Until recently I accepted the general consensus unquestioningly that 1945 marked the shift from the Age of Modernity to the Age of Post-Modernity.
But what, oh what, what if we all got it very badly wrong?
After all, the very notion of a shift from one age to another, from Classicalism to Romanticism to Modernity in a smooth linear fashion is itself the very embodiment of Modernist thinking.
Surely in a true Post-Modern Age ,won't we see Modernity and its hegemony simply shattering into slivers of many many little "local" hegemonies (if one can imagine the concept of hegemony itself surviving its public questioning, implicit in a "many-worlds" of hegemony).
Perhaps then we do not live in a Post-Modern World as much as we live in a Post-Hegemony World ?
I won't have thought so, as I say, if I hadn't recently divided deep into the cancer-inducing Tar Ponds of online comments from those who call themselves "skeptics" but who are generally better - and more accurately - known as "deniers" .
First one notes the sheer strength of their bile - hardly coming from the depressed remnant of an aged & dying life form. Then you note their numbers - usually well hidden, as most deniers only unburden their true feelings in safe company.
Then if one moves on to examine the actual content of all those comments and blogs and mainstream media headlines and one sees - can it really be ? - yes it can ! - the sturdy roots and stems of 1875-1965 Scientism & High Modernity, albeit clothed in modern up-to-date Libertarianism.
Libertarianism, you may or may not choose to recall , first slouched into rough being around 1945 and so itself might be best seen as a Counter-Post-Modernist reaction rather than from the Age of Scientism itself.
Seen through this prism, we might better understand our current Climate Wars in a new light and will be better placed to accept that it will display an extraordinary ferocity before it all ends (or the World itself all ends, in the awesome hellfires of Global Warming) ....
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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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