Steven West

Hist 481

Final Thoughts on Modernity

Modernity is one of the words most frequently bantered over in our contemporary

lexicion. The arguments made in C.P.Snows The Two Cultures are as fresh and relevant

now as the day they were written. Added to this difference in the functional enframement

of the term modernity, it has been claimed by different groups at different times, to refer

to different things. Which cultural attributes are referred to, when one says “modernism,”

is very different depending on whether the vantage point is the arts&letters or the

sciences. Literary Modernism, to the average aficionado/ literature department partisan

would seem so extraneous an appendage, as painstakingly enunciating “French Onion

Soup,” at your favorite restaurant in Paris. To we, the dissolute masses of literature

lovers, modernism is a simple thing, Ours. So the first hints of strife and territorialism

arrive when those scientific Do-Gooders arrive on the scene; always toting either social

programs or some new jargon. They inevitably start pulling out the syllables and

pamphlets, talking about progress, talking about development and “modernization

theory.” But insult turns to outright injury when chic post-modernists arrive in turtlenecks

to claim Modernity as their own vantage point. Everybody perceives the conflict from

their own perspectives. Well, who gets usage rights? I’ll concentrate here on correlating

and contextualizing the three spiraling concepts of Modernity in relation to one another:

literary modernism, modernization theory, and postmodernism. They can share.

Modernism in literature represented a large turn away from the tenets of Realism,

which for many ironically no longer convincingly represented the changing reality of
their lives. In place of simplicity, suddenly a great recontextualization of the individual

Identity seemed compelling: in either new conceptions of “validating groups,” or

recomprehension through a great look inward through the methods of Freud or Jung. The

organizing ideals of meta-narratives multiplied themselves, in constant attempts to

ground individuals and trends into a larger tradition that would vindicate and explain

them, endow them with logical references, terminology and elegance and lend the

authority of precedent. This is one of the largest distinctions separating modernism from

the post modernism to follow, the belief that these meta-narratives grounding each epoch

had any degree of legitimacy or coherence. However, it must be said that even these first

glimpses of the failing of meta-narrational structures caused turmoil and angst, and

ushered in an enormous period of existential response to changes in Life. Writers in this

period of modernism had to rationalize the large changes in psyche in response to loss of

tradition and the changes of setting and everyday habit. Furthermore, each of their

comprehensions of the social creature was permanently altered by the terms and

conceptions of these new thinkers: Freud, Jung and others. In order to rationalize these

seemingly cognitively dissonant images of the self, many of these writers and poets

scoured endless to seek precedent: looking back for past stories of their ancestors who

had survived their own respective wars with urges, desires, totems and taboos. Many

turned with fascination to trendy sciences such as anthropology, where writers like

Frasier were putting out texts, like the Golden Bough, which would directly influence and

inspire generations of writers with its exotic view of their own semi mythic past.

This was an era that would encounter an explosion of writers no longer enamored

of Victorian optimism. Loss of the prominent sensibilities of quiet submission to

Authority and Tradition led to inquisitiveness, restlessness. This was a moment when the

gains of an industrial revolution would all come to be analyzed in terms other than

quantitative. The fact that society was arranged so as to be completely geared towards

production and consumerism would eventually have to justify itself, temporarily people

quietly nurtured their private angst. Indeed, even the very utility or positive value of lives

spent perpetually hoarding goods into dark rooms would be somewhat questioned by

some…drawing into question the dominant purposes of this new industrial society of

modernity. Enter entertainment.

This era would come to see two world wars through the fogs of media diversion,

amidst a new appreciation of the massive societal spectacle. What was lost in meta-

narrative was to be constructed through this new social regimen, observe! It was a time

unifying advertising and propaganda with the legacies and proponents of psychology, in

order to hone a craft of social manipulation enforcing calm conformity and passive

acceptance of the status quo. This was achieved through new control structures: like new

PR enterprises under Bernays. As seen in realized form during Reisman’s The Lonely

Crowd, society merges into an endless slalom of identical groups hell-bent only on

keeping up with the Joneses, aspiring to the perfect mediocre politic. The live for the

buying of matching sprinkler systems. Identity was rapidly changing, but emerged

emulating a shopping list of purchased goods, thumbed pages of identical cookbooks and

installment-plan appliances as per W.H. Auden’s foreboding The Unknown Citizen.

