Modernity x
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Read articles and answer the 6 questions below.
Trace the development of Greek optimism from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century
2)Why do the new technologies make war with the older values of family, church, and state?
3) The text refers to three different belief systems. Name and explain each one.
4) What is Drewness and what are its threats?
5) Choose two of the componets of postmodernism, explain them and tell me what about them made you choose those two.
6) consider what you’ve read and tell me in your own words what postmodernism is.
Lecture on Modernity
The Middle Ages and the
Renaissance World Views
To gain a sense of how much life has changed over the last several hundred years, contrast that kind of life immersed in information to the life of a serf who lived 500 years ago, thinking mainly about where his next meal was coming from. Our serf didn’t live entirely in uncertainty and fear, however, for in religious and political terms, things were pretty fixed, stable, sometimes boringly routine. During the interval of over a thousand years that we call the Middle Ages, the Christian cosmos was so thoroughly charted that there seemed to be little room for uncertainty about his role and proper conduct in society. As shown in our essay on the origins of democracy in Chapter Seven, obedience and conformity were the very foundations of the lives of the masses. For most of the time from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, humans in the Western world lived within one belief system, the Christian cosmos. That belief system was controlled by a lord or bishop, and it existed under the economic control of a manor or the religious control of a priest or minister. Thus, one lived within one’s religion or politics as if in a fishbowl; just as the fish is the last to see the water, the serf was the last to think carefully about the rules of the human game. The Bible was interpreted as saying that priests and kings inherited power from God. Such a cosmology was largely unquestioned and therefore unseen. It was assumed that there was . a Truth, one Truth, and it was Supreme.
At the same time in artistic and intellectual circles in the fourteenth century, at the beginning of the Renaissance, the Greek optimism toward the perfectibility of the individual was renewed and continued through the seventeenth century Enlightenment, and into the eighteenth century with its emphasis on human reason, in particular the scientific method. Confidence in the supposedly unlimited human capacities to solve problems and the inevitability of progress grew steadily. This confidence continued into the late eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution began in England, and into the nineteenth century, with the discovery of the biological principles of evolution. (Some would say it continues today—computer magnate Bill Gates’ future looks bright. In his book The Road Ahead, he shares his belief that a computer- networked world will make people happier, richer, healthier, and smarter.)
The Global Village
With modem communications making nearly instant worldwide contact readily available, creating what Marshall McLuhan called a “global village,” the belief in a fixed and unquestioned Truth in an ordered and fully discoverable cosmos
becomes questionable, tentative, and highly unstable. In little towns all over America, where a conservative politics and ethos used to set the controlling tone of life, convenience stores are open 24 hours a day, while CNN and MTV play on cable. Sixteen-year-olds get their first job at McDonalds and soon save enough for their first car. The Playboy channel is available for a few extra dollars a month. Thus, the new technologies make war with the older values of family, church, and state. The more information one gets, the more likely one will reflect on and often question what was blindly accepted before. The Internet, television, the cell phone, the fax, and email lead us to ask, How can my truth, my lifestyle, my beliefs be so right if there are so many others who think so differently, but with equal passion?
Some say that all this saturation of information has given our culture an “appetite for ambiguity” and that we don’t seem to know what is right or wrong. Ask people what they think of many of the critical issues of the day: welfare, abortion, illegitimate birth, gun control, and capital punishment. Deep in the American psyche there are conflicts about most of these troubling issues—between mercy and justice, between tradition and a hard-nosed, no-nonsense wish to demand change. Notice the frequency of white-collar crime and the increasing violence among the young. Where has our unambiguous sense of right gone?
These cultural changes, so many of which are brought on by technology, especially the demise of the single belief system, have been charted by many scholars, especially by historians, anthropologists, and linguists. By studying many cultures and language systems, many have concluded that what we once thought of as fixed truths are really “social constructions.” (We should emphasize the word many here, since there is a backlash among anthropologists against postmodernism.) A social construction is a belief created out of the particular circumstances of a particular culture. Theorists like Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and Mikhail Bakhtin think of knowing as a process mediated by language and, therefore, believe knowledge is the product of a social consensus. Two fields in particular, semiotics in linguistics and deconstruction in literary criticism, accelerated these changes even more. French scholars like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault argued that because we could not depend on a certain, fixed relationship between the word (signifier) and its referent (the signified), the conceptual picture we draw of the world with our minds was at best unreliable and, more likely, a fabrication that fit the circumstances.
