Modern to Post : why did MO go PO ?

Virtually everyone who thinks about it at all agrees that Modernity (1875-1965, R.I.P.) has morphed into Postmodernity, MO has gone PO, gone Postal.

Almost all of the serious thought ever since has gone into determining 'what exactly is this new Post-Mo thing anyway?'

But I am much more interested in asking why, after a 500 year long successful run, did the Enlightenment Project (Modernity simply being its latest variant) fail ?

And fail so abruptly too --- just after its supposed greatest success : winning WWII, against great odds, defeating the supposed Axis of Anti-Modernity.

If I had to describe the general tenor of postmodernity - down among the non-academic types, among the little people like you and me - I 'd describe it as a sense of being at ease with variety, diversity, the plentitude of life and reality.

Nay - more - a craving to taste as much of that variety as possible.

PostMO = Plentitude

By contrast, great-grandma's generation was only comfortable with a synthesized simple predictable order being judged worthy of life.

Complex unpredictable natural chaos was greatly feared and judged unworthy of life - hence subject to being plenticided as quickly and quietly as possible.

MO = Plenticide

Modernity arose in an era - and against an era - of Romanticism , which tends to welcome plentitude.

It might even be seen as mere re-fried Classicalism --- done up in the new Modern Science's clothing.

Modern Science's industrious spadework had revealed a much greater natural plentitude than hitherto known .

This process of discovery started ,not at all coincidentally, in the same mid-1870s that churned up the scientific ideology of anti-plentitude Modernity.

Buecause all that new plentitude was not what modern scientists had expected or wanted.

In response, they reluctantly manned-up and said they hadn't actually reached the innermost core of pure simplicity as they had originally thought - that the true core actually lay much deeper.

'Just give us more tax money for more expensive equipment and we will yet find that core of ultimate simplicity that our Faith tells us must be there'.

I am Catholic, but let me tell you, I've never met anyone who displays half as much faith as an atheist scientist convinced - beyond all the current evidence to the contrary - of the inner simplicity and order of reality.

Forget Darwin - Plato is the true GOD of the atheist and the scientist.

(Am I not being a tiny bitter harsh ? Aren't some scientists also Christians and other religions ?

No --- they are naturalists , more attuned to Natural history than Natural Philosophy.)

So after atoms turned out not to be the ultimate building blocks of reality, new equipment was brought in and layer by layer, the onion of physical reality was slowly peeled back.

Each time, the innermost core soon proved to be anything but and ever more expensive equipment was ordered up to reach the innermost sanctum.

Hadron Collider world's largest and most expensive religious building

I'm betting replacing today's already incredibly expensive and already outdated Hadron Collider will approach the F-35 fighter aircraft project in terms of cost.

I even could cheer to think governments are actually now willing to spend as much on peaceful science machines as on war machines.

But if the Hadron replacement does ever produce a theory of everything, knowing that all the known forces in the universe are united in some fundamental sense may produce little immediate change in life on earth.

Bits and pieces of general scientific advance have always been highly valuable at the level of giving us the very useful machines now found in all homes.

The billions of smart phones found even in the poorest nations being a prime example.

But whether a unified and simple model combining both the tiny sub-sub-sub atomic world and the massive supra-galaxy world will give us new household wonders is to be greatly doubted.

But won't Plato and all his modernity disciples be cheering in their graves ?

But at the level of lived life, physical reality is and always will be a plentitude - complex, chaotic, as unpredictable and as unknowable as the weather four days from now ...

Blame OSSIAN, not Obama, for why American Skeptics deny Climate Change

Ossian, godfather of CLIMATE CHANGE !

Ossian ?!  A fake bard from 250 years ago ? What on earth , heaven and the multi-varient Universe does he have to with denying Global Warming  - you're barmy !

Ossian , son of Fingal, is albeit inadvertently , the only-begetter of the hatred thrown up against the revolutionary changes he directly brought in and against the general idea (that he also brought in) that things are always changing and always changing in unpredictable ways.

In this case the hatred is against climate change, but worry not, in time this eternal fear of un-certitudes and against the greys of reality will move on to new targets.

Ossian - if you still remember anything from high school or university  -is that 1760s fake creation from the otherwise-obscure James MacPherson that is generally agreed to have sparked the reaction against 18th century Classicalism that we now call 19th Century Romanticism.

