[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] Modern/Postmodern Reflections

[Terry W. Colvin]

Dear friends, thinkers, and Listmates,

Just a few of my recent random thoughts and observations here and there 
on Modernity and Postmodernity.

 As I've often said, during my first year as a graduate History student 
at the University of Virginia, in 1963-1964, I had the satori-like flash 
of insight that early "modernity," as exemplified in the Renaissance, 
Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, and 17th & 18th 
century artistic, literary, and architectural Neoclassicism, consisted 
above all of a passion for order, symmetry, regularity, streamlining, 
centralization, and normalization. It was a reaction against what many 
15th, 16th, and 17th century Europeans intellectuals perceived as the 
mediaeval and "Gothic" barbarism, corruption, disorder, anarchy, 
sloppiness, irregularity, messiness, clutter, and over-complication 
exemplified by the sale of indulgences, the "superstitious" and 
"idolatrous" cult of saints and holy relics, Gothic cathedrals (in 
contrast to Greek and Roman temples), feudalism, Ptolemaic astronomical 
epicycles, and "barbaric" Church and lawyers' Latin (in contrast to the 
elegant "pure" Latin style of Virgil, Cicero, Caesar, and Horace).

 Now, of course, I'm perfectly aware that mediaeval culture itself 
certainly exalted order, system, hierarchy, and symmetry in theory, as 
exemplified for instance in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica and 
Summa Contra Gentiles, and in Dante's Divine Comedy. Thus, Pomona 
College philosopher and cultural historian W.T. Jones described the 
"Mediaeval Syndrome" as strongly Order-Biased in The Romantic Syndrome 
(Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), specifically citing Aquinas and Dante. C.S. 
Lewis likewise, noted the "classic severity" of the "self-explanatory" 
and "luminous" official cosmology of mediaeval theology, metaphysics, 
and literature in The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and 
Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1964). In 
his chapter on the "Longaevi" or fairies in mediaeval literature, Lewis 
noted that as "marginal, fugitive creatures" without an "official 
status" in mediaeval theology, cosmology, and metaphysics, the Longaevi 
"soften the classic severity of the huge design" and "intrude a welcome 
hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of 
being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous" (C.S. Lewis, The 
Discarded Image, p. 122).

 However, the Renaissance Humanists and Protestant Reformers were 
addressing not the majestic architectonic symmetry and order of the 
greatest mediaeval thinkers, but rather what they saw--and HATED--as the 
corrupt, messy, sloppy, irregular, cluttered, jerry-built, patchwork 
quality of actual mediaeval religious, political, legal, literary, 
artistic, and architectural PRACTICE. They loathed what I sometimes call 
the Chaucerian or Breughelesque court-jester, Friar Tuck, Carmina 
Burana, drunken swineherd, gluttonous lustful monks side of mediaeval 
life. They wanted to clean up and clear away the mediaeval sloppiness, 
messiness, irregularity, and clutter--the "wildness and uncertainty" as 
C.S. Lewis said of the fairies--to which Aquinas and Dante had loftily 
closed their eyes.

I've also been thinking of the way the Modern/Postmodern problem 
intersects my own "Theosphere/Physiosphere/Sociosphere" trichtomy of 
cultural orientations. As you may recall, a couple of years ago I used:

             (1) "Theosphere" for religious beliefs about God, angels, 
demons, the soul, life after death, absolute moral values, and the 
Divine inspiration of sacred books like the Bible, Qur'an, or Vedas, 
including beliefs about Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary; Muhammad, Heaven, 
Hell, Purgatory, the Last Judgment, karma, reincarnation, the Jewish 
Mosaic Law or Muslim Shariah, Papal infallibility, etc.

            (2) "Physiosphere" for our knowledge of the material world 
of tables, chairs, knives, forks, sticks, stones, cells, tissues, 
neurons, genes, chromosomes, stars, planets, atoms, electrons,  quarks, 
and gravitational fields, including both our own immediate everyday 
physical environments and our scientific knowledge of physics, 
chemistry, biology, neurology, genetics, geology, astronomy, etc;

            (3) "Sociosphere" for the domain of human personal, social, 
and political attitudes and relationships, including our attitudes and 
beliefs about social justice, sexual behavior, family relationships, 
gender roles, race relations, education, alcoholism & addiction, and 
crime & punishment.

