Chapter 4: Modernity and Post-Modernity - Some Further Explanation

Chapter 4: Modernity and Post-Modernity - Some Further Explanation Despite the emerging cracks in its foundations, modernity is a fact from whose corrosive impact there is no cure, from whose gravitational pull, there is no rational escape and from whose templates there are but the smallest of concessions to strangers.  For the most ancient of pre-modern peoples, its advent was like being hit by a bolt of lightning; when eons of history bridged and arced in but a moment of such violence, that even the hand of friendship would melt that of the other.  Even for those who were standing on the very cusp of modernity, the transition into it was fraught with risk, violence and trauma, with awful punishment for hesitation (China) and terrible moral and institutional disfigurement as the reward for success (Japanese imperialism). Modernity has been a vision so vast and powerful it has captured our sense of the possible and the imaginable.  It has immunized its subjects against almost anything beyond its pale. Modernity has been our dreaming.  Modernity has informed us what is Real and Rational, and what is not. Its power is such that even when its end comes, very likely most of the dreamers will not see it until it is an accomplished and irrevocable fact. And elites are no more immune to this than plebeian humbletons.  When confronted by climatologists who inform them that hydrocarbon burning is causing global climates to change in ways that will soon become not merely increasingly more violent and environmentally damaging, but irreversible, they go into profound denial, en masse. They reassure themselves that markets have always been infallibly self correcting and able to meet any challenge, no matter how daunting, because, more or less, for the last 250 whole years they have.  And because they always have, they always will.  As German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels waxed so eloquently in the last few months of the Second World War, a fix was just round the corner, because the extant track record of glorious victories was bound to presage so many more to come…. The reality of the strategic advance of allied armies was masked by constant reports of heroic and magnificent tactical victories, and the re-assurance that the Reich still had enormous ‘secret’ reserves to throw back its enemies and win the war.  And people wanted to believe it so much that they did, in large numbers, and continued to do so until the roof crashed in. In the same spirit of the Jewish banker and communist conspiracy to undermine the Reich, the public relations successors to Goebbels’ Reich Ministry are sent into overdrive to hose down scientific ‘alarmism’, ‘hoaxes’, ‘scams’, ‘peer pal groupthink’ and ‘post-normal science’. Ideological warriors are mobilized across the entire spectrum of public information to create the impression that the whole climate business is a left wing conspiracy to disindustrialize modern societies. This ideological paralysis in the face of crisis is but a rerun of that which confronted pre modern societies when they had to deal with the corrosive might of modern industrial society.  The environmental crisis is every bit as much a threat to the modern project as the modern project was to the pre-modern ones. Modernity is the ubiquitous term not merely for what is most recent in our own time, but as a descriptor of the developmental dynamic of industrial society from its beginnings onwards. Societies that are not modern are by definition ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ and incapable of informing our Reality; our technological and scientific rationales; our lifestyles. They are defined by their deficit of modern features, as ‘pre-modern’. Modern History is seen as an inevitable one way linear ‘progress’ that extrapolates into an indefinite future of ever more powerful, inventive, bigger and sophisticated webs of industrial development, the knowledge base that underpins it, and The Enlightenment utilitarian ideology that garnishes it. Even to the uninitiated, Post Modernity can make sense in a historical context if it is assumed that no entity or mechanism, including modern industrial capital, has an indefinite life span or does not have within it the seeds of its own destruction.  However, Post Modernity does not yet exist in the popular mind as a recognizable historical trend, at least in the developed world, except perhaps as a noisy and unarticulated discomfort in the collective cultural background and in the messianic and eschatological rantings of religious fundamentalists. Even in The Great Western Megatropolis, while the urban infrastructure seems in overall good shape, much of the psychological operating platform of affluent individuals and their communities is now as under-constructed, distorted and corrupted as many of the teeming cities of the third world.  Thus pathological and bizarre behavior in the West becomes an analogue of broken down state apparatus and the violence, poverty and filth of shantytowns.  