These were the social doldrums warned about by Fromm, who warned that people would

be so terrified by their tranquil Freedoms out in the seas of Life, that they would actively

seek to escape Freedom. He saw them leaping towards authoritarianisms and destructions
of every sort. He postulated that if their destructive urges towards the outside world were

not gratified quickly enough these automatons would point these same urges in self-

destructive patterns directed at themselves. Adorno, too, was led to claim that in fact,

"every pleasure which emancipates itself from the exchange-value takes on subversive

features." At times even H. L. Mencken berating his readers for forming a Booboisie

class of chumps; wide-eyed goons for anyone led to fool them. In this environment

thrived the least common denominator, the man in the greyest flannel suit, and the

endless existentialist scenarios in a world being hedged into cubicles. This was a time of

intense top-down fiddling with the population, with constant efforts to manipulate and

control the larger masses by industrial interests and the antidemocratic forces propping

them in power. This was the modernity, for example, awaiting young students. Trilling

was to falter into hesitation respecting his aims of teaching them the modernist literatures,

as he began to recognize he was promulgating a very deserved distain and weariness for

the world as it was, the world battered by war profiteering, false pretenses and subtle

repression. He observed that he was presenting a world vividly distraught at the insincere

postures of a Victorian tradition drowned in its own hypocrisies to defenseless youth, yet

he was unaware what better solutions he could propose to offer. One risked creating a

sea of Holden Caulfieldesque nihilists from the ripe fields of phony material- intent only

on recognizing and disassembling false confidences large and small, but never venturing

their own truth. Existing, but only capable of destroying things, or themselves. Worrying,

one hears echoes of Auden’s September 1, 1939, or Fromm’s warnings about undirected

self-energy venturing to turn against freedom. These were the concerns, subtly ominous

and hushed under a constant patchwork quilt of distractions, peeking up now and then in
the undirected angst as witnessed in the film Rebel Without a Cause. These were the

chafings that led the power-elite of society to believe that their unending implementation

of social controls through television and media was necessary; that the currying of “false

needs” described by Marcuse was warranted. This received angst is at root of the

divergent views towards modern civilization: depending on vantage point, depending on

how far and in what niche capacity one either worked within the paradigmatic system of

the day or in aghast reaction to it. C.P. Snow wrote of a vast incomprehensibility, for

example, between two stances, that of normalized science and that of the arts at large.

Society was creating a sort of crucible out of the test: whether someone was capable of

rational referential analysis, (isolated as it were from the stark specters spun of mass

psychology), or if they relished and lingered among the muck and artifice- of the

cathartic trudge through the age, mad. The poets were saying the culture was mad, but the

businessmen were looking for markets.

The promise was simple, we’ve got it all figured out. The promise was Mickey

Mouse; it was family sedans, Layaway. The American Dream. The entire idea of

Modernization theory was that: a jangling cadence of the heroic march of capitalism to

greater and greater freedoms. That was the gimmick. The promise seemed to be that

anybody who developed their markets in a similar way, i.e. developed their society after

the consumerist blueprints the USA had followed- was bound to experience nothing less

than everlasting joy and perfect freedom. The artists who might have belied this fantasy

were chased by hounds of hell almost without compare, oppressed without qualification

in red scare after red scare, after tribunals on moral content and proper edification, and by

constructed cosmic fear of ever pervasive “pornography.” Many artists and thinkers
therefore became disillusioned with the United States and led long periods of self-

imposed exile abroad. Some of them, obviously, thrived in the heart of the machine.

