Category Archives: Governance

Ruminations On Modern …



Auschwitz_gas_chamber

mod·ern
adjective \ˈmä-dərn, ÷ˈmä-d(ə-)rən\: of or relating to the present time or the recent past : happening, existing, or developing at a time near the present time

: of or relating to the current or most recent period of a language

: based on or using the newest information, methods, or technology

— “Modern”, from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

We live in a modern world, during the modern period; we take ‘modern’ for granted, at the same time it is very difficult to pin down what ‘modern’ is, exactly. We have modifiers and word-association but these are vague and ill-defined. At the same time, everyone knows modern when they see it …

Modernism (disambiguation)

Jump to: navigation, search Modernism refers to a movement in the arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, or more generally to modern thought, character, or practice.

Modernism or modernist may also refer to:

  • Modernism (Roman Catholicism), theological opinions expressed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries characterized by a break with the past
  • Modernism (music), change and development in musical language that occurred at or around the turn of the 20th century
  • Modern architecture, attempts at the turn of the 20th century to reconcile the principles underlying architectural design with rapid technological advancement and the modernization of society
  • Modern art, artistic works produced roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era
  • Modernist literature, a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and verse in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
  • Modernism/modernity, a peer-reviewed academic journal founded in 1994
  • Modernism: A New Decade, a 1998 album by The Style Council

See also

— from Wikipedia

Modern is our culture, a collection of ideas we have about ourselves. Once people become conscious of ideas, they don’t disregard them although some less practical ideas might be forgotten: we are- and will remain modern until we consciously become something else.

Modern is about ‘new-ness’ but it is over five hundred years old. It emerged during the Middle Ages after Johannes Gutenberg invented printing. In short order, ordinary persons learned how to read, they became educated. They learned about the world in a practical way, as it really functioned by way of physical, chemical and biological processes, rather than by mysticism and magic. Many of the myths and fantasies of preceding generations were retired and replaced with more practical versions; this is a reason why modernity has succeeded as long as it has. Myths have remarkable staying power — thousands of years — as long as they are simple enough to remember and be passed on to others.

Modern is the culture of science and technology, management and complexity. It offers us nation-states, constitutional governments, improved medical care, sanitation, media, popular arts, status, wealth, transportation, finance, the sensation of speed, comfort, instant communications, leisure … at least eight intercontinental wars, death camps, mass deportations, epidemics, overpopulation, colonialism, banality, finance bubbles, mass delusions and … all-out assault on natural systems, nuclear weapons and resource exhaustion … Modern is the culture of how to scientifically kill things.

Publius Democritus says:
September 26, 2013 at 11:26 am

As far as the elite’s ability to survive, I think they greatly overestimate their chances. The idea that modern, high-tech industry will survive the coming catastrophe is laughable.

The author of this article makes the cardinal mistake of other techno-optimists – and yes, I put him in the camp of a techno-optimist. He deifies human ingenuity, as though it places us in a whole new category of creature that is almost immaterial, and can magically “survive” the destruction of the environment to which it is adapted.

At the very least, industrial civilization will collapse. Good riddance. It has been on a genocidal, omnicidal rampage. It no longer produces art worth reading, listening to, or viewing.

— a comment from another blog.

We assume new things are good, that is, they are possessed of a positive virtue. Because modern is always new, it is presumed to be an improvement upon the old. Modernity creates its own values: new = good, old = bad. Every time modernity sells something, these new values are reinforced even if these ‘values’ don’t reflect any sort of reality.

Virtue also exists because everything new passes through the filter of gigantic business- or state entities that are the gatekeepers for all products, useful and otherwise. Because these entities exist and we do not question them, approval assigns virtue to a product, it does not matter whether there is merit to the assignment or not.

Modern is the relationship between a seller and what he offers for sale at any given time. This concept is a little hard to pin down because the relationship appears to be both self-evident and unimportant. However, if the product is ‘life’ during some marketing minute, the promoter will sell life. If on the next minute the product is ‘death’, the promoter will sell death and will do so the same way he sold life. Given time and enough sales, it becomes impossible to tell the difference between life or death or anything else as they are all products that are sold exactly the same way.

 

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic … “

— Joseph Stalin

A modern myth is that material progress is the antidote to killing; that given enough generalized prosperity — by way of economic growth and increase in material possessions — the primary motivation for murdering our neighbors or going to war will vanish. At the same time, there is the observable tendency on the part of moderns toward horrific crimes …

Modernity, progress and prosperity provide the illusion of means by which successful war can be waged …

In the beginning of modernity, wars of conquest were indeed remunerative: a handful of adventurers armed with a royal decree were able to conquer a continent, a century later much of Asia and Africa were overrun. Afterward, these places were used up; would-be conquistadors had nowhere to turn but against each other, costs multiplied and returns evaporated even as the technicians invented more diabolical means to murder. Advantages never lasted as the means were either duplicated by adversaries or ways were found to neutralize them.

