sane life. Again the individual must make existential choices as to substance and relevance since no system exists to save us in this unfolding world that puts the burden of freedom in the middle of one’s back. How many ways can this new condition be expressed or hidden?
This found a relevancy in a view expressed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, (Feb. 27, 2007) which was partially summarized in stating that “today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study of five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.” The article continued that ” We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special and having children repeat that back,’ said the studies lead author … ‘Kids are self-centered enough already.’” Finally it stated that “the study asserts that narcissists ‘are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors.’”[fn.4C.EL] Life may be short and death long for those seeking a self-centering in their becoming.
How to explain this requires a component that takes account of this new postmodern view. A key element is that such behavior is driven by the ego rather than the postmodern sense of a self, keeping in mind that the ego is what we are born with while the self is something that develops by the labor of the person acquiring a more mature psychological, emotional and intellectual becoming. The ego for those maturing could be considered a bee in a bonnet debilitating the potential for human development. The self is hard work for the growing individual as it is given birth by experience, expanding horizons and the challenge of living as many full lives as one can between birth and death, all too rare in this complex universe and materialistic society. It is not surprising that there are “… modernists, … who sometimes called themselves `post-modernists,’… and find that “… modernism of pure form and the modernism of pure revolt were both too narrow, too self-righteousness, too constricting to the [post-] modern spirit. Their ideal was to open oneself to the immense variety and richness of things, materials and ideas that the [post-]modern world inexhaustibly brought forth.” They further “… breathed fresh air and playfulness into a cultural ambience which in the 1950s had become unbearably solemn, rigid and closed.”[fn.5.32B.SM] These are activities of those postmodern selves in becoming rather than the more traditional modern ego-driven fixed being. It is no accident that during the post-war years of the fifties the counterculture was rightly the appropriate label for these changes and may be one of the reasons for their revolt.
The self must have an open playing field that calls on the creative energy of the inner transformation to draw out the potential we each have and in doing so welcomes the challenges of the unknown. The musical “Hair” was not a modern event, and Woodstock was a well-disorganized happening. The self is always an becoming and opening.
Again we should beware of more traditional labels when facing this new world being born around and in us. As one commentator put it: “Like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, then, liberalism, communism , and fascism are singular, `totaliz ing,’ and `hegemonic’ - as the postmodernists rightly point out. Plurality and diversity are anathema to all grand narratives. … It is a recipe for perpetual war, violence, and conflict.” The theme is clear: “We must beware of he dangers of faith in an inevitable destiny - … . it allows human beings to absolve themselves of responsibility for action by imagining that they are pawns in the grand scheme of God, history, or nature. In this way, conscience is silenced in the face of imperialism, indiscriminate slaughter, and genocide.” As the writer makes explicit: “…civilizations will always rise and fall. It is time to embrace a genuine plurality and stop insisting on our own global dominance.” [fn.5] People who have answers will always need to find more questions if they are thoughtful.
The question therefore must be asked: when can we attempt to date a transformation into a more postmodern perception for this growing new world? One suggestion by the famous historian Arnold Toynbee stated his answer In 1939 and later in 1954 when he offered that it was the “term to designate a historical period as postmodern - first referring to the time after 1914 and then for the age since 1875.”[p15B.FH] It is important to recall names like Baudelaire, Rambaue, Kafka and others arriving out of the late nineteenth century seeing inherent problems with the unfolding of modernity.