There are droves of beautifully crafted, atrocious wartime and peacetime social

propaganda products, directed at civil society and put out by the likes of the Disney

powers. These folk employed artists at the height of their strengths, towards projecting a

vision of America to the world. It was persuasive, Fun! Recreation! Whimsy! In reality,

everyone knew it was a time of contradictions. Perhaps it can be said that those who had

distanced themselves already from the existential angst and its attendant issues, (perhaps

in crafting them for others), felt the compulsion to replace a new sort of Victorian

industry and optimism for the old ones, much as Fromm had warned. So their every

thought, then, was on advancing the ship of Progress, the tired taglines of Condorcet and

Durkheim. Expecting to find themselves rational and objective, these power elites of the

American grain went out to describe economic, cultural, political and psychological steps

necessitated by the aspiration of a region to Modernity. What’s interesting to note, in

passing, is the predictions put out earlier among our Literary Modernist theorists: when

William Whyte would point out in the Organization Man how no one was free from the

strange socialization or strangulation of industrial neurosis, not even the top men of

management. This was, however, seemingly not brought up while promoting

Modernization theory. Even if the United States sent unlimited funds purely labeled

“Military” towards countries with no foreign aggression, no threats, in order to keep

bloodthirsty military juntas in their pockets which rubber stamped any and all incentives

to American business acquisitions; this was rarely labeled “Colonialism.” Rather, several

shrewd proponents of various brands of pragmatic persuasion, with consciouses aligned

towards economic opportunism- decided to inform the nonaligned regions of the world,

or the entire world: how to grow in accordance with Uncle Sam's Miracle Recipe. Several

thinkers and interest groups forwarded their own ideal methodologies for this. One, was

Rostow’s Five Stages of Growth. Rostow claimed up front that often the preconditions

for growth often had to do with happy, traditional societies being suddenly interrupted by

an outside force which jars their sense or normalcy and spur them to action. One thinks of

Matthew Perry at Japan. In an enthusiastic rush to Take-Off! The developing countries

are then encouraged to race through manifests of their natural resources and start

exploiting them, using the investment money to invest in more exploitation schemes. This

leads to building huge piles of money with which to jumpstart their nationhood and build

their own Disney park extensions. Herein, however, lies the problem: reality. The

theoretical application of these Five Stages of Growth didn’t take into consideration

rogue American entrepreneurs who always seemed to show up and buy everything in

town- summoning military aid when threatened in their actions. There isn’t usually a

mention of the practice of “filibustering” the whole of Central America1, or Teddy

Roosevelt’s belief that he held some mystical right to police the continent. That, of

course- was obviously the reality behind the quaint gestures and civilized lists of

expected foreign comportment. American “initiative” and opportunism was praised

overtly or behind the scenes by all the vested powers hoping to gain something, and few

tears were shed when developing countries were hindered in the rise to glory. But I

digress. Should all preconditions of Rostow’s have been followed, the drive towards

maturity would lead towards High Mass Consumption. The idea was that in high mass

1
Filibustering with William Walker, Virtual Museum of City of San Francisco accessed 3 May 2011
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist1/walker.html
consumption one had three options to pursue depending on their civilizations goals; they

could focus on luxury, on security or on increased equality. What does this mean? And

what then? What was the context of Modernization theory in the US 1950s and 1960s?

The US worked at externalizing focus away from internal malaise, ignoring the war

trauma, silencing and discrediting subcultures, and ignoring the vacuity of consumption.

The whole culture was militarized, conscripted- entering a ritual of standardization. Work

ethic became a form following form, there was no function. One followed the Joneses.

The main point is that the fact of mere subsistence was long ago realized; these

people are no longer making needs, but excess objects. These excess production goods

will be somewhat derided under most modernist aesthetics as being trite or kitsch, for

example, a Mickey Mouse doll. This is a product which has no subsistence, no

immediately apparent functional utility. However lowbrow it might seem under this

categorization, however, it became the very poster-child of modernization theory. These

goods and services which advance only an ideal of leisure and The Good Life were a

huge part of the message we hoped to export to countries who might be considering our

development model as one that might work for them. It often worked! Finally, however, a

new intellectual trend came to town, demanding that we’d analyze this same object

through the third and final enframement potentiality: that of a postmodernist perspective.