Modernity created the state, rather it was the instrument by which the state was created by reckless and violent men. Modernity anoints the state by default as the arbiter of power. Of all the characteristics of modernity, the relationship between violence and the state is the most enduring as well as the most self-destructive. Within modernity violence is cultivated- or pulled away from the extremities, from individuals and their natural tendencies toward the center, toward the authority of the state … where the individuals’ urge to violence is given sanction. This amplifies the state’s aggressive tendencies; moderates are swept aside by radicals and the state becomes militant, then bankrupted or destroyed by its own violent actions.

To be modern is to surrender individuality and to merge with the state. Conformity becomes another commercial product of the state and big business … Individuality is non-marketable, it is a competitor to both modernity and state control both of which work to ruthlessly stamp it out.

Modern offers itself as being relentlessly commercial, that is a guise. As such it can dodge away from the accusations that it is an instrument of state excess. Modernity also claims to be idiosyncratic and individualistic, which is absurd. Ideologies that propel nations and enterprises reveal themselves to be components of marketing campaigns red and blue, communism or fascism; Shia or Sunni. Modern is totalitarianism with the human face.

Within modernity, there is no real difference between business and warfare besides tactics, one is a version- or a servant of the other … both pretend to be what they are not, progress must be considered to be war by other means.

Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.

— Susan Sontag

We wage war against ourselves, our war takes the form of a gigantic, mindless force waging war against everything while pretending not to do so.

Sign on Packard Plant, Detroit

— Niraj Warikoo/DFP, graffiti sign on Packard Plant, Detroit.

Definitions of modern tend toward the self-referential … things are modern because they are modernistic. Ironically, what we see of modern are its artifacts, modern emerges out of history, it exists in the past … and in advertising. We are modern in retrospect because of various modern-appearing calling cards/wreckage we have left behind.

‘Modernity’

Related terms

The term “modern” (Latin modernus from modo, “just now”) dates from the 5th century, originally distinguishing the Christian era from the Pagan era, yet the word entered general usage only in the 17th-century quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns—debating: “Is Modern culture superior to Classical (Græco–Roman) culture?”—a literary and artistic quarrel within the Académie française in the early 1690s.

In these[which?] usages, “modernity” denoted the renunciation of the recent past, favoring a new beginning, and a re-interpretation of historical origin. The distinction between “modernity” and “modern” did not arise until the 19th century (Delanty 2007).

Phases of modernity

The history of Modernity is construed in many ways. It is mainly aligned with the age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century (also known as Age of Reason).[citation needed] Others[weasel words] have noted that its spread went so far back as the 16th century during the period of Western imperialism. In relation to Media theory it is commonly understood as having emerged in and around the 15th century where the Printing press was first invented.[citation needed]

According to one of Marshall Berman‘s books (Berman 1982, 16–17), modernity is periodized into three conventional phases (dubbed “Early,” “Classical,” and “Late,” respectively, by Peter Osborne (1992, 25):

  • Early modernity: 1500–1789 (or 1453–1789 in traditional historiography)
  • Classical modernity: 1789–1900 (corresponding to the long 19th century (1789–1914) in Hobsbawm‘s scheme)
  • Late modernity: 1900–1989

In the second phase Berman draws upon the growth of modern technologies such as the newspaper, telegraph and other forms of mass media. There was a great shift into modernization in the name of industrial capitalism. Finally in the third phase, modernist arts and individual creativity marked the beginning of a new modernist age as it combats oppressive politics, economics as well as other social forces including mass media (Laughey 2007, 30).[citation needed]

— from Wikipedia

Modernity submits that it is nothing more than a neutral carrier of information; its priests always demand the benefit of the doubt. Within modernity choices are offered between more-or-less identical products, rather than between what is offered and what is excluded. This sleight of hand gives progress its power to co-opt. Modern is propaganda that does not look like propaganda …

Whether it is Clausewitz calling war “the continuation of politics by other means,” or Engels defining violence as the accelerator of economic development, the emphasis is no political or economic continuity, on the continuity of a process that remains determined by what preceded violent action. Hence, students of international relations have held until recently that “it was a maxim that a military resolution in discord with the deeper cultural sources of national power could not be stable, ” or that, in Engels’ words, “wherever the power structure of a country contradicts its economic development” it is political power with its means of violence that will suffer defeat.

Today all these old verities about the relation between war and politics or about violence and power have become inapplicable. The Second World War was not followed by peace but by a cold war and the establishment of the military-industrial-complex. To speak of “the priority of war-making potential as the principal structuring force in society,” to maintain that “economic systems, political philosophies, and corpora juris serve and extend the war system, not vice versa,” to conclude that “war itself is the basic social system, with which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire” — all this sound much more plausible than Engels’ or Clausewitz’s nineteenth-century formulas.

