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Monday, November 10, 2014

The brief blip of Modernity (1875-1965) lost WWII - thank God !

Germany , Italy and Japan didn't lose WWII , not to judge by their present day prosperity and happiness that is far far higher now than even at the height of their world conquering triumphs.

Above all, they're still here - but Modernity (the philosophical glue that held Allied , Neutral and Axis together in 1939-1945) sure isn't.

Isn't really around , except in the minds of angry-old-Protestant-men-with-money, who still have plenty of power and money to deny any limits to Man's ability to control Nature.

(A big shout out to once socialist fellow traveller Rupert Murdoch, who is still denying we can't control the climate  - perhaps by tapping its phone.)

But rabid global holocaust deniers aside, the bulk of today's humanity rejects the idea that Modernity gives us an accurate picture of how the real world works.

Many may do so reluctantly or grudgingly , others eagerly .

Still,  seventy five years on, what is really changed from 1940 and today is just how differently almost all of us think about humanity's relationship to the world and about our ability to predict, control and successfully change that world.

Its almost as if the insights of Quantum Physics were discovered in 1915 at the height of Modernity, but not really believed , even by scientists, until 100 years later.

Physically, the military forces of one part of Modernity did indeed successfully defeat the military forces of another part of Modernity over the six year long duration of WWII.

But mentally and emotionally, over the course of doing so during those six years, the slow rot of uncertainty and doubt had entered the collective mind.

Modernity sputtered on, going through the motions, running on sheer inertia , but conviction was gone in the minds of many - particularly the minds of the youngest.

And no ideology, no matter how strong it appears at the time, can survive if it fails to indoctrinate the new young.

Because no human-created ideology is proof against the slow certainty of the physical deaths of human beings.

And so it is time we stop trying to soften the blow to the elderly who still embrace the Modernity of their youth.

For post-modernity, so-called, accepts the reality of relentless modernization (good and bad) while Modernity only into existence to praise it in rhetoric  --- and oppose it in practise.

It is thus tempting to call today's post-modernity 'anti-modernity' but it goes far beyond that.

For today's world is a form of un-modernity, that in many startling ways is rather like life before the brief (reactive) interregnum of 1875-1965 Modernity ....

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