Are we really so modern?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This leads to people being ignorant of and confused about philosophical issues, but more importantly, it leads to them dismissing them without looking at them. Which doesn't make a worldview void of philosophy, instead it makes one with an unquestioned amateur philosophy.
It's a lot like many in politics assuming that our time is different, and historical examples are irrelevant, even when there is no good reason to believe that. Our modernity is a lot like that.
Back in Enlightenment days, people also consulted empirical reality.
Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this :
I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s
was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969.
Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of
hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over
the country.
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science.
It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction
movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar,
Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you
would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be
back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where
actually believing that a better future is possible that you can
have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually
radically counter-cultural.[1]
Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like.
http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-co...
(or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck)
Space-stuff is a cerebral pleasure. As an astronaut you can feel in awe as you experience the sum total of human technological prowess. But space is a horrible sensual pleasure. Mindnumbingly dull, ugly, and most of all, shackled. No personal freedom, fully a slave to the overlords in Houston.
Let space to the robots. They can go mine ores, take pictures, and putz around in the dust. But that sounds like a terrible way to spend time as a human.
So the experience of 99% of humanity ... on Mars. The "on Mars" part sounds better enough to sign up for.
I suppose there's an aspect of personal taste. I think Mars and the Moon are very beautiful. Imagine what a landscape photographer like Ansel Adams could have done if unleashed on the surface of the Moon...
Someday we'll have a colony up there and I think its important that before we start bulldozing and building a human settlement up there, we should have a real artistic landscape photographer run around for awhile.
Settlement of e.g. Mars will never be needed in the time frames we should be thinking about. If asteroid defense is developed, then for thousands of years that will not be a concern at all. And if in 2,000 years they need a settlement on Mars, the people in 1,800 years can prioritize doing it.
In other words I don't see it as a priority. Material conditions on Earth are not great, and we are threatened by catastrophes in the atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates. Earth and its cities are infinitely more responsive to our efforts and investment than Mars or elsewhere. There is so much that we can do here in this century, while settling another planetary body in this century seems basically impossible.
I may not happen within this century, maybe even not this millennium. But I believe it will happen. And for the time being it would be great adventure just to try and make the Mars more friendly.
And if I'm there, odds are that it made my personal survival chances worse, since they're mostly determined by the many "normal" causes of death and being a pioneer in a world not really suited for humans is likely to be worse than Earth.
You could make an argument that it's not wise to put all your eggs in one basket, and it has some merit in this discussion, but when all I have is one egg, the only thing I can do is to pick the safest basket I have - and for now it's Earth.
I'm not sure I generally agree that technological progress helping people is deeply counter-cultural. People like to wallow in cynicism, but young people are super hopeful about the progress of science. I guess that's partially bias of whom I meet online, but it is well established.
Not that most are deeply interested in science or tech, but they sure do like professing love to it, scrolling through cute image macros about it online, and they're not afraid of using it when it's easy enough. Now they might not be the majority if we count old people in the US, I don't know, but if this is a counterculture then it's one that's huge, and growing.
However where I think our points tie together is how people think about politics. People sure love professing cynicism about politics as a way to relieve responsibility. We can make as much tech progress as we want, but no, we won't get better political institutions or more freedom. Impossible.
Unfortunately, tech people are just as guilty of this one.
That seems like a very selective view on modernity which tries to embrace "science and technology" for the profits they can bring, while deliberately discounting what the many human sciences tell us about how humans can work and work together. Can you actually believe in, say, "human collective intelligence as distributed Bayesian inference"[2], while also wanting a world dominated by monopolists and dictators? I mean, for that matter, how can you claim to stand by science and technology while also being, quite publicly, an evangelical Christian, who thus rejects naturalism, the broadest worldview-level fruit of the sciences, in its entirety?
[1] -- https://medium.com/soapbox-dc/peter-thiels-plan-to-become-ce...
Human spaceflight only coincides with "progress" in as much as it improves material conditions on Earth. That is what we think of as progress. Technological progress must be recognized as distinct from technological advance.
I think the belief lives in the modern mind because when a modern does something that would have resulted in Alexander the Great spanking him severely, the modern feels better when claiming "not my fault that my culture doesn't respect the past" etc etc.
For example the Vikings used to F over the British locals centuries after Alexander the Great via the good ole feigned retreat. Trick a tough defensive shield wall into thinking you're running for it and they should chase you, because booty, then once they break their wall at a predetermined practiced point reform your own shield wall, flank the freshly unorganized soldiers and slaughter them. Oldest trick in the book. The book that no military readers read, I mean. Yeah yeah I realize the general population didn't sip tea while reading Plutarch in that era, anymore than British do today, but you wouldn't expect a King of England to fall for that even in the late dark ages.