Basically, as I've noted before, in the late 20th and early 21st 
centuries liberals and leftists largely think, speak, and write almost 
exclusively in "Sociospheric" categories in discussing, say, 
homosexuality, the priestly ordination of women, race and I.Q., and 
"nature vs. nurture" in relation to crime, poverty, school achievement, 
alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, personality traits, etc. 
Conservatives and rightists prefer to rely rather on "Theospheric" 
and/or "Physiospheric" categories and concepts in discussing these 
issues. Conservatives feel instinctively that we know quite a lot about 
the  objective factual contents of the Theosphere and/or Physiosphere. 
Specifically, conservatives believe that we know quite clearly, 
definitely, and unambiguously what the Bible says about God's own views 
on homosexuality and sex roles and/or what genetics says about heredity 
and I.Q. Liberals, on the other hand, feel that our inferences about God 
or genes, Leviticus or chromosomes, St. Paul or I.Q. tests, are pretty 
iffy, ambiguous, and subject to wildly differing interpretations. So, 
they believe, we're really best off relying rather on our decent, 
compassionate, humanitarian, warm-fuzzy, "politically correct" 
Sociospheric perceptions. As I have sometimes put it, the extreme 
Sociospheric liberal position is that nobody we know of has actually 
ever seen God or a gene, Heaven or a chromosome, Hell or a DNA molecule, 
the Last Judgment or the fine details of a brain cell--and it may be a 
bit doubtful if anybody ever will--BUT, we all HAVE seen the human 
suffering resulting from injustice, prejudice, unfairness, and negative 
labeling--and if there should be a God up there after all, He probably 
won't be too angry at us for choosing the most compassionate option!

Now, how do my Theosphere, Physiosphere, and Sociosphere tie in with the 
Modern/Postmodern problematic? As a rough, crude, primitive, tentative 
first approximation, I would sort of suggest that the Theosphere is 
privileged by pre-modern thinkers, cultures, and societies, the 
Physiosphere by early modernity and by bewildered, resentful modernist 
survivors in the later postmodern society, and the Sociosphere by  
late-moderns and postmoderns. Our mediaeval ancestors were convinced 
that the Theosphere is by far the most important and significant part of 
reality, and that our Theospheric beliefs should also determine our 
views about the material world and about social ethics--that we cannot 
and must not hold scientific, cosmological, or ethical views that 
contradict Divine revelation. Puritan New Englanders believed the same, 
as do religious fundamentalists and traditionalists--Christian, Jewish, 
Muslim, Hindu, etc.--in our own time, in the USA, England, or Canada and 
in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or India, Biblical, Qur'anic, or Vedic 
accounts of Creation and human origins are believed to trump and 
override materialistic secular "scientific" theories of cosmology, 
geology, palaeontology, and evolutionary biology, and Scriptural 
pronouncements about sexual morality and the role of women are believed 
to trump and override secularist liberal notions of fairness, equality, 
compassion, tolerance, and individual freedom--and also secularist 
"scientific" theories about sexual orientation.. 100% strict Theospheric 
thinkers won't allow speculative "scientific" theories about fossils, 
geological strata, and an expanding universe where light from the 
furthest galaxies took 10 or 12 billion years to reach us shake their 
faith in the literal truth of Genesis, or speculative psycho-medical 
theories about the genetic or brain chemistry causes of homosexuality 
sway them from their faith in what they see as the Biblical condemnation 
of "sodomy" as sinful.

The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and Victorian scientific 
materialism progressively suggested that it was the Physiosphere that 
was all-important, instead. Scientific knowledge suggested--or proved 
outright--that the Bible, Qur'an, Vedas, and other sacred books 
contained a lot of sheer misinformation, superstition, mythology, old 
wives' tales, and outdated knowledge about the physical world. 
"Advanced," "enlightened," and "progressive" Modern thinkers 
increasingly felt as the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries wore on 
that a materialistic and empiricist world-view rooted in scientific 
method and scientific knowledge was more conducive to liberal 
humanitarian ideals of social justice, of "Liberty, Equality, 
Fraternity" and "The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number," than a 
religious world-view based on "superstition" and "mythology," on "totem 
and taboo." Marx and the Marxists, in particular, tried  to ground what 
they considered progressive social change in Physiospheric concepts and 
foundations, on an explicitly, aggressively materialistic world-view. At 
the same time, on the socio-political Right in the 19th and 20th 
centuries, the Social Darwinists, racialists, eugenicists. Nazis, 
Fascists, racialist IQ theorists of the Jensen/Shockley/Herrenstein 
type, and searchers for genetic factors in neurosis, psychosis, 
alcoholism, homosexuality, or shyness have all seen human thought, 
feeling, and behavior as little more than a derivative reflection of 
Physiospheric factors, and human beings as little more than passive, 
helpless puppets of those Physiospheric factors.

 Late-Moderns and Postmoderns, however, it's my hunch, gravitate more to 
"Sociospheric" explanations and interpretations of human attitudes and 
behavior. I'll examine that point in more detail in a later essay. For 
starters, I think it has a lot do with the sheer vastness and complixity 
of 20th/21st century knowledge and culture which are simply much too 
vast for any one human being to ever master by himself or herself, with 
what David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd called the 20th century 
characterological shift from "Inner-Direction" to "Other-Direction" 
among middle-class people in contemporary urban high-tech 
late-industrial societies, and with the fact that the vast majority of 
miiddle-class jobs in our time involve dealing with, manipulating, 
persuading, pleasing, flattering, placating, "making nice to," and 
getting along with other people than grappling with "the coal-face of 
Nature" (as the British philosopher and sociologist Ernest Gellner put 
it) or "the hardness of the material" (as David Riesman put it).

Peace,
T. Peter


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
     Alternate: < fortean1 at msn.com >
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