"Modernity is simply the sense or the idea that the present is discontinuous with the past, that through a process of social and cultural change (either through improvement, that is, progress, or through decline) life in the present is fundamentally different from life in the past. This sense or idea as a world view contrasts with what I will call tradition, which is simply the sense that the present is continuous with the past, that the present in some way repeats the forms, behavior, and events of the past."

"The camera suddenly allowed the painting or the statue to appear, not only in a singular physical context, but also in the textbook that could be distributed around the world. Increasing democratization of Western Civilization had removed the elite from the position of cultural guardian. Culture was placed in the hands of the common man (sic). For some, this created a crisis."

"What placed thestamp on the Enlightenment was this analytical method of Newtonian physics applied to the entire field ofthought and knowledge. Order and regularity came from the analysis of observed facts. (Gotthold Ephraim) Lessing said thatthe real power of reason lay not in the possession but in the acquisition of truth. So pure analysis wasapplied to psychological and social processes. From here on out the doctrine of historical and sociologicaldeterminism (the application of the principle of causality to social science) was generally accepted. Many historicists have ridiculed this naive scientific positivism. By facile dogmatism the philosophes frequentlyignored their own method."

"The great reward of Western causal logic has been technology and the manipulation of the environment. The loss has come about because we consider every act as a closed system with short range predictable consequences. The result is therefore a loss of meaning to the act."

The Parable of the Beast
by John N. Bleitreu
page 33

"Rational discourse generates order. For the rational subject, there is a necessary imperative to think in a particular way. The sensual (empirical) self is displaced in favour of an ordered self, the body becomes a useful, servile instrument. The rational community structures individuals in formal terms, as a functional unit of rational discourse."

-- some fascinating comments on modernism, postmodernism, and the poetry of John Cage

...

"Western culture has not survived this century; we float and make our lives, says Steiner, from the surface wreckage,the post-culture, and in the depths the largest fragments anchor vast, proliferating reefs of coral scholarship. ...

The death of the culture is not just the breaking of the chain of tradition, of reference. The confidence of the culture hasbeen shattered as well. The automatic, unself-conscious elitism it once possessed is gone --- Western culture is uniquefor its assaults on itself --- and the unforced ease with which it distinguished and evaluated, created hierarchy and gaveitself a high place therein is lost to all but the fatuous. That the great events of our century --- the ``Thirty Year's War''of 1914--1945, the genocides, the bureaucratization of terror and torture and death, the real possibility of deliberatehuman extinction at the press of a button --- that these were even possible would have struck those of prior centuriesas ``nightmarish jokes.'' The optimistic beliefs of those centuries, of the prior tradition --- that there is progress, thatthe humanities make one humane, that ``the future is holy'' --- in their turn begin to seem like nightmarish jokes."

-- and see also "'Applied Science' and Superstition"
(originally "The Human Uses of Science") by Paul Goodman

"This masterwork of interpretative history begins with a bold declaration: The Modern Age is the Jewish Age -- and we are all, to varying degrees, Jews.

The assertion is, of course, metaphorical. But it underscores Yuri Slezkine's provocative thesis. Not only have Jews adapted better than many other groups to living in the modern world, they have become the premiere symbol and standard of modern life everywhere.

Slezkine argues that the Jews were, in effect, among the world's first free agents. They traditionally belonged to a social and anthropological category known as "service nomads," an outsider group specializing in the delivery of goods and services. Their role, Slezkine argues, was part of a broader division of human labor between what he calls Mercurians -- entrepreneurial minorities -- and Apollonians -- food-producing majorities.

Since the dawning of the Modern Age, Mercurians have taken center stage. In fact, Slezkine argues, modernity is all about Apollonians becoming Mercurians -- urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. Since no group has been more adept at Mercurianism than the Jews, he contends, these exemplary ancients are now model moderns."

"Is the 21st century a Dark Age, compared to the 20th? Is the culture of modernity and enlightenment slipping away, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world? Is this really an age of neo-primitivism and superstition?

... the great gains of decolonization and personal liberation in recent decades [are not] necessarily incompatible with an intellectual and cultural Dark Age. After all, the fall of the Roman empire led to the emergence of many new kingdoms, nations and city-states, and slavery withered away by the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. ...

