modernism and post-modernism

[Captain Genet]

(07-04-2021, 11:45 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: 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.

Maybe. Which concepts should I start distinguishing?

Quote: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 overreaction against totalitarianism created the intellectual climate of the postwar academia, which raised the hippies. I know that democratic socialism was popular among postwar intellectuals and their countercultural students, and is still cool for millennials. This kind of academic democratic socialism is characterized by cultural individualism, which is quite alien to the working class and fails to win their support.

Quote: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.

I see the idea of military intervention against tyranny or terrorism as a continuation of the Victorian "civilizing mission". Some people adopted it as a reaction to Nazism, but it is not a distinctly "millennial saeculum" way of thinking. Heck, even the Romans understood they need to use the sword to stop some barbarian warlord.

Pacifism definitely did not arise in the Sixties, maybe that's when you (and many others) learned about it, but as far as I am aware Einstein was a pacifist in the 1940s. It seems that pacifism started already in the late 19th century, among some intellectuals disillusioned with the Victorian civilizing mission. But it became more persuasive with the threat of atomic warfare. The UN was created after WW2 in order to prevent wars by means of diplomacy and prevent a nuclear apocalypse. Sounds like what peaceniks propose now, doesn't it? The idea that the Taliban will cease to be terrorists when the civilized nations "starts talking to them" did not originate with the flower power of the 1960s, but with the UN.

Quote: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.

I agree with the first part, but you can have modernism without supporting the free market and you can have the free market without modernism. Some people blend neo-liberalism with post-modernism, and maybe this was the gist of the 1990s zeitgeist.

Quote: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.

The civil rights movement in America could not be a product of the 2T since it started in 1954:
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/civilrights...vement.htm

S&H mentioned Artists starting to doubt the Civic consensus during the 1T. I see the movements of the 2T of the continuation of these doubts. Silent intellectuals doubted because they saw similarities between American GIs' conformist society and fascism or communism abroad. For example racial segregation was too obviously similar to the Nazi system.

I'm above all curious what will new Artists doubt in the 2030s? This will determine the zeitgeist of the entire new Saeculum.

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Quote: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.

Intelligence, by which I mean not only abstract school abilities, but also practical and emotional intelligence, is largely determined by genes. Of course genetically enhanced people will still need education, probably more than we do. With this caveat, their societies will be more sophisticated and peaceful than it'll be ever possible for naturally evolved humans. I also need to mention longevity, a society ruled by centenarians who are physically still in the middle age is necessarily a more experienced, wiser civilization.

"Learned and acquired characteristics and behaviors can be passed on genetically" - it's called Lamarckian evolution and has been refuted already in the 19th century.