What are the key elements of modernism?
[ 6/11/20 ]
That depends very much on how deeply you want to look at it.
For me, clearly, it is a willingness to break with tradition, to test out ideas in reality, but to not entirely do away with tradition either, as often there is practical wisdom embodied in tradition that no-one is conscious of – it just works because it does.
By the time many generations of people have been through many instances and levels of questioning and testing in reality, and developing new tools, we end up with understandings from quantum mechanics, to biochemistry, to the deep strategy of multi level evolutionary theory, to an understanding that all new levels of complexity are necessarily based on new levels of cooperation, and that the survival of complexity at that level is dependent upon maintaining cooperation at all levels.
The development of tools to do agricultural work easier and faster than people freed many people to pursue other interests.
We are now in a very complex situation, where the incentives of our economic and political systems now directly threaten our long term survival.
As one example, global climate change is a real threat. Technology to address the threat is possible, but in the absence of global cooperation poses greater threats than global climate change.
So a lot of people need to give up the overly simplistic myth that competition is good, and see that fundamentally competitive systems destroy complexity, necessarily. Our future is predicated on enough people realising that global cooperation between multiple levels of diverse agents is the only game with any significant long term survival probability.
