Modernism

[Dick Wisan]

[moderator note - Please confine replies to items of historical interest. Dave]

In article <5hnqkm$n...@shell3.ba.best.com>, j...@athena.mit.edu says...

>In article <5hngdp$d...@nntp1.u.washington.edu>,
>Donald Phillipson <ad...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:

>>Askew takes her a naive and unrealistic attitude to technology.
>>People have since at least 1800 (e.g. Robert Owen) to the early 1900s
>>(Lenin, Henry Ford) equated "modernism" with science and technology as
>>well as with personal liberty -- not liberty alone.

>But we live in interesting times, because this equation is facing its
>first serious challenges. Much of the reason for that is that we are
>seeing for the first time the emergence of non-Western industrial
>societies who have the ability to put accross different definitions of
>what modern really means. The other reason is that technology has
>provided people with more wealth than the really know what to do with.
>When you are starving, then economic progress is a pressing issue.
>When you are comfortably middle class, then it is less of one.

>So you get people like me who are pro-science and technology yet at
>the same time think that people would be better off reading more of
>Confucius and the familial loyalities ought to be strengthened. A
>good part of the reason I am Confucian is that my familiarity with
>science, makes me think it makes a poor guide for running ones
>personal life. Does this make me a modernist, a traditionalist, or
>rather does it show that the distinction really isn't that useful.

Why must all things modern be of a piece? There is a sense of "modern"
which means only "characteristic of the present moment". In that sense,
post-modernism is --or seemed until very lately-- to be modern. If
"modern" means "better", as it usually seems to, I agree that you can't
use the distinction, but why not be a modernist with regard to
technology and a conservative in cultural matters. There really _is_
a problem about combining modern technology with traditional cullture,
and that's what the non-Western industrial societies are struggling
with.

--
R. N. (Dick) Wisan - Email: internet WIS...@hartwick.edu
- Snail: 37 Clinton Street, Oneonta NY 13820, U.S.A.
- Just your opinion, please, ma'am: No fax.

[Joseph Askew]

Donald Phillipson (ad...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA) wrote:

: >Mostly what I have to say concerns the previous post rather than
: >Joseph Wang's. My problem is less that it is a tautology but that it
: >does exactly whta I object you. It lists things Americans do as
: >modern. Among others. This is just what the first Anglophones did in
: >the nineteenth century as well except of course they had a very
: >different list. China allowed polygamy and divorce for instance.
: >Britain did not. Thus monogamy and no (or difficult) divorce was held
: >up as a sign of modernity. It is a clever way of defining things but
: >of limited use.

: >The big step forward in "modernity", I think and I expect most people
: >would agree, is the French Revolution. . . . Was Napoleonic France
: >modern?

: Askew takes her a naive and unrealistic attitude to technology.

"her"? And that would be Mr Askew to yuo I expect. Given I have not
discussed technology so far (except to mention China's abortive
attempts at importing it) I don't think ou have good grounds for
claiming I have a naive or unrealistic attitude to it. However if
we are going to discuss the possession or not of technology then
I don't think it is the most useful measure but it is one I am
happy to work with precisely because it is objective an measurable.
All the things the present discussion has not been.

: People have since at least 1800 (e.g. Robert Owen) to the early 1900s

: (Lenin, Henry Ford) equated "modernism" with science and technology as
: well as with personal liberty -- not liberty alone.

Fine. As measures go it is a good one because it is so easily
measured. It has not been one that has featured prominently so
far and of course it is hard to divorce technology and science
from their cultural context. But that aside....

: Modernism in the 18th century appeared to be a British invention,

Indeed. When the British Whig historians reinterpreted history as
forward progress they needed a goal to progress towards. So they
made the typical senior book-keeper from Tunbridge Wells as the
measure of modernity. An interesting but fundamentally flawed
concept in my opinion.

: technology.> The French revolution offered "Liberty, Equality and
: Fraternity" as another basis for modernism: but this did not work in
: practice (because of the excesses of the Terror, the character of the
: Napoleonic empire, and Napoleon's defeat by the allied powers. That
: is why France's direction oscillated so much in the restorations and
: revolutions of 1815, 1848, 1851, 1870 etc. France was in this period
: uniquely complicated but not uniquely "modern.")