Most modern physics fails this proof as it cannot show convincingly that it is the only true version of physics. And that is quite rigid, well tested and proven knowledge about the world...
With regards to science, it seems like at least young people respect it, so we're going to have progress in that sense.
Unfortunately, philosophy doesn't produce life-changing tech or neat gadgets, so reading philosophy that would change one's outlook on politics, ethics or epistemology is ignored.
What basis do you have for saying this?
I'm curious as to what you think.
My wife is fond of "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosopher", which argues the Enlightenment wasn't new, either, it was just pouring religion (the thirst for god) into new cups.
Modernity, to me, is a more complex attempt at the same, to find a new source of unambiguous authority, a method by which the world makes sense. Again a futile gesture, but still it takes hold.
How does science tread in politics? I'm actually honestly wondering.
I do enjoy seeing VLSI microprocessors, optical networks, and sophisticated software being used for discussions on whether or not science works.
I think that is one of a very few universals out there, and yet I think very many people are willing to admit it to themselves.
Schaeffer is a Christian, and his philosophy is explicitly Christian. If that isn't your perspective, you still might benefit from his analysis of why modern thought ended up where it did.
> Gottlieb writes, “physical bodies are . . . not quite what they seem, but are only appearances somehow thrown up by monads” seems less extravagant in the light of contemporary string theory, which holds that everything that exists is the product of vibrating one-dimensional objects
Poor string theory used to justify such nonsense..
In a world were there are so few answers to genuinely big questions, seeking explanations or making them up seems reasonable and, as history seems to show, kind of inevitable. Interesting to keep in touch with, diversity I think helps understanding and/or appreciation (and also the ability to discuss in polity, heady company where there may be disagreement to chat about).
Apart from the swashbuckling, romance and intrigue what makes the books so compelling is the idea that so much of what we take for granted with respect to our worldview and our mindset was created at this time.
As an undergraduate history minor I took electives all over the place, including 'The Glorious Revolution', 'The Scientific Revolution' and 'The Rise of Financial Capitalism'. Even though I kind of knew it, reading the Baroque Cycle it really hit home that all of these things were happening at the same time, and over the course of a generation or two, the world, and in the West the worldview, was really, fundamentally changed
(WRT, the Peace of Westphalia - not sure where you're writing from -- but if you're ever in the neighborhood visit Muenster and check out the room where it was signed, as well as the cages for the Anabaptist leaders still hanging from the cathedral steeple.)
To compare to today, the keyboard and vocal cords afford many more authors. History is not taking the "average" of philosophical thought but if it was I wish there were more writers centuries ago.
Why would that be surprising? Far more people are interested in learning than are capable of teaching and even more just want to be entertained. It seems that most people just do not have anything to say. When it costs money to print something, many thoughts without merit will not be printed.
For example, if this post cost me money to make, or quite frankly anything I post online cost money, it would not be made. I have no compelling reason to spend money on any of this. That's before taking into account if anyone wants to publish it.
And invariably during the climb to the plateau, the humans living at the time envision the climb to go on forever.
So when people looked at the rapid growth of computing power as transistors and ICs replaced radio valves, they envisioned the computing power hitting the point where it would rival neurons.
But now we are reaching the plateau, and it has come far short of the early visions.
Heck, as an middle-class kid growing up back then, we had wood-fired heat (no A/C), well water, grew half our own food, walked miles to town, and 4-digit phone numbers. Home computers didn't exist early on, the closest being hobby kids with maybe* hundreds of bytes of storage; when "personal computers" finally appeared (Apple II and IBM PC) they were, well, paltry. I don't remember a milkman delivering, but do recall returnable glass bottles.
We could have rockets and Moon bases etc as the norm, but when we got to the Moon early on we realized it really wasn't that interesting. Infinite cat videos in your pocket - that's what people really wanted.
well water, grew half our own food, walked miles to town
It's not that moon isn't interesting, it's that we decided that the moon isn't interesting.
Now, we are on the verge of commercial reusable rocket and launch cadence is going to dramatically speed up in the next decade or so.
Some examples:
My mother is active and healthy and doing the grandma things after her heart operation instead of being a tombstone, and after the laser operation my MiL is not blind. I'm mystified how you'd even visually express that, but it is a pretty big change over the last 50 years.
