Friday, September 11, 2015

Capital Punishment was Modernity just as its abolition was Post-Modernity

A new take on why 'abolition' and 'postmodernity' arrived together in the same taxi, back in 1965...


If Modernity was all about Grand Narratives, then there was no grander narrative than actually carrying out a capital punishment.

Modernity is best known now for its hubris over its total faith in its predictions about events in the near future.

But imposing capital punishment really is also about being totally certain, certainty about (often hidden) events in the near past.

Certain enough about your reading of them to kill a fellow being, with no chance to revive them, if you are subsequently proven wrong.

But Modernity simply couldn't conceive it might ever be wrong - not about the past and not about the future.

Postmodernity is really all about being less certain , about the past and the future.

Uncertain enough to never want to close all doors to doubt by executing people for crimes that we can't usually see on instant replay video and so remain always open to new evidence and motives.

@ Hope w/o Frontiers at
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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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