Modernism
Description
(written in the context of therapeutic practice)
By Emiliano Gonzalez & Marie Faubert:
(Logical Positivism)
"Modernism has been around since the turn of the 20th century and goes back to as early as the last decade of the 19th century (as exemplified in the works of Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman and W.B. Yeats, to name a few (Yousef, 2017). Dussel (1996) ) states that modernism origins can be traced to the Iberian-peninsula before as the Americas were invaded in 1492. With time, modernism moved away from religious institutions and forms of governments as authority sources of information and knowledge (Crouse, 2013). Ultimately, the modernists started to look for relative truth instead of absolute reality. They also viewed the psyche as diverse, contradictory, multiple and inconsistent (Yousef, 2017). Perhaps the best definitions of modernism were provided by Matei Calinescu (1987) who outlined how enlightenment principles were founded on premodern concepts, while opposing those same concepts, and that is why modernism—as a system of thought—has been open to much selfcriticism and revision. Further, the duality of the physical world and the spirit world was accepted as a mental construct. The validity of the spirit world was often entirely rejected as not “real.” Modernism moved away from the authoritative omniscient point of view to the individual’s consciousness advocating the use of different viewpoints and multiple narrators (Yousef, 2017). From a modernist perspective, things are clearly defined where cohesion and unity, such as collective identities and social practices, are essential whereby individual identities become uprooted, and logic and reason are substantiated (Rodriguez Magda, 2004). Moreover, the traditional scientific methods of investigation embraced modernism (Crouse, 2013). The driving force behind modernism was ‘innovation’ but Rodriguez Magda (2004) calls it “having naïve faith in scientific and technological progress.” As such, modernism depends upon facts that are measurable and attainable (Klages, 2005). If something cannot be counted and measured, it does not have value. It is akin to what Rodriguez Magda (2004) claims: whatever cannot be transmitted simply does not count. Increasingly, social scientists are rejecting modernism both on philosophical and scientific grounds. Logical positivism requires that knowledge be verifiable; hence, anything that cannot be counted and measured cannot be verified. For example, values cannot be verified; they can only be inferred. Constructs of any kind cannot be verified; they can only be inferred. The fact that constructs cannot be counted and measured directly is problematic from a collaborative-dialogic counseling perspective where people’s motives and values, important variables in counseling, cannot be directly measured or counted. They can only be inferred from observable behavior or what clients tell their counselors. Modernism is being challenged by natural scientists and social scientists. What might be surprising to some is that even scientists are beginning to question modernism (Majid, 2012). For example, there are more basic “things” being found that scientists are naming as elementary particles. One can recall when the atom was considered the fundamental particle; then, it was protons, neutrons, and electrons. Presently, physicists and chemists are studying evidence of what they are naming fundamental particles, such as fermions, which are made up of quarks and antiquarks and leptons and antileptons. Scientists are still building a world gleaned from evidence, but they are taking much more care not to be definitive. Quantum mechanical concepts, such as nonlocality, tunneling, and entanglement have been proven by multiple experiments, but defy basic modernist ways of thinking, especially the “either/or” paradigm (Majid, 2012). The philosophical underpinning of traditional counseling theories embodies modernism. Modernism (Logical Positivism) tends to ignore the client’s history, culture, language, ways of being and knowing, feelings and sentiments; this is not client-centered but rather counselor driven (Yousef, 2017).
Characteristics
By Emiliano Gonzalez & Marie Faubert:
1. "Human behavior can be objectively observed and measured and operates in a predictable fashion; as such, cause and effect can be inferred;
2. People can be separated from their environments for study, and they can be further subdivided for study;
3. Inferences are made from measuring observable facts that can be measured either directly or indirectly as articulated by Daniel;
4. The traditional scientific method is the accepted paradigm for identifying facts about human behavior; and
5. The contexts (environments) in which people operate are considered as neutral or relatively unimportant; thus, the focus of inquiry should be observable actions of individual human beings (Brown, Brooks, & Associates, 1990)."