There have been others noting this growing change in attitude, all of which should be considered since this is such a contemporary and therefor difficult event to date. One who has seen it suggested that “the postmodern age was Western culture’s stage of the decadence that recurred in every high culture, once total relativism prevailed and ushered in anarchy in thought (excessive relativism) and life (social turmoil, revolutions, wars).”[p.15B.FH] It should be safely added that eventually, “In the 1950s, the term postmodern found more frequent use.”[p.16B.FH] But if we are looking further back we can find an important mind for the creation of that existential approach, “Nietzsche [who] once remarked that since Copernicus Western culture had been on a slide downward toward nihilism. He referred to the vanishing certainty that had been offered by the essences, and ideas of the ancients, God and divine providence of Christians, and, he might have added, the Reason of the Enlightenment thinkers.” This was one of the earliest thinkers to see that the belief in nothing and its growing love affaire with materialism was expanding as he equally interpreted it correctly. What followed only confirmed his insights since when we turn to the years after “… 1945, the progressive view’s persuasive power showed a serious erosion as the impression of an inescapable impasse in truth-finding had reached critical levels.”[p.16B.FH] The technical and dehumanizing “progressive” changes created for those war years that civilians were increasingly dependent upon offered an odor that more thoughtful observers began questioning. One need not travel far to pursue what the electronic and military hardware were doing to the young minds of this past century, at least for those who survived a slaughter with indifference that too many embraced.
It was, after all, right after the First Chapter of the Great War that “the disenchantment, particularly in Europe, began … and increased steadily as the twentieth century kept on producing a long series of events that supplied testimonies against the progressive hopes once vested in human control:…” The list which is much too long can be best summarized as “…the inability of modern knowledge to stop the deprivations of the Great Depression, the shocking role of science and technology in increasing the horrors of war, the horrendous price exacted by tyrannical ideologies in their attempts to create the envisioned `new human being,’ and…” lest we forget, also “the so-far unimaginable Holocaust and other genocides.”[ibid] Brutalities offered in the mid-century remains a problem for digestion, even for those more enlightened and possessing the strongest of stomachs.
Little wonder that the brilliant thinker Max Weber offered an “assessment [that] was less than sanguine when he described the late modern human beings as `specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines it has attained a level of civilization never before attained.”[fn.6B.FH] The word hypocrisy appears too often regarding the contemporary picture of the west.
While a passing reference has been made regarding the arts and the transformation of this new term seeking meaning, a closer examination may could prove to be helpful for the reader trying to find their footing. One name that comes to mind intertwined in the arts of our unique age is that of Eugene Ionesco who once examined some of the earliest experimenters entering the realm beyond modernity: “Indeed Buadelaire, Kafka, Pirandello … and Dostoevsky were regarded with good reason as writer-prophets.”[fn7p.40I.NC] These as well as others would be later referred to as the avant-garde who “… would seem to be an artistic and cultural phenomenon of a precursory nature…” since “avant-garde cannot generally be recognized until after the event: … a cultural style which is recognized and will conquer an age.”[p.40I.NC] An issue for all dramatic historic changes is that retrospective is necessary to create meaningful definitions, understanding and clarity. The reason in this instance is made clear by Ionescoe: “`Symbolism and later surrealism [dadaism] were further attempts to reveal and express hidden realities.’” [ibid] In this is the “hidden” where the great historic changes are taking place and making them so impossible to understand as they occur - from Medieval to Renaissance to the Enlightenment; it matters not, for each period cannot be truly understood in its own era since only history can catch up with reflective justice. As the historian Jackob Burckhardt once noted, in order to have an understanding of a new era one must first study the period that preceded it. This applies equally to retrospectives. It would be grand to be around to give witness to the discovery of the historic transformation of the counterculture, from music, literature, arts and new social attitudes.
The reason for this difficulty is that all great historic changes are great works of art and Ionesco makes it clear that “… a creative work of art is, by its very novelty, aggressive, spontaneously aggressive; it strikes out the public, against the vast majority; it rouses indignation by its nonconformity which is, in itself, a form of indignation. … the sense in which a work of art is unpopular, … it is unpopular only because of its unfamiliarity.”[fn.8p.45I.NC] So much more yet for this curious, wonderful and confusing world we are now entering.
Pirandello was brilliant with his own understanding of the art of humor, and, to be honest, as Ionesco noted, most people “… are afraid of too much humor, (and humor is freedom). We are afraid of freedom of thought,…”[8p.46I.NC] One of the characteristics of the postmodern mind is its welcoming not only freedom but a freedom that walks on the edge of chaos. A happening, good or bad, can never be anticipated as Kafka’s Mr. K. discovers, and even with sick humor there is a place, although not readily so in the modern world. Ionesco said it best: “The imagination is not arbitrary, it is revealing. … since the imagination has laws this is a further proof that finally it is not arbitrary.” [ibid] Never try to live trapped by images when you can live by way of imagination.
