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MODERN TIMES
"What used to be described as thoughtless acts of aggression, was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member. fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man. ..anyone who held violent opinions could be trusted...and to plot successfully was a sign of intelligence."
Thucydides (describing the corruption of Athens)
"This is a land where no one has an indulgent smile for immorality or calls seducing or being seduced 'the spirit of modern times . "
Tacitus Germani
"people who will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman, implacable, slanders, prolifigates, fierce, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God (2 Timothy 3:2 Timothy 3:2-4" St. Paul
"In the muddled middle of the twentieth century A.D., the problems of the second century can be viewed with sympathy. The Romans of that bygone age worried about over-urbanization, recalcitrant teenagers, public finance, and even the problems of the aged. Their artists and literary men were struggling to discover new and appropriate forms of expression. Busy people, who could not do much reading, liked condensations and epitomes: the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius was the Readers' Digest of the second century. Citizens expected their government to provide them with all kinds of social services and then complained about high taxes. Workers dreamed of a six-hour day."
-Tom B. Jones
The Silver-Plated Age
-
Listen to these melancholy lines:
To whom can I speak today?
The gentle man has perished
The violent man has access to everybody.
To whom can I speak today?
The iniquity that smites the land
It has no end.
To whom can I speak today?
There are no righteous men.
The earth is surrendered to criminals
(written some four thousand years ago in the time of Egypt's Middle Kingdom)
"Art degraded, Imagination Denied, War Cover'd the Nations."
William Blake
The craft that we call modern;
The crimes that we call new;
John Bunyan had them typed and filed
In 1682"
-Rudyard Kipling
"How New York has fallen off during the last forty years! Its intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood-tide of material wealth.....men whose bank accounts are all they can rely on for social position and influence. As for their ladies, not a few of who were driven in the most sumptuous turnouts, with liveried servants, looked as if they might have been cooks or chambermaids a very few years ago."
-George Templeton Strong 1835
"The Enlightenment is the "great divide" in Western intellectual history that separates the modern period from all that went before it. The Enlightenment began in the seventeenth century and gave birth to the modern worldview with its understanding of reality as material and "self-contained,," operating in accord with "natural laws" of cause and effect.
Marcus J. Borg
Meeting Jesus AGAIN for the First Time
"The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts....
-Willa Cather
"Dante and Shakespeare divide
the modern world between them;
there is no third."
-T.S. Eliot
"I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought."
-Alexander Herzen (1812-70)
From the Other Shore
"Our epoch has been given many nicknames-the Age of Anxiety, the Atomic Age, the Space Age. it might, with equally good reason, be called the Age of Television Addiction, the Age of Soap Opera, the Age of the Disk Jockey."
-Aldous Huxley (1958)
"In one of the curious ironies of history at the beginning of the new century, with the triumphant arrival of modern times, one of the most influential currents of thought was the call for a return to the past."
-Gary Lachman
Politics and the Occult
"It is a mistake to think the times we are living in are like any other. These are extraordinary times."
-P.D. Ouspensky
"Some tolerance of dissent has characterized many human societies and organizations down through the ages. But the deliberate and systematic attempt to make life livable for dissenters is a product of the modern world and the open society. How alien this point of view was in some earlier societies is illustrated in Petrarch's remarks to his patron, the Lord of Padua:
Thou must not be the master but the father of thy subjects and must love them as thy children; yea, as members of the body. Weapons, guards, and soldiers thou mayest employ against the enemy-with thy subjects good will is sufficient. By citizens, of course, I mean those who love the existing order: for those who daily desire change are rebels and traitors, and against such a stern justice may take its course."
-John Gardner
Self-Renewal
"A state which dwarfs its men....will find that with small men no great thing can be accomplished."
-John Stuart Mill
"the illusion that times that were are better than those that are, has probably pervaded all ages."
-Horace Greeley
"Why did the Twentieth century produce so many-and such vivid-dystopias, works of fiction depicting not an ideal future but a future as terrible as could be imagined."
-Theodore Dalrymple
Our culture, What's Left of it
"We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."
-George Bernard Shaw
Man and Superman
"We live as if in a dream. Our sense of self-preservation has nearly left us. All moral limits are gone. Work and play absorb our every moment. Silent time is impossible to bear, while the music remains very loud. The new sin, of course, (besides self-restraint) is thinking. For the first time in history it is possible to "think too much,"because thinking, if taken too far, leads to uncomfortableness; and above all, we are the Comfortable Ones."
-J.R. Nyquist
The Origins of the Fourth World War
"I think people think too much!"
-Frank Sinatra
"Modern man's besetting temptation is to sacrifice his direct perceptions and spontaneous feelings to his reasoned reflections; to prefer in all circumstances the verdict of his intellect to that of his immediate intuitions."
-Aldous Huxley
"Our contemporary Western society, in spite of its material, intellectual and political progress, is increasingly less conducive to mental health, and tends to undermine the inner security, happiness, reason and the capacity for love in the individual; it tends to turn him into an automaton who pays for his human failure with increasing mental sickness and with despair hidden under a frantic drive for work and so-called pleasure."
-Dr. Erich Fromm
"Modern man is anxious, even during peace and in the midst of economic affluence, because the technological world that constitutes his immediate environment, by separating him from the natural world under which he evolved, fails to satisfy certain of his unchangeable needs."
-Dubos
"This modern mind sees only half of the horse-that half which may become a dynamo, or an automobile, or any other horse powered machine. If this mind had much respect for the full-dimensioned, grass-eating horse, it would never have invented the engine which represents only half of him. The religious mind, on the other hand. has this respect; it wants the whole horse, and it will be satisfied with nothing less. I should say a religious mind that requires more than a half-religion."
-Allen Tate, "Remarks on the Southern Religion." in I'll Take My Stand
"If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century. I would be unable to find anything more precise than to repeat 'men have forgotten God". the failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimensions have been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this century."
-Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"We need not deny that modern doubt, like ancient doubt, does ask deep questions; we only deny that....it gives any deeper answers. And it is a general rule, touching what is called modern thought, that while the questions are often really deep, the answers are often decidedly shallow. And it is perhaps even more important to remark that, while the questions are in a sense eternal, the answers are in every sense ephemeral."
-G.K. Chesterton
The Well and the Shallows
"It's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering canting age....an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been."
Henry James
The Bostonians (1886)
"We currently live in the Economy and Culture of the "one-night stand." Industrialism has provided us innumerable commodities, amusements, and distractions, but these offer us little satisfaction. Instead we suffer ever-increasing alienation from our families, our communities and the the natural world."
-Wendell Berry
"This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims."
-Matthew Arnold
The Scholar Gypsy
"Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life is hatred of modern civilization....What shall I say concerning its mastery of and its waste of mechanical power.....its stupendous organization for the misery of life....was it all to end in a counting house on the top of a cinderheap?"
William Morris
"It is more precise to assert that we live in the time of the death of God than to declare God is dead."
-Richard Lowell Rubenstein
"The most significant characteristic of modern civilization is the sacrifice of the future for the present, and all the power of science has been prostituted to this purpose."