History
Raymond Williams Society:
"Modern, in its root sense, means ‘just now’. But since the time some 500 years ago when groups of people began defining themselves as moderns in comparison and contrast with the ancients and, indeed, invented the middle ages to create a proper distance between them, modern has also taken on a historical dimension. That is to say that at any time, modern in the last 500 years has been ‘just now’ but has also been this constantly extending period after some date which usually settles around the Renaissance. Since that time certain words derived from it – ‘modernist’ itself, ‘modernism’, ‘modernize’ – have been regularly used on the whole until the nineteenth century relatively unfavourably; as ‘a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement’, as Jane Austen was to put it in one novel. There was a sense that something was being brought up to date but whether this was anything better was always a question. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century when it began to acquire, in the wake of the industrial revolution, much more positive uses. From then on there are certain decades where the description modern or new seems almost obligatory for certain groups of a cultural kind making their way."
(https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/2021/09/02/when-was-modernism-by-raymond-williams/#more-2283)
Discussion
Radical Critique of Euromodernism by Rajani Kanth
Rajani Kanth:
1.
"Modernism ‘creates’ a wholly mutant social form , alien to the anthropic essence, and antithetical to its hospitable survival in a relatively equable natural world.
It replaces the vital nexus of kinship with contractual relations, to the point of viewing society itself as a ‘contract’ rather than an affective compact.
It postulates, and idealises, an asocial ‘individual’ who is prompted with self-seeking conduct as the ontological ‘building block ‘ of this ‘civil’ society.
It also vests this luckless creature - doomed henceforth to live out the dual , if still monotonic, destinies of a producer/consumer - with illimitable material drives that keep it at the wheel ,like hamsters , for the duration of its days.
After performing this radical caesarean , it compensates this disabled, rootless entity with the promise of a slew of meretricious ‘rights’: equality, liberty, et.al.
Where/when these dubious benefices are found insufficient in themselves (as ever!) there is that standby, gaudy, glut of commodities that might help while away the idle, empty hour , where such time is available at all : away , that is, from the daily, lifelong, grind of laboring - usually for the profit of others, which is the abject lot of the vast majority.
Even were these ‘rights’ to be ‘real’ (i.e. realizable) they would only help solidify the alienated individual forlornly within his/her personalized domain of cold, ‘rational’ anomie, floundering without the crucial rudders of care and consideration , manifestly essential to anthropic well-being.
But they are tendentious promises only , run through , and razed, by the designs of the rich and the powerful who manage the ‘system’, one way or other, for their own ends.
To live and die within the solitary confinement of such a lightless, privatized , existence, formally ‘equal’ to others suffering similarly under the same common fate, does not , somehow, appear to represent a cornucopia of psychic riches to be envied, or marveled, at: let alone being the apex of human attainment, as EuroModernism views itself.
Indeed, it is a condition that , perhaps somewhat more obviously, moves sentient, feeling , creatures to the very margins of debauchery and destruction (of the Self, or Others) - as befitting a state of rudderless anomie.
Paradoxically, the more normless and amoral the real societal state of being, on average, the more glaring the Modernist flaunt of Constitutions, Codes, and Rulebooks (yes, it is an Empire , any time of day, blest with a commanding largesse of Laws).
In fact, even a casual glance at the civil/social statistics of EuroModernist societies would help confirm the very palpable psychic suffering, alienation, if you will, that accompanies a life spent - not lived! – in such an arid terrain of perpetual, pitiless competition, one-upmanship, and despoiling, extirpative conflict.
It becomes, inescapably, a nasty, boorish , Hobbesian world where, as has justly been remarked, ‘hell is other people’.
The urban jungles of the lead Modernist entity, the US, illustrate this ineffable quality of hellishness , almost in caricature.
Small wonder that desperation, existential angst, and coruscating, irrequitable , loneliness is the lot of so many of the true believers who still worship at the Modernist Altar(even whilst being sacrificed on it).
