The Myriad Anomalies of Modern Life

[Olm the Water King]

The Myriad Anomalies of Modern Life - The New Indian Express

The Myriad Anomalies of Modern Life

By Ajay Gudavarthy

Published: 11th March 2016 06:00 AM

Last Updated: 11th March 2016 01:37 AM

Something in modern life continues to exist without political articulation. While we try to subsume it under the known categories of caste, class and gender, there is a pervasive excess that spills over and bleeds into everyday life. News dailies routinely carry stories of child sex abuse, road rage, rape, murderous attacks and suicides that are often reduced to individual psyche without an explanation in our collective existence. It could well be that the cause and effect of some of these phenomenon seem to have become too circular to offer an explanation. Some of them that are relatively more visible include boredom, alienation, anomie, stress, anger and loneliness.

...

 

[Lark]

Biophilous versus necrophilous

eros versus thanatos

life force versus death instinct

 

[Olm the Water King]

ModernityCharacteristics

...

Defining Characteristics of Modernity

There have been numerous attempts, particularly in the field of sociology, to understand what modernity is. A wide variety of terms are used to describe the society, social life, driving force, symptomatic mentality, or some other defining aspects of modernity. They include:

Bureaucracy--impersonal, social hierarchies that practice a division of labor and are marked by a regularity of method and procedure
Disenchantment of the world--the loss of sacred and metaphysical understandings of al facets of life and culture
Rationalization--the world can be understood and managed through a reasonable and logical system of objectively accessible theories and data
Secularization--the loss of religious influence and/or religious belief at a societal level
Alienation--isolation of the individual from systems of meaning--family, meaningful work, religion, clan, etc.
Commodification--the reduction of all aspects of life to objects of monetary consumption and exchange
Decontexutalization--the removal of social practices, beliefs, and cultural objects from their local cultures of origin
Individualism --growing stress on individuals as opposed to meditating structures such as family, clan, academy, village, church
Nationalism--the rise of the modern nation-states as rational centralized governments that often cross local, ethnic groupings
Urbanization--the move of people, cultural centers, and political influence to large cities
Subjectivism--the turn inward for definitions and evaluations of truth and meaning
Linear-progression--preference for forms of reasoning that stress presuppositions and resulting chains of propositions
Objectivism--the belief that truth-claims can be established by autonomous information accessible by all
Universalism--application of ideas/claims to all cultures/circumstances regardless of local distinctions
Reductionism--the belief that something can be understood by studying the parts that make it up
Mass society--the growth of societies united by mass media and widespread dissemination of cultural practices as opposed to local and regional culture particulars
Industrial society--societies formed around the industrial production and distribution of products
Homogenization--the social forces that tend toward a uniformity of cultural ideas and products
Democratization--political systems characterized by free elections, independent judiciaries, rule of law, and respect of human rights
Mechanization--the transfer of the means of production from human labor to mechanized, advanced technology
Totalitarianism--absolutist central governments that suppress free expression and political dissent, and that practice propaganda and indoctrination of its citizens
Therapeutic motivations--the understanding that the human self is a product of evolutionary desires and that the self should be assisted in achieving those desires as opposed to projects of ethical improvement or pursuits of public virtue

Modernity is often characterized by comparing modern societies to premodern or postmodern ones, and the understanding of those non-modern social statuses is, again, far from a settled issue. To an extent, it is reasonable to doubt the very possibility of a descriptive concept that can adequately capture diverse realities of societies of various historical contexts, especially non-European ones, let alone a three-stage model of social evolution from premodernity to postmodernity. As one can see above, often seemingly opposite forces (such as objectivism and subjectivism, individualism and the nationalism, democratization and totalitarianism) are attributed to modernity, and there are perhaps reasons to argue why each is a result of the modern world. In terms of social structure, for example, many of the defining events and characteristics listed above stem from a transition from relatively isolated local communities to a more integrated large-scale society. Understood this way, modernization might be a general, abstract process which can be found in many different parts of histories, rather than a unique event in Europe.

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...many critics point out psychological and moral hazards of modern life - alienation, feeling of rootlessness, loss of strong bonds and common values, hedonism, disenchantment of the world, and so on. Likewise, the loss of a generally agreed upon definitions of human dignity, human nature, and the resulting loss of value in human life have all been cited as the impact of a social process/civilization that reaps the fruits of growing privatization, subjectivism, reductionism, as well as a loss of traditional values and worldviews. Some have suggested that the end result of modernity is the loss of a stable conception of humanity and/or the human being.

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[Mole]

We are moving from a literate society based on authority to an electric society based on the helping form of child rearing, leading to empathic and creative personalities.

Unfortunately we are left with legacy institutions based on authority. And these legacy institutions are losing the respect of those they are tasked to serve. These legacy institutions are religious, political, and even sporting institutions.

And worse, these legacy institutions are staffed by those with poorly developed psyches so that they are unable to distinguish between themselves and the institution. So when the institution is critiqued, these inadequate staff identify with the institution and defend it.