-William James
"However many locks are undone, human beings remain imprisoned in their several cages. Twentieth-century man is no freer than his nineteenth-century predecessor. At least, one assumes that he cannot feel free, for everywhere he is making frantic efforts to escape from....something. This something he has been unable to identify, but its existence is necessary to his peace of mind: if there is no cause to be destroyed, how then can he escape the result? Everywhere he is still indulging in excesses of drink, food, violence, and copulation' he is attempting to use the ancient system of orgy, but he cannot succeed in his attempts at purging himself because he does not know of what it is that he wishes to be purged."
Burgo Partridge
A History of Orgies
"The century of health, hygiene and contraceptives, miracle drugs and synthetic foods, is also the century of the concentration camp and the police state, Hiroshima and the murder story. Nobody thinks about death, about his own death, as Rilke asked us to do, because nobody leads a personal life. Collective slaughter is the fruit of a collectivized way of life."
-Octavio Paz, from "The Day of the Dead" in The Day of Solitude
"For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence. In contrast modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question."
-Michel Foucault
"The imbecile who sits beside us on the train doing financial deals at the top of his voice is in reality strutting around like a peacock with a crown of feathers and a multicolored ring around his penis. They want everyone to know that they are decision makers in a refrigerator manufacturing company, that they buy and sell on the stock exchange, that they organize conferences, or that their partner has left them. They have paid for a cell phone and the hefty bills that come with it, to flaunt their private lives in the presence of all."
-Umbert Eco
"Many people experience lives today steeped in such seething mediocrity that the beast-ridden savannah of our ancient past seems inviting by comparison. Whereas life may have once been "nasty, brutish, and short," these days it can be confused, pointless, and headed toward a disaster that most people don't have time enough to recognize is coming. Never before has reading the signs of the times been more essential, and never has it been so imperative that the concept of wisdom be a holistic notion favouring humanity over the special interest of some excessively needy individual, group, corporation, or nation-state."
-Charles D. Hayes
September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life
"We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. He feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at its disposal, more knowledge, more techniques than ever, it turns out that the world today goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been: it simply drifts."
-Ortega Y Gasset
"Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!
-Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass
"A multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor."
-William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
"Science Finds-Industry Applies-Man Conforms"
(Motto of the Chicago World's Fair,1933)
"Without Fear, and Without Haste, We Conquer The World"
(motto of the Chinese Space Agency)
"The spirit of rapine and greed is the true characteristic of the modern epoch: the poor exploit the rich, the workers and their employers, the tenant his landlord, the company promoter his shareholders, no less than the capitalist exploits and puts pressure on the industrialist, the industrialist his workers, and the landlord his tenants. And there is another way in which this antagonism is expressed, in the matter of taxation: the poor want the rich to pay it all in the form of sumptuary taxes, graded income-tax, estate duties, wealth taxes and taxes on unearned income. The rich seek to cast all burden onto the poor in the form of taxes on consumption."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty": that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it."
G.K. Chesterton
"What is wrong with the modern world is that having ceased to believe in the greatness of God, and therefore the infinite smallness (or greatness-the same thing!) of man, it had to invent or emphasize distinctions between men. It does not say "I have said, 'Ye are gods!" Nor does it say "all flesh is grass." It can neither rise to the heights or descend to the depths (these meet in a spiritual exaltation which may be called either optimism or pessimism). What it does say is that some men are gods, and that some flesh is grass, and that the former should live on the latter (combined with pate de fois gras and champagne), and this is false. For what elevates or depresses, what makes man regarded from one point of view as an angel and from another an ape, is not something peculiar to individuals, but characteristic of the species, something which cannot distinguish between men, precisely because it is inherent in man." "
-Richard Tawney 1880-1962
"Our present economic, social and international arrangements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness."
Aldous Huxley
"I'm not delivering any news if I tell you the world is a piece of hell for millions of people....There are always a few who manage to find a way out, humans are capable of the best as well as the worst, but you can't change human destiny. We live in a dark age, when freedoms are diminishing, when there is no space for criticism, when totalitarianism-the totalitarianism of multination corporations, of the marketplace-no longer even needs an ideology, and religious intolerance is on the rise...Orwell's '1984' is already here."
Jose Saramago (Nobel Prize Winner)
"When I was growing up good mobs of people all around then. Now people bit wicked. My time never do little bit wrong…otherwise get spear straight away. Now….little bit cheeky mob, Old time they would all be dead now, Old people were hard….I frightened when young. Only few people now, but it easy for this mob."
Big Bill Neidjie (Australian Aboriginal)
"It was not a superior quality of happiness that distinguished the pre-Ford, pre-radio, pre-boarding school home from our modern perches between migrations….It was confidence….that made the great difference between then and now, a confidence that reached down below comfort or pleasure into stability itself."
Henry Seidel Canby
"brilliant men, beautiful jazz babies, champagne baths, midnight revels, petting parties in the purple dawn, all ending in one terrific smashing climax.."
(a motion picture advertisement in the 1920s)
"The flapper was, in effect, the first thoroughly modern American."
-Joshua Zeitz
Flapped
"Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide awake. But this wide awake thinking has led us into mazes of nightmares in which torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason."
Octavio Paz
The Labyrinth of Solitude
"The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the "disenchantment of the world." Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental."
-Max Weber (1864-1920)
"We rush through heated garbage days
With fear in morbid blood-raw eyes:
Mobs in cancerous slums….
At noon. Angled faces in twisted Patterns of survival."Ben Okri (Nigerian Poet)
"The whole psychology of modern disquiet is linked with the sudden confrontation with space-time."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"Despite all the vaunted technological and economic progress of modern times, there are probably more poverty-stricken people in the world today than there were fifty years ago."
Dr. Eugene Staley (Stanford Research Institute)
"Modern emancipation has really been a new persecution of the Common Man. If it has emancipated anybody, it has in rather narrow ways emancipated the Uncommon Man. It has given an eccentric sort of liberty to some of the hobbies of the wealthy and to some of the lunacies of those who call themselves cultured. The only thing that it has forbidden is common sense, as it would have been understood by the common people."
-G.K. Chesterton
"A population subjected to drastic change is a population of misfits-unbalanced, explosive, and hungry for action."
Eric Hoffer
The Ordeal of Change
"Noise, crowding, pollution, and the sheer rush of our complex, modern society are rapidly becoming as oppressive to many individuals as the worst kind of political dictatorship."
Thomas F. Eagleton
"Modern man has left the realm of the unknown and the mysterious, and has settled down in the realm of the functional. He has turned his back to the world of the foreboding and the exulting and has welcomed the world of boredom."
Carlos Castenada
The Fire Within
"Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect."
Lionel Trilling
"It cannot be denied that for a society which has to create scarcity to save its members from starvation, to whom abundance spells disaster, and to whom unlimited energy means unlimited power for war and destruction, there is an ominous cloud in the distance though at present it be no bigger than a man's hand."
-Arthur Stanley Eddington
New Pathways in Science
"Living in an age of advertisement, we are perpetually disillusioned."
J.B. Priestly
"Throughout these years, the power of the State to do evil expanded with awesome speed. its power to do good grew slowly and ambiguously."
-Paul Johnson
Modern Times
"Pessimism in our time is infinitely more respectable than optimism; the man who foresees peace, prosperity, and a decline in juvenile delinquency is a negligent and vacuous fellow. The man who foresees catastrophe has a gift of insight which ensures that he will become a radio commentator, and Editor of Time or go to congress."