— Hannah Arendt

Even as modernity exists only in the past, it aggressively colonizes the future … ‘now’, cool, hip, curvy, trendy, ‘happening’, immediate, hard, metallic, industrial, streamlined, chic … the modern future is relentlessly newer, it is what comes next; every form of post-modern is also modern … Even when current version of modernity is swept away, the replacements will be modern, with slight variations. Our ‘stuff’ requires energy and resources, myths require only memory.

Modern is also fast, which is the modifier for every idea about modern. Everything about modern is fast, it is also about more. Speed for its own sake is a modern virtue the same way violence is a modern virtue: fast and more make right.

Modernity

Modernity typically refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period, one marked by the move from feudalism (or agrarianism) toward capitalism, industrialization, secularization, rationalization, the nation-state and its constituent institutions and forms of surveillance (Barker 2005, 444).

Charles Pierre Baudelaire is credited with coining the term “modernity” (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.

Conceptually, modernity relates to the modern era and to modernism, but forms a distinct concept.

Whereas the Enlightenment (ca. 1650–1800) invokes a specific movement in Western philosophy, modernity tends to refer only to the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism. Modernity may also refer to tendencies in intellectual culture, particularly the movements intertwined with secularisation and post-industrial life, such as Marxism, existentialism, and the formal establishment of social science. In context, modernity has been associated with cultural and intellectual movements of 1436–1789 and extending to the 1970s or later (Toulmin 1992, 3–5

— from Wikipedia

Modernity is the business of replication of ‘goods’ and ideas. What matters is increasing numbers, of products, of sales, of customers of wealth; modernity is the triumph of counting over meaning and the parallel ascendency of economists. Mathematics is the science of numbers, economics is the science of lying with numbers. Progress is the substitution of human labor and art with machines powered by fossil fuels. Modernity empowers the wicked; by making wickedness useful and necessary, it becomes an integral component to the modern state …

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

— Mark Twain

The passage of five-hundred years has left a world with little left to plunder outright, there are diminished returns to wars and conquest, the plunderers are left to cannibalizing each others’ economies if they can. There is the pittance of gain that has resulted from these calamities — as if the human race set out to create a short-cut to paradise but invented the tornado instead. Now, there is the existential challenge to the cult of murder that is modernity, we have no choice but to reinvent ourselves and discover different ways to do business. Instead we keep improving the old methods and amplifying the wickedness … we are trapped.

Society evolves along with the means to distribute information, what can be made of the present? Distribution in our present requires only access to the Internet, a smart-phone or a computer, a printer or money to buy copies at a store. Anyone can say anything they want, and they do … and there is nothing to say. Content evaporates even as the means to distribute it expands in every direction. Information has become facile and incompetent, redundant and pointless; there is nothing but contradictory noise that drowns out everything else.

The populations of dying empires are passive because they are lotus-eaters. There is a narcotic-like reverie among those barreling toward oblivion. They retreat into the sexual, the tawdry and the inane, retreats that are momentarily pleasurable but ensure self-destruction. They naively trust it will all work out. As a species, Margaret Atwood observes in her dystopian novel “Oryx and Crake,” “we’re doomed by hope.” And absurd promises of hope and glory are endlessly served up by the entertainment industry, the political and economic elite, the class of courtiers who pose as journalists, self-help gurus like Oprah and religious belief systems that assure followers that God will always protect them. It is collective self-delusion, a retreat into magical thinking.

— Chris Hedges

Yet, this noise is meaningful: the entire edifice of modernity is rotting from the inside out; it relies on a quality of information which it can no longer obtain. Modernity has been undone by its success … as well as the absence of returns. It has become senile, corrupt and decadent. All that remains of it are the residues of its crimes; these are disguised now behind the scrim of myth but due time will reveal these for what they are, no amount of effort will be able to disguise them …

Top image: unknown photographer, a killing room at Auschwitz, a monument to modernity.

Wow, Steve. A tour de force. Seriously.
Thanks for quoting me!

I am going to have to reread your brilliant essay, after printing it out. Too much to digest in one sitting.

You bring together into a real systems theory disparate parts of our society: culture, finance, energy, sociology, philosophy.

For those of us with dependents, and few resources other than our skills and willingness to work, what should we do? What’s our strategy?

The only thing I can honestly think of is trying to build tribes or communes. Tribal communes. In order to survive the coming denouement of this clusterfuck, we need food, shelter, clothing, and companionship.

The System is providing these things for fewer and fewer people, and the quality is going down. In fact, the quality is terrible. The food and water is becoming poisonous, unless you filter it and grow it yourself, or seek out locally produced organics, etc.

My major fear is that the System will actively try to stamp out experiments in alternatives. It will not tolerate, in my opinion, alt currencies. If you try to produce something locally, and don’t get all the proper licenses, you will be harassed.

What do you think of time-banking? Alt currencies? Land trusts as a way to provide a place for one’s tribe?
What shall we do?
Keep up the good work.
Publius.