We can sum up the effects of rapid technological change this way: if premodern societies situated people in one belief system, modem societies, beginning in the nineteenth century with the attempted overthrow of the bourgeoisie, pitted one belief system against another. In the postmodern world, with so many competing systems inundating us daily, we are bound to question the very nature of belief itself. Many have, then, concluded that belief systems are not coming from and existing “out there,” fixed in some Transcendent Reality; rather, beliefs are human creations. And these creations take the form of meta-narratives, all-encompassing stories that cultures use to give themselves purpose and continuity.
You may find much of this unsettling at best, because it sounds too much like an anything-goes form of relativism or a direct road to atheism, agnosticism, permissiveness, and moral emptiness. But it is still helpful to look at life through this postmodern lens, in order to better understand our world. As writer Walter Anderson claims, Humpty Dumpty isn’t going to get put back together again and any attempt to impose a single order on all will backfire (The World Isn’t What It Used to Be).
Drewness: A Fable for Our Times
The story of a recent remake of a popular novel series from the 1940s and 1950s will help us see how dramatic these changes really are. Premiering in fall 1995, “Nancy Drew” is a syndicated television program based on the Nancy Drew mystery novels. A guide was written to help the program staff shape the show’s characters, plot, themes, and style. Among other things, the guide pointed out that Nancy should have the “ability to make clear choices.” She would live “in a moral universe that is simple and straightforward.” What the writer called “Drewness” would demand a wardrobe with “clear saturated colors that reflect her moral certainty.” Even though Nancy is young, she “brings order to chaos. The objects in her apartment radiate a feeling of security. They have a timeless quality that is impossible to date” (Harpers, November 1995, 28).
This guide provides a moral fable for this chapter, which examines the threats to “Drewness,” with its moral clarity, its simple colors, and its clear sense of purpose. While Drewness may appeal to many of us for its ready simplicity and easy answers to the dilemmas that plague us, it still represents a fragment of the old world, quickly being replaced by a new one. The new world is called by many names, among them the information society, the postindustrial society, the global village, and the postmodern world. All of these terms describe a world where individuals, once comfortable with their gods and their world views, are now bombarded with conflicting narratives (e.g., different creation stories or competing value systems) and in search of new certainties. The god of technology and technology’s effects on the world’s cultures begin to explain some disturbing yet at the same time exhilarating world developments that result from extremely rapid technological change, the widespread development of communications, and an almost ceaseless questioning of the inherited meta-narratives on which we’ve based our lives.
Four Components of Postmodernism
Writer Walter Anderson sees four aspects to the postmodernism we have been broaching here:
562 Technology, Postmodernism, and the Cyberfuture . . .
fact, many have correctly observed that we live in an environment bombarded with information, which is the result of sophisticated technologies that feed facts, figures, opinions, and images, almost without stop, to anyone who walks the street, or turns on a radio, a television, or a computer.
The Middle Ages and the
Renaissance World Views
To gain a sense of how much life has changed over the last several hundred years, contrast that kind of life immersed in information to the life of a serf who lived 500 years ago, thinking mainly about where his next meal was coming from. Our serf didn’t live entirely in uncertainty and fear, however, for in religious and political terms, things were pretty fixed, stable, sometimes boringly routine. During the interval of over a thousand years that we call the Middle Ages, the Christian cosmos was so thoroughly charted that there seemed to be little room for uncertainty about his role and proper conduct in society. As shown in our essay on the origins of democracy in Chapter Seven, obedience and conformity were the very foundations of the lives of the masses. For most of the time from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, humans in the Western world lived within one belief system, the Christian cosmos. That belief system was controlled by a lord or bishop, and it existed under the economic control of a manor or the religious control of a priest or minister. Thus, one lived within one’s religion or politics as if in a fishbowl; just as the fish is the last to see the water, the serf was the last to think carefully about the rules of the human game. The Bible was interpreted as saying that priests and kings inherited power from God. Such a cosmology was largely unquestioned and therefore unseen. It was assumed that there was . a Truth, one Truth, and it was Supreme.