As for that more comfortable term, avant garde, Ionesco noted that in “the beginning of this century and in the 1920’s, in particular, a vast universal avant-garde movement was felt in all domains of the mind and human activity.” The reason for this is not hard to understand if one considers that we are now dealing with the “…overthrowing of our mental habits. Modern painting from Klee to Picasso, from Matisse to Mondrian, from cubism to abstractionism expresses this overthrow, this revolution.” Not only here but we also see it emerging in “music and films” while it also “affected architecture.” From A-tonal music (Schoenberg) to counter-cultural blues and progressive jazz where the artists did not always know what they would blow next, and for many films like the “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, the mind moved out of the most conventional modes and for all time were dawn out of their everyday slumber of complacency, out of their lack of imagination as they walked away saying “Yes, yes, yes, that’s it!” If one were to ask as to what a film like Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” is about, the answer would have to be that it is about 111 minutes long - you personally experience it and create your own world. Looking for answers is not wrong but finding them can be disappointing since new questions immediately arise from any valuable answer.
Several examples may make this clearer. The film “2001 A Space Odyssey” ends with the confusing picture of birth and rebirth. Even televison has not been immune from the postmodern view as Patrick McGoohan’s “Prisoner” series does not have a denoument at the end since we still do not know who No. I. is. For rock listen to the “Goodby Hello” album by Tim Buckley where the last song ends on an unresolved chord while for jazz there is Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” where there is no final “doh” or eighth sound leaving you in a state of incompleteness, much like living in the postmodern realm. Knowing your resolved chord or point for your flick occurs best when dead, not before.
These new insights of the sixties generation of protests and experimentation aimed at knocking down old boundaries that constrained the human spirit worked as well in testing new realities that came with an intellectual companion in the form of postmodern creative thinking.[p.4R.ED] Thus a substantive ending might be reached here by applying some thoughts that have more relevant ingredients for this transformation, some defining clarification without reaching a resolve or entrapment.
First note that “the post-modernist asked how the world came to be locked into a death change. What were the reasons that led to the dropping of the atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the establishment of Nazi death camps in Europe, detention camps in the Gulag and Maoist re-education camps in the Chinese country side?”[ibid] This could be considered too important and complex for our age to completely understand.
One answer in part could be simple since postmodernists consider “modernity itself as the culprit. They placed the blame for much of the world’s ills on what they regarded as the rigid assumptions underlying modern thought. The European Enlightenment, with its vision of unlimited material progress, came in for particular rebuke,…” along side “market capitalism, state socialism, and nation-state ideology.” Little wonder then, that “Modernity, argued the post-modernist thinkers, was at its core deeply flawed. The very idea of a knowable objective reality, irreversible linear progress, and human perfectability were too rigidly conceived and historically biased, …”[ibid]
One can smell the stench of conformity on a grand scale when “by locking humanity into the ‘one right way’ of thinking about the world, post-modernists contend, modern thought became dismissive of any other points of view and ultimately intolerant of opposing ideas of any kind.” This has not been the view of an open society full of ideas that many would want to embrace. Too much of modern thinking like the old religious narrow paradigms were limiting original and creative thinking. “Those in power - be they capitalists or socialists, conservatives or liberals - continue to use these meta-narratives to keep people contained and controlled, argue the post-modernists.”[pp.4-5R.ED] As an alternative: “The post-modernists provided the rationalization for the revolt, arguing that there is not one single perspective but, rather, as many perspectives of the world as there are individual stories to tell.” In other words: “For the post-modernists, there is no one ideal regime to which to aspire but, rather, a potpourri of cultural experiments, each of value.”[p.5R.ED] Each of us has a history to live and a story to experience and express, for the triumph of individuality is a characteristic defined by the creative imagination in this postmodern world.
