The World After Modernity

Mouthwash

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I found a really great essay by John Reilly. Religion, empire and the course of civilization:

A persistent and highly influential image of the future appeared in the late nineteenth century. It occurred to a long list of people: I might mention Ernst von Lasaulx, Henry and Brooks Adams, Nikolai Danilevsky, Nikolai Berdyaev and Walter Schubart, and for that matter Albert Schweitzer and Jacob Burckhardt. They all shared the intuition that the Western world had entered a new "Hellenistic" age, and the twentieth century was going to see a recurrence of the less pleasant aspects of Hellenism. (1) These would include such things as demagogic tyrannies, annihilation warfare, and a relaxation of traditional restraints in art and personal life.

Nietzsche had said as much, too, and in fact anyone who entered the 20th century with this modest insight would have met with few surprises. (2) During the 20th century itself, the notion was worked up into great, formal models of history. This enterprise is sometimes called "macrohistory," (3) unless it waxes very philosophical, in which case it is called "metahistory." Either way, the best-known example is still Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West," the first of whose two volumes appeared just as the First World War ended. The biggest example, in fact the biggest book of the 20th century, is Arnold Toynbee's 12-volume "Study of History," most of which was published in the 1930s and '50s. The aspect of the Hellenistic analogy that chiefly interested them, like us today, is the way the modern era can be expected to end.

...

I wish I could have his prose.
 
I enjoyed the essay too. However, you have to use caution when approaching Spenglerian theories. It is prone to be vague and I can understand why quite a few people (such as Karl Popper) found his philosophy 'pointless'. To understand Spenglers seasonal theories of civilisation without making them contradictory to what we understand of history, it is necessary to realise that 'civilisations' as Spengler understands them is basically transmitted consciousness in the form of memory and self-identification: When you are initiate to history as someone of European descent, you likely know more about medieval Europe than you know of the Arab world in the same period and that is key.
 
I do think that these theories are breaking the cardinal rule of history. It's one thing to make generalisations about the past, such as 'periods of national disunity often end in the imposition of unity by foreigners', but it's another to make laws about the future, such as 'if nations are divided, foreigners will always impose unity'. Of course, the prediction that 'a supernational unity will eventually arise' is self-fulfilling, in the manner of many of which I've said the same. There's never a point at which you can say it's not going to happen - if there's currently no international superstate, then you can just say that it's still in the works. The same holds for 'all things must end, for all began', which seems to be a common prediction around here.
 
I do think that these theories are breaking the cardinal rule of history. It's one thing to make generalisations about the past, such as 'periods of national disunity often end in the imposition of unity by foreigners', but it's another to make laws about the future, such as 'if nations are divided, foreigners will always impose unity'. Of course, the prediction that 'a supernational unity will eventually arise' is self-fulfilling, in the manner of many of which I've said the same. There's never a point at which you can say it's not going to happen - if there's currently no international superstate, then you can just say that it's still in the works. The same holds for 'all things must end, for all began', which seems to be a common prediction around here.

I think you rather missed the point of it. He's suggesting that not because it is some immutable, mystical law of geopolitics, but because it seems to be a natural course in human civilization. Marx did the same thing.
 
Marx however made a major logical error when he said that capitalism would collapse due to the contradictions of capital: There is no inherent contradiction in saying that there are 'enormous wealth differences between rich and poor' and 'the means to produce wealth are many'. Marx error was that he claimed the two were contradictory. In fact, the two are completely unrelated. While I am no fan of Hegelianism, Oswald Spengler's conclusions derived from it were far more logically consistent than those of Marx', despite their vagueness.
 
He's suggesting that not because it is some immutable, mystical law of geopolitics, but because it seems to be a natural course in human civilization.

What's the difference?
 
What's the difference?

The former implies some supernatural cause independent of technological progress and social constructs, whereas the latter primarily involve technological progress and social constructs.
 
Due to the fundamentally contextual nature of history it is not useful as a predictive tool.
 
The function of history is not prediction. At best, it will provide you with a set of precedents.
 
Indeed. To make any historical example apply to the present day, you have to twist it enough that you could actually have taken any example you liked and made it point at something entirely different.
 
I don't understand how anything can be "after" modernity when modernity is just the ways in which things are like the way they are in the present for whoever's discussing modernity.

Early modern China isn't called "early modern China" because of specific qualities of modernity that are immutable and do not change, but because it was a period during which China became a great deal more like the way China is now in many ways. A future historian might describe China of the 1980s as "early modern China" for the same reason many historians now talk about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China that way.
 
Unless stated otherwise or implausible considering the context (say an essay from the 1400s), I assume 'modernity' to be everything which is an outgrowth of the European Enlightenment and its rationalism. The Nation-State, Social Democracy, Libertarianism and the French Revolution are products of 'modernity'.
 
I don't understand how anything can be "after" modernity when modernity is just the ways in which things are like the way they are in the present for whoever's discussing modernity.

Early modern China isn't called "early modern China" because of specific qualities of modernity that are immutable and do not change, but because it was a period during which China became a great deal more like the way China is now in many ways. A future historian might describe China of the 1980s as "early modern China" for the same reason many historians now talk about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China that way.

Semantics! :hammer:
 
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