Indeed, the frantically utopian yearnings of the sensitized , within them, are a reflex only of the unbearable , destituting, burdens of that prostrating geist.
The conclusion may well be indefeasible: that EuroModernism is little other than sheer fraud, a scurrilous Libel upon the - admittedly slender reeds of beneficence of - the Human Race.
For desocialisation is , for us humans, dehumanization.
Stated differently , the eclipse of gemeinschaft communities by the hypertrophic gesellschaft formations so favored by Modernist Corporatism – for it is their choice creation !- presages only the slow , suffocating, extinction of the civilities, nay decencies, of anthropic life. With the latter, dies morality - a societal norm deriving from the domestic sphere of child-rearing (the domain, in extremis, of societal care and consideration).
Whence arises the amoral ‘human’ ( a real oxymoron) , now rendered fair game for manipulation , robotisation , and exploitation - by the powers that be.
I have tried to point out that deep underneath the unprecedentedly egregious Crises of our times is a real, titanic struggle between the ‘mammals’ (warm blooded/heat-seeking) and the ‘reptiles” (cold blooded/calculating).
I have no doubt that given time, our species-being will , eventually, assert itself: but it could be this very vital resource that may be insufficient to ensure such an outcome - given the overflowing Tribe of Dr Strangeloves (and worse) that today populates , in increasing overswell, the extant halls of Power and Governance.
EuroModernism is, in short, misanthropy, writ large." (email December 2014)
2.
For over a year, I have disinterred, possibly ad nauseam, the various logics of Modernism, both overt and covert. Stated simply, there is little that is redemptive about it.
Au contraire, it represents the most sweeping about-face of baseline anthropic values in the history of humankind. The consequences of that fateful eventuality are all about us: to witness - and despair.
The fact that it fell to Europe to lead us all, ready or not, on that choice path to perdition may or may not be fortuitous.
Here, I won’t go into that set of issues.
Instead, I will spell out, briefly as ever, what is to come.
First, who we are.
Whether we evolved or devolved, we are humanids with some unique instinctual traits.
Our closest kin, bonobos and chimps, differ radically amongst themselves.
The former are female-driven and relatively pacific : the latter are male-driven and aggressive.
We fall in between: with virulent patriarchy as evident, as slightly more textured tribes within matrilineal contexts.
It would appear, importantly, that male aggression can be tempered, if not tamed, within the affective ties of kinship, i.e. within a moral economy usually worked by either women or the ‘feminine principle’ , as I have termed it. The material economy is largely, perhaps even wholly, a male enterprise , dominated, and driven by men, or what I term the ‘masculine principle’.
Milder tribal forms devolve into empires when the latter force , no longer bounded by affective restraints, runs amok.
Simple gender constraints , it would appear, break, yet again, into class divisions with the discoveries of settled agriculture.
Knowledge of these simple facts might have pre-empted much of the vast trove of vacant philosophising as to ‘human nature’ and ‘human perfectibility’ as characterised the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ - when Europe, shrugging off biblical restraints, nevertheless retained basic biblical notions, if now transmuted into secular form(s). Modern Utopianism , right or left, however, founders, ever, on the immutable shoals of our received anthropic instincts.
Curiously , both Soviet communism and the non-descript hippie commune break up on that same set of traits. Stated semi-seriously, bonobos cannot be chimps, nor vice versa.
More specifically , men and women are gifted with differing instinctual traits (denied fervently by many brands of Modernist thought) that have huge consequences for society.
It is nonsensical to believe , as with centuries of Modernist sloganeering, that we can simply ‘declare’ ourselves into a benign state of being.
That modus of sloganeering – liberty, equality, etc - was either tendentious and hypocritical, and/or wholly a creature of fantasy.
Contra Rousseau , we are not ‘born free’ – except , perhaps, in a derelict Modernist ghetto beyond the pale of society – , and even less, to design ourselves as we please.
Everywhere, Men tend, in the domain of power, to oligarchy and near-despotism , whenever/wherever opportunity affords regardless of the political set-up.