We can understand our own regressive era by contrasting it with the period that preceded it. From the 19th century up until the 1970s, religion and premodern traditionalism were retreating before the advance of science and modernity, symbolized by large-scale, bureaucratic organizations in government and industry. The great ideological struggles of the twentieth century were between secular political religions that all claimed the sanction of science and glorified technology. While liberals and Marxists claimed the heritage of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment that produced the American and French revolutions, Mussolini and Hitler denounced Enlightenment ideals, but did not reject science. Nazi racism, like Soviet communism, was justified by appeals to pseudoscience. Totalitarianism is best understood as a perverted version of modernity.

Following the world wars, the U.S. and other liberal democracies rebuilt themselves as modern, technology-based, progressive societies that offered a higher standard of living to ordinary people than ever before. Gradually they liberalized their cultures, shedding the vestiges of priestly control, moved toward meritocracy away from aristocracy and dismantled racial caste systems. They devoted themselves to great civil engineering projects, like hydropower dams, nuclear power plants, continent-spanning highways and space exploration.

And then their people suddenly got tired of modernity and tried to crawl back into the past. ...

If there was a moment when the culture of enlightened modernity in the United States gave way to the sickly culture of romantic primitivism, it was when the movie Star Wars premiered in 1977. A child of the 1960s, I had grown up with the optimistic vision symbolized by Star Trek, according to which planets, as they developed technologically and politically, graduated to membership in the United Federation of Planets, a sort of galactic League of Nations or UN. When I first watched Star Wars, I was deeply shocked. The representatives of the advanced, scientific, galaxy-spanning organization were now the bad guys, and the heroes were positively medieval -- hereditary princes and princesses, wizards and ape-men. Aristocracy and tribalism were superior to bureaucracy. Technology was bad. Magic was good.

The Dark Age that began in the 1970s continues. Today's conservatives, centrists, progressives -- most look like regressives, by the standards of mid-20th century America. Tea Party conservatives argue that federal prohibitions on child labor are unconstitutional, that the Fourteenth Amendment should be repealed, and that the Confederates were right about states, rights. Religious conservatives, having lost some of their political power, continue to their fight against Darwinism. Fiscally conservative "centrists" in Washington share an obsession with balanced budgets that would have seemed irrational and primitive not only to Keynes but also to the 19th-century British founder of The Economist, Walter Bagehot. And while there is a dwindling remnant of modernity-minded New Deal social democrats, most of the energy on the left is found on the nostalgic farmers' market/ train-and-trolley wing of the white upper middle class.

Here's an idea. America needs to have a neomodernist party to oppose the reigning primitivists of the right, left and center. Let everyone who opposes abortion, wants to ban GM foods and nuclear energy, hates cars and trucks and planes and loves trains and trolleys, seeks to ban suburbia, despises consumerism, and/or thinks Darwin was a fraud join the Regressive Party. Those of us who believe that the real, if exaggerated, dangers of technology, big government, big business and big labor are outweighed by their benefits can join the Modernist Party. While the Regressives secede from reality and try to build their premodern utopias on their reservations, the Modernists can resume the work of building a secular, technological, prosperous, and relatively egalitarian civilization, after a half-century detour into a Dark Age."

"One of the things that Lind’s preferred states all have in common is that they are expansive, bureaucratic, centralized states ruled by autocrats or unaccountable overseers, and they are capable of extracting far larger revenues out of their economies than their successors. Obviously, Lind finds most of these traits desirable, and he seems not terribly bothered by the autocracy. In the case of the UFP, one simply has a technocrat's utopian post-political fantasy run riot. Indeed, the political organization of the Federation has always struck me as stunningly implausible and unrealistic even by the standards of science fiction. It was supposed to be a galactic alliance with a massive military whose primary purposes were exploration and peacekeeping, and which had overcome all social problems by dint of technological progress. If ever there were a vision to appeal to a certain type of romantic idealists with no grasp of the corrupting nature of power or the limits of human nature, this would have to be it. ...

There are very real trade-offs in opting for political and economic decentralization, just as there are significant costs in opting for centralization. Under a decentralized arrangement, efficiency and utility are going to be sacrificed for the sake of other goods (e.g., preserving local traditions and communities, sustainability, social solidarity, cultural identity, greater political autonomy, etc.) that Lind either ignores or simply declares backwards. Lind prefers one tendency that leads towards empire, concentrations of power and wealth, and technocratic government, and he is dismayed that anyone would object to the costs that these things impose. He would prefer instead that we pretend that those costs don’t exist, and he wants us to accept that resistance to the advance of Progress is futile. It is telling that his concluding proposal sounds a great deal like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World."