A young, spoilt and protected San Franciscan can become a casual hit man and torturer with the same ease as a conscripted Hutu child soldier who has been systematically abused into violence by men lost to all moral understanding.  The American boy’s famished soul ingests crack with the same alacrity as his starving Zimbabwean counterpart eats grass and leaves.  The US is in its own way, in just as much of a mess as The Democratic Republic of Congo.  Only the sites of infrastructural damage and deprivation are different. Behind this is the ‘background’ of the fastest living species collapse in sixty-five million years. As the top feeders in the ecological chain, we sit astride a colossus whose very foundations are disintegrating directly as a result of both our intentional and unintentional attacks on it.  We are beginning to feel the first stirrings of later disaster, but they are as yet insufficient to inspire the kind of fear that might induce an emergency salvage response; one that might save us from going down with it. The term postmodern is used in this work to share a sense, an instinct if you like, that we are moving towards an increasingly turbulent and destabilized transitional period that may well turn out to be both dangerous and unmanageable.  It is informed by a belief that the modern world is advancing well beyond not merely sustainable boundaries, but the boundaries of sanity and psychopathology itself.  It is about that epiphanous moment when one realizes that despite winning most of the battles to date, unless something altogether unexpected happens, or a drastic change in course occurs, we are likely to lose the overproduction ‘war’ catastrophically, disgracefully and quite soon. It is about a coming uncertain time of competing visions for a future too open ended and perilous for anyone to claim as their own; even the currently overwhelmingly powerful Empire of Capital. Just as in the latter days of the Western Roman Empire, as it started to collapse, we may not only have to endure the rigors of internal dissolution and external threat, but face the need to completely rethink and re-invent ourselves and our surrounding communities. Post-Modernity is not just about strategically retreating from ground we cannot possibly hold for very long.  It is not just about cutting a slightly less aggressive deal with nature and us.  It is an attempt to start redefining the landscape of economics, society and moral consciousness.  It is about what our ambitions, priorities and values should be and how we should recognize and measure wealth.  It is about the architecture, building and maintenance of the city of the imagination; i.e., the psychological and social construction of the self. Post Modern thinking warns the subjects of latter day capital that they are living in a society that is more threatening to them than any previous regime; one that is more totalitarian, revolutionary and destructive in its operations than anything that has yet been faced, whether fascist or communist; one that compared with its cruder antecedents, has been very sophisticated at both camouflaging from the mass consciousness the depth, extent, strength and character of its control, and its capacity to inflict cultural and ecological damage; one that in some measure has made lifelong collaborators out of almost all of us. There is yet to be found a towering character of the caliber of an Alexander Solzhenitsyn to morally expose and help decommission this monster.  And yet, we inadequate children of a different future must do our best to seek an elusive and unlikely salvation as best we can. Post-Moderns are never going to win popularity prizes for the dour bleakness of their views.  But then, even from Biblical times on, individuals who warned of the possible consequences of the follies of their contemporaries were almost never popular, often reviled and even killed for their trouble.  Further, The Long March from Modernity is not likely to be easy and will probably be made by people who know they haven’t got any other choice. There is no easy vision of the future to comfort them; only the possibility that with great collective effort and good luck, they and their descendants might make it through the transitional period to the next epoch of human history, whatever that is. Their ideological journey starts its life as being therefore humble, small scale, tentative, pragmatic and conservative. Revolution is the folly of the status quo. For them, expecting to have all their fantasies and dreams come true is the seed of all the totalitarianisms and psycho-pathologies they are trying to escape.  Post-Moderns cannot sustain such promethean ambition and hope it will run its course without covering them in blood and the values of the Old Order. Hard work, discipline, steady and secure character, solid values and  a readiness to make sacrifices for others will be the mark of those who most successfully manage the undoubtedly extremely trying circumstances of the coming of the end of modern times.