John Kenneth Galbraith
"In all the cities of the world, it is the same….The universal and modern man is the man in a rush (i.e. a rhinoceros), a man who has no time, who is a prisoner of necessity, who cannot understand that a thing might perhaps be without usefulness; nor does he understand that, at bottom, it is the useful that may be useless and back-breaking burden. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and uselessness of the useful, once cannot understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slave and robots."
Ionesco
"Countries like ours are full of people who have all of the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it....it aches!"
Bernard Levin
The Times (London),1968
"Our age will be known as the age of committees."
Sir Ernest Benn
"Modern man fashioned himself for the conquest of the external world: he had faith in machines and that faith was justified by works. He projected the infantile dream of limitless power upon adult society and looked forward to a time when a push button would command food as easily as the infant’s cry brings the bottle or the breast. But after four centuries of strenuous effort his mythic powers are still illusory. Despite his machines he starves in the midst of plenty; despite his knowledge of distant stars and intra-atomic worlds, the civilization he has created has given rise to a barbarism that now has swept across the planet. In a series of world wars and world revolutions Modern Man has in fact been painfully committing suicide."
Lewis Mumford
The Condition of Man
"The prevailing paradigm that speed is inherently good benefits some elements of society more than it does others, Those who benefit most are the largest institutions and travel directly into money and power. For most of the rest of the world, the emphasis on acceleration is harmful. It is surely harmful for workers. It is harmful for relationships among people. It creates anxiety. And it has very important ramifications for the survival of diverse non-western cultures."
Jerry Mander
In the Absence of the Sacred
"It rises on a basis of crude materialism and blind determinism built by the unconscious toil of the conquered, and bathed in their tears and blood, like the old pagan Coliseum-a ruin washed over by Christian centuries. It rises up monstrous, holding out before the eyes of the deluded mob of slaves-bringing bricks and pitch for its making-a vain mirage of perfect prosperity and terrestrial felicity….But at the same time on the glacis of the New Babel, there arise the launching ramps for missiles, and in its storehouse the ogival nuclear weapons pile up for the universal and total destruction to come."
Cardinal Pizzardo (Vatican 1960)
"The outstanding feature of our time is insecurity. Epochs of this character-witness the Reformation and the French Revolution-have always been unfavorable to reason and tolerance; they have therefore been epochs in which dictatorship has its opportunity. And men always feel insecure when their privileges are challenged. They are not prepared to accept the invasion of their wonted routines. They seek to make their private claims universal rights; and those who provide them with the means of enforcing their claims are regarded as their saviors. The limits of men's faith in a reason which disturbs their established expectations are more narrow than they care to admit. Yet such disturbance always comes in an age of economic contraction. Whenever, historically, the economic forces of society cannot contain themselves within the political forms-as, once more, in the Reformation and the French Revolution-we have moved into an epoch of war and revolution."
-Harold J. Laski "The Challenge of Our Times," Autumn 1939
"Surely we are justified in saying of our time: If you seek the monument to our folly, look about you. In our own day we have seen cities obliterated and ancient faiths stricken. We may well ask, in the words of Matthew, whether we are not faced with "great tribulation, such was not since the beginning of the world." We have for many years moved with a brash confidence that man had achieved a position of independence which rendered the ancient restraints needless. Now, in the first half of the twentieth century, at the height of modern progress, we behold unprecedented outbreaks of hatred and violence; we have seen whole nations desolated by war and turned into penal camps by their conquerors; we find half of mankind looking upon the other half as criminal. Everywhere occur symptoms of mass psychosis. Most portentous of all, there appear diverging bases of value, so that our single planetary globe is mocked by worlds of different understanding. These signs of disintegration arouse fear, and fear leads to desperate unilateral efforts toward survival, which only forward the process."
Richard M. Weaver
Ideas Have Consequences
" 'the modern world has been shaped by technology. It tumbles from crisis to crisis; on all sides there are prophecies of disaster and,
indeed, visible signs of breakdown."E.F. Schumacher
"If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void: ‘Nothing in the paper today,’ we sigh."
Valery
"Our thought has been ‘Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself.’ While we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves."
Woodrow Wilson (First Inaugural address Mar 4,1913)
"The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun."
-George Orwell
Shooting an Elephant
"Let us admit, even if in a whisper and only to ourselves: in this bustle of life at breakneck speed-what are we living for?"
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Anyone who does not wish to deceive himself by systematic lies must acknowledge the agony and horror of modern life."
T.S. Eliot
"We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their deficits."
Hazlitt
"To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind."
Edmund Burke
"Just because people have been saying for generations that the good old days are gone and our present condition is worse than anything in memory doesn’t mean it isn’t true."
David R. Slavitt
"It takes a kind of shabby arrogance to survive in our time, and a fairly romantic nature to want to."
-Edgar Z. Friedenberg
The Vanishing Adolescent
"Modern man represses his fear of the technical world and intoxicates himself with action, or better, with the illusion of action."
Jacques Ellul
"There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness."
-George Steiner
"People are anxious to endorse the tenets they consider fashionable lest they appear boorish and backward."
Ludwig Von Mises
To crush what is spiritual, moral, human-so to speak-in man, by specializing him; to form mere wheels of the great social machine, instead of perfect individuals; to make society and not conscience the center of life, to enslave the soul of things, to de-personalize man,-this is the dominant drift of our epoch."
Amiel
"A popular misconception exists that the builders of the pyramids or the cave painters of prehistory were somehow less intelligent that we are……This simply isn’t true-there is no evidence that the human brain has evolved at all in the last fifty thousand years at least. Modern people are merely benefiting from thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and experimentation, not from increased intellect….These ides are part of the mistaken view of history best described as Temporocentrism-the belief that our time is the most important and represents a "pinnacle" of achievement. The Tempororcentric view is a hangover from nineteenth-century ideas of progress. This crude version Darwinian evolution has led to many misinterpretations of the archeological evidence for ancient technological and cultural achievements."
Peter James & Nick Thorpe
Ancient Inventions
"The amount of real leisure a society enjoys tends to be in inverse
proportion to the amount of labour-saving machinery it employs."E.F. Schumacher
"Every time a savage tracks his game he employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other maters, would assure some reputation as a man of science….The intellectual labor of a "good hunter or warrior" considerably exceeds that of an ordinary Englishman."
Thomas Huxley
Collected Essays,1907
"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it."
Thomas Carlyle
"No poetry can bloom in the arid modern soil, the drama has died, and the patrons of art are no longer even conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals, the ecstatic dream, which hallowed by the presence of his God, is reproduced to bedizen a warehouse; or the plan of an abbey, which Saint Hugh may have consecrated, is adapted to a railway station."
Brook Adams
Law of Civilization and Decay 1896
"The modern age can be understood as that of an unrelenting 500-year war waged to destroy the environmental conditions for subsistence and to replace them by commodities produced within the frame of the new nation state. In this war against popular cultures and their frame-work, the State was at first assisted by the clergies of the various churches, and later by the professional and their institutional procedures. During this war, popular cultures and vernacular domains-areas of subsistence-were devastated on all levels. Modern history, from the point of view of the losers in this war, still remains to be written. The report on this war has so far reflected the belief that it helped ‘the poor’ towards progress. It was written from the point of view of the winners. Marxist historians are usually not less blinded to the values that were destroyed than their bourgeois, liberal, or Christian colleagues. Economic historians tend to start their research with categories that reflect the foregone conclusion that scarcity, defined by mimetic desire, is the human condition par excellence."
