so what exactly is “modernity”?
if we compare our current situation to the situation of someone in the
past, say, 1700, France… you can say that the average person was a farmer,
who lived to say, 35, who was born into the Catholic church and the King of France
had been King since 1643… all of these are part of the identity of someone who
was living in 1700…their families had probably owned the land they worked on
for generations…the average person didn’t travel that far in their life, perhaps
a couple of hunred miles away from their home…
we understand the human condition by the possibilities that exists in
that time period…the average person, I shall call Rene, didn’t go to
collage, most likely had a limited education, probably couldn’t read, as the
number of nobles were around 600,000 in a population of 22 million and the
money always goes to the wealthy nobles or the church,
thus Rene was also living on the edge of poverty…
and until recent times, the possibility of a famine was always in
mind… Rene lived a hard, brutal, short life and because of that
he needed all the help he could get and that came from the church
and its all-encompassing hold over life in rural france in 1700…
you were born, lived and die within the hold of Catholic church…
and average person like Rene most likely didn’t object because
his life was so transitory and difficult.
Now compare that to your life…
and now we see modernity in its full exposure… it is the difference
between a person’s life in 1700, Rene and your life today…
we feel alienated, disconnected, atomized by life today because
the factors that comforted Rene does not exists today…
perhaps Nietzsche was right, god is dead and we have killed him…
and it might be those factors of life, the church and the small village
near the land of Rene, that all gave solace and comfort to Rene… his life
was a life grounded into the traditions and experiences he had living
in his very limited life……compare that to your life or maybe I can compare
that to my life… at one stretch, my family moved over 10 times over
4 states in 10 years… I had no stability, nothing that was a shared experience
during all those moves outside of my family and books…compare my life
with Rene’s life…… I had a completely different experience then Rene
and that difference is called “Modernity”. Also in play with the difference with
Rene is all the science and technology and machines that exists in my life that
didn’t exists in his life. I have never killed a animal in my life… I have never
picked fruits and vegetables in my life. I have never fished in my life……
I am separated, apart from the experiences that Rene had, that he needed
to have to survive… and those difference is what we call, “modernity”.
god is dead and we have killed him… we killed him when we became
separated from, alienated from, that which keeps us alive,
the basics of life… I have never build a shelter and I cannot fix a car,
I can’t tell you how an stove works nor how the computer works…
I use these things all the time and my shelter was built for me
and my car is fixed by someone else and my food is prepared
by someone else… I am mediated from my life by the tools,
science, technology and machines that exists in my life……
that too is “modernity”… our separation from the basics of life…
I stand here and the basics of life stand over there and all these things,
tools, science, technology and machines stand between me and the
basics of life…it creates a different reality, experience for me, then
it does for Rene who had to find his food and fix his food and repair
his hovel with what was at hand and fix his wagon with whatever he could
find…and then he would go out into the field and plant his crop
and raise that crop and then sell that crop for whatever he could get…
I woke up today, it is my day off, I came into the kitchen and turned on
the TV and then I took my various pills that I need, then I microwaved something
for breakfast… I am wearing my headphones to listen to music and I did read
some but I have mostly spent my morning writing here… compare my day
with Rene’s day…… that is “modernity”
Rene’s life was grounded in the fact he was a farmer and his life was grounded
in a life that his father had and his grandfather had and his great grandfather had…
with a church his father and everyone before had, with a state with Kings
and nobles that been there for a thousand years…he didn’t travel and he couldn’t
read and his experiences are the experiences of a French famer in 1700… limited,
at best………
I am not grounded by my experiences, I will work again on Weds, standing for
8 hours while I scan and input codes into the computer… weighing fruits
and vegetables and chit chat with the customers in a brightly lit store full
science and technology and machines…….as I now work much further away from
home, it takes about an half hour to drive home in my car, mostly in ugly
traffic… I reach home and perhaps my wife will make me dinner by using the
stove or more likely the microwave to cook my dinner…….
My daily experiences are so different from Rene’s that we could be
from different planets… and that difference is “modernity”
now the question arises, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
and do we, must we change ourselves to become more grounded?
or should we just learn to change and adapt to our new reality, our
new understanding of what it means to be human?
many, many questions are here… and I don’t know the answers…
Kropotkin