modernism and post-modernism

[Eric the Green]

(07-04-2021, 03:02 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: Some thousands of years without much cultural advancement, if we don't embrace space travel and genetic modification of human beings, because I believe we have reached the full potential of natural human society confined to a single planet. Okay, we can still democratize the Middle East and Africa and eliminate hunger left in some places left in Madagascar.

I don't see any possible technology being developed anytime soon that could take us to planets around other stars, and the few terrestrial planets and a few moons don't offer enough real estate to expand into, even supposing it could ever be anywhere near as appropriate and life-giving in every way as our beautiful and rare gem and jungle planet here.

I don't think we have even scratched the surface of the potential of human society and individuality on Earth. We have only in the last few decades even approached childhood in our development. To begin with, we are a very primitive species only recently emerged in human form. I am appalled whenever I read about conditions under which people lived only a few decades ago, let alone centuries and millennia ago. Most people, outside a few aristocrats and priests and the artists and seers they employed or enslaved, have only now been starting to unfold their potential in this current and perhaps-all-too-brief window of a livable human society, in some places but not others, on a planet with a still-livable climate (but if current trends continue will soon be a hothouse). And now we live in a time of regression in which people in half the world or more are not even allowed to speak up about the concerns they face everyday without being shot or jailed by their tyrant, and in which a few capitalists and national-capitalist regimes can with impunity in a few more years go on polluting and ruining our extraordinary and beautiful livable Earth that took 4 and a half billion years to create and evolve, for no other purpose than their own convenience.

Genetic enhancement I don't see as any possible path to human improvement, beyond possibly eliminating some inherited disabilities and diseases. It cannot create virtue, or higher consciousness, or love, or creativity, or the ability to look beyond personal greed and insecurity to envision a society where everyone's needs are striven to be met instead of the needs of a powerful few. Instead, we must learn and practice, and evolve and be able to transmit through culture and genes what we learn to future generations. Genetics as understood by those still in the old paradigm is incorrect; learned and acquired characteristics and behaviors can be passed on genetically. We must learn that we are not just bodies, but first and foremost and most-basically souls, before we can advance those abilities that are soul abilities.

Quote:Genetically enhanced galactic humans might figure out how to harness the power of dark energy which caused the Big Bang. It is possible this is a way to break the light speed limit, making space contract in front of a spaceship. Neil DeGrasse Tyson discussed this in the 2020 Cosmos series.
It is very likely some creatures in the Universe are already using such technology.

But we won't, for the foreseeable future. And Tyson I am sure does not believe that the light barrier can be broken. He is a very traditional scientist within a very confined, narrow and very-incorrect worldview. His concept of dark energy is not even known to him; it is just an assumption made to account for what his colleagues have measured.

Quote:Maybe we are overstimulated and need to recognize digital technology addiction as a problem. Many young people would be way more normal if they got off social media. But I also believe the West overcorrected after WW2. Fascism and colonialism were big on collectivism, militarism and cultural superiority, so since the 1950s Silent (and later Boomer) intellectuals started to posit radical individualism, pacifism and cultural relativism as cures. The cures now became problems in themselves, and this is the condition I call postmodernism. Note there are different combinations of these ideas, e.g. the "wolves of Wall Streets" are radical individualists to the point they see any communitarian ideals as evil, but are not pacifists. Socialists like Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders adopt pacifism and cultural relativism, but not individualism.

As I see it, your philosophy tends to cram and shove a lot of different concepts under one label of your own choosing. These are a lot of different and conflicting worldviews and intellectual positions, with different origins.

Socialism is collectivism, so it still exists, and emerged from the mid-19th century, and is still popular among such politicians as Corbyn and Sanders. What was discredited after World War Two (and yet still also exists) was totalitarianism, which was based on either socialism (communism) or fascism (Darwinian racism and nationalist militarism). But collectivism can be moderate and democratic, and in the USA was exemplified by the New Deal, and which is now proposed in an updated form called the Green New Deal, which contains most of the political program needed today.

The major over-correction after World War Two was not pacifism, but precisely the opposite: the Munich Syndrome, which held that "democracies" must intervene to "contain" or "stop the aggressive advance" of communism or fascism, lest we fall into the mistake of appeasement and the "dominoes" fall. Thus the USA and some of its allies invaded Vietnam for this purpose. The pacifism among intellectuals arose in the sixties in reaction to THIS Munich Syndrome. Detractors to this pacifism like George Bush I called this the "Vietnam Syndrome", which he supposedly "overcame" via the Gulf War of 1991. Now however, there are some folks like Tulsi Gabbard and Ron/Rand Paul, both on the left and the right, who have exaggerated this Vietnam Syndrome into a belief that any US military action is evil, and that most wars in the world are regime-change wars caused by the CIA. But most people have, on the other hand, reacted to Saddam Hussein and Al Queda to embrace a new militarism, to one degree or another, and for such folks pacifism is passe again.

Neo-liberalism is an entirely separate ideology from post-modernism. It is the economic-libertarian philosophy that supports the wolves on Wall Street and most Republican and Libertarian politicians and pundits. It did originate among intellectuals like Hayek and Mises in reaction to totalitarianism as realized in the time of World War Two. You could call this free-market ideology a classical-liberal modernism stripped down to just whatever supports the market and those who make money in it.

Cultural relativism rose alongside collectivism and totalitarianism, rather than separate from or in reaction to it. The ideas of Freud and Einstein gave it a foundation, as did existential philosophy. It was popular in the 1920s, and again in the 1970s. There is a general counter-cultural rebellion that broke out in the 1960s and 70s against depersonalization, conformity, and various oppressive hierarchies like patriarchy. This was more of a reaction against the conformist society in The West itself that emerged AFTER World War Two, or just continued as it already was before it, rather than the societies like fascism and communism that CREATED World War Two. There was the racism and nationalism of the Nazis to react against after the BIG WAR, but also the racism already existing within American and other western societies to react against. People didn't have to look abroad to feel the pinch of this oppression. The civil rights movement thus encouraged similar movements against other unjust hierarchies, and some of these are cultural relativist ideas that can be annoying if taken to extremes, and which are the ideas most-often labelled as post-modernist.