Election 2020

[pbrower2a]

(12-29-2020, 12:06 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: "...The modern age begins with the Renaissance and goes through the Enlightenment. It is one smooth, connected time because there has been no cataclysmic break."

Any break would be a new Dark Age at the worst or at the least an overall repudiation of trends that began in the Renaissance. Even in art, the Impressionist era looks like a new sort of Renaissance, the Impressionists accepting Renaissance realism with muted contrast. Renaissance taste was generally for dark backgrounds to accentuate the subject, and Impressionist taste is for lighter backgrounds as a realism of its own kind. Some people may have rejected the curiosity about scientific reality or made scientific reality subordinate to faith or ideology, but this has typically won rejection. The Renaissance is also a break from the amateurish quality of art and the subordination of all expressions to a faith that  none challenge without fear of severe retribution. 

There have been severe Crises from the 15th century on, and some of those have broken old orders or so weakened them (think of the damage that World War II did to colonialism) that something that people took complacently as uncontestable reality  became absurd and indefensible.       

Quote:We differ there, and WEIRD advocates should be aware that historians do assign a major break in the early 20th century, whether in the years leading up to World War I, or at World War II which was its direct result. The modern arts, psychology, modern physics, modern music, new philosophy, modern architecture, a surge of inventions-- all proclaim the break, which was followed by the fall of Europe and its empires and kingdoms as the leading civilization on the planet, thanks to the world wars they created. The founding of the League of Nations, followed by the UN, is the signature of our age, which is now a global society. The new age, the green awakening, the counter-culture, the decline of American exceptionalism and imperialism, all followed in the sixties and seventies. That in turn is the post-modern period, which continues, and whose hallmark trait is the end of progress.

Technology changes how people do what they have always done. Yes, the darkness of night is meaningless in a 24-7 world in which some people keep Dracula-like hours; telephones made conversation possible over long distances. Radio expands the scope of the spoken word, and television, motion pictures allow the replay of old performances (and the sound-set is a theater stage for all practical purposes), and television expands the range for sending a variant of live theater or sporting events seemingly everything.  Much of what people do with computers is what they used to do with a telegraph (e-mail) that basically replaced carrier pigeons and semaphores; we do brute-force calculations with computers instead of doing them by hand; we simulate board games (although that may expand to three dimensions)on computers, and we are likely to see computers supplant broadcasting. Much of what some of us do is reading, so the even the late-medieval innovation of the printed word has found a threat to its continuing relevance. Computers can simulate travel; there is even a YouTube series called "Big Rig Travels" which shows what travel between some locations looks like in real time. Shopping that depends on getting people into a store to buy stuff  may be becoming less relevant as a way to sell stuff; instead of brick-and-mortar entities such as Tower Records we now have Amazon, e-Bay, and the like. The stores that seem to be thriving are grocery stores (for perishable items, at the least) and those with demographics that consist largely of people of limited sophistication with computers. Until someone can convince me that we are using computers to do things that we used not to do, I see computers at most as disruptive toward old ways of doing things.   

Quote:These events are all a decisive break from the Renaissance, which is now called early-modern. The Enlightenment was the finalized expression of the Renaissance humanist culture which at the time was still embedded in traditional medieval society. The great late 18th century Revolutions began the shift toward our times, and some historians date "modern times" from then.

But it is still evolution. I see no large tendency for anyone to say "Let's break with the Renaissance". Maybe people cast off the medieval claptrap, but that itself is an expression of modernity. To be sure there are people who have rejected the modern in an effort to restore the certainty (flawed as it was) of medieval times because such is somehow comforting to the dim-witted or useful to traditional elites. The problem for such reactionaries is that they need sophisticated technologies, typically of weapons and the means of surveillance, to enforce their nostalgia for a past that many of us would find uncomfortable and offensive. If the unholy trinity of weaponry, tools of censorship and surveillance, and torture devices that underpins more modern forms of tyranny two of those groups of tools themselves require great sophistication to design and manufacture, the devices of torture are much what they were in the middle ages.   

Technology is amoral. The same device that allows us access to concerts of great music can also supply child pornography or 'beheading video'. The basic rules of human conduct that make civil life possible without oppression have been under discussion for over two millennia.  
  

Quote:Going back to calling the Renaissance "modern," is a mark of the decline in historical awareness and awareness of the new trends that has happened in the recent regressive years. The 21st century so far is a giant ZERO in every way.

But progress may now start to return, redesigned from the previous era of earth-conquest.

This is like saying that Europe between 1930 and 1945 was mostly a degradation, one that might have seemed inevitable (the fascist Wave of the Future) where it came to prevail... temporarily. Much of the current trend is awful. This said, fads die, especially those involving bad behavior including intellectual emptiness and vile conduct. Donald Trump may be a repudiation of much that many of us have thought intellectual and moral progress... but he was defeated. Bad habits typically die in a Crisis Era, and surprisingly many of those that die are recent innovations. Consider the intellectual fad of eugenics, and contrast that to old moral values that state that murder, rape, theft, adultery, fraud, deceit, ignorance, chattel slavery, and intoxication are incompatible with a good world that makes life tolerable. Just think of how different Germany would have been had it accepted the moral teachings of a minority religion in its midst instead of accepting a criminal who repudiated every human decency that that minority religion taught.