we must locate modernity in our understanding of the past…
recall our standards for understanding: compare and contrast…
one of the ways we reach an understanding of anything is to compare
and contrast things…am I a better person today then I was
30 years ago? I need to then compare and contrast who I was 30
years ago with who I am today…another path to understanding lies
with our engagement with others… now others can be anything else
in the universe… and that includes ism’s, ideologies, biases, superstitions,
prejudice…so I can better understand being human by comparing
who I am against animals or plants or walls and other human beings……
now is my understanding biased because I can only understand by my
one viewpoint, my subjectivity? I cannot see the universe or reality in your
shoes or in your viewpoint… I am limited to having just one viewpoint or
place to stand where I can understand the world…….and that one viewpoint
or place to stand is limited by history and experiences and by my accidental
birth in a particular place and family…… I have a hearing loss and you most likely
don’t… my understanding of reality, of the universe is changed by the very
act of having a hearing loss… just as your understanding of the universe, reality is changed
by you having all your hearing…….so ask yourself, who has a “better” understanding
of the universe? You or me? to me that is an irrelevant question for it has no
possible answer because we can never know that answer… because “better” requires
some form of comparison or contrast and what are we to compare and contrast
“better” to? it all becomes just a subjective understanding of the word “better”……
so we begin by understand modernity by comparing our “modern” lives with
the lives of people who existed before us…
first of all, most people in history had a very short life expectancy, during the
Roman empire, the average life expectancy was roughly 25 years and I can’t see
it being any different from the height of the Roman empire to 1789…perhaps
give it to 30 or 32 after the middle ages…next, the average person rarely
traveled more then a 100 miles from their place of birth… just the amount
of movement by human beings has dramatically increased… next, the average
person for most of history was a farmer. Today, we have more human beings
living in cities then living on the farm, world wide… that alone makes
all the difference in the world… for city existence is vastly different
then a farm existence…in the city, we experience far more in a year
then the average farmer in the middle ages experienced in a lifetime…
and that fact is vital………for it is within these experiences that we
compare and contrast ourselves to… I cannot know if I am a bigot for example
unless I compare myself with others and it seems clear that I am not
a bigot comparing myself to the bigots that inhabit ILP……
and that is just one way we can find out or discover who we are
and what is our nature…now some clowns here have tried to
tie anti-Semitism with being liberal but that can only happen if
you twist the entire understanding of being liberal and anti-Semitism into some
unrecognizable definition.
thus we return to Socrates and his dictum, know thyself……
and we can only know ourselves in relations to others…
and so by comparing the fact that we moderns, experience
and travel and live longer then the prior generations means
our understanding of the universe is different from those
other generations…we live in modern world where we have
science, technology and machines… the average person during
the last 100,000 years didn’t have those things. those facts of “modernity”
means we view the world vastly different then those who didn’t have our
modern tools of science and technology.
Our understanding of “Modernity” is view by comparing and contrasting
what is our modern experiences compared to those who existed before us…
we see in those difference what modernity means……
the loss of ism’s and ideologies that existed in the past came about from
the way people came to understand themselves… you can see that
when you see the rise of Christianity in the ancient world… you can compare
and contrast Rome from the time of Caesar to the fall of Rome in 476 BC…
we see Rome slowly change during those 500 years… for example,
the Rome of Caesar had engineers and builders who could build grand, fine
buildings but by the time of the fall of Rome, you didn’t have any body
who could build or construct those wonderful building of ancient Rome…
the knowledge and technique was lost during those 500 years and wasn’t
rediscovered until the Renaissance……
Modernity is more then another time period… it is about the comparing
and contrasting of the experiences and events and people of previous times
compared to our modern times…and in that comparison and contrast,
we can see why we have lost our faith in god and religion and most forms
of ism’s and ideologies……. we are atomistic and isolated from the past
in ways we haven’t even discovered yet… but that doesn’t mean we must
return to the past…as has been noted before, you can’t go home again…
we must not go back to the past… we have only one direction we
can move and that is forward… and any who call for a return to the past
must find out the past is no longer a home for us… we cannot go home again…
we must find our way forward…… but that doesn’t tell us the new ism’s
and ideologies and prejudices and superstitions that we must now
hold in order to be at home in this modern world… no, it doesn’t…
Kropotkin