If you were only half listening to your teachers you do recall the terms but deflate them to only referring to literature and , maybe, the visual arts.

Wrong, wrong, wrong !

They were not "just" art movements or even - slightly bigger - "political ideologies".

They were the ultimate biggies : all encompassing worldviews held - in their day - by most anybody who was anybody as just common sense, pure and simple.

Hegemonic hegemonies, in other words.

But then, by the 1850s, Romanticism lost much of its short lived hegemony and a highly self-conscious opposing movement emerged (counter-romanticism/pro-classicalism) and was called - by its critics - Late Victorian Scientism.

But it had to share the stage with Romanticism which had by then lost its self-conscious 'movement' nature and merged into simple common sense.

Today most all of us hold bits and pieces of both Romanticism and its Scientism critics inside of us, all in a glorious muddle.

Where we all differ - and all 7 billion of us do differ - is in the proportions of these two we hold inside us as the basis for all our other beliefs.

To Deny is to be anti-Romanticism

Deniers - it is fair to say - are highly un-Romantic , highly pro-Scientism , not withstanding their attacks on today's living, practising, scientists.

The rapid and rabid popularity of MacPherson's "beautiful poetic forgery" across all of Europe, alarming the powers-to-be everywhere.

Hard to imagine poetry doing that today - but think of alarms over Rap lyrics or the reaction against Pussy Riot, to see we scribblers still have the potential to alarm our barely-literate superiors every time we put pen to paper.

Ossian's poetry emerged in the extreme North West of Europe - as far away as possible from Europe's civilized roots in the extreme South East of the continent - Greece and Italy.

Add to this geographic affront to good taste and breeding , was the fact that this was the work not of Greek aristocrats with education and breeding , but of untutored peasants, living in dire poverty under harsh - not azure blue - skies.

Worst of all, the young everywhere - particularly those with the most education and breeding - loved the stuff , tossing aside their millennium old classic texts with disdain.

This Ossian stuff - they said - was the work of pure genius - pure untutored genius !

Genius - then being using for the first time in our modern day sense of the word, was bad enough.

But its association with untutoredness - no,  more than that - its association only with untutoredness, was literally Revolutionary, in the widest sense of that over used term.

For this poetry literally revolved - flipped - all previous values on their heads : day was now night, black was now white.

Rude, untutored, uneducated, genius (aka street smarts or native intelligence) was now set ahead of highly (highly expensively) educated people from old families of good breeding and manners.

Think of the same situation today - for very little has changed , at least on the untutored side.

When almost everybody today has to have a certificate of some sort to make a living (even ditch diggers need their heavy equipment operating papers ), some people still get fabulously rich, important and admired, without any sort of certificate.

They even make a point of flaunting their relative lack of professional education or institutional accreditation to account for their success.

They are the same people that arose to threat classicalism and the aristocracy in Ossian's day: entrepreneurs, inventors, writers and entertainers/artists.

Who hasn't seen one's friends, people with too much money and not enough self-honesty, sending their lazy dolts of children off to get highly expensive education to obtain a MBA,PhD, MA in creative writing, BJ or MFA because the kid - when pushed - pretends to a faint interest in 'doing' that sort of thing for a living.

From expensive pre-school, to expensive post doc living expenses subsidies, with expensive educational toys,summer camps, tutors and educational trips to Europe in between, modern parents spent a million 2012 dollars to give their kid 25 years of the best possible education of the old breeding and Grand Tours sort.

The only change is that starting in the 1850s, the need to know the classics to be considered a highly educated part of the natural aristocracy was gradually replaced by a need to know some form of science - say hard like chemistry or soft like economics.

Their kids now know everything that is already known about the past and present of their chosen field: and is not the past and present, a la Charles Lyell , a reliable guide to the future ?

(In reality, all this is really just a way to avoid heavy inheritance taxes on your death, by spending as much of it as possible - now - on your kids' education. You are hoping to ensure the family's wealth and influence moves forward in time via education rather than by inheritances.)

Today's professionals are yesterday's classical aristocracy in a new guise

These are the "heavily-tutored competent". Aka the professionals.

(For I think you could fairly abstract the whole point of this post as me claiming that yesterday's aristocracy: classicalism: professionalism: today's aristocracy.)

But then some uneducated immigrant with chutzpah and drive blasts well past your precious kid's MBA or a tiny garage and an lone inventor discovers what a university full of PhDs like your son could not, or a street kid's painting, writings or comic turn makes her a famous personality while your daughter puts her MFA to work teaching uncaring high school kids in some small city in the Mid West.

