About "Modernism"

"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
 

APPARENTLY MY most persistent troll has come out of retirement though I didn't put a No Help Wanted sign up.  He objects to my criticism of the ideology of modernism attributing to me the idiocy of what under Republican-fascism passes as intellectualism as they rail against what they might call "modernism." I will note that that world of what I've called untellecutualism has raised up everything from Little Benny Shapiro to the absurd and pompous Victor Davis Hanson (or "VD" as I used to call him back when he got more attention).  That is something that also holds Ted Cruz as a brilliant debater and Thomas Sowell as a great scholar.  And anyone who could pretend to mistake what I criticize as the same as what they do has more in common with them than I do.

It is one of the dumbest things about most peoples' concept of political identity that they think Republican-fascism and what is called "modernism" are necessarily at polar extremes of some graph of positions in politics.  That is entirely wrong.  What is the polar opposite of Republican-fascism is to do unto others what you would have them do to you, to love others as you love yourself, to tell the truth even if you don't want what comes of that and to do to the least among us what you would do for God.  Those have nothing to do with either Republican-fascism or modernism, those truths are beyond time and are the very foundation of the only genuine alternative to materialist depravity there is, no modernism which does not have those as its foundation will ever be a real alternative to some kind of oppressive, deadly, gangster-ruled hell.  Those are what every period of history either takes as the basis of human behavior and society or it will be just another period of human depravity, whether it hankers for the inadequate and superseded past or some present and pretend future based on some other guarantee of depravity.  

The denial of religion, a human administered thing and so guaranteed to be imperfect, is among the stupidest tactics of the would be alternative to it because there is no other sufficiently strong force to oppose gangsterism, whether fascist or Nazi or Marxist or capitalist, than the prophesy that articulates that genuine truth.  The would-be materialist alternatives to that inevitably devolve into the same if not worse gangsterism under a different label, as the history of one such phony alternative, Marxism, without but especially with power proves.  So does the history of anarchism, one of the daffiest ideological positions ever adopted by those who have some repute among the so-called intelligentsia.  Anarchism is a guarantee that gangsters and thugs and will rule because there is no alternative power which will prevent that.  I remember Karl Hess who was a popular voice for anarchism in the 1970s and 80s who had once been Barry Goldwater's speech writer.  As I recall he claimed to have coined Goldwater's statement about extremism in the defense of liberty, during his flagrantly racist 1964 campaign profiting from the resentment of white racists for Black People gaining their freedom and rights, in case you're wondering what the idiot Margery Taylor Green was ignorantly emitting the other day, Goldwater's politics was all about racism.  Last I heard of the Goldwater anarchist, he was one of the early voices advocating no gun regulations, an even stronger evidence that anarchism benefits gangsters in every way.

But that brings up the thorny problem of what anyone means when they use the word "modernism" as I did.  

What set off the Troll Signal was  me saying this:

And I'll also point out that James Shaprio's masterful management of including both hard science and far more philosophical handling of the consequences of our own cognitive equipment and language  as it must mitigate what we find out and how we find that out which is certainly not good news for the old-fashioned automatic materialist causative ideology which is dominant in science and the general culture of 20th century style modernism.  

I did specifically intend to place the style of modernism put into difficulty by James Shapiro's brilliant EVIDENCE BASED SCIENCE in the last century, perhaps I should have noted that his most well known work is titled Evolution: A View From The 21st Century. That modernism as I use the term has been tied to materialism from the start.  Both in Indian Carvarka ideology and Greco-Roman atomism, materialism has been tied to atheism and a belief that life is merely an aggregation of particles in a particular, transient and ephemeral form.  Enjoyment of sensual pleasure as you can have that is an inevitable conclusion from that nihilistic idea, so elite and vulgar materialism are pretty much the same thing.  While morality is probably the most significant victim of materialism, truth and reason hardly can escape deadly damage from it, as well.   

That with its more or lesser consequences has been adopted and adapted from quite early in the history of science though it was certainly something that predated that in the renaissance as such writers as Lucretius were rediscovered and published, inspiring, among others, that advocate of strong-man rule, Machiavelli.  It was something that was a minor riple in the fabric of kulcha a while back as that boob Stephen Greenblat re-popularized it for a while through his book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.  For an interesting critical review of it from a better scholar, read this.   Greenblatt's alleged scholarship should always be read as fiction, though I won't get into that again just now.

More importantly, it became an increasing part of the culture of scientism and, as the profitability and utility of science (and even more so its application in technology) grew, and so its status in the stratification of repute, in academia and the wider world, reaching its current nadir in the 20th and 21st centuries in the explosion of decadence in popular and would-be elite culture, in academia, in the pseudo-sciences and sciences, and even in philosophy which apparently now has room for scholars who make their living by debunking consciousness, on which any wisdom, what puts the "soph" in philosophy, depends.  That is what a superficial and stupid concept of science adopted as an all-controlling world view can do, produce an academic culture in which what universities and colleges and, in fact, science exist for and are bothered with, employ eliminative positivists to get rid of God by dismissing the existence and so significance of consciousness and the paying suckers buy it in the name of science or reason or logic or even wisdom.  

