03-04-2019, 05:55 PM
(This post was last modified: 03-04-2019, 05:55 PM by Eric the Green.)
(03-04-2019, 06:58 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: The "civilizations" described in the article are in fact socio-political orders. They come and go, but Mankind endures. I see post-1945 West as, in many ways, a different socio-political system than either pre-Enlightenment Thomistic Christendom and high Industrial Age modernism. So, if the average lifespan of such an order is 336 years, the end of the current one should happen in late 23th century.
The basic principles of modernism were individualism and empiricism, resulting in rule of reason established as its core tenet. But the chemical attacks during WW1, and then the Holocaust and the murder of Hiroshima made many intellectuals question the value of rule of reason. Hence the Lost, and later the Boomers adopted a different set of tenets. The Lost were more driven to hard nihilism (fascism), while boomers tended to be attracted to soft nihilism (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll). In the boomer-led Anglosphere individualism went up to eleven, best expressed in Maslow's ethos of self-actualisation adopted by many post-1945 psychologists, and nature started to be viewed more favourably than the modernists ever did. Environmentalism, excessive appreciation of pre-modern cultures (think Avatar) and sexual revolution (think Sex in the City) are the most distinctive traits of this "New Americanism", and were exported all over the world.
Perhaps the last modernists were the neo-cons, other aspects of modernism are also present in the transhumanist movement which is for the time being NOT mainstream. Can modernism become fashionable again when boomers are gone? I suppose it could, "New Americanism" might turn out to be as short-lived as Bolshevism. Apollonian character of the upcoming cycle is a good prognosis for a revival of modernism, an improved form of it could come from China where Confucianism encourages more communitarian values. The Chinese already use the expression "white Leftism" for what I have called New Americanism. They are not attracted to it. But a Chinese-led renaissance will happen only if China starts democratising.
I'm not afraid of an actual apocalypse caused by global warming, but I do worry about out-of-control AIs and genetic engineering in hands of dictators. 1950s-style nuclear winter might be a possibility if a non-democracy uses nuclear weapons.
The counter-culture and the new age were the best prospects for an alternative to modernism.
It was not just chemical attacks in WWI, but its slaughter of an entire generation for no reason which occasioned the Lost Generation's rejection of modernism, but they were just going along with trends already evident in the 1890s and 1900s in new philosophers (Nietzsche, Bergson, Freud, quantum theory) and modern art (post-impressionism, expressionism, symbolism, fauvism, cubism). These and other trends of the Awakening era in Europe were hugely influential, especially on youth.
World War II and the bomb helped to encourage the growth of existentialism (an outgrowth of the popularity of Nietsche and Bergson) and such movements as the beatnicks and anti-war sentiment. But it also extinguished the visionary tendencies in modern art and earlier awakening culture, and left us with humanism and secularism and rampant commercialism.
Post-modernism is an outgrowth of these earlier trends and took hold in the 1960s and 70s. It looks upon progress as an outdated concept and reduces rationalism to relativism.
Meanwhile exploration of the occult, the esoteric and the mystical resulted in new age and neo-pagan movements and other explorers beyond the limited realms of modernism.
Modernism as individualist, liberty-oriented and science-oriented belief in progress is still popular, and has revived among millennials. I expect this mixture to continue. The next awakening may be somewhat more Apollonnian, but there is no chance that it will revive modernism. To suppose so is not to understand the nature of Awakenings, whether Apollonian or Dyonysian. Every Awakening results in philosophies and religious movements that go beyond the rational and toward either or both traditional or mystical religion. Such movements as the Enlightenment and rationalism are not Awakenings, but arrive in other periods in the cycle, such as the current 4T which has seen the suppression of the paranormal on wikipedia by millennial skeptics.
The next Awakening will fulfill the previous one, just as the previous one to some extent extended and fulfilled the one before and twice before. Awakenings skip from one era to the next, and are always intended to bring back spirit into our normally spirit-dead modernist American culture.