Those fracking, fracking, damn untutored geniuses - it just isn't fair !

These guys know nothing of the present or the past - thus leaving them open to make lots of mistakes - and to discover the future.

Bruce Springsteen, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson : all have recently blasted well past kids with 25 expensive years of good education.

They represent as much unplanned, unpredicted, uncertain, mercurial change as Ossian did yesterday or the Climate will for tomorrow - and they are all equally hated by well educated professional deniers cum competent nobodies * of every generation.....

* Our think tanks are just filled with the well breed well educated second rates of this world : little wonder they envy the sudden rises of those superstars of academia the climate scientist.

"NINETY YEAR RULE" between epochs cum generations : ideas don't change, merely die out

   If Romanticism was born in the heady atmosphere of the 1790s, its replacement by Scientism in the 1870s might have no more significance than Scientism's replacement, in turn, in the 1960s : all were victims of the "Ninety Year Rule" .

   All of these replacements weren't the result of the intellectual triumph of exciting new ideas, but merely the fact that the last of the powerful men holding older, once-exciting, ideas had finally died.
   Depressing, because we may not have the luxury - this time - of waiting till the last of the Modernist/Scientism Limit-Deniers finally dies out some time in the 2030s...

Two centuries of direct family memories covers a number of EPOCHS

    If you are 84 in this Post-Modern year of 2012 , while your father, who born in 1896 (at the height of the Age of Modernity) lived with his elderly grandmother (born in 1811) until 1901, there is a potential there for two centuries of direct family memories.

  So you could find yourself telling your great-grandchildren, "I can remember my father telling me of hearing his grandmother recalling her early years growing up in a remote part of the Highlands in the 1810s, at the height of the Romantic Era."
  I am not saying that Shirley Dawson Kirkland, eldest daughter of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, has in fact ever recounted such an account - but technically - she could have.
   If Dawson's grandmother had gone further back and recounted to him what her parents or grandparents had told her of the effect upon their intellect world caused by the events of the French Revolution/end to the Age of Classicalism & Enlightenment/rise of the Age of Romanticism, we can span even more epochs and epoch changing events.
   His grandmother Janet's parents and grandparents had lived through the heady transition from the Ages of Classicalism/ Enlightenment into the Age of Romanticism.
   By contrast, Janet was fully a child and adult of the Age of Romanticism.
   Just as Henry Dawson himself was fully a child and adult of the Age of Scientism.
   But his parents, rather like his grandmother Janet's parents, were children of a time of dramatic transition - from Romanticism into Positivism.
 His daughter Shirley and son Keith were teenagers in the Age of Modernity, pre-1945, but have spent the vast bulk of their lives in this Post Modern Era.
  Since they were not even 15 and 17 when the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima, I would say they, also, were children of a transition period (Modernity to Post-Modernity).
   Through the eyes of just this one family, we can tell one hell of a story, of epochs succeeding epochs and being succeeded in turn.
  And I aim to tell just that story....

Neo-Romantic ? So now you're calling COMMENSALITY 'neo-romantic' ?

Michael Marshall

When we compare it to the Modernist Science of 100 years ago ( the science of just before World War One ), Commensal Science does appear to be a near-perfect exact opposite.

Appearances can be deceiving, but in broad strokes, it does seem to oppose the basic tenets of Modernity root and branch.

But venture back two hundred years ago,  and Commensal Science at first blush seems to be an awful lot like the Romantic Science of the era ( from roughly the 1790s to the 1840s).

But appearances are deceiving, once again, and Commensal Science both agrees with and disagrees with Romantic Science enough to be more fairly called Neo-Romantic Science.

I don't really like using terms like neo- or post- , they seem so loose, so cliched.

But like everyone else, I use them when no other term appears to convey what I mean any better.

The very self-consciousness in the use of the term neo- is exactly what I want to convey --- because so many of today's Green or Commensal scientists do deliberately hearken back to Romantic Science (and Romanticsm generally) for inspiration with which to attack The Enlightenment Project and Modernity.

Like Plato and Aristotle, these things ebb in and out of fashion:

Classicalism/Romanticism/Positivism/Commensalism.

On and on and on - ever onward - like the eternally alternating ins and outs of election results in a democracy.....