modernism and post-modernism

[Eric the Green]

(07-08-2021, 03:43 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: Maybe. Which concepts should I start distinguishing?

Those that I described in my post. Those you listed in the comment made before mine.

Quote: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.

I dunno. Totalitarianism was horrid; a strong reaction against it was warranted. But the dominant reaction was the McCarthy era, not some socialist professors. If they were socialists this was hardly apparent in our democracy in the 1950s. Socialist parties declined to almost nothing. Such watered-down socialism as existed already had arrived with the New Deal, not through reaction to the war which tended to stifle it. Some hippies had left-wing parents, but as a younger generation member you don't know how widespread a trend hippies were; all sorts of young people became hippies or semi-hippies and underwent the "conversion" to one degree or another.

Quote:I see the idea of military intervention against tyranny or terrorism as a continuation of the Victorian "civilizing mission".

Sure, and it goes back to the French Revolution and Napoleon too.

Quote:Pacifism definitely did not arise in the Sixties, maybe that's when you 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.

The UN was created after WW2 in order to prevent wars by means of diplomacy. Sounds like what peaceniks propose now, doesn't it? The idea that the Taliban 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.

But what I am saying is that pacifism did not increase much at all because of World War Two. It declined because of it, and resulted in increased militarism in the USA to avoid another Munich appeasement. The whole USA defense establishment arose directly after and because of this, and because Stalin and Communism had become the new Hitler. This syndrome was the direct cause of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, which in turn aroused the first peace movement to actually stop a war. Pacifism had existed before, and there was a strong peace movement before Pearl Harbor, but World War II tended to discredit it.

Diplomacy by the UN is not pacifism. The UN has not disarmed nations yet or confiscated and taken over their weapons. Obama, Trump and Biden all tried diplomacy with the Taliban. That does not make them pacifists.

This history was so well-known to we boomers that it is interesting that you as a younger generation member don't seem to know it, or the immense scale of the influences it had. I wonder a lot what world I live in now.

Quote: Eric the Green
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.

Quote:Captain Genet
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.

Yes, you can have modernism without supporting the free market; that's called socialism. The free market without modernism seems only to apply to ancient barter 4000 years ago. But free market ideology descends directly from classical liberalism, which is modernist, even though another modern ideology of socialism arose to challenge it in the 19th century.

Quote:The civil rights movement in America started in 1954:
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/civilrights...vement.htm

But it became powerful in the early sixties, and not before. A Court decision paved the way for the movement, but did not start it. A couple of incidents in 1956 and 1957 did, but then it died away again until 1960, when it took off with the sit-ins and freedom rides and continued from there and resulted in the civil rights and voting rights acts in the mid-60s.

Quote: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?

Again, on a small scale that's true; like the Beatnicks, circa 1956, doubted the civic consensus. There were a few wild ones like Marlon Brando. But the predominant trend among Silents was conformity until the 2T began in 1964. Look for Gen Z to begin to doubt the civic consensus in the 2040s. 2030s will be too soon. Why were the Silent Generation called that? Because of their conformity in the 1950s. Look for Gen Z at least to doubt the enormous application of virtual reality, zooming, robotics, social media, etc.