At the same time in artistic and intellectual circles in the fourteenth century, at the beginning of the Renaissance, the Greek optimism toward the perfectibility of the individual was renewed and continued through the seventeenth century Enlightenment, and into the eighteenth century with its emphasis on human reason, in particular the scientific method. Confidence in the supposedly unlimited human capacities to solve problems and the inevitability of progress grew steadily. This confidence continued into the late eighteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution began in England, and into the nineteenth century, with the discovery of the biological principles of evolution. (Some would say it continues today—computer magnate Bill Gates’ future looks bright. In his book The Road Ahead, he shares his belief that a computer- networked world will make people happier, richer, healthier, and smarter.)
The Global Village
With modem communications making nearly instant worldwide contact readily available, creating what Marshall McLuhan called a “global village,” the belief in a fixed and unquestioned Truth in an ordered and fully discoverable cosmos
The Global Village 563
becomes questionable, tentative, and highly unstable. In little towns all over America, where a conservative politics and ethos used to set the controlling tone of life, convenience stores are open 24 hours a day, while CNN and MTV play on cable. Sixteen-year-olds get their first job at McDonalds and soon save enough for their first car. The Playboy channel is available for a few extra dollars a month. Thus, the new technologies make war with the older values of family, church, and state. The more information one gets, the more likely one will reflect on and often question what was blindly accepted before. The Internet, television, the cell phone, the fax, and email lead us to ask, How can my truth, my lifestyle, my beliefs be so right if there are so many others who think so differently, but with equal passion?
Some say that all this saturation of information has given our culture an “appetite for ambiguity” and that we don’t seem to know what is right or wrong. Ask people what they think of many of the critical issues of the day: welfare, abortion, illegitimate birth, gun control, and capital punishment. Deep in the American psyche there are conflicts about most of these troubling issues—between mercy and justice, between tradition and a hard-nosed, no-nonsense wish to demand change. Notice the frequency of white-collar crime and the increasing violence among the young. Where has our unambiguous sense of right gone?
These cultural changes, so many of which are brought on by technology, especially the demise of the single belief system, have been charted by many scholars, especially by historians, anthropologists, and linguists. By studying many cultures and language systems, many have concluded that what we once thought of as fixed truths are really “social constructions.” (We should emphasize the word many here, since there is a backlash among anthropologists against postmodernism.) A social construction is a belief created out of the particular circumstances of a particular culture. Theorists like Thomas Kuhn, Richard Rorty, and Mikhail Bakhtin think of knowing as a process mediated by language and, therefore, believe knowledge is the product of a social consensus. Two fields in particular, semiotics in linguistics and deconstruction in literary criticism, accelerated these changes even more. French scholars like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault argued that because we could not depend on a certain, fixed relationship between the word (signifier) and its referent (the signified), the conceptual picture we draw of the world with our minds was at best unreliable and, more likely, a fabrication that fit the circumstances.
We can sum up the effects of rapid technological change this way: if premodern societies situated people in one belief system, modem societies, beginning in the nineteenth century with the attempted overthrow of the bourgeoisie, pitted one belief system against another. In the postmodern world, with so many competing systems inundating us daily, we are bound to question the very nature of belief itself. Many have, then, concluded that belief systems are not coming from and existing “out there,” fixed in some Transcendent Reality; rather, beliefs are human creations. And these creations take the form of meta-narratives, all-encompassing stories that cultures use to give themselves purpose and continuity.
564 Technology, Postmodernism, and the Cyberfuture . . .
You may find much of this unsettling at best, because it sounds too much like an anything-goes form of relativism or a direct road to atheism, agnosticism, permissiveness, and moral emptiness. But it is still helpful to look at life through this postmodern lens, in order to better understand our world. As writer Walter Anderson claims, Humpty Dumpty isn’t going to get put back together again and any attempt to impose a single order on all will backfire (The World Isn’t What It Used to Be).