And it's especially popular among the mid-brow wise guys and folky poseurs and would-be tough guy gangsters who pretty much have the same motives for that as anyone, a. cynicism is easy and irresponsible and groovy, b. it gets you acceptance in some clique you want to be in with, c. it's a quick and easy substitute for research and hard thought.  I should add, d. making naughty sex more available.

And I did specify that it was 20th century modernism that was the focus of my comment.Hard as it is for my critic and, perhaps me, to believe it, the world of our childhood, youth and middle-age has been over for almost a quarter of a century.  That modernism of materialist-atheist-scientism at its higher rent end was something different from even other modernisms that co-existed and sometimes conflicted with it, some of them having little to do with MAS other than that it was the general culture among many, quite likely most of those who had been to college, graduated from high school or those who watched movies, TV, pop-music or, if they still did something like that, read magazines and books written during that time.  

On the one hand there is the elite modernism of academia, on the other end was the vulgar modernism which has produced both the already past retirement age "new left" and the Republican-fascist left, all of them sharing the same materialism, demotion of rigorous striving for the truth and a degraded sense of morality. Trump is roughly the same age as my troll, after all.

As to things called "modern" that means a lot of things.  Some of them are quite harmless, some of them death dealing. I think the term "modernist" and "modernism" as applied to art is probably wrongheaded except in those cases where the adoption of the pose of modernism intentionally adopted as self-conscious tactic of those who generally aren't that good at art.  

I have a liking for looking at Eames furniture, though I find sitting in the knockoff chairs copied from it rather uncomfortable. The rickety old wooden folding chairs I got when they shut down a church here are a lot better.  I like much of the substantial art produced after WWII (and much from the 30s) and even some of the content free abstract art. I have a good deal of affection for Marc Rothko and Robert Motherwell, though I like the anti-modernist Jack Levine far better (see the masthead above, he said it a lot better and shorter).  I have to admit, most of the splashiest recent art fails to move me in anything but revulsion for its commercialism, art made to be bought by phony kulcha vulchas, who only hope they get some frisson of attention before they hope they can unload it at a profit.  And for its pretension.  

When I was on a committee to plan a public building about thirty years ago I was outvoted as the only one who favored a more modern style architecture over "traditional" styles.  Though lots of architecture from big name architects considered modern is a tedious and stupidly expensive waste of materials and space.  That can include the buildings in which it is displayed.  Modern architecture has gone from good to bad to totally decadent Frank Lloyd Wright's roofs are notorious for leaking.  Look also at what I wrote about the absurd and similarly disastrous Strata Center at the Vatican of science and, yes, technology, MIT. I see it as impeaching its status as such that such an architectural plan could get to the building stage there.  One house carpenter I know who saw pictures of it said anyone who would build that many wacky roof-lines in New England, some of which look as if they would shed onto other building surfaces, clearly doesn't know the first thing about roofs, which are supposed to keep rain and snow out of the building.  And don't get me started on what the dictator of Saudi Arabia is paying to get built, something that the Ceausescud would have loved to do and probably worse.

Though I think music is quite a different thing from the object producing and so profitable arts, the "M" word is used for it, too.   I think other than self-conscious "modernism" most of what gets called "modern music" is inaptly called that.  I have been a dedicated listener to, player of and producer of "modern music" from before I was born and during my lifetime and wish I had had the training to participate in the jazz of my time, all of that from the period after the PBS high priest of culture, Ken Burns and his chosen reactionary authorities, tacitly declared jazz to be over.  There is nothing more current than real jazz which as the great Betty Carter noted has to be "new every day."  

In my criticism of science I've certainly never rejected science like the boob in the link thrown at me.  I've got so much respect for the real accomplishments of science that a lot of my criticism is of science which rejects the necessity of observation and so measurement OF WHAT IS OBSERVED, rigorous analysis of that and that what has been reported can either be replicated by experiment or confirmed in observation by independent scientists. Much of my criticism of science is exactly of them doing it about things that either can now be observed or which certainly never will be observed.  If you aren't well read on the critique of science by other scientists and those who report on things like the replicability crisis, not only in the squishy pseudo-science such as psychology and, God help us, ethology but, also, in what are supposed to be harder sciences.  If you aren't aware of that going on largely through the lapses in what is supposed to be scientific method, you can't have enough respect for science to read what's going on in it, as I'm sure my troll doesn't.  And I don't mean watching NOVA* or, God help us, again, the alleged science programming on commercial cable stations.

The modernism I criticize is not science, it's ideology. That ideology has, in fact, been a big part of the decay of science from quite early in its existence, starting as far back as the early 17th century.  If I had the time I would link to a post I did in which Francis Bacon gave some warnings about keeping things like ideology out of science, so it's clear that even one of the founders of modern science saw the potential of that happening and that it could lead things astray.  

