Modernity

jasonrohrer · 2019-04-23 22:25:33

My local designer friend Casey wrote this essay on modernity:

There's a problem with modernity. Nothing has ever been so comfortable, easy, convenient, or meaningless. Some people say it's a spiritual crises. But I don't think so. Formulating the problem like that has an answer baked right into it. Spirituality/religion was lost, therefore... But that is an old answer, a bad answer, and an irrelevant answer. The problem with modernity is a new problem, and it won't have an old answer. It's not that people have changed, they're the same as always. It's that the circumstances have changed.
It would be nice if the circumstances hadn't changed. If life was still infused with meaning and beauty. When you were born, the meaning of your life was invisible and surrounding you, like a fish in the ocean. Everything fit together. You can talk all day about how hard life was then, and how easy it is now. I believe it. But making life easy does not make it meaningful. And I believe if any person could honestly see the two options in a clear way, they would choose the difficult and meaningful life over the easy and meaningless one. Every single time.
So why not just go live in a cabin in the woods? It's a nice fantasy and one that a lot of modern people have. At least some variation of it. But hardly anyone actually does this. Are people just stupid cows that can't see what's best for them? I don't think so. I think going to live in a cabin is just play-acting at a meaningful life. We have some vague picture of what a meaningful life might look like, and we would be enacting that. Just like a little kid has some idea of what a house looks like, mommy and baby, cooking dinner, etc... We see ourselves enjoying the simple things in life, nature, the slow pace, the peace. But people aren't stupid. We know when it's real, and when it's a game.
Before we can even talk about a solution to modernity, we need to make it clear what the problem actually is. Human beings were built for a specific set of circumstances. The modern view of the human is as something incredibly adaptive. That's wrong. There's a narrow band of existence that humans thrive in. A meaningful life can only ever be found within this band. So the first problem with modernity, is that it doesn't even provide a solid concept of what this life is like.
How did we lose this concept, and deviate so far from a workable path? Modernity is the result of a series of small compromises and changes over a few thousand years. Any one of these compromises looked at individually makes sense. A tractor is a lot better than a plow. But when you add them all up, you get something ugly. A painting with lots of detail but no sense of composition or beauty. A story with a lot of events, but no narrative.
And humans are narrative beings. It's how we think, and it's what moves us into action. Narrative is the connective tissue of life. It gives purpose to actions beyond their immediate usefulness, and brings them together into something coherent. Story is the organizing principle of experience.
A compelling narrative has a well known structure to it. The world begins in a state of disharmony. It calls out a challenge to its protagonist: come change the world, make things right again. The journey is challenging. To rectify the disharmony requires some type of transformation to occur. And the transformation requires a sacrifice. Finally, the result of the transformation connects back into the world and changes it for the better. The story is complete and we can say that something meaningful has occurred.
A meaningful life is a life with a compelling narrative. When the world needs you. When you have to change and grow and sacrifice to answer that need. And when the results of your efforts have a renewing effect on the world. Those are the ingredients for a compelling narrative, and a meaningful life. Life without a story is nothing. It's the classic nihilistic complaint, we are just cosmic dust in an infinite universe. And if your life lacks a story, you might as well be a chunk of rock, or a speck of cosmic dust.
Everything you know about a compelling narrative is something you know about a meaningful life. It doesn't start on a whim, it starts with the world calling out a challenge to you. That's why the cabin fantasy is nonsense. It captures the superficial appearance of meaning without providing anything real. A real narrative has a goal, something worth fighting for. How many times have you heard about people working for a better life for their children? And a narrative has challenges. Consider the disgust we feel towards those who have everything given to them. If there is no challenge, there is no narrative. And if there is no narrative, there is no meaning.
The problem with modernity, then, is that it does not provide the setting for a compelling narrative. The world doesn't seem to need us anymore. And if we take on some challenge anyway, it seems there are many easy roads on one hand, and many foolish roads on the other. And even if we find a road that demands something from us, the results of our efforts don't seem to affect anything. The world is in a solved state. It may not be impossible to live a meaningful life but it's damn sure not easy.
The reason that modernity provides no story to so many is simple. Every narrative has an end, and the narrative of the modern world is ending. The big questions that we have been asking over the last few thousand years have been answered; we know where we came from. The challenges we have been struggling against have been solved; survival is basically a given. Any remaining questions, and any remaining challenges, are small detail work left to a small contingent. We have constructed an unbelievably efficient machine that is modernity. All that's left to do now is keep the wheels turning and try not to screw it up. There is no meaning in that, because there's no story to it.
We can see the modern world tearing itself apart because of it. It's preferable to destroy everything than it is to live without meaning. To merely keep the machine of modernity running is utterly pointless. It's not an idea that can sustain the collective effort of the Western world. Every fracture we see in the culture, is some new group of people being left empty. The number of actors in the story of modernity is shrinking. When you're left without a productive narrative, the only possible narrative is the destruction of the world that left you behind. Only in it's destruction can a new story rise.
Picture a forest. All the physical resources are basically allocated, locked up in the trees. It takes a fire to destroy it all, free the resources and give everything a chance to grow again. The seeds dropped in a mature forest are essentially doomed.
It's not a coincidence that the narrative of the modern world is ending now. It's happening because modernity has put everything on fast-forward. Cities, mass media, multiculturalism, and other trappings of modernity, have given people tools to very rapidly parse any narrative to it's logical endpoint. Post modernism is the culmination of this. Not just parsing any particular narrative, but parsing the very idea of a narrative to it's endpoint.
This is getting high minded. But it's easy to see in simple terms. Can you honestly picture yourself being proud of your country? To the point where you would enlist and risk your life for it? No. The idea seems insane. Yet, there are people still living that did that exact thing. The only conclusion we can draw, and still maintain our perspective on life, is that they were stupid rubes. They were hoodwinked into something terrible.
And that's the exact perspective modern people must maintain on all of history. That it was horrible, dirty, miserable, that life was nothing but suffering. That modernity swooped in and saved us from all that. The hubris to think that things were terrible for the last two hundred thousand years, then suddenly got good in the last fifty. That hubris must be unique to modernity. It's sad more than anything.
If you want to understand the difference between modernity and antiquity, consider a scenario. Your life consists of sleeping on a small hard cot for only 5 hours a night. You eat thick grey flavorless gruel. Your day is spent turning a large wheel around in circles. It's heavy and difficult.
In antiquity, your effort turning the wheel is moving you closer to something beautiful and transcendent, you are pulling yourself to heaven. It doesn't matter that the work is tedious and difficult. It has a purpose.
In modernity, your effort moves you forward, but not towards anything in particular. Just in a larger circle. Maybe you turn the wheel less, or not at all. What's the difference? You can eat your thick grey gruel all day if you want. You can wither away sleeping.
Life is only a heavy wheel and gruel when you get down to it. There is no escape from that, no alternative. The sole redeeming factor to the whole operation is why you wake up and turn the wheel. If you have a good reason, then being alive is better than not being alive. If you don't, it doesn't really matter either way.

