Modernity

"Modernity is a cancerous form of humanity that is now grossly metastatic. Can cancer cells decide they don’t want to be cancerous anymore? We haven’t yet, as participants in modernity, collectively realized that modernity is self-terminating in a particularly ugly way that tramples irreplaceable life across the globe. We have forgotten that we, too, are animals who actually need a functioning, biodiverse ecology to remain resilient and healthy."

"Modernity is a very new phenomenon on this planet; nothing of its kind has happened before. Even extending the boundary of modernity to a 10,000-year run since agriculture began, its duration is exceedingly short on evolutionary timescales—even compared to our species’ existence of 250–300 kyr, which itself is short compared to many species’ lifetimes (i.e., modernity is uncharacteristic of humans). The present hyper-active mode, characterized by science, is just 400 years old, and the industrial/fossil-fuel age is less than 200: a mere flash, contextually. Modernity relies on non-renewable resources dredged out of the depths that are not integrated into ecological cycles and often create unprecedented ecological harm—the full extent of which we can’t possibly yet know. Even traditional agriculture chews up land on thousand-year timescales (much faster these days)—besides setting up ecological disconnection and objectification, money and capitalism, toxic social hierarchies and power concentrations, and human-supremacist religious and political regimes. For many materials, the prospect of depletion has become apparent after only a century or even decades of intense exploitation. The notion of maintaining current practices on millennium timescales is unsupported conjecture. Today’s practices and material profile represent a one-time stunt."

"… the entire modernity project is an incoherent amalgam of stunts that is inherently incompatible with ecological health, and thus fated to self-terminate. Besides offering promises of more houses, more jobs, more money, more material comfort—which only moves us closer toward ecological collapse—the dream being sold is such a self-deluded fantasy… [and] has a similarly infantilizing effect on the population."

"We—embedded in and raised by modernity—only know one way of living, and it’s a way of ultimate failure."

"Modernism is the attempt to permeate religion with middle-class reason."

"… den modernen Schlacht- und Opferruf „Theilung der Arbeit! In Reih' und Glied!”"

"Faced with a world of “modern ideas” which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a “specialty,” a philosopher, if there could be a philosopher these days, would be compelled to establish the greatness of mankind, the idea of “greatness,” on the basis of his own particular extensive range and multiplicity, his own totality in the midst of diversity."

"‘Progress’ is just a modern idea, which is to say a false idea."

"Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else."

"Philosophy is no longer to be public ally defended as the highest good, above and beyond any service to society. The love or pursuit of the truth is to be understood as in the service of the gratification of other, more natural or deep-seated, needs and passions. Even where philosophy still comes to the fore, as in Spinoza, philosophy is understood to culminate in the teaching of a system of ethics for mankind."

"Is the intellect to be regarded as autonomous and self-sufficient, as pursuing ends of its own, and as judging by standards of its own? or is it to be regarded as the servant of alien interests which impose their ends and standards upon it? The modern tendency has been towards the latter or practical interpretation of the knowing faculties."

"Modernity, which in my opinion constitutes a substantially unified process from Baruch Spinoza to Karl Marx (passing through Kant and Hegel), is instead characterised by a conscious revival of rational and dialogical logos that is self-sufficient (i.e., not subservient to the rationalisation of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim monotheistic theology)."

"Modernity was always going to happen. Rampant ecological destruction was always going to happen. If it happened in the past, because humans are a species then it will happen in the future, once that becomes possible, whether with some future hominid species or any other species that has the wherewithal to make tools."

"Almost every aspect of our lives is worse, with only a few technological gimmicks to fool us into thinking how great modernity is. The kinds of food we eat, the toxins we pour into the environment, the lack of community and the lack of attachment to nature has caused humans all sorts of health and mental issues. Even the medical miracles designed to keep us alive for longer doesn’t restore health, merely puts off the fateful day, often with declining health needing all sorts of drug and technological aids to make life bearable."

"... it’s pretty clear that civilisation as we know it, modernity, can’t be made sustainable. It will have to end. And since humans are a species, so can’t alter their collective behaviour, the only question is when will civilisation end? I’m sure it’ll be a drawn out process but quite possibly a lot quicker than most people would think, due to the inter-dependencies of regional economies."

"The Greeks … did indeed divide human nature into its several aspects, and project these in magnified form into the divinities of its glorious pantheon; but not by tearing it to pieces; rather by combining its aspects in different proportions, for in to single one of their deities was humanity in its entirety ever lacking. How different with us moderns! With us too the image of the human species is projected in magnified form into separate individuals—but as fragments, not in different combinations, with the result that one has to go the rounds from one individual to another in order to piece together a complete image of the species. With us, one might almost be tempted to assert, the various faculties appear as separate in practice as they are distinguished by the psychologist in theory, and we see not merely individuals, but whole classes of men, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain."