What we find with the runners of the counterculture are new paths where “we became existential nomads, wandering through a boundary less world full of inchoate longings in a desperate search for something to be attached to and believe in.” While it is true that the “human spirit was freed up from old categories of thought, we are each forced to find our own paths in a chaotic and fragmented world that is even more dangerous than the all-encompassing one we left behind.” [ibid] The word “left” is appropriate here since other labels are too restrictive. The author’s point is clear; the closer we have come to this awareness the more we are to be associated with the expansive term of the counterculture still so alive and active.
As noted, the scientific insights of the past century have contributed greatly to a change of thinking since “The Great Turning Points in human history are often triggered by changing conceptions of space and time.”[p.89R.ED] It is because of this context that being “autonomous is to be independent,” which guarantees “endless new opportunities.”[p.90R.ED]
While our sense of time and space has found new roots in the thinking of postmodern physics, old Newtonian laws of motion and ideas of nature in the hands of philosophers of the Enlightenment, those of “abstract, rational, mathematical construction, seem better suited for a world of machines than of human beings.”[p.102R.ED] Where can humans find a place in such a new paradigm? We now have the “detached, impartial, automatic, and autonomous, the new god governing the marketplace”; no longer the traditional deity, today’s “understands only the language of numbers,. … all phenomena are reduced to commodity values costs per unit, price per pound, dollar per hour, wages per work, rents per month, profits per quarter, and interest compounded semiannually.”[p.103R.ED] Is it surprising that humans in the modern world are themselves considered nothing more than a number. We acquired a “…modern and scientific tableau, based on objectivity, mathematical calculation, detachment, and appropriation. Time was denatured and scientized.”[p.103R.ED] Ah, human control is now reduced to rationality and progress while in “The Prisoner” No 2 said that “I am not a number, I am a freeman”, or, we could add, a postmodern man.
If time is mathematical then profit plays in the hands of time and we finally can discover a key invention of that era - the clock. “Lewis Mumford once remarked that `the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the Modern Age.’” Could there have been either the first or second industrial revolution without the clock? “The first automated machine in history ran by a device called an escapement, a mechanism that `regularly interrupted the force of a falling weight,’ controlling the release of energy and the movement of the gears.”[p.108R.ED] Time, energy and a mechanical rather than a natural life began taking shape. “By its essential nature,’ observes Lewis Mumsford, the clock `dissociated time from human events.’ …” Now ” time, which had always been measured in relation to biotic and physical phenomena, to the rising and setting sun and the changing seasons, was henceforth a function of pure mechanism.” [p.109R.ED] The “escapement” should not be lost as a metaphor for those stepping outside this modern world as it has been forming. After all, “highly centralized energy-consuming production technology made it necessary to establish and maintain fixed hours for the beginning and end of the workday.”[p.110R.ED] If you were to add television to this scene you would have that early hippie, Charlie Chaplin, and his “Modern Times” to which he rebelled against, or should we say he escapes from. The frightening line of being regular as clockwork began taking hold on one and all. This was the winding-up of the industrial age in the heart and mind of citizens, rich and poor.
One of the more curious, paradoxical and promising historical concepts began when “the radical new idea of the rational `individual’ took shape slowly over a period of several hundred years and paralleled the deep changes in the worlds of philosophy, science, commerce, and politics.” [p.120 R.ED] What irony that “the strange idea of the self was so revolutionary that, for a long time, there were insufficient metaphors to even explain its meaning. In previous times, … lives had been lived, for the most part, publicly and communally.”[ibid] Even in the medieval world university students would never be seen walking alone. “No one would run such a risk who was not deviant or mad.”[ibid] Welcome to the “Cuckoo’s Nest”.
It is within this transformation that the “spiritual values had been largely replaced by material values. Theology gave way to ideology, and faith was dethroned and replaced by reason. Salvation became less important than progress.”[ibid] As we moved to the modern world “Nature, in the Enlightenment scheme, was wild and dangerous, a primal and often evil force that needed to be tamed, demonstrated, made productive, and put to the service of man.” When Louis XIV plane his Versailles gardens he made sure that the grounds were drawn with detailed mathematical balance and order. There is an interesting irony where “people, too, had to be made over to make them more rational, calculating, and detached. Creating the self-aware autonomous individual proved to be a challenging task [as it still is today].”[p.121R.ED] When noting how many today are dominated more by their ego than any growing sense of a self it now can be seen how challenging this task is; there is a big difference in moving from individuality to self-controlled individuality. For most, one’s identity is their position in society from whence the satisfaction of the ego is acquired - “see my new suit?” “my new car?” “my new mate”. These become an extension of your job and ego in offering up a public persona.