Ivan Illich
Shadow Work
The very word modern comes from a Latin word which means "just now", to be modern means, accordingly to be in the mode: that is fashionable-which means to discard the past as one would discard last year’s garment, and to wear the same uniform as one’s contemporaries……….
"We may say, therefore, that modern technology has deprived man of the kind of work that he enjoys most, creative, useful work with hands and brains, and given him plenty of work of a fragmented kind, most of which he doest not enjoy at all."
E.F. Schumacher
"Most Americans are aware that we, as a nation, are not enjoying our material success. To scan today’s cultural landscape is to see a burgeoning underclass, a growing army of homeless people, and increasingly frustrated, alienated, economically hard-pressed middle class. We see drugs, crime, violence, racism, hate crimes, mindless massacres and children killing children. We find deteriorating cities and crumbling infrastructures."
Norman Lear
"….all our lauded technological progress-our very civilization- is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal."
Einstein (Dec 16,1917)
"The modern world belongs to the half-educated, a rather difficult class, because they do not realize how little they know."
William R. Inge
"We are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance. Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operations as well. So as a corollary to writing about what we know, maybe we should add getting familiar with our ignorance."
-Thomas Pynchon, 1984
Doubt is our product.
-Born & Williamson tobacco company, internal memo, 1969
"Unhappiness is manifest at every level of the national scene. From big city to the remotest rural trailer court, our civic life is tattered and frayed. Unspeakable crimes occur in the most ordinary places. Government can’t fulfill its most basic role in guaranteeing the public safety. Our schools, in many cases, barely function. The consensus of what constitutes decent behavior fractured with the social revolutions of the 1960s, and has not been restored, Anything goes."
James Howard Kunstler
Home from Nowhere*
"I am truly horrified by modern man. Such absence of feeling, such narrowness of outlook, such a lack of passion and information, such feebleness of thought."
Alexander Herzen (1812-70)
Thinker from the other Shore
"First, one must take into account the deep psychic anxiety, the extraordinary prevalence of neurosis, which make our age unique. The typical modern has the look of the hunted. He senses that we have lost our grip upon reality. This, in turn, produces disintegration, and disintegration leaves impossible that kind of reasonable prediction by which men, in eras of sanity, are able to order their lives. And the fear accompanying it unlooses the great disorganizing force of hatred, so that states are threatened and wars ensue. Few men today feel certain that war will not wipe out their children's inheritance; and, even if this evil is held in abeyance, the individual does not rest easy, for he knows that the Juggernaut technology may twist or destroy the pattern of life he has made for himself. A creature designed to look before and after finds that to do the latter has gone out of fashion and that to do the former is becoming impossible."
Richard M. Weaver
Ideas Have Consequences
"It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times-the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie-seem attractive by comparison"
Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
"In the society of men the truth resides less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly it seen in the light of exiled truth, and beauty is no longer possible if it is not a lie."
R.D. Laing (1927-89)
The Politics of Experience
"The sickness of our times for me has been just this damn thing that everything has been getting smaller and smaller and less and less important. That the romantic spirit has dried up, and there is no shame today….We’re all getting so mean and small and petty and ridiculous, and we all live under the threat of extermination."
Norman Mailer
Hip, Hell , and the Navigator
"You don’t have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: that world is gone."
Peggy Noonan
What I saw at the Revolution
"I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "admin". The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final results. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and mounted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the thoroughly nasty business concern."
C.S. Lewis
"The beginning of the Atomic Age has brought less hope than fear. It is a primitive fear, the fear of the unknown, the fear of forces man neither channeled nor comprehend….it is the fear of irrational death."
Norman Cousins
Modern Man is Obsolete (1945)
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the "the social," our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek, little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures."
Jean Baudrillard
Cool Memories
"The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism."
Albert Camus
"We modern human beings are looking at life, trying to make some sense of it, observing a 'reality' that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue-only we've all been issued the wrong librettos. For a text, we're given the Bible. Or the Talmud or the Koran. We're given Time magazine and Reader's Digest, daily papers and the six o'clock news, we're given schoolbooks, sitcoms, and revisionist histories, we're given psychological counseling, cults, workshops, advertisements, sales pitches, and authoritative pronouncements by pundits, sold-out scientists, political activists, and heads of state. Unfortunately , none of these translations bears more than a faint resemblance to what is transpiring in the the true theater of existence, and most of them are dangerously misleading. We're attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe barroom melodramas or kindergarten skits. And when's the last time you heard anybody bitch about it to the management?"
Tom Robbins
half asleep in frog pajamas
"don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid."
Salvador Dali
"This strange disease of modern life,
With its sick hurry, its divided aims."Matthew Arnold(1822-88)
"The Empire was falling, the Barbarians were on the move….what was to be done, except to escape the age? Happy moment, when there was still somewhere to go, when the empty places were accessible and welcoming! We have been dispossessed of everything, even the desert."
E.M. Cioran
"So far the twentieth century seemingly belongs to Darwin, Marx, and Wagner."
Jacques Barzun
(and may we leave them behind. .ed)
The Century is dead; long live the Century!….the lights flashed, crowds sang, the sirens of craft in the harbor screeched and roared, bells pealed, bombs thundered, rockets blazed skyward, and the new century made its triumphant entry.
Tonight when the clock strikes twelve, the present century will have to come to an end. We look back upon it as a cycle of time within which the achievements in science and in civilization are not less than marvelous.
The advance of the human race during the past one hundred years has not been equaled by the progress of man within any of the preceding ages.
The possibilities of the future for mankind are the subjects of hope and imagination….
On this occasion, which is one of solemnity, I express the earnest wish that the rights of the individual man shall continue to be regarded as sacred, and that the crowning glory of the coming century shall be the lifting up on the burdens of the poor, the annihilation of all misery and wrong, and that the peace and goodwill which the angels proclaimed shall rest on contending nations as the snowflakes upon the land."
(Thus the twentieth century was issued in by the New York Times)
"Our century, the Twentieth, has been a Century of horrors."
Edward Abbey
Book: Raids on the Unspeakable…by Thomas Merton
"This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities by science and technology which now constitute the slavery of man-if man is not enslaved to it."
Jonas Salk
"The technology of mass production is inherently violent, ecologically
damaging, self-defeating in terms of non-renewable resources, and
stultifying for the human person."-EF. Schumacher
"Ours is an age which is proud of machines that think, and suspicious
of any man who tries to. "Howard Mumford Jones
"In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical
powers, modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man. If only there were more and more wealth, everything else, it is thought, would fall into place. Money is considered to be all-powerful; if it could not actually buy non-material values, such as justice, harmony, beauty or even health it could circumvent the need for them or compensate for their loss. The development of production and the acquisition of wealth have thus become the highest goals of the modern world in relation to which all other goals, no matter how much lip-service may still be paid to them, have come to take second place. The highest goals require no justification; all secondary goals have finally to justify themselves in
terms of the service their attainment renders to the attainment of the highest.