Amon · 2019-04-23 22:40:04

In antiquity, it was also so, you were the one that turned the wheel, you were the one who did it and it had meaning. In a world as interconnected as this, you have the ability to percieve that you are turning the wheel and so are a million other people, you are but a grain of sand in the beach, I'd like to add up.

Simply knowing, the knowledge to have is disastrous in it's own right. And humans are beings of knowledge, ones that always strive for more? What does that strive, that endless human curiosity and progress bring us?

What tree did human eat from in Eden?
The knowledge of good and evil, you mean the knowledge of everything?

Dodge · 2019-04-24 05:28:35

The modern world brings with it a lot of new challenges, they are maybe not obvious to most people since they are not directly related to basic survival and the comforts and distractions are abundant. But they are present nonetheless and the state of our current era is unsustainable and will either collapse or change but more likely a little bit of both.

Weather looking good in bankok:

"Toxic air forces Thai officials to close Bangkok schools for rest of week"

Number 1 killer in america: Heart disease

"Heart disease kills way more people than war, murder, and traffic accidents combined"

We have come full circle, before we died from starvation to lack of food and now whe are dying because of an abundance of low quality, processed, unhealthy foods.

Modernity with it's comforts, distractions, easy acess etc. Only gives the impression that there is no more challenges but this couldn't be any further from the truth.

Last edited by Dodge (2019-04-24 05:30:55)

Kinrany · 2019-04-24 21:12:06

Games are a pretty good solution to this problem, no?

Besides, even once we have AI, there'll still be other people, and we'll still have conflicts with other people.

The hubris to think that things were terrible for the last two hundred thousand years, then suddenly got good in the last fifty.

Some would say that things are still terrible.

Sukallinen · 2019-05-21 23:13:28

"(people) would choose the difficult and meaningful life over the easy and meaningless one"
Red flag there, why would modern life be less meaningful than harsh reality of medieval peasant, doing 14 hours days in field, meaningful work to plant potatoes ?