Enlightenment thinkers sought that “the civilizing process separated man not only from his own animal nature but also from his fellow beings. He became an autonomous island, a detached free agent, in control of his own body and private space in the world. He became `an individual.’”[p.122R.ED] Yet he became alienated and estranged, those modern conditions that continue to grow as a burden for too many. Even privacy grew with the sense of individualism making it possible “to exclude others …” therefore offering “a mark of the new priority given to the individual life as opposed to extended-family relations,…”[p.125R.ED] Here we find interesting writings on the collective wall of “individuality”.
This pattern went so far that “the word ‘I’ began to show up more frequently in literature by the early eighteenth century,” and as well, the “prefix ’self-,’ ‘Self-love,’ ’self-pity,’ and ’self-knowledge’ found their way into the popular lexicon.” Thus we find that “The autobiography became a new popular literary mode. Self-portraits … small personal mirrors, … being mass-produced by the mid-sixteenth century.” This culminated with “the increasing sense of self [that] brought with it greater self-reflection …”, or at least its eventual potential.[p.126R.ED] This further developed in our own era with increasing introspection which became indispensable for the growth of one’s own inner consciousness.Even what might appear to be small inventions could make a great deal of a difference in moving away from the collective. While this may appear strange, “the idea of the chair was truly revolutionary. It represented an emerging feeling among an incipient bourgeois class that each person was an autonomous and self-contained being, an island unto him-or herself.” It could be suggested as one writer did “that with the widespread introduction of the chair in Europe, the autonomous individual of the modern era had indeed arrived.”[p.127R.ED] All roads were appearing to lead to our increased individualized isolation, unless your’s was a love chair. The irony was that this growing middle class living style “were, at once and the same time, both more individualized and autonomous and yet more tightly integrated into a conformist-oriented culture than any other people in history.” [p.129R.ED] It was in the “modern era that the individual claim to independence became so totalized”[ibid] - but only within the paradigm of Enlightenment reasoning. Here is a paradox where the modern world introduces the postmodern idea of a land of individuality with implications of an inde- pendent self that follows when those implications are explored beyond immediate effects. It is time to leave the collective box of attempting individual thinking and settle into one’s own inventive chair.
In the world of economics the same confusing pattern was developing since we now have “… Adam Smith’s glib suggestion that in a market economy, each individual pursues his or her own self-interest and that even though such behavior might appear selfish, it’s only by the maximizing of each self-interest that the general welfare is advanced. A dubious proposition.”[p.130R.ED] One might add to this position that it became less and less appealing for any of the new youth who returned to nature and wonder: “how many roads must a man walk down” as we face histories paradox if not contradictions.
While this new economic class “… learned to be self-controlled, self-sacrificing, and self-possessed, to be diligent and industrious. … never before in history had people willingly imposed on themselves such utter restraints. …” With the “autonomous individual, each person now became his or her own ruler, governing his or her own behavior…”[ibid] Such individualized collective restraints inherent in the modern mind was not appropriate for a new and fresh way to view history and the world since for the middle class “everyone learned to balance his or her newly won autonomy and independence with self-imposed responsibilities to society.”[p.131R.ED] Now, one way or the other, it was time to explore in this confusing state “…the premium each placed on the autonomy of the individual.”[ibid] This was what the “drop-outs and tune-ins” did.
What began with the Protestant Reformation when it “sought to dethrone the Church hierarchy and elevate each believer, making every human being equal in the eyes of the Lord. …”[ibid] and which eventually lead to the Enlightenment’s commitment to each equally independent in their reasoning as they pointed to a future, offered a two edge sword of conformity verses rebellion.