Modern cars are horrifically ugly and character-less compared to my grandpa's cars, but they last roughly 10x as many miles and require far less than 1/10th the maintenance and get about twice the MPG and I'm almost certain to survive most car crashes (whereas in my grandpas day, a car crash was only about as survivable as an airplane crash). Its easy to express the bland ugliness of modern commuter cars visually, but how do you express that the hood may as well be welded down compared to the bad old days?
Progress to be excited about: Wright Brothers flew in 1903, Yeager went supersonic in 1947, and we were on the moon in 1969. Commercial flights were crossing the Atlantic at 2x the speed of sound in the 1970's.
You're making my point. Your mother is simply alive. Your MiL sees like anyone else might. Cars are kinda ugly, but in a character-less way instead of "OMG that's butt-ugly", and simply travel farther and kill fewer people.
The reality of being in the "future" is that it's not visually a dramatic difference ... yet it is dramatically "futuristic" precisely because percentage-wise more people are leading normal lives, living on the Moon isn't interesting to most, and instant access to the near-sum-total of human knowledge just means more porn & cat pictures to amuse oneself with.
50 years ago, the first super computer was built that could do 3 MegaFLOPs. No one had a home computer. People used land-line rotary phones to make audio calls to their friends. Sputnik had been launched and men had been to space.
Today, we all walk around with GigaFLOPs computers in our pockets that can make video calls and talk to billions of other computers around the world, all over the air—and we think nothing of it. There are people living in space semi-permanantly, we've sent probes to every major body in the solar system (and some minor ones) and there is so much stuff in orbit that it's become a potential hazard.
That seems like a ton in 50 years, and that's just in two areas.
So yes, that future has been very, very slow to arrive.
And yes, we're all carrying gigaflops computers around, which is massively cool but also, 40 years ago, somewhat expected.[1]
My feeling is that in the last 10 years -- and particularly in the last 5, as the AI winter has decisively ended and the private spaceflight reusability efforts have ramped up -- things have genuinely been accelerating. But prior to that, the 70s, 80s, and 90s were relatively stalled decades, compared to the much more fundamental breakthroughs of the three decades before.
1: http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/samsung-says-2001-a-space-odysse...
"Wanting to learn more about physics, chemistry, and astronomy, I entered the University of Berlin for graduate study. I was graduated with a Ph. D. in Physics in 1934."
[1] http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/recollect-childhood.ht...
He earned a Ph.D. in Physics as a result of his post-graduate studies at Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1934.
There's certainly a regime connection, in that there was both a public portion of his thesis and a classified portion that was not published at the time, and that his research was military. But the idea that he didn't "acquire" (or, more specifically, earn through research) a Ph.D. but somehow had one bestowed as a gift by Hitler seems to be without basis.
Alright, thanks for researching this. The actual title that I was thinking of is "Professor". Hitler always called him "Prof Von Braun" even though he was never a tenured professor.
- Everyone in his team started calling him 'Professor' as a term of respect
- The war ended, Hitler died, Americans got a hold of Von Braun and his team and literally transported them whole sale to Huntsville Alabama where they continued their rocket research
- His team members still referred to him as 'Professor'
- Americans working in team: "Why do they call you Professor?"
- Everyone: awkward silence
Von Braun was extremely embarrased of the honorific due to its origins. You must remember that just after the war, any association whatsoever to the Nazi party was a kiss of death and both Von Braun and the American government tried very hard to gloss over his involvement in Hitler's machinations. It wasn't until much, much later that people found what really went on - that to perform his research in Hitler's Reich, Von Braun was a party to some of the worst atrocities committed during the war.
Don't know about German practice, but in places I have been that honorific isn't restricted to those holding tenure.
But, in any case, even if that is true that he got referred to as "Professor", basically, because Hitler, that's no longer germane to the upthread poster's reference to him as Dr. Von Braun.
Well clearly it isn't. I made a post in this subtree that goes further into why I thought it a useful fact to point out. I'm getting my info from the Von Braun biography that Michael Neufeld wrote, which I read recently. If you don't want to push further into an irrelevant discussion we can stop here.
http://www.airspacemag.com/space/the-road-to-mars-961235/?al...
> Washington-savvy Webb stepped down in 1969. Tom Paine, an entirely different kind of NASA chief, replaced him. Pain, a Washington neophyte with little grasp of politics, let vision be his guide as he set out to define NASA's post-Apollo goals. He liked the audacity of a plan that Mueller's office had outlined for NASA. Evolved from JAG work, Mueller's Integrated Program Plan saw a space base in Earth orbit, a moon base, and humans on Mars—all by 1982. [...]