In fact, they have gotten seriously astray in many areas of science, especially in those branches of genuine science that rely dangerously on theory without possibility of observation, without which you can't even get to the second stage of quantitative analysis of NATURE. That would be the opposite, of using math as a permanent replacement for observation, to see if the measurements of that agree with the predictions.  That includes ALL of the "social sciences" that claim to report on minds, singly or collectively and most of what is claimed about the evolution of species in the forever lost past.  And also the spectacle of what happens when highly mathematically trained physicists and cosmologists want to go past where observation is possible.  Which can make you world famous in ways that scientists who do, you know, science, seldom are.  Listen to that very brilliant critique of string theory I posted a while back (though don't watch the screen with its annoying and distracting video game) and you'll hear some of the biggest names of recent popular science mentioned.  One was Brian Greene's whose series on string theory on NOVA was about the last time I ever watched that show because it seemed to be promoting decadent ideology and not presenting science anymore.**   

I've done many other criticisms of 20th century modernism here, one of the longest and strongest was about the close relationship of cultural modernists to fascism, Nazism, Marxism and other forms of anti-democratic government. I have never been able to listen to Stravinsky's (Schoenberg called him "Kleine Modernsky") music in the same way after reading his disgusting admiration for Mussolini's fascism in the early 1930s, thought I never really did like most of his "neo-classical" period stuff.  Neo-classicism has too often been too close a relationship with fascist and Nazi ideology. Thought I like much of the poetry and some of the other literature that falls within "modernism," as a literary movement I think it's mostly decadent.  I never felt any admiration for the putrid Gertrude Stein who was an admirer of Hitler and a collaborator with the Nazi-puppet Vichey regime. Though even before I knew that, having tried to read her, it's as artistically and intellectually substantial as throwing confetti in the air and about as fun. I have linked some science to that as it is obvious to anyone who wants to check the record that especially Nazism is largely a creation of the theory of natural selection mixed with modern-period academic assertions about linguistic, national and cultural "purity" and putting those in another scheme of economic valuation.  As any close student of Darwin will know, his theory of natural selection does much the same purportedly on the basis of science.   

Marxism is both a pseudo-scientific ideology and, as became obvious during, especially, the Stalin regime, a powerful distorter of science.  The number of scientists murdered by Marxists and such other, earlier, expressions of modernism as the French Revolution dwarfs those who were allegedly oppressed by the Church which is the stuff of so much legend, movie and theater crap and pop-historical-scientific bullshit.  Of course Nazism played a double game, rejecting especially modern physics in public due to its creation being due to Jewish scientists such as Einstein while using it to try to build an atomic weapon first.  No regime has ever in my knowledge rejected science when it was in the business of weaponeering.  Not even the worst regimes, from Hitler to the Kim regime in North Korea, has lacked scientific collaboration and collaborators.  

That Republican-fascism is doing the same in suppressing genuine science around climate change, which is unprofitable to the oil, gas, other polluting industries is no great shock as they wallow in the same amorality that science is given license to practice.  Which I've called probably the most important science ever done.  There are a number of those credentialed as scientists who are whoring for the side that pays the best, that's been an intrinsic part of science from its earliest figures, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, and even Newton ended up that way, though I don't know how much his science was involved with his term in the Exchequer.

The romantic view of science is a particularly dangerous feature of modernism as is the notion that science is to be held immune from criticism.  Given that it is one of the pretenses at worst and best features of science as it's supposed to be done that criticism is an intrinsic part of it, anyone who holds that science is not to be held up to criticism proves they have little to no regard for actual science.  Though there are certainly professional scientists who hold that, many of them while they attack scientists who don't share even extra-scientific ideologies with them.

* As a past weekly watcher of NOVA and a listener to such things as the CBC's science program Quirks and Quarks, those have really let us down in so many ways.  A good part of my growing criticism of science was due to what I read scientists online claiming and proclaiming and slamming on the old Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell financed ScienceBlogs and associated online babble by their club-mates such as Jerry Coyne.  That alone convinced me that there was a lot of philosophical idiocy and destructive ideology within American science.   

** I did watch one with my brother at his house, I think it was last year, about the fossil evidence from likely the very day of the meteor impact that ended the Cenozoic era.  It was fascinating, I hope that they're doing more of that instead of fame fucking fashionable physicists, now, though I ain't buying another TV.  One of my brothers-in-law encouraged me to for the good things on TV but I said if he poured a bucket of quarters into a cesspool I wouldn't wade trough it to find them.  I'd rather listen to a lecture five times, you waste less time that way. 

Update:  Having spent several hours at the hospital last night and being exposed to TV the whole time,  I told my surviving siblings that if I'm ever bad enough to have to go to the hospital, I want them to shoot me.