This only furthers the expansion of a global direction for our immediate history where pressure is moving in two opposing directions, one a western heritage while the other an expanding of force moving towards a global economy: “… in an era where space and time are quickly being annihilated and identities are becoming multilayered and global in scale, no nation will be able to go it alone twenty-five years from now. European states are the first to understand and act upon the emerging realities of a globally interdependent world.”[p.358R.ED] As a clear example of that other world, we can turn to the orient long known as different from the west. For the “East Asian economic community would be a formidable economic and political force on the world stage. The combined land area of East Asia (including China, Korea, and Japan) is 50 percent larger than the United States.” [p.361R.ED]
But this is more than just economics since the “… Eastern mind is also conditioned to appreciate a world full of contradictions.” This at least is more than we of the west would traditionally accept. The nature of opposites are not as much an issue there as here. As an example: “The idea that every event is related to every other event makes the Asian mind more interested in the relationships between phenomena rather than the phenomena in isolation.” This is a radical perception only to those in the west who only dip their toes in the east. “It’s not surprising, given their more holistic orientation, that Asians emphasize harmony of humans and nature.”[p.363R.ED] The western alienation from nature puts us at a disadvantage. The Chinese don’t even have a word for individualism.[p.364R.ED] The coming together is less discomforting for those who think more in line beyond modernity since “post-modernism, after all, is a reaction to the Enlightenment idea that `one container fits all,…’”[p.366R.ED]
Our moral frame has now come under attack where we now have “violent weather changes induced by global warming, the spread of deadly new bacteria and viruses resulting from inhumane animal-husbandry practices and factory farming,… .” If that is not enough, we now have “terrorist attacks using chemical and even biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, more prolonged power blackouts around the world brought on by global energy shortages, massive starvation, and a global depression…” all of which “could hasten a new systems approach to morality and ethics.” [p.369R.ED] A global bases for morals changes the assumptions and framework for how we should function as decent humans. It also raises the issues of “…whether the increasingly harmful systematic effects of the activity created a sense of shared vulnerability and responsibly for one another and the Earth or whether the fear generated by catastrophic activity creates a siege mentality and a feeling that everyone better fend for him- or herself in a war for survival.”[p.369R.ED] Fear is an end while challenges are a beginning.
If not problematic enough then answer “how do we create a new moral bridge between `the self’ and `the other’ that is expansive enough and encompassing enough to be global in scale and universal in outlook? Can we establish a systematic approach to ethics that allows us to identify cold evil in all of its various guises?”[ibid] Modernity has been raised on its own pre-supposed purity offering a conundrum of conflicting values while the counterculture embraces all peoples of all cultures and values.
There still may be one creative method for reaching towards agreed upon means, assuming we can engage ourselves around that massive term consciousness. The argument has already been made that there has been a growing sense that this is an interior mental phenomena slowly developing within people.[p.370R.ED and V.P.M.] “The emergence of the totally detached, autonomous self brought with it an increasing self-awareness on the part of human beings. With self-awareness came the sense of personal volition, …” This “gain in self-awareness and personal sense of identity has come at a very high price, however - the loss of intimate participation and communion with the natural world.” [p.373 R.ED] Yet we find we can fall back on mental states of our becoming and on occasion our consciousness of these events. Those with “…self-awareness and individuality have only made us all the more aware, and thus anxious, about our own finite existence and morality.”[p.374R.ED]
Death is only a step for conscious beings and it is a challenge to accept a universe in flux where all societies should be capable to find in this finite world of existence a means of functioning together in an expansive manner. “The early-twentieth-century poet Rilke provides us with a clue. He wrote, `… whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life.’ In other words, we can’t really begin to live until we first accept the fact that one day we will die.”[pp.374-5R.ED] The more we control our own mind set, our ability to become conscious of alternatives and their burdens, the more complete our life is before the finale curtain is lowered.