> In September 1969, President Nixon's Space Task Group endorsed the NASA plan, but with reservations. NASA formed an agency-wide team to begin implementation. But Nixon ignored the task group's recommendations, opting instead to funnel NASA's budget toward building the space shuttle.
When I was born 50 years ago, supersonic commercial flight was being built. We thought we'd be talking to computers that had artificial intelligence. We thought we'd be living on Mars by now.
I'm guess you've never lived in a world where almost all the information contained therein was in the form of paper documents, and have had to search for information in those documents?
"[...]the loss of contact with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by which side you take on this question"
Modern? We're practically medieval. But at least there is some glimmering of hope that we understand our problems and are working to fix them.
I get your point but the author in the article is talking about "modern" not in terms of "morals" but in the (meta) philosophy of existence.
In his particular definition of "modernity", the world would meet that criteria when most of the inhabitants could look at themselves with philosophical detachment: e.g. Most of us would realize we have no special centrality in the universe (we're not the only higher life forms in the vastness of space). Our timeslice of humanity is but a microscopic blip in the 14 billion years of its existence. Most of us would seriously think it's possible that _we_ are digital avatars in "the matrix", etc.
Furthermore, the author feels that assessing "modernity" by looking at the technological progress around us is deceptive and therefore it's a bad measurement. Instead, he thinks humans reach a threshold of "modernity" when a large percentage internalize deep philosophical questions like the way Descartes and Hume did.
I'd think it was just a dud headline, were it not for the closing line.
I'm not convinced that "morals modernity" is a prerequisite for "philosophical introspection modernity". To me, it seems like those 2 are orthogonal. In other words, we could have both of these outcomes:
- I believe we humans are the center of the universe and with Zeus by my side, I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race.
- I believe we might be in The Matrix but can't prove it and I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race.
It looks like both types of "modernity" can coexist.
Perhaps the New Yorker shouldn't have put "modern?" in the title. At the bottom of the article, they disclosed that they used a different title (which emphasizes philosophy instead of morals) in other editions:
>This article appears in other versions of the September 5, 2016, issue, with the headline “What Makes You So Sure?.”
(Btw, I didn't downvote any of your posts.)
I think you're making the mistake that "progress" = "adopting my values."
I (at least from the surface level conversation so far) don't disagree with your moral values, but part of this kind of conversation is the tricky bit of everyone finding a way to distance themselves from things they believe in.
Morals are not something that improve or decline, they just change with society.
Misogyny is definitely not as bad as it used to be, but it's still everywhere. And in many cases the victims don't report it for whatever reasons.
The vast majority of people I've met who challenge these "virtues" aren't frothing hate-mongerers, but their rhetoric naturally becomes more extreme when their questions are immediately dismissed with these ad hominem attacks.
Equalling "migration" with "open borders" is dishonest and already spinning the discussion before it even starts. I don't blame people for pre-emptively downvoting that.
But yes, dehumanization goes both ways. Branding everyone you disagree with as Nazi isn't helping anyone either.
The way I read the comment, it's saying that when people say things against open borders or multiculturalism, they are accused of being racists. Then they say worse, obviously racist things, but they're just saying them because they were called racists, not because they are racists (who froth.) Therefore, if people wouldn't accuse people of being racists for saying things against open borders and multiculturalism, people wouldn't say racist things.
Or, perhaps, because it is very easy to become angry when one feels oneself unjustly maligned, and anger often betrays one into saying things which are ill considered and do not accurately depict one's genuine opinions or beliefs.
Of course, there is a contrary position which holds that such things more accurately characterize those who say them than do the things they say when calm. I can only surmise that people who adhere to this position have never themselves experienced anger.
Maine's Governor Insists the Problem Isn't His Racism—It's Being Called a Racist
Finally, you're probably right that insults and intolerance of religions is common, although I don't see why that should be discouraged - after all, religion is a choice, and disliking it is just as valid as disliking e.g. neo-Nazis and white suprematists.
A little bit of everything. Here in Austria I see people raging against German immigrants (they're stealing our white-collar jobs!), against Hungarian immigrants (they're stealing our blue-collar jobs!), against Romanians (they're stealing our bicycles!); and everyone with the wrong skin colour is treated as second-class citizens (at best) just for the heck of it.
> Furthermore, often times people have legitimate concerns, such as job losses and incompatible cultural norms
That's what I meant with genuine policy problems. Sometimes it stays at that. But get some people drunk and they start