I think it did work in practice. It did not give France a stable
system of political rule but fundamentally the ideas of the West
ever since have been mostly commentary on the French Enlightenment
and Revolution. So it did not work in practice, the French still
won the battle for ideas. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity are
highyl important principles in the world today. And form much of
the intellectual basis for the modern West. No Communism without
the French Revolution and Marxism has been the most influential
school of thought this century. Maybe Freud might try to make a
claim.

: By the late 19th century, "modernism" had come to appear
: characteristically American. W.T. Stead (British journalist) wrote
: about this as early as 1901 under the title "The Americanization of
: the World," which he saw acting on manners (e.g. adults' behavior
: towards children and children's towards adults) as well as being
: enabled if not primarily driven by industrial technology.

So we can see that a British concept can be transplanted to the
United States. Mere posession of technology does not explain this.
After all the Germans were as advanced if not more so. German
scholarship and Univerisities have been very powerful too. Yet
no one much has claimed that Germany was the cutting edge of the
modern world. Outside Germany that is. So the concept seems to be
little more thana rationalisation of power. If you have it and you
dominate others you are modern. Hardly of much importance.

: This approach to modernism is more convincing than Askew's because it
: looks for what is characteristically different in modernism, e.g.
: technology, rather than what is common in many societies, ancient and
: modern (e.g. warlords, democracy vs. despotism, etc.)

I most emphatically do not look for what is common. I notice some
things that are but to define what it is to be modern (something
I have not really tried so far) relies on working out what is so
very different. So far we have only been discussing political and
cultural features.

Joseph

--
"Blessed are the Peacemakers, for they shall inherit the Earth"
- President Bill Clinton

[Joseph C Wang]

In article <WISANR-0104...@r30p11.onramp.net>,
Dick Wisan <WIS...@hartwick.edu> wrote:

>If "modern" means "better", as it usually seems to, I agree that you can't
>use the distinction, but why not be a modernist with regard to
>technology and a conservative in cultural matters.

Because there is no reason to make this distinction. In 1900, the
notion of modern was associated with a better and brighter future, and
so people wanted to be associated with that. In my mind modernism is
associated with things like the Cultural Revolution, the Communist
bureaucracy, and the breakdown in social and moral order. So there
really is no psychological need for me to associate myself with the
notion of modern.

--
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[Erik Hare]

Dick Wisan <WIS...@hartwick.edu> wrote:
>If "modern" means "better", as it usually seems to, I agree that you can't
>use the distinction, but why not be a modernist with regard to
>technology and a conservative in cultural matters.

The use of "Modern" as a synonym for "Better" is an interesting one, and
whilst I have to admit that you are generally accurate, consider this
definition from the 1913 Webster Dictionary (found on-line as:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/forms_unrest/webster.form.html )

Modern (Page: 935)

Mod"ern (?), a. [F. moderne, L. modernus; akin to modo just now, orig.
abl. of modus measure;hence, by measure, just now. See Mode.]

1. Of or pertaining to the present time, or time not long past; late; not
ancient or remote in past time; of recent period; as, modern days, ages,
or time; modern authors; modern fashions; modern taste; modern practice.

2. New and common; trite; commonplace. [Obs.]

Whilst definintion 1 is the neutral one, if "Modern" has any slant at all
(allbeit, obsolete) it is one of being commonplace. Shows how the
attitude toward newness has changed in the last 100 years.

Erik Hare
Saint Paul, MN

[thomas kavanagh]

Joseph C Wang wrote:
<snip>

> In my mind modernism is
> associated with things like the Cultural Revolution, the Communist
> bureaucracy, and the breakdown in social and moral order.

I think a good anthropological and historical case can be made that
there has been *no* "breakdown in social and moral order" because past
"social and moral orders" were just as screwed up as ours.

Thomas Kavanagh
Curator
Mathers Museum
Indiana University

[Eric Gross]

>I think a good anthropological and historical case can be made that
>there has been *no* "breakdown in social and moral order" because past
>"social and moral orders" were just as screwed up as ours.

Hear, Hear!

Nearly every generation has believed their society to be in decay. There has
never been a perfect society. What changes is the relative balance of order
to disorder, rationality to irrationality, humanity to inhumanity. The
"modernist" belief in the linkage of technical and economic advancement to
political, social and moral improvement is conditional at best, and certainly
subjective. The western world may have been clinging joyously to the
perception of its enlightened state as a result "modernist" evolution at the
turn of the century, but WWI and WWII argue strongly that somewhere, somehow,
little had really changed except our ability to do harm on a larger scale . .
. .