Drewness: A Fable for Our Times
The story of a recent remake of a popular novel series from the 1940s and 1950s will help us see how dramatic these changes really are. Premiering in fall 1995, “Nancy Drew” is a syndicated television program based on the Nancy Drew mystery novels. A guide was written to help the program staff shape the show’s characters, plot, themes, and style. Among other things, the guide pointed out that Nancy should have the “ability to make clear choices.” She would live “in a moral universe that is simple and straightforward.” What the writer called “Drewness” would demand a wardrobe with “clear saturated colors that reflect her moral certainty.” Even though Nancy is young, she “brings order to chaos. The objects in her apartment radiate a feeling of security. They have a timeless quality that is impossible to date” (Harpers, November 1995, 28).
This guide provides a moral fable for this chapter, which examines the threats to “Drewness,” with its moral clarity, its simple colors, and its clear sense of purpose. While Drewness may appeal to many of us for its ready simplicity and easy answers to the dilemmas that plague us, it still represents a fragment of the old world, quickly being replaced by a new one. The new world is called by many names, among them the information society, the postindustrial society, the global village, and the postmodern world. All of these terms describe a world where individuals, once comfortable with their gods and their world views, are now bombarded with conflicting narratives (e.g., different creation stories or competing value systems) and in search of new certainties. The god of technology and technology’s effects on the world’s cultures begin to explain some disturbing yet at the same time exhilarating world developments that result from extremely rapid technological change, the widespread development of communications, and an almost ceaseless questioning of the inherited meta-narratives on which we’ve based our lives.
Four Components of Postmodernism
Writer Walter Anderson sees four aspects to the postmodernism we have been broaching here:
Four Components of Postmodernism 565
■ The self, rather than being based on a fixed role or tradition, is rather a “made identity constructed from many cultural sources.”
■ Morality, rather than found in one’s cultural heritage, is made, and we become relativists (constructivists and ironists) who know that when “we do make our judgments, we’re standing on the ever-shifting ground of our own socially constructed world views.”
■ Rather than one style dominating a period, as it did in modernism, we see an endless parade of improvisations and variations on themes, especially through parody and play. Postmodern architects, for example, are “unabashedly eclectic.” People everywhere borrow and combine rituals, traditions and myths.
■ Rather than being tied to our own place and time, we live in our first global civilization, one of rapid information exchange and unprecedented mobility. (Anderson, The Truth of the Truth, 10)
J. D. Hunter takes us further into postmodernism by differentiating between orthodoxy and progressivism, offering a helpful insight into the nature of our culture. Orthodoxy in any major faith or political system asks us to communicate to “an external, definable and transcendent authority” (James D. Hunter, “The Orthodox and the Progressive,” in W. Anderson, The Truth about the Truth, 97). In Judaism, that authority is the Torah; in Islam, it is the Qur’an. In the United States, it is the Constitution. Such an authority tells us what is good and offers a stable world view. For a progressivist, on the other hand, moral authority is defined by the spirit of the modem age, a spirit of pluralism and subjectivity. This latter view is not necessarily pessimistic, one of malaise, fragmentation, and disintegration. Rather, as we see in New Wave lifestyles and New Age philosophies, it can be affirmative and process-oriented. A good reading of Tarot cards demonstrates this. Perhaps, as opposed to a single religious truth or orthodoxy, there is emerging a transcendent pluralism, where individuals will be freer to be their unique selves as there is greater harmony among the world’s many cultures. Admittedly, some might see a “transcendent-pluralism” as in conflict with postmodernism’s emphasis on the here and now.
In practical terms, we see a number of features of our culture that reflect postmodern themes. One, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton describes “Protean man,” an infinitely changeable individual, who finds it difficult to commit to one role or persona. How many of us find it hard to commit to one church or one political party? Is the perennial popularity of Ross Perot, in part, the result of the search for alternatives to time-honored traditions in politics? Two, some see a dangerous relativism afoot; the popularity of William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues speaks to an attempt to stem what many see as an erosion of morality. Three, many observers of the culture see a loss or diminution of distinctions between high and low culture. Museums display street art or the works of unschooled artists next to so-called high art of the masters. Such changes can be traced back to the information explosion in the nineteenth century with the mechanization of the printing press. Matthew Arnold’s fear that his high culture, preserving what he called the “best that has been said and thought,” would be overthrown, carries over into our century.
