Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Modernity's star turn was impoverished Prussia ,not Manhattan's skyscrapers
Historical consensus to the contrary, America, Russia, Canada, China, Brazil, Australia were never full members of Modernity.
At best, they could only be hybrid members.
Modernity and the Enlightenment Project was premised upon Man's mind triumphing over matter ---- more importantly, "lack of matter".
Mind hardly gets a fair workout in vast lands rich in natural resources and with relatively small populations.
In America, it seemed you only had to trace a line in the Ohio soil and up would come corn and pigs.
By contrast, Germany (Prussia really) and Japan - Germany in particular before WWII and Japan in the 1970s to 1990s - were small, natural resource poor, lands with large hungry populations and no vast overseas colonies ----- unlike the equally small British and French homelands.
Their initial triumph was a tribute to the power of Modernity's thesis.
Their subsequent failure, equally, marked its absolute failure....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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