This is the philosophy of materialism, and it is this philosophy-or metaphysic-which is now being challenged by events. There has never been a time, in any society in any part of the world, without its sages and teachers to challenge materialism and plead for a different order of priorities. The languages have differed, the symbols have varied, yet the message has always been the same: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things (the material things which you
also need) shall be added unto you."E.F. Schumacher
Small is Beautiful
"Sanctity is out and television is in. The city skyline is broken by the twisted arms of the TV aerial , not by the plain
four-armed cross of Christ. TV is only a symptom of the disease of an age which has learned how to pull the atom to
pieces without discovering how to integrate itself. It represents the immense technical and scientific achievements of
the few for the enjoyment of the many: the dictatorship of a commercial technology which screams at us from every advertisement that progress is marked by new gadgets and that the secret of happiness is to be purchased with a washing machine and a new soap powder."-Lewis Mumford
"Modern man has not retained his sanity.
The sophist will cry out at this point that 'nobody knows
what sanity is. ' But while 'he' may not know it, it is
knowable up to a point, regardless of obscurantist 'science' ."Konrad Kellen
"For though today is always today and the moment is always
modern, we are the only men in history who fell back upon
bragging about the mere fact that today is not yesterday.
I fear that some in the future will explain it by saying
that we had precious little else to brag about.'G. K. Chesterton
"Modern man honors a man by calling him a realist. This
concept has been wrought from religious prejudice. This makes .
modern times appear like a new civilization, different from
the past. "Von Weizacker
" Also it seems very far from sure that the Victorians did
not experience a much keener, because less frequent, sexual
pleasure than we do; and that they were not dimly aware of
this, and so chose a convention of suppression, repression
and silence to maintain the keenness of the pleasure. In a
way, by transferring to the public imagination what they left
to the private, we are the more Victorian-in the derogatory
sense of the word-century, since we have, in destroying so
much of the mystery, the difficulty, the aura of the forbidden,
destroyed also a great deal of the pleasure. Of course we
cannot measure comparative degrees of pleasure; but it may
be luckier for us than for the Victorians that we cannot."John Fowles
" 'Our Men of that time, ' continued the necromancer in a grim voice, voice 'have exactly three ideas in their magnificent noodles. The first is that the human species is superior to others. The second, that the twentieth century is superior to other centuries. And the third,that human adults of the twentieth century are superior to their young. The whole thing is an illusion being labeled Progress, and anybody who questions it is called Mad. The March of Progress, God help them. "
The Book of Merlyn
T. H. White
Texas Press
Inequalities of status between members of the various 'estates' do not exclude a kind of mutual respect and genuine human intercourse. Looking back to the "good old days" people sing the praises of personal relations and extol the virtues of fidelity and loyalty as opposed to the coldness and lack of sympathy between individuals who are theoretically equal. We have all succumbed to Nietzsche's commandment "Be Hard"--
now we are dead. Life which is love means sensitivity.
"The secret that the Victorians knew 'The one Great truth' which our modern thought does not know and which it may possibly perish through not knowing, is that to enjoy life means to take it seriously."
G. K. Chesterton
"Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure."
Aldous Huxley
"The supposed great misery of our century is the lack of time;
our sense of that, 'not' a disinterested love of science, and
of the ingenuity and income of our societies to finding faster
ways of doing things-as if the final act of mankind is to
grow closer not to a perfect humanity,, but to a perfect lightning flash."The French Lieutenants Women
John FowLes
Little, Brown and Co .Boston-Toronto
"Modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sorely " '
beset by his own bad conscience, and wants rather to
know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature-how
he is to love the enemy in his own heart and call the wolf his brother. "C . G . Jung
"--they dwelt anxiously among political, economic and moral ferments and earthquakes. Wasted a number of frightful
wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang
from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary
world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles , to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the
consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and
listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of
death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in tomorrow."
The Glass Bead Game
Herman Hesse
"The growth of what is called the Modern World has been, by turns , both the cause and effect of the destruction of that old sense of universal order. "
Wendell Berry
"It is an awful satire, and an epigram on the materialism of
our modern age , that nowadays the only use that can be made
of solitude is imposing it as a penalty, as jail. What a
difference there is between those times when, no matter how
secular materialism always was, man believed in the solitude
of the convent, when, in other words , solitude was revered
as the highest, as the destiny of Eternity-and the present
when it is detested as a curse and is used only for the
punishment of criminals. Alas, what a change. "Soren Kierkegaard
1850
"Our age could be characterized as a manifold experiment in faithlessness, and if it has yet produced no effective understanding of the practicalities of faith, it has certainly produced massive evidence of the damage of its absence. "
Wendell Berry
The Unsettling of America
"To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness . "
G.K. Chesterton
"Our is a world in which knowledge accumulates and wisdom decays. "
Aldous Huxley
"The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked
at from the standpoint of the social 'system' , the aim of
specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim to see that
the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering,
agriculture, education, etc. are given into the hands of the
most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not
appear until we look at specialization from the opposite
stand-point-that of the individual person. We then begin to
see the grotesquery-indeed, the impossibility-of an idea
of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of
personal wholeness. "Wendell Berry
"Men some centuries from now will surely look back upon our time
as a golden age of unparalleled technical, intellectual, institutional, and perhaps even of artistic creativity. Life in Demosthenes' Athens, in Confucius' China, and in Mohammed’s Arabia was violent, risky, and uncertain; hopes struggled with fears; greatness teetered perilously on the brim of disaster. We belong in this high company and should count ourselves fortunate to live in one of the great ages of the world. "W.H. McNeil
TheRise of the West
"The axiom "you become what you hate" is never more apparent than today. We have tried to banish from the planet darkness and ignorance of the ages. We have heralded a new age of discovery and civilization for mankind. We have been blowing the horn of the golden age while reviling the dark superstition of the past, the abysmal obscurant patterns of thought which prevented us from seeing the world as it "really is. " One cannot help but wonder if we have not instead embodied a greater ignorance and folly which beggars all that has preceded it, bringing a total lack of understanding that has created a howling apocalyptic nightmare which the planetary body must now wrestle in order to survive. "
Paul Hawken
The Magic of Findhorn
"One of the main characteristics of modern thought is a contradiction between the way man regards the external world, outside himself, and the way he regards the internal world, inside himself. As regards the external world, he has never been more objective, more convinced of the universal application of 'laws' , expressible by formulae and consistently measurable in their effects. In this field, any belief which throws doubt on the principle of measurability, for example, By any belief in intelligence or consciousness belonging to beings greater in scale than man, is in danger of being regarded as superstition.
As regards his internal world, on the other hand, man has rarely been more subjective, more convinced of the special validity of his every whim, imagination, hope and fear, and less willing to admit that his inner world is subject to any laws whatsoever. "Rodney Collin
The Theory of Celestial Influence
"Descartes' philosophy is haunted by two nightmares which in a
sense became the nightmares of the whole modern age, not be-
cause this age was so deeply influenced by Cartesian philosophy,
but because their emergence was almost inescapable once the
true implications of the modern world view were understood.
These nightmares are very simple and very well known. In the
one, reality, the reality of the world as well as of human
life, is doubted; if neither the senses nor common sense nor
reason can be trusted, then it may well be that all we take
for reality is only a dream. The other concerns the general
human condition as it was revealed by the new discoveries and
the impossibility for man to trust his sense and his reason;
under these circumstances it seems, indeed, much more likely
that an evil spirit, a 'Dieu Trompeur' , willfully and spitefully
betrays man than that God is the ruler of the universe. The
consummate devilry of this evil spirit would consist in having
created a creature which harbors a notion of truth only to be-
stow on it such other faculties that it will never be able
to reach any truth, never be able to be certain of anything. "Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition
"This time, like all times, is a very good one-if we but know
what to do with it. "Emerson
"If you want to live an easy life, you picked the wrong century
to be born in. "Trotsky
"Mr Gandhi, what do you think of modern civilization?
