WE IMPOSE STRUCTURES ON TIME, time doesn't seem to notice. That structure we put on the past is what we think of as history. That doesn't mean the structure is real but it does comprise what we story-telling animals can consider an understanding of it. Though there isn't any real reason to think some of that isn't spot on, too. Only time doesn't care.
I think it's extremely helpful to consider that the 20th century till today was the culmination of the test of time for modernism, whether the modernism that started with the Baconian-Descratian scientific revolution and its impact on world culture starting in Europe in the 17th century, the 18th century with one of the greatest achievements in the history of science or, indeed, in human culture, the Newtonian revolution of physics and cosmology. And the subsequent and, I think entirely unfortunate, attempt to extend that far past its knowably valid realm into the general culture well outside of the process of Baconian observation, measurement and rigorous analysis.* The so-called "enlightenment."
The American "Founders" and many of the criticisms I've made of their Constitution and other writings are directly attributable to that cultural milieu. The extent to which the "enlightenment" led to such milestones of actual progress such as the destruction of some, not all ghettos under the military despotism and bloodshed of the same Napoleon who John Adams credited in that quote I went over yesterday, that's a validly positive development from it. But the concomitant violence and destruction and despotism that accompanied it is as real an evil as the ghetto was. I think that a military dictator who crowned himself Emperor, widely considered a major milestone of "enlightenment" is worth considering as a warning of what was to come, one which is still not taken as such.
The 19th century with its major figures in valid science and the ossification of the "enlightenment" into the ideological programs I've slammed, endlessly here, scientism, materialism, atheism, anti-religious secularism, Darwinism and the amorality that Nietzsche very insightfully and very accurately deduced from them and then developed with depraved abandonment.
Those developed in the late 19th and early 20th century into what is more popularly understood to be "modernism" in philosophy, especially in literature, in the visual and solid arts, not as validly in most music**, though there are some generally lesser aspects of music that were self-consciously "modernistic." And in what are considered sciences starting in the same period which I have also slammed endlessly here, sociology, psychology, anthropology (though there have been movements in anthropology to be more honest about the dubious scientific nature of what they do in that one) economics, etc. which, as I went through earlier here, jettisoned the use of Baconian methods, something that Darwinism had done before that and gotten away with.
In politics and morality and real life modernism was given a test of time, especially in the 20th century until today and the results have been a disaster. The environmental catastrophe that has come is directly attributable to the thing that Bacon hoped for in his science, the imperialistic domination of all of nature, turning it to human material advantage and profit without regard for anything like the sacred. It is one of the reasons that I cannot believe, on reading much of him the past several years, that he, despite his intellectual and scholarly brilliance and experience, wrote the "Shakespeare" plays.
The link between self-conscious modernism, especially literary modernism, scientific modernism, intellectual and philosophical modernism and all of the most horrific of the regimes which regarded what they do as based in science, Communism, fascism, Nazism and the non-regime program of much of anarchism - never forget that the phony saint of anarchism Emma Goldman was a devotee of Nietzsche with all his moral depravity, violence and love of elitist inequality - is enough for me to have rejected modernism altogether. Not in the stupid manner of longing for some lost past, which is not only a stupidly romantic and dishonest way to structure understanding of the past BUT AN ABSOLUTE IMPOSSIBILITY but to get beyond modernism, including the malignant parts of the inheritance from Bacon and Descarte and a whole host of those who came with it. Science, for better or worse, and there is much of both in it, we are not going to abandon.
We can't go back in time, we should not delude ourselves we can nor should we want to. Time goes in one direction, the universe goes on as creation continues, we are to go into the future, our imaginations about that may make plans, we cannot know even as much about that as we do the past
One thing that I think is a reliable conclusion about that, we have to try to do better or we will get worse. Wallowing in the things that haven't worked are reliably suspected of producing the problem of the past, they are rightly believed to produce the same in the future and it is the highest immorality to retain them.
Doing to others as we would have them to do to us, treating the least among us as we would treat God, forgiving the wrongs done to us as we would have the wrongs we do forgiven, trying to act as People of good will while being fully aware that there are people of bad will that we have an obligation to thwart in their desires work. Darwinism gave us eugenics, scientific racism, World War One, the mass murders of the Nazis and many other depravities. Scientism, atheism and materialism have done nothing but made people arrogant and conceited and, in so far as science is involved, more efficient and effective in doing evil.
And I don't care who says saying that gives me a case of the cooties. Grow the fuck up and face history.
* In fairness, Bacon and Descartes were the originators of those far too ambitious extensions, Bacon put the ambitions for his science in terms taken from English imperialism, his achievements in creating science are entirely admirable, his goals for it in life have been a disaster. The same can be said of Descartes's to some extent. His treatment of animals on the basis of his ideological conclusions has to mask a sadistic callous love of inflicting pain which even someone of his ideology would have been able to restrain themselves from if it were not a product of his malignant desire. I could make a long list from Hobbes to the big names in "public intellectualism" today to go with it.
** In music the attachment to fascism largely came from the retrospective hankering after and attempt to regain the past in neo-classicism of such composers as Stravinsky who in 1930 declared his admiration for Mussolini and disdainfully rejected democracy, I've never liked his neo-classical period with a very few exceptions though I have to admit since I read what he said then has soured me of all of it. As a composer I would take off my hat to him but I can't stand it anymore. There are things more important than music, literature, art and being attuned to the zeitgeist. Hell with the zeitgeist, it's dead as soon as it develops.
Update: I should add, in so far as music is concerned, the "folk music" revival was another thing which had its bad side. The early, nationalistic-romantic view of folk lore and folk music isn't that far removed from some of the things which developed into various national fascisms and Nazism (doing a lot of original language reading of the literature of Nazism has done more to put me off of "volkisher" talk than even the singer-songwriter "folk musicians" of my youth did). Though it also is as true that a truly universalist collector and researcher into folklore such as Bela Bartok was, was the opposite of that malignant trend.
Update 2: I could have mentioned the music of the Soviet and other Communist establishments, excepting that of Cuba, which have been characterized by retrogressive bathos and self-conscious populism. There's a reason that even the neo-classicism of fine composers such as Prokofiev and, though I really don't care for his music, Shostakovitch, got them in trouble with Stalin and the mostly forgettable Soviet music establishment, their condemnations including terms and names describing some of the greatest music being composed and played at the time.
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