Postmodern perspectives tend to highlight the multivalent natures of all things

based on their context, their viewers, their historical connotations and iconic

ramifications. Postmodern critical strategies are all about defamiliarizing the complex

webs of associative/symbol relationships and indicative significations that any object can

have for a huge cloud of potential viewers. In problemitizing the simplicity of received
truths about something, then, one grants it the reality it does actually hold; in each of the

disparate roles it holds for separate communities. Consider the aforementioned Mickey

Mouse doll, for instance. In several different communities, national and temporal, along

gender lines, along sexuality lines, under different conceptions of idealology and spiritual

perception, etc, perhaps the Mickey Mouse doll is perceived differently. What we’re

complicating here is the concept of overarching, meta-narratives, or the idea that society

can be spoken of as a deliberate whole experiencing “sameness.” We can no longer

attribute sameness in perspective, or in consistent wants and perspectives; we rather see

irreconcilably different and unique, important viewpoints held together merely by

geographic proximity. Postmodernity takes the Things which were described by

modernism as merely the crassness as everyday life, and celebrates the infinity of

perspectives with which these object can be interpreted. Postmodernism prizes kitsch,

prizes the irony and play of reacquisition. It celebrates the breakdown of clear categorical

organization into webs of potentialities and associations. As our understanding of the

multiplicity of perspectives which were now valid tore down positions of supremacy, the

long-attempted goals of “clarity” through the suppression of diverging perspectives

became a more glaring taboo. For example, clear categorizations of archetype, such as Us

and Them, blue collar and white collar, Marxist and Fascist, were forever broken down

into components, into exceptions, into unforeseen amalgamations. What this meant for

the privileges of power-elites beset in Culture Wars, was a tough battle they’d never

counted on fighting. The idea that the disenfranchised could have just as legitimate a say

on Culture, even if their tastes and viewpoints were “wrong,” according to traditional

Might Makes Right doctrines, terrified many academics and authoritied purveyors of
straightforward “Tradition.” Postmodernism often rewrote history from the perspective of

the loser, which never seems to happen enough in historiography. “The Canon,” and its

buttressing historical archives were mostly revealed to be just a monarchist’s forbidden

treasure-chamber: a vault of privilege and glory withheld from all but those lucky few

born into the dominant mold. Those few were entitled to speak and perceive Truth

according to the rulebooks, but now people insisted on repudiating tradition. With this

revelation, everything became unceasingly politicized. One began to realize that their

understanding of the machinations of the world was inextricably linked with their

personal conception of good and evil. It seemed tied to ones willingness, for example, to

probe whether the United Fruit Company “mostly sold bananas” or “mostly caused

bloodshed.” There was an enormous wave of new political theory, and with it new

diverging claims on “correct” interpretations of the events. This, never withstanding the

revelation -that the relativity of personal experience wasn’t ever going to fade back into

the shadows. An illustration: a simple account of a day spent interviewing for a job at a

Mickey Mouse manufacturing plant becomes only more and more complex when one

shifts the young white male protagonist to a young woman, or perhaps a young black

woman, perhaps an OLD black woman who is obese! Who is a lesbian, who is

handicapped, who has PTSD, and/or who is transgender, etc. These gradations in

attribute, and insistent minutia of truth reveal and comprise realities which would have

been completely overlooked in Modernism. In fact in this new mentality these

considerations all but obscure the object themselves: the million counterfactual trails

slipping down from the pedestal. Knit into this somewhat dangerous social situation of

stepped-on toes and realized miscarriages of justice, an enormous insistence on “political

correctness,” became a fad. The revelation of constant repression of non-dominant

elements of society was responded to, therefore, by a top-down charade of mannerisms.