Four, as we pointed out above, there has been a collapse of distinctions between reality and virtual reality; note the growth in virtual businesses and schools, in many of which the only geography is a World Wide Web address and the request for credit card numbers. Note also increasingly sophisticated VR machines, and the growing power of the Internet, especially browsers like the web’s Netscape, where, as Wired magazine’s Kevin Kelly writes, “millions of messages are passed between its members without the benefit of a central authority” (Harpers debate). Finally, the revolution on computing has seen interactive communications technologies that change our capacities for storing and accessing memory. However, we are only slowly achieving social equity and access to these media.
Contextualizing Postmodernism in History
When all of this is said, one must ground these thoughts in intellectual history in order to appreciate what is new and what isn’t. Understanding a cultural movement like postmodernism is paradoxical, especially when one reflects on our recent cultural history. Some readers of this text, for example, might have recognized that morality as a “social construct” was also a Marxist idea, but without the notion that change in certain directions is inevitable. For that matter, morality as a social construct did not originate with Marx. A small group of thinkers and poets we now call the Romantics from England had more than a half century earlier begun to conceive of the world in terms of a developmental model, arguing that change and growth defined both nature and history. One, Percy Shelley, argued that morality was not eternally established by an allknowing God but was created and progressively developed and recreated by imaginative and visionary individuals, in fact by poets, who he described as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Also Marxist, though anticipated by French political reformers before him, is the broader idea within this discussion of postmodernism that new technology can alter values. If, in even broader terms, the essence of postmodernism is that Enlightenment attitudes (of an ordered universe) and gods are breaking down, then postmodernism began toward the end of the eighteenth century.
This does not mean that the term is meaningless. Rather, it reveals that what makes describing accurately any new cultural movement so difficult is precisely the fact that there is nothing new that does not have complicated roots reaching back into the past, even an idea that claims to reject the past. We cannot, after all, escape history, not even when we choose to be willfully blind to it.
A Whimsical Model of Culture
It would help, perhaps, if we tried to construct a model of culture that reflects this fact. Let’s start with a developmental model that pictures the history of culture as a series of layers, like the geological strata that appear on a cliff face revealing the history of the evolution of life on earth, or, better yet, like the churning of a water spout. Fairly low in this water spout, not by any means the bottom, would be Judaism, and overlaying it would be Greek rationalism, and above that Christianity, and so forth with the many ideas and -isms that have followed.
So far so good, but here is where the analogy breaks down: though most of these layers to some extent grow out of the lower layers (Christianity, for example, includes, with some features that are very new, its own synthesis of Judaism and Greek rationalism), unlike a literal cliff each new layer does not supersede or bury the lower layers. The whole of our cultural water spout is alive, not just the top layer, and the newest value system both grows out of older ideas and continues to live not so much above as beside many of those it often claims to have superseded.
Although this is a condition that has always existed, recent advancements in communication technology, in making more information more easily available, have made it less easy for a dominant group to control the means of communication, more easy for minority cultural elements to be expressed, and more possible for us to be aware of the cultural multiplicity—indeed the multiplicity and complexity of life itself—that surrounds us. And certainly it is easier for us to be confused by the resulting sense of information overload. Thus, we characterize our postmodern age as multicultural, fragmented, decentralized, fluid, and nonlinear (against a modernist world that is ordered, logical, and hierarchical), when in fact we have only become dramatically more aware of this multiplicity and other complexities.
But such awareness is no minor factor: our awareness is the essence of what we conceive of as our culture, and our degree of awareness determines both the direction and the rate of our personal growth as well as our development as a culture. Indeed, this may help us understand why to those who identify intellectually with postmodernism the crucial question is whether we will face the present and future with an acceptance of the complexity and diversity that life entails and a commitment to a quest for ways of dealing fairly with that complexity, or retreat into some vision of reality that simplifies, narrows, and distorts the truth.
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