In a post-modern world which is marked by “increasing individuation, where personal identity is fractured into a myriad of sub-identities and meta-identities, reintegration with the whole of the biosphere may be the only antidote encompassing enough to ensure that the individual does not lose all of his or her moorings and disintegrate into a nonbeing.”[p.375R.ED] Those of the postmodern mentalities like many of the counterculture note that the self development grows into multiple selves where the complexity of individualities become activated. One psychologist has argued “that multiple personas are a coping mechanism that allows the psyche to adjust to the growing density in an increasingly globalized society.” It therefore has been suggested that “multiple personas represent a more mature state of consciousness - one that allows individuals to live with the complexities and ambiguities around them as they try to make their way in a more interconnected global environment.” [p.376R.ED] No one knows yet how far this most recent development of consciousness can lead but that is the challenge for and the promise of tomorrow. As has been noted: “Overcoming the sense of personal isolation and alienation that can accompany an electronically mediated environment requires a new integrative mission powerful enough to be transformative in nature.”[pp.376-7R.ED]
There are writers who have suggested “that human beings are maturing in their self-development to the point where they can make a personal choice to re-participate with the myriad relationships that make up the biosphere.” It is in “our growing involvement in networks, our new founded ability to multitask and operate simultaneously on parallel tracks, our increasing awareness of economic, social, and environmental interdependencies, our search for relatedness and embeddedness, our willingness to accept contradictory realities and multi-cultural perspectives, and our process-oriented behavior…” that can for some aid in breaking through those characteristics that “predisposed us” to chose “systems thinking.” [pp.377-8R.ED] If there is to be a re-participation, a true reaching out to the other for “actually being there” is required [p.378R.ED] However, “if that awareness is not balanced with intimate, face-to-face re-participation with the body of nature, our journey into a new stage of consciousness will be stillborn.”[ibid] One way to put it is to note that “the life instinct can be rekindled only by really living life, and living life means deep participation in the life of the other that surrounds us.”[ibid] It is in asserting life that we defeat death and in this, “by choosing deep-re-participation with nature, by stewarding the many relationships that nurture life, we surround ourselves with a life-affirming environment.”[pp.378-9R.ED]
The real tragedy of modernity has been that “the American Dream is largely caught up in the death instinct. We seek autonomy at all costs. We over consume, indulge our every appetite, and waste the Earth’s largesse.” If this is not enough, “we put a premium on unrestrained economic growth, reward the powerful and marginalize the vulnerable.” Now that we have come to consider ourselves a chosen people, we are “therefore, entitled” and “sadly, our self-interest is slowly metamorphosing into pure selfishness. We have become a death culture.”[p.379R.ED] Our greed has become a form of greed-itus for which there is no known cure. After all, “consumption and death are deeply intertwined. The term ‘consumption’” itself “dates back to early fourteenth century and has both English and French roots. Originally, to ‘consume’ meant to destroy, to pillage, to subdue, to exhaust. It is a word steeped in violence and until the twentieth century had only negative connotations.” Lest we forget, in the early 1900s within the walls of medical societies we “referred to tuberculosis as ‘consumption.’ Consumption only metamorphized into a positive term at the hands of twentieth century advertisers [people like Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud] who began to equate consumption with choice.” The consumer’s choices soon replaced “representative democracy as the ultimate expression of human freedom, reflecting its new hallowed status.”[ibid] It is no accident that “on the domestic scene, these critics on the Left warn that modern technology, with its un-precedented productivity, `sells’ itself to the people so pervasively that, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, they `recognize themselves in their commodities,’ thereby accepting `a comfortable, smooth,, reasonable, democratic unfreedom.’”[pp.12-13S.PC] After all, “a consumer-oriented society is self-destructive psychologically as well as ecologically.”[p.138S.PC] And if one needed a more deeply understood knowledge of the dangers offered by continually consuming one need only look at psychology where ” it results in the transformation of man into an insatiable consumption machine, and, as Maslow had noted, man by his very nature cannot remain forever content with this role.”[p.182S.PC] Suicide may be painless but the real change is the end of life for zombies in the mall.