"The polypoid character of the Greek states, in which every individual enjoyed an independent existence but could, when need arose, grow into the whole organism, now made way for an ingenious clock-work, in which out of the piecing together of innumerable but lifeless parts, a mechanical kind of collective life ensued. State and church, laws and customs were now torn asunder; enjoyment was divorced from labor, the means from the end, the effort from the reward. Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being, and instead of putting the stamp of humanity upon his own nature, he becomes nothing more than the imprint of his occupation or of his specialized knowledge."

"The greater part of present-day object knowledges has, in fact, freed itself from any relation to a self and confronts our consciousness in that extracted matter-of-factness from which no path is any longer bent “back” to a subjectivity. Nowhere does an ego experience it-“self” in modern scientific knowledge. Where this ego still bends over itself, with its obvious tendency to a worldless inwardness, it leaves reality behind. Thus, for present-day thinking, inwardness and outwardness, subjectivity and things, have been split into “alien worlds”; at the same time, the classical premise of philosophizing falls away. “Know thyself” has long since been understood by modern people as an invitation to an ego trip for an escapist ignorance. Modern reflection expressly renounces any competency in embedding subjectivities without rupture into objective worlds. What it uncovers is rather the gulf between both."

"Very often the question of 1941 is posed in a more abstract way, as a matter of European civilization. In some arguments, German (and Soviet) killing policies are the culmination of modernity, which supposedly began when Enlightened ideas of reason in politics were practiced during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The pursuit of modernity in this sense does not explain the catastrophe of 1941, at least not in any straightforward way. Both regimes rejected the optimism of the Enlightenment: that social progress would follow a masterly march of science through the natural world. Hitler and Stalin both accepted a late-nineteenth-century Darwinistic modification: progress was possible, but only as a result of violent struggle between races or classes. Thus it was legitimate to destroy the Polish upper classes (Stalinism) or the artificially educated layers of Polish subhumanity (National Socialism). Thus far the ideologies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union permitted a compromise, the one embodied in the conquest of Poland. The alliance allowed them to destroy the fruits of the European Enlightenment in Poland by destroying much of the Polish educated classes. It allowed the Soviet Union to extend its version of equality, and Nazi Germany to impose racial schema upon tens of millions of people, most dramatically by separating Jews into ghettos pending some “Final Solution.” It is possible, then, to see Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as representing two instances of modernity, which could emanate hostility to a third, the Polish. But this is a far cry from their representing modernity as such."

"Compared to Homeric or even to medieval times, modern man inhabits the physical world like a rapacious stranger."

"Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur."

"They are born, put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box."

"The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one."

"I have respect for mother nature's methods of robustness (billions of years allow most of what is fragile to break); classical thought is more robust (in its respect for the unknown, the epistemic humility) than the modern post-Enlightenment naïve pseudoscientific autism. Thus my classical values make me advocate the triplet of , elegance, and courage; against modernity’s phoniness, nerdiness and philistinism."

"Men have become the tools of their tools."

"Modernism is in essence a provincialism, since it declines to look beyond the horizon of the moment, just as a countryman may view with suspicion whatever lies beyond his country."

"Modern man … when he looks at his daily newspaper … sees the events of the day refracted through a medium which colors them as effectively as the cosmology of the medieval scientist determined his view of the starry heavens. The newspaper is a man-made cosmos of the world of events around us at the time. For the average reader it is a construct with a set of significances which he no more thinks of examining than did his pious forbear of the thirteenth century—whom he pities for sitting in medieval darkness—think of questioning the cosmology. This modern man, too, lives under a dome, whose theoretical aspect has been made to harmonize with a materialistic conception of the world. And he employs its conjunctions and oppositions to explain the occurrences of his time with all the confidence of the now supplanted discipline of astrology."

"Modern publication wishes to minimize discussion. … Phrases ... are carefully chosen not to stimulate reflection, but to evoke stock responses of approbation or disapprobation. Headlines and advertising teem with them, and we seem to approach a point at which failure to make the stock response is regarded as faintly treasonable."

"While US and Soviet ideologies had much in common in terms of background and project, what separated them were their distinctive definitions of what modernity meant. While most Americans celebrated the market, the Soviet elites denied it. Even while realizing that the market was the mechanism on which most of the expansion of Europe had been based, Lenin’s followers believed that it was in the process of being superseded by class-based collective action in favor of equality and justice. Modernity came in two stages: a capitalist form and a communal form, reflecting two revolutions – that of capital and productivity, and that of democratization and the social advancement of the underprivileged. Communism was the higher stage of modernity, and it had been given to Russian workers to lead the way toward it."

"The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value."