"That would be a good idea."(Gandhis reply to a reporters question disembarking in Southampton in lB3O)
"Muggers attack in broad daylight. Churches lock their doors because, as one clergyman explains, "Too many bums come in, wander around and take what they like." Last week a purse snatcher was shot to death by a rookie policeman; a 4O-year-old man was beaten to death in his home with a leg wrenched by a couple of intruders from his end table; a bank' was robbed and police pursued the bandits through the streets while passers by scattered to escape the gunfire.. ."
Time (Mar 22,1963)a description of the capital city of the leading nation of Western Civilization
"By the spirit of the age, then, the man of to-day is forced into skepticism about his own thinking, in order to make him receptive to truth which comes to him from authority. To all this constant influence he cannot make the resistance that is desirable because he is an overworked and distracted being without power to concentrate. More-over, the manifold material travails which are his lot work upon his mentality in such a way that he comes at last to believe himself unqualified even to make any claim to thoughts of his own.
His self-confidence is also diminished through the pressure exercised upon him by the huge and daily increasing mass of Knowledge. He is no longer in a position to take in as something which he has grasped all the new discoveries that are constantly announced; he has to accept them as fact although he does not understand them. This being his relation to scientific truth he is tempted to acquiesce in the idea that in matters of thought also his judgment can- not be trusted. Thus do the circumstances of the age do their best to deliver us up to the spirit of the age. The seed of skepticism has germinated. In fact, the modern man has no longer any spiritual self-confidence at all. Behind a self-confident exterior he conceals a great inward lack of confidence. In spite of his great capacity in material matters he is an altogether stunted being, because he makes no use of his capacity for thinking. It will ever remain incomprehensible that our generation, which has shown itself so great by its achievements in discovery and invention, could fall so low spiritually as to give up thinking."Albert Schweitzer
Out of my life and thought
"We modern men are ideological creatures. That is, we were invented by ideologists. For if we removed all ideology from the world, we ourselves would (in large part) be removed. That is the low state we are in. It is not the extent to which we have absorbed ideology, but the extent to which ideology has absorbed us."
-J.R. Nyquist
"Though the modern may know a million secrets, the ancients world new one-and that one was greater than the million; for the million secrets breed death, disaster, sorrow, selfishness, lust, and avarice, but the one secret confers life, light, and truth."
Manly P. Hall
"Reading Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, The Thirties, I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed esophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period-twenty years, perhaps-during which he did not notice it."
-George Orwell
"The spirit of our age dislikes what is simple. It no longer
believes the simple can be profound...The spirit of the age
loves dissonance, in tones, in lines, and in thought. That
shows how far from thinking it is, for thinking is harmony
within us."Albert Schweitzer
"Men of earlier cultures were tactually aware of external reality-the relationship was martial-whereas moderns are voyeurs . "
Aldous Huxley
"You turn to religion him who was born to wear the sword, you
make a King of one who was born to preach. Thus all your
steps are out of the true way. "Dante
"Modern life is the silent pact to keep up appearances."
by John Buchan
Longmans-Green & Co.
"The moderns are fond of the modern metaphor 'You can't turn
back the clock' ,obviously you can with one finger. Anything
being a human construction can be reconstructed upon any plan
that has ever existed."G.K. Chesterton
"The modern mind is forced to face the future by a certain
sense of fatigue, not unmixed by terror with regards to the past. "G. K. Chesterton
"The Modern Temper. Hollow men eating their Naked Lunches in the Wasteland while awaiting Go out. Botched civilization. Sick
world. Untergang des Abendlandes. No life beyond the grave. Loss of traditional symbols of Western Culture. No integrating myths. No worship. No reality independent of the disinterested observer. No objective, sharable truth of truths. No scale of values. No norm of human nature. . . No boundaries between the rational and the irrational, normal or abnormal. Solipsism. Nothing to discipline our emotions. No firm roots in domestic or civil ritual. Life pattern less, purposeless, meaningless. Everything "phony"Hoxie Neale Fairchild
Religious Trends in English Poetry
"What a spectacle do the nations present today! We see a hand-
full of rich, idle and voluptuous men enjoying themselves at
the expense of a multitude which flatters their passions
and can only live by pandering to their appetites. This assembly
of oppressors and oppressed constitutes what is called Society,
from which the vilest and most miserable elements are selected
to make soldiers."Saxe
1756
"Now, the world' s decisions were made by smaller men; by gray,
faceless bureaucrats without vision or wit; committeemen who
spoke committee speak and thought committee thought, men who know
more of dogma than destiny, men who understood production but
were ignorant of pleasure, men more comfortable with a file full
of papers than a fistful of gems; unsmiling men, unmannered
men, undreaming men, men who believed they could guide humanity
when they could not seduce a countess nor ride a horse."Tom Robbins
Still Life With Woodpecker
"The revolution of modernity has....been a moral revolution of extraordinary scope, a radical alternation in what the human imagination is prepared to envisage and demand. And it has changed the basic dimensions in which we measure happiness and unhappiness, success and failure. it has given us the sense that we make our own history; it has led us to impose new and more exacting demands on ourselves and our leaders; it has set loose the restless visions of a world in which men might be liberated from age-old burdens, and come to set their own standards and govern their own lives."
-Charles Frankel
"Curious, is it not, that in modern Western society alone
"Enlightenment" with a capital "E" came to mean the repression
of transcendent aspiration, the destruction of religious
experience. "Theodore Roszack
"Is it not terrible, is it not humiliating to suppose that Moses climbed Mount Sinai, that the Hellenes built their enchanting citadels, that the Romans fought their Punic Wars, that the handsome Alexander crossed the Granicus in his plumed helmet and fought at Arbela, that the apostles proclaimed the word of God, that martyrs suffered, poets sang songs, painters painted, and knights glittered at tournaments-and all this so that the French, German, and Russian 'bourgeois' in his ugly and ridiculous attire might enjoy the blessings of peace, "individually' or 'collectively' , on the ruins of past greatness?...One would have to blush for mankind if this shabby ideal of universal utility, or shallow, commonplace work and inglorious prissiness were to triumph for centuries."
K.N. Leontiev
(1831-1891)
"We, who detest from the depths of our soul all Christianity,
from Jesus ' to Marx's, look with extraordinary sympathy upon
this 'resurgence' of modern life in the pagan cult of force
and daring. "Mussolini, Dec. 1919
"We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential ingredients of our poetry. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned by great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath- a roaring car that seems to run on shrapnel-is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. We will glorify war-the world's only hygiene.. .We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, an by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals.. ."
First Futurist Manifesto
Le Figaro 1909
"Multicolored billboards on the green of the fields, iron bridges
that chain the hills together, surgical trains that pierce the blue
belly of the mountains, enormous turbine pipes, new muscles of the
earth, may you be praised by the Futurist poets, since you destroy
the old sickly cooing sensitivity of the earth."Marinetti (the caffeine of Europe)
"The past has a tyrannical influence which is difficult to escape-
The worst is that there is always something of the past within us.