Note that we in the modern world is where “today, Americans consume upwards of a third of the world’s energy and vast amounts of the Earth’s other resources, despite the fact that we make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population.”[pp.379-380R.ED] As the “cultural historian Elias Canetti once observed, `each of us is a King in a field of corpses.’”[p.380R.ED]
For modernists, reasonable and massive wars with slaughtering of civilians by newly developed destructive weapons as well raping of the restoring plant’s natural gifts, have come to enjoy the sick humor of this past century of annihilation and the insanity that seems to prevail while embracing diseases we call unlimited growth. Ah, how we have come to worship at the alter of death in our over-priced and over-dressed clothing of tanks we call cars. We should all join consumer’s anonymous since “a consumer-oriented society is self-destructive psychologically as well as ecologically.”[p.138S.PC]
We grow our own terrorist in Washington and the hinder-lands while seeking to attack the more abstract versions abroad. We have replaced a meaningful life of free choices with what we call the good life where we need garage sales to make room for what postmodern poets like Ferlinghetti called a “Junkman’s Obbligato” which is tied to “One the Road” by Kerouac and “Howl” by Ginsberg. As one thinker stated - “That our age and culture are apocalyptic is a truism.”[p.37 B.BC]
Sure, the universe is not as orderly as we would like even with our mathematical tricks, nor is living with a relative degree of wonderful absurdity easy, but that is the price of living with discovery where death is reduced to a later conclusion. Maybe one thinker has a partial solution in offering that “considering first the restructuring of the Third World, we will see a political decentralization reminiscent of the disintegration of the Roman Empire. In the Third World today as in the Roman Empire … there will be an assertion of local autonomy and traditions against the increasingly restrictive and exploitative domination by metropolitan centers.”[p.168S.PC]
NACHWORD
There have been others who contributed to the new thinking and demands noted in the beginning of this essay.
We were given insights with the words from songs by Pete Seeger and spread by Peter, Paul and Mary, who like others stated it so clearly:
“If I had my way, if I had my way, in this wicked world I would tear this building down …”: Goodby modernity. And as in another of their well sung offerings:
“Where have all the flowers gone, long time passingWhere have all the flowers gone, long time agoWhere have all the flowers gone, young girls have picked them every one
Oh when will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn.”
“Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago.
Where have all the soldiers gone, Gone to graveyards everywhere
Oh when will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn”
As an addenda: Transitions may be difficult but they are inevitable -
So dig it, as the old song says: “Which side are you on …”
After all: “The answer is blowing in the wind.”
FOOTNOTES: Because so much of my thoughts were match by these writers it only seemed reasonable to us their notes where possible to make the points for this essay. When the citation has been made, the code for the study is used in the text where applicable. The length of this work was not intended but the breath and depth of the subject from an historian’s point of view made for this demanded for which this author apologizes.
F.N.1 Breisch, Ernst. “On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath.” U. Of Chicago Press, 2004 p.11B.FH
Stevrianos, F.N.2 L. S. “The Promise of the Coming of the Dark Age” W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1976S.PC
F.N.3 Rifkin, Jeremy. “The European Dream. How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream” . Penquin Books, London. 2004/05R.EDF.N.4 Berman, Marshall. “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity.” Simone and Schuster NY 1982B.SM
F.N.5 Crary, David. “El Paso Times Feb. 27 2007 and the Chronicle of Higher Education” 28 Feb. 2007C.EP
F.N.6 Drury, Shadia. “Free Inquiry” Aug/Sep.. 2009 pp. 22-3D.FI
F.N.7. See in Breisach, Ernst “On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath” see the reference to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” trans. By Tacott Parson, NY Scrimbers 1958,[p.182] p.36B.FHF.N.8. See Ioneso, Eugene. “Notes and Counter notes: Writings on the Theater.” Trans. by Donald Watson, NY Grove Press, Inc. 1964 orig. fr. 1962I.NC
For Luigi Pirandello on humor see his “On Humor” Trans. By Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1974. To see his theory applied see Vwadek P. Marciniak, “Politics, Humor and the Counterculture: Laughter in the Age of Decay.” Lang, NY 2008
F.N.9. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Bread @ Circuses. Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay.”Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1983 p.37B.BCThat the war of 1914 is still with us see Hew, Strachan, “The First World War” Simon & Schuster, 2006.
PAX/LOVE