So, notions such as ‘democracy’ , etc , are simply the savvy rhetorical flourishes by which we are gulled into believing in patent counter-factuals.
It is in this arena that EuroModernism has us all, even the quick-witted, swept clean away.
We remain ever a totemic species, so modernist ‘leaders’ can and do beguile us , especially given our loosely tied ‘contractual’ societies, with self-interest as the sole binding force, and lead us willy-nilly (that is what Weber understood as ‘charisma’) into this or that exit into (usually) a deeper damnation.
This impetus, by its nature, is a force for both good and bad: i.e., charisma can break the bounds of the Modernist Empire of today , much as it can lead us into a Jones-style mass-extinction.
Modernism, an alien form, was imposed by brute force on communities linked by antic hospitalities , universally, East or West.
It dissolved our tribal nexus, and cut us adrift into so many free floating islands of anomie and angst, if we were at the bottom, and into towers of profiteering , profligacy, and power, if at the top.
But it allowed no one , high or low, the grace of contentment: so it is with EuroModernism that the Age of Discontent begins.
Restlessness is its intrinsic norm.
But we are ineluctably tribal in our very natures and so this unnatural restlessness can only lead to collective suicide, if unchecked.
Much of Neo-Lib or Neo-Con radicalism, as with the incredible huckstering mania of Wall-Street (to which they bear an umbilical connection), is a sort of a runaway death-wish unchained : with each faction charging ahead - to see who can go over the cliff first.
For such is the madness that takes over when we, qua Modernists, deny ourselves our species-being of communal existence.
It might simply be a species of karmic justice if ALL of their ilk were to rush over that precipice, if we could but stand aside and watch: but that , alas, is not to be.
They appear determined, instead, to drive us all into a Finance-Capital Jonesville of catastrophe and cataclysm. It is this ferocious doggedness that sets up the reality scenario that I have termed, only partly satirically , as the extant struggle between mammals and reptiles.
That is to say, the warm-blooded and the cold-blooded.
Who shall win?
Keeping an eye to the current setting of the Doomsday Clock, it might appear that the Modernist reptiles shall overrun us all.
And , for years, I had feared that that fate was to be borne through, inexorably,
However, the latter-day insights of Quantum Physics, much as the ancient intuitions of Vedic wisdom (with which they seem, at times, to be in synch), now has me give pause.
We live in a self-aware universe: that much is not mumbo-jumbo, but physics.
But I go a step further than Amit Goswami (whose eloquent phrase that is).
I feel – regret I can’t ‘prove’ it - it’s a ‘ self-fulfilling’ universe, as well.
In effect , a universe that , apparently, wishes to behold itself albeit, for now, via human eyes.
So , if we were to be extinct now , so would the Universe, with us.
What an egregious waste of super-colossal effort/energies ‘invested’ over billions of years!
So, surely, it cannot be: we are to stay, perforce!, and survive.
Right now, developing facts appear tending that way: it is Modernists - EuroModerns in particular who lead that choice band - who are in panic, in flight, in disarray, in indecision, globally.
So, our ‘choice’ is simple: any way we can, we need to try and get out of the way of their careening Juggernaut, and build ourselves simpler, humbler shelters of conviviality, community, and co-operation.
Yes, we need to revive moral economies (I said revive, not invent: so ‘utopia’ is, simply, rediscovery), such as the human family (which is defiantly, nay instructively!, Non-Modernist : it is NOT built on equality, freedom, or democracy; yet gives us all , pathetic hominids that we are, what we crave most , as a species: warmth, shelter, caring, and kindness).
For you see, there is but one real human need (left or right, east or west): to huddle.
If so, the ‘future’ is no more, you see, than a return to our antique past.
Ironic, is it not?: that those who sought to leap over us all, via cannon and chicanery, into a neon future of consumerist gluttony based on the drudgery of the multitude may now have to walk the plank , in ignominy, back to the ingenuous burrows – where we all started together, a long, long , time ago.