Fortunately, we can also enjoy modern construction, marvels of
science, technique of all kinds, as well as modern art. We can
enjoy real jazz and its dance; we see the electric lights of
luxury and utility; the window displays. Even the thought of all
this is gratifying. Then we feel the great difference between
modern times and the past. "Mondrian
"Today, in every domain, all forms of imagination are rampant-except in those spheres where our "historical" life goes on,
stifled, unhappy and precarious, like everything out of date. An immense gulf separates the man of adventure from humanity
and our societies from our civilization. We are living with ideas of morality, sociology, philosophy and psychology that belong to
the nineteenth century. We are our own great-great-grandfathers. As we watch rockets rising to the sky and feel the ground vibrating
with a thousand new radiations, we are still smoking the pipe of Thomas Braindorge. Our literature, our philosophical discussions, our ideological conflicts, our attitude toward reality-all this is still slumbering behind the doors that have been burst
open. Youth! Youth!-go forth and tell the world that everything is opened up and already the Outside has come in!"Jacques Bergier & Pauwels
The Morning of the Magicians
"In my opinion, a man who has not lived through Hegel's phenomenology who has not passed through that furnace and been tempered by it, is not complete, not modern. "
Herzen (about 1830)
We search for justification, explanations, try to find ideas and truths.
Everything that surrounds us has been submitted to the searching
eye of criticism. This is a disease that affects all ages of
transition. Formerly it was otherwise: all relationships, ,whether
close or distant, family or social, were clearly defined-just or
unjust, they were defined. Hence there was no place for lengthy
meditation; to have an easy conscience it was enough to conform
to positive law. The whole existing order then seemed natural,
like the circulatory and digestive systems whose origins and
operation are hidden from our consciousness, although they function
according to specific laws and need be neither watched nor
understood. For every case there was a ready-made solution;
there was nothing better than to live in conformity with an
established pattern."Alexander Herzen (1830) Russian Philosopher
"I do not want happiness, even as a gift, if I cannot be easy about the fate of all my brethren, my own flesh and blood.
They say that there can be no harmony without dissonance; that| may be all very pleasant and proper for music lovers, but certainly not for those who have been picked out to express the idea of dissonance by their fate...What good is it to me to know that reason will ultimately be victorious and that the future will be beautiful, if I was forced by fate to witness the triumph of chance, irrationality, and brute force?"Belinsky (about l88O)
Russian philosopher
"Modern man, in industrial society, has changed the form and intensity of idolatry. He has become the object of blind economic forces which rule his life. he worships the work of his hands, he transforms himself into a thing. Not the working class alone is alienated (in fact, if anything, the skilled worker seems to be less alienated than those who manipulate men and symbols) but everybody is. This process of alienation which exists in the European-American industrialized countries, regardless of their political structure, has given rise to new protest movements. The renaissance of socialist humanism is one symptom of this protest. Precisely because alienation has reached a point where it borders on insanity in the whole industrialized world, undermining and destroying its religious, spiritual, and political traditions and threatening general destitution through nuclear war, many are better able to see that Marx had recognized the central issue of modern man's sickness; that he had not only seen, as Feuerbach and Kierkegaard had, this "sickness" but that he had shown that contemporary idolatry is rooted in the contemporary mode of production and can be changed only by the complete change of the economic-social constellation together with the spiritual liberation of man."
-Erich From: Beyond the Chains of Illusion
"Let the devil take all dreams! What is good is what is under
our nose, within reach of your hand."Belinsky
"So read these texts, look around you With an honest eye, and
have the courage to make a truthful. choice. To live with
danger in these times, with the ache of disorder in one's
bones and the bars of prison down one's horizon, is to live with health. "Alan Lelchuk
American Mischief
"Nowadays is, lit by lightning, a plague has stricken
the moths , and Blanche has been 'put away' .. .Tennessee Williams "
Memoirs
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. "
Oscar Wilde
"Surely one of the most characteristic phenomena of our time is the denial of asylum to those persecuted for religious or political reasons. History has known nothing like it. The Jews driven from Spain found shelter in the Sultan's empire and in the Netherlands Republic; the Huguenots fleeing France settled in the colonies of the New World, or in the Prussian Kingdom; but 'displaced persons' are an essentially modern phenomenon. Countries did not grant visas to poverty-stricken German Jews, or gave them only with extreme reluctance. In response to public opinion and following various interventions, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States called an international conference on July 6, 1938, at Evian, to do some- thing about this problem. But the only result of the Evian conference was the creation of a permanent intergovernmental committee with headquarters in London; its representatives regularly went to Berlin to arrange for the financing of emigration through property requisitioned from the Jews. But these attempts failed because the powers of the intergovernmental committee were very limited, and the nations making it up, divided in their counsels and their minds, did not really know what they wanted. "
Leon Poliakov
London: Elek Books
Harvest of Hate
"But there have been positive changes: some people are no longer angry when told that restoration must come from with-
in. The belief that everything is 'politics' and that radical rearrangements of the 'system' will suffice to save civilization
is no longer held with the same fanaticism as it was held 25 years ago. Everywhere in the modern world there are
experiments in new lifestyles and voluntary simplicity; the arrogance of materialistic scientism is in decline, and it is
sometimes tolerated even in polite society to mention God."Schumacher
"It is always the autumn of 1926, the last Saturday in September or the first in October, the ivy leaves on the
stadium wall crisping to scarlet, the sun still warm, the lucent air all blue and gold. It is a Midwestern university, .
the Midwestern university-mock-Gothic library and chapel mock-classic classrooms, the lush tapestry-brick veneer of
fraternity row. With the big game only hours away, the saxophones of the college band are giving anticipatory blasts between the chapel and the gymnasium. Over that pied and milling campus the sunshine is almost tangible. The sheiks wear Fair Isle sweaters
, checked plus fours with tasseled shoes, or gray trousers so bell-bottomed that they completely cover the saddle-strap
shoes. Most of the sheiks are hatless, and their hair, parted in the middle, is lacquered with Slikum or Staycomb to a mirrorlike
stiffness. The shebas have close-cropped, shingled hair. Beneath their sweaters or sheath dresses there is onlythe vaguest convexity of breast. Their knobby knees are topped by frilled garters, and fringed skirts sway above the knees.
A Theta Delt is strumming 'Bye Bye Blackbird' on his ukelele for a covey of shebas sitting on the library steps.
They sit with legs apart, displaying the y-shaped pattern of their lace panties with provocative unconcern. A freshman,
still marked with the grotesque innocence of Central High School (he will shed it before spring) , passes timidly by the
insouciant sophs and juniors, wearing a beanie branded with the numerals 1930. The date is, of course, part of his absurdity
, that there will never be anything but here and now-this timeless moment throbbing to the beat of 'The Varsity Drag. '
It is warm mindless and immediate. After the game there are the ritual dances along fraternity row. Over the fieldstone mantel of the fraternity-house living room stand the cabalistic Greek letters. In the corner the saxophones wail and bulb flashes on and off in the interior of the bass drum to light up a windmill or a waterfall or a sailboat by moonlight painted on the drumhead. A few couples
are dancing, a few more are in the kitchen mixing drinks, but most are twined in each others' arms in the convenient alcoves
or along the wide staircase as they neck with concentrated unconcern. After the dance there is the ride home. Some of the
dough heavy sheiks may drive a Jordan Playboy, with port and starboard lights, but most settle for the modified Model- T, the tin lizzy touring with the top and windshield removed and its side covered with legends: Four Wheels-No Brakes; Stop me If you've heard This; Enter by Rear. Under the trees the last sheik parks with the last Sheba for the last drink and the last neck. Yet for all this hip-flasked groping in the moonlight, it is somehow innocent, or almost so, and has the poignancy of everything that is brief. "
"Sheiks and Shebas, Dance no more"
Horizon Magazine July 1963
Francis Russell
She: Tell me, are you fond of Brahms?