Oppressive nomenclature often disappeared, police tried to appear neutral in

administering Justice, sometimes the government even attempted to give disenfranchised

groups amounts of money or services. Gestures of empathy and equality were meant to

defuse the tinderbox situations, which more or less seems to work, despite occasional

flare-ups. By extension, this can inform the old addressed questions of intentional artifice

versus reference, in that the lines begin to blur. Sincerity of empathy was dancing with

intentions and power structures yet characters with power found themselves unwilling to

divest themselves completely of privilege. Thus, the constant pervasive uncertainty, the

shaky ground of postmodernity adds a certain fictional flair of ambivalence to its

constructed declaratives. Reality is not the firm ground it used to be, and the villains and

heroes have stopped dressing in their traditional simple dichotomies of hats and

contrasting color. Extremely postmodern world features spark through the internet,

international travel and situations of lessened government repression; which mean that

people can much more easily perceive repression/ manipulation as it is happening and

resist it rather than perhaps remaining immobile or oblivious. Translation and

transmission have replaced whole subsections of intentional manipulation, as various

cultural production sites and iconographies cooperate, creatively misinterpret and play

through proverbial “games of telephone.” A very strong visual parallel for this

phenomenon was the most extreme elements at the edges of late modernism- the avant

garde. This was almost postmodern already. It was here that cubism first conceptualized

the look and feel of life viewed from countless perspectives, as well as attempting to
evade the chokeholds of the dominant expectations, worldviews and excess

rationalizations of high culture by retreating into conjecture and fantasy in such realms as

Dadaism. These harbingers well predicted the perplexing future they signified.

In closing we find a world that has been attempting to define modernity,

modifying the parameters of its own discursive analysis. It has been realizing the need to
re-enfranchise its repressed spokespeople. The shortsightedness would have seemed
obvious, but this belies the nature of a paradigmic comprehension in the intellectual
world. Whenever one believes they’ve crafted a Real Scientific Method, they then
operate careful isolation. They move only within the blinders of those observational
trenches and strictures, lest they fracture the sterile quarantine around “objectivity”
they’ve imagined crafting. This refusal to admit subjectivity can and does have huge
repercussions in everyday scenarios, as in the long, drawn out battle seen over the Enola
Gay exhibit: where old power groups refused to see that shifts in historical interpretation
had muddied waters, of received ideas of valor and heroism involved in murdering
65,000-200,000 civilians in an instant. The trouble with widening the pools of not just
audience, but also the writers of Culture; was that propositions such as “the Other,”
(BAD Other!), weren’t possible if the responsive audience included those same Others
--now empowered to give their accounts. Neither did barking “The Ends Justify The
Means,” should the audience be brave enough to demand exactly How, or to refute that
cost-benefit analysis. Theories therefore opened into eddies and waves of temporary
tyrannies, where the proponents of each persuaded camp would convene and conspire,
arranging their prominent voices around, say, Rawls or Nozick’s positions. They’d rush
through every short spell of power trying to implement every possible change before the
power balance careened away from them. This was, (is), an era in which massive think
tanks were made to pool the resources of these conspiratorial contenders, where Francis
Fukuyama would work for ages under partisan interests proposing echoed mantras of
Might Is Right, while believing somehow that international neoliberal cycles would
prevail against machinations he helped create. His was the awful responsibility to
distance himself from all of his prior friends during political events under Wolfowitz and
Cheney, when he realized he’d naively overestimated the altruism of a laissez-faire
model left to be guarded by military advisors. These are the positions which remain:
partisan squabbles. Samuel Huntington is a bigot. The questions which remain in our
present day do not propose a stark juxtaposition as per his very familiar and repellent
diction, but rather present an extremely complex, problematic vision of competing
subgroups and diverging interests scattered among several distinct issues and vantage
points. There are no longer lingering meta-narratives internationally than locally,
Wahhabism is past. What is vital today for analysis is empathy, pragmatism, an
avoidance of generalizations. One requires learning a reluctance to learn infrastructural
and social lessons from military sources and their industrial complex counterparts. What
is important to remember is that ever since we acknowledged Ourselves to be larger than
white protestant New England, we have to think in terms of the entire US, a sea of
interest groups and communities. We have to think in terms of compromises, in terms of
forging common ground, links and empathy. If we can’t do that then leadership in society
will remain nothing more than parody the familiar scene in Frasier’s Golden Bough: an
endless succession of brief Kings of the Wood one by one gain omnipotence, utter
authority over all. They murder the previous King, usurp everything! Only to be
annihilated the next day by the next blinding agenda.