[E.F.Schelby]

egr...@mailer.fsu.edu (Eric Gross) wrote:

>Nearly every generation has believed their society to be in decay. There has
>never been a perfect society.

Hear, hear. The generations all over-evaluate their own importance.
But where does that leave modernism? Isn't the above the
Apollonian(classic) as contrasted to the Dionysian (romantic) view?

ES

[Kamal J Southall]

In article <5hu39o$p...@nntp1.u.washington.edu>,
Joseph C Wang <j...@athena.mit.edu> wrote:
->In article <5hre49$7...@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu>,
->Donald Tucker <bs...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote:

->>We have been shifting into a "post-modern" era
->>for nearly a century.

->Who is we?

The Occident

->"Modernist" thinking in China is stronger is some respects
->that in the West. Most Chinese intellectuals, for example, have far
->more faith in science than Western intellectuals, and it's no
->coincidence that the top leadership of the Communist Party are all
->engineers who rose to the top as factory workers.

This is also largly true in the Islamic world, esp. in Arab
countries. It appears that the majority of Islamist movement leaders are
engineers. Reading works produced in Pakistan and some Arab countries one
finds the same trend that you noted above. In fact the vast majority of
Political Islamic movements are not traditional in that their leadership's
priorities tend to concentrate on Industrial reconstruction(Hizb ut
Tahrir), economic modernization(within the bounds of the Sharia), and the
development of psudo Democratic and civil institutions(under traditional
Islamic guise).

->>Finally,
->>we see the "post-modern" loss of belief in the certainty of
->>rationality in relationships, whether scientific (chaos theory),
->>social or economic.

->This is quite ironic. Much of the reason that I am a Confucian is
->that it offers a vision of rationality in social relationships and a
->sense of connectedness that most post-modern philosophies don't. Does
->that make me a traditionalist, because I believe in the Confucian
->classics, or a modernist, because I think that society can be
->rationally ordered? Probably it illustrates that these sorts of
->distinctions aren't useful.
Nope, they just muddy and blur things up a *lot*.

->One other thing that is that you mentioned chaos theory. I shudder
->whenever scientific concepts get incorporated into the mainstream,
->because the public generally gets the concept wrong. This can be
->disastrous (i.e. as with Darwinism).

It was my impression that social darwinism and eugenics theory was
very much in the scientific mainstream in the late 19th and early 20th
century... I Don't know...

[Joseph C Wang]

In article <southakj-090...@r32p20.onramp.net>,

Kamal J Southall <sout...@ucunix.san.uc.edu> wrote:
> This is also largly true in the Islamic world, esp. in Arab
>countries. It appears that the majority of Islamist movement leaders are
>engineers. Reading works produced in Pakistan and some Arab countries one
>finds the same trend that you noted above. In fact the vast majority of
>Political Islamic movements are not traditional in that their leadership's
>priorities tend to concentrate on Industrial reconstruction(Hizb ut
>Tahrir), economic modernization(within the bounds of the Sharia), and the
>development of psudo Democratic and civil institutions(under traditional
>Islamic guise).

It seems to me that the Arab world and China have followed a different
order. In China, there was an attempt to industrialize within
traditional forms, and after this appeared to fail, there was a
general reaction against and form of tradition. In the Arab world,
the domainant ideology was pan-Arab socialism, and the failure of that
to greatly improve standards of living is what has triggered the shift
toward Islamism.

The depth of Islamist ideology is generally not appreciated in the
Weet, who for some reason looks at Islamists as radical bomber
terrorists. I've never really completely understood what caused this
perception.

> It was my impression that social darwinism and eugenics theory was
>very much in the scientific mainstream in the late 19th and early 20th
>century... I Don't know...

The trouble with social Darwinism is that it isn't supported by
Darwinism itself. There is a episode of the "Day the Universe"
changed in which James Burke talks about how Darwinism was the
inspiration for a number of radically different views about how
society should work.

What happens is that because "science" has a positive connotation,
every social theory nowadays needs to construct itself to sound
scientific.

[Moderator's Note: We don't need to hear more about social theories
except in their historical context. --tm]