He: OH, very! But I think I like shredded-wheat biscuits even better. ....Sheiks in coonskins with hip flasks, shebas in helmet hats carrying tapered cigarette holders.. They are models rather than caricatures, hey-hey sayers to a life that reaches its thundering climax in the cheering sections at the Saturday big game…
"People have now been talking long enough about the frivolity of this age; I believe it is now high time to talk a little about its melancholy, and I hope that by this everything will be better clarified. Or is not melancholy the defect of our age? Is it not this which resounds even in its frivolous laughter? Is it not melancholy which has deprived us of courage to command, of courage to obey,
of power to act, of the confidence to hope?"Soren Kierkegaard
"The revolution of modernity has....been a moral revolution of extraordinary scope, a radical alteration in what the human imagination is prepared to envisage and demand. And it has changed the basic dimensions in which we measure happiness and unhappiness, success and failure. it has given us the sense that we make our own history; it has led us to impose new and more exacting demands on ourselves and our leaders; it has set loose the restless vision of a world in which men might be liberated from age-old burdens, and come to set their own standards and govern their own lives."
-Charles Frankel
"Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination may talk of degeneracy and decay, but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present."
-Thomas Macaulay
"The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in."
-A.E. Housman
"Our age reminds one vividly of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gives it validity no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic-tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on."
Soren Sierkegaard
"Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a teenage dropout who ran away from a hated apprenticeship, spent the next twenty years in apparent idleness punctuated by occasional low-level jobs, and until he was well into his thirties seemed to have no future whatsoever. But then, unexpectedly even to those who knew him best, he became one of the most influential writers of his time and and, as it would eve3ntually turn out, of the modern world. Rousseau's triumph was the more surprising since, unlike most famous writers then or later, he did not go to school for a single day and was essentially self-taught. In a series of amazingly original books, of which The Social Contract is the best known , he developed a political theory that deeply influenced the American Founding Fathers and the French revolutionaries, helped to invent modern anthropology, and advanced a concept of education that remains challenging and inspiring to this day. His Confessions virtually created the genre of autobiography as we know it, tracing lifelong patterns of feeling to formative experiences and finding a deep unity of the self beneath apparent contradictions; modern psychology owes him an immense debt."
-Leo Damrosch
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
"The old modern age is ended. We live in a post-modern as well as a post-Christian age.....It is post-Christian in the sense that people no longer understand themselves, as they understood themselves for some fifteen hundred years, as ensouled creatures under God, born to trouble and whose salvation depends upon the entrance of God into history as Jesus Christ.
It is post-modern because the Age of Enlightenment with its vision of man as a rational creature, naturally good and part of the cosmos which itself is understandable by natural science-this age has also ended. it ended with the catastrophes of the twentieth century."
Walker Percy
"...The Judeo-Suburban Consumer Citadels so many of us live in grow increasingly nonsensical, even if you happen to be one of the winners in the system. The Fossil Fuel Empire grows ever more violent and demonic. You put busted glass and surveillance cameras on top of the safety walls and a paid guard at the locked gate of your Republican Golf Community, and you still get robbed silly by the insurance scammer, the pool boy, and the guy who mows the lawn. Or every time you misplace something, you think you're robbed. It's stupid to live this way if you have any spiritual aspirations at all..."
-David James Duncan
God Laughs & Plays
"Since the introduction of the disk drive in 1956, the density of information it can record has swelled from a paltry 2,000 bits to 100 billion bits (gigabits), all crowded in the small spaces of a square inch. That represents a 50-million-fold increase."
-Chip Walter Scientific American 2005
"In less than half a century we have moved from a condition of essential isolation into one of intense and almost unbroken mediation....A finely filamented electronic scrim has slipped between ourselves and the so-called "outside world." The idea of spending a day, never mind a week, out of the range of all our devices sounds bold even risky."
-Sven Birkerts The Gutenberg Elegies; The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
"The real social revolution of the last 30 years, one we are still living through, is the switch from a life that is largely organized for us to a world in which we are all forced to be in charge of our own destiny."
-Charles Handy
"....automatons, who follow without force, who are guided without leaders, who make machines which act like men and produce men who act like machines.....This alienation and atomization leads to ever-increasing insanity. Life has no meaning, there is no joy, no faith, no reality . Everybody is "happy"-except that he does not feel, does not reason, does not love. In the nineteenth century the problem was that "God is dead", in the Twentieth century the problem is that "man is dead."
Eric Fromm The Sane Society
"In this electronic age we see ourselves being translated more and more into the form of information. moving toward the technological extension of consciousness."
-Marshall McLuhan
"The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in"
-A.E. Housman
Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution and display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen. The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift-from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality."
-Kevin Kelly
-"Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity for wandering. Its progressive thought and its progressive technology make the transition through time, from generation to generation, a true migration into uncharted seas of adventure. The very benefit of wandering is that it is dangerous and needs skill to avert evils. We must expect, therefore, that the future will disclose dangers. It is the business of the future to be dangerous ; and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties. The prosperous middle classes, who ruled the nineteenth century, placed an excessive value upon placidity of existence. They refused to face the necessities for social reform imposed by the new industrial system, and they are now refusing to face the necessities for intellectual reform imposed by the new knowledge. The middle class pessimism over the future of the world comes from a confusion between civilization and security. In the immediate future there will be less security than in the immediate past, less stability. It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But, on the whole, the great ages have been unstable ages."Alfred North Whitehead
Science and the Modern World
"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religion destroys spirituality."
-Michael Ellner
****************
Article:" Measuring Modernity: The U.S. Is Not Number One" by Rodger Doyle Scientific American Dec 2003
Book: "William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson
Book: "Modern Times, Modern Places." by Peter Conrad
Book: "Eiffel's Tower: And the World's Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count" by Jill Jonnes
Book: "Revolt against the Modern World" by Evola
Book: "The Theological Origins of Modernity" by Michael Allen Gillespie
Book: "The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century" by Peter Watson
Book: "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 years of Western Cultural Life" by Jacques Barzun
Book: "Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties" by Paul Johnson
Book: "The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 by Paul Johnson
Book: "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World" by Jack Weatherford
Book: "American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century" by Christine Stansell
Book: "Inventing Modernity" by John Lienhard
Book: "Barbed Wire: A Political History" by Olivier Razac
Book: "The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment" by Roy Porter
Book: "The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century" by Peter Watson
Book: "Men, Machines, and Modern Times" by Elting E. Morison
Book: "Religion and the Modern Mind" by W.T. Stace
Book: "Forgotten Truth: The Primordial Tradition" by Huston Smith
Book: "How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions." by Francis Wheen
Book: "Twin Tracks: The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World" by James Burke
Book: "Telegram! Modern History As Told Through More than 400 Witty, Poignant, and Revealing Telegrams" by Linda Rosenkrantz
Book: "Three New Deals: Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany, and the Rise of State Power in the the 1930s" by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
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