"It would be nice if the circumstances hadn't changed. If life was still infused with meaning and beauty"
Same. How can he see more meaning being a galley-slave than current abundance of possibilities in making your life matter ?

"Human beings were built for a specific set of circumstances."
Oh, sorry now that I read this far. A religious nut. But might as well glimpse rest since gone so far...

(ancient times) "Your life consists of sleeping on a small hard cot for only 5 hours a night."
Maybe he should learn a bit of history, for example in a bit more modern understanding it was usually the case that people slept twice or three times (medieval, changes between cultures and ages, this is european way, way of your ancestors), so sleeping until wolf's time, having couple hours housework/anything done, maybe sleep a bit, do morning work, sleep couple of hours. His idea seems to be between lives being totally simple or harsh, although I do not have context why (s)he wrote that. Could've been schoolwork but probably not, it's bit short for that and faulty, also being certain of everything isn't school way. Or for some it is of course, but not in the 1st world countries (I hope).

(about life how it should go) "A compelling narrative has a well known structure to it. The world begins in a state of disharmony. It calls out a challenge to its protagonist: come change the world, make things right again. The journey is challenging. To rectify the disharmony requires some type of transformation to occur. And the transformation requires a sacrifice. Finally, the result of the transformation connects back into the world and changes it for the better. The story is complete and we can say that something meaningful has occurred."
...wordless... Basics of psychiatry, did he read about inkstains and write the whole thing on basis of that ? About only thing taught in universities that's mainly guesswork-better take image of brains (there's good TED talk about this in youtube) and treat accordingly. However at same time, it's only medical field that doesn't use anything but talk to try to guess what's wrong, coincidence ?

WalrusesConquer · 2019-05-22 04:55:00

This is a month old

wio · 2019-05-22 08:58:25

I don't think spirituality or religion is wrong just because it is old. That's a silly reason to discount it. A better challenge might be that it can't be brought back or it is unsustainable. We didn't solve it. We merely rejected it, because it was inconvenient. A lot of things have been rejected out of convenience without knowing their true purpose and the full effect of their rejection.

Modernity still has jobs and children. The essay doesn't really explain why people can't find meaning from their children or their jobs. Those things provide challenge and a sense of being needed.

ProNice · 2019-05-22 13:04:40

I think Casey is a spiritual student of Jung.
If you want to understand what he tried to explain in his essay, you should get familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell and Jordan Peterson. You can also watch Rick and Morty, created by Dan Harmon, if you want a prime example of the futility of the search for meaning in the postmodern perspective. It's a compelling idea, which resonates quite well with my gut feelings.

Religion, myth, culture and spiritual thought are true in a different sense than physical truth (the bare bone base reality). The former provides a framework for meaning. The other one provides a framework for existence. People often struggle to understand the interconnected nature of both resolutions of reality.

One Hour One Life is a good game to create your own sense of purpose, be it the role of a provider (protector against conflict), a mother (creatior of life) or a griefer (creatior of conflict). I enjoy it very much. It reliefs a little bit of real world tension that builds up while trying to face my modern life.

Ilka · 2019-05-22 13:19:49

jasonrohrer wrote:

My local designer friend Casey wrote this essay on modernity:
... The sole redeeming factor to the whole operation is why you wake up and turn the wheel. If you have a good reason, then being alive is better than not being alive. If you don't, it doesn't really matter either way.

Your local designer has depression. He should drive to the countryside and work with his hands. And if he can not, let him buy too tight shoes. Wearing such shoes will certainly cure him of spiritual distress and realize what is important and what is not.
I'm sorry but this is a whole bunch of nonsense.
Whether your life is beautiful or significant depends only on you man.
Do you really think this world is perfect because you have a full bowl of chips? And what about those who are dying of hunger when you die from overeating?
Nothing can be done and nothing is worth doing?
Because it does not matter?
You have a sick soul, man.
The narrative of the modern world is ending? And very good because it was a lousy world.
Okay, I mean, there's a whole lot of challenges in the world and your friend of mine is sitting on his ass and complaining instead of doing something useful.
I'm really annoyed though I know it's not worth it.

One Hour One Life Forums

#1 2019-04-23 22:25:33

Modernity

#2 2019-04-23 22:40:04

Re: Modernity

#3 2019-04-24 05:28:35

Re: Modernity

#4 2019-04-24 21:12:06

Re: Modernity

#5 2019-05-21 23:13:28

Re: Modernity

#6 2019-05-22 04:55:00

Re: Modernity

#7 2019-05-22 08:58:25

Re: Modernity

#8 2019-05-22 13:04:40

Re: Modernity

#9 2019-05-22 13:19:49

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