So our legacy institutions and their inadequate staff are increasingly anomalous.

 

[Olm the Water King]

"...Thomas Mann seems to me to get the matter right when he says that even Nietzsche's criticism of Wagner is 'inverted panegyric...another form of glorification'..., an expression of one of the major experiences of Nietzsche's life, his deep love-hate of Wagner and his music. The love was there virtually from the beginning, as was the hate; both lasted to the very end."

"...Roughly speaking, The Birth of Tragedy asks: how can we remedy the ills of 'modern' society? Nietzsche's answer is: by constructing a new 'tragic culture' centred on an idealized version of Wagnerism... The second set of issues with which The Birth of Tragedy is concerned derives from the tradition of Western philosophical theology. The second basic question is: 'Is life worth living?' Nietzsche's answer is (roughly): 'No (but in a tragic culture one can learn to tolerate the knowledge that it is not).' Obviously the two questions are intimately connected."

"...The Apolline artist glorifies individuality by presenting attractive images of individual persons, things, and events. In literature the purest and most intense expression of the Apolline is Greek epic poetry (especially Homer). The other contestant in the struggle for the soul of ancient Greece was Dionysos. The Dionysiac is the drive towards the transgression of limits, the dissolution of boundaries, the destruction of individuality, and excess. The purest artistic expression of the Dionysiac was quasi-orgiastic forms of music, especially of choral singing and dancing. Although these two impulses are in some sense opposed to each other, they generally coexist in any given human soul, institution, work of art, etc (although one will usually also be dominant). It is precisely the tension between the two of them that is particularly creative. The task is to get them into a productive relation to each other. This happens, for instance, when the Dionysiac singing and dancing of a chorus is joined with the more restrained and ordered speech and action of individual players on a stage, as in Attic tragedy. The synthesis of Apollo and Dionysos in tragedy (in which the musical, Dionysiac element, Nietzsche claims, has a certain dominance) is part of a complex defence against the pessimism and despair which is the natural existential lot of humans."

"...the balance is upset by the arrival of a new force, principle, or drive, which Nietzsche associated with Socrates...Socratic rationalism upsets the delicate balance on which tragedy depends...'Modern culture' arises in direct continuity out of such Socratism."

"...The Birth of Tragedy was one of the last and most distinguished contributions to a Central European debate about the ills of modern society. This was a debate in which many of the participants, oddly enough, were broadly in agreement on a complex diagnosis of the problem, although, of course, they disagreed on the treatment. The diagnosis was that life in the modern world lacks a kind of unity, coherence, and meaningfulness that life in previous societies possessed. Modern individuals have developed their talents and powers in an overspecialized, one-sided way; their lives and personalities are fragmented, not integrated, and they lack the ability to identify with their society in a natural way and play the role assigned to them in the world wholeheartedly. They cannot see the lives they lead as meaningful and good. Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel, Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche (and many other lesser-known figures) all accept versions of this general diagnosis. Theoretical and practical reactions to this perceived problematic state differ enormously..."

Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy And Other Writings; Edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs

 

[Olm the Water King]

"...The neo-Nietzscheans go beyond Habermas in rejecting a Whiggish story altogether. By 'Whiggish' I mean a story that sees the past as culminating in the present, which is then asserted to be necessarily superior to the past. The neo-Nietzscheans could maintain that Habermas's distinction between the evolution of nature and the evolution of humanity preserves the quintessentially metaphysical distinction between nature and spirit. For the Nietzscheans, if the evolution of nature (instead of the organism) is the model, and if evolutionary changes are the result of sudden genetic mutations or environmental accidents, then the 'ranking' of species has a different effect from that which the modern rationalist expects. While some species may be 'cleverer', it is difficult to say in what sense they are 'better' than other species. Conceivably, most species might have been better off if the most clever species had not emerged (especially as that species gradually annihilates most other species and perhaps all life on the planet). Furthermore, there is no reason to think that the clever species itself had to be as it is, for it could have been much better off lacking certain abilities it has or possessing abilities it lacks. The neo-Nietzscheans might argue that just as dogs lack the ability to do mathematics, or some species lack the desire to harm members of their own or other species, so humans may lack certain cognitive abilities, and they certainly could have had a more kindly disposition.

I doubt that there is a fact of the matter about which of these evolutionary models is true. The question is which of them is more useful, and for what purposes. I suggest that the neo-Nietzschean model has some advantages over the Whiggish one. The neo-Nietzschean model is not nihilistic. Instead, it challenges us not to be arrogant about the superiority of the present over the past, or of our own point of view in contrast to competing contemporary points of view. Instead of stressing the convergence of other viewpoints with out own, it holds open the difference between our viewpoint and other possible ones. Whereas the Whiggish model suggests that there are features of ourselves we could not imagine wanting to be any different, the neo-Nietzschean model challenges us to imagine ourselves as having different features from those we normally take for granted both in ourselves and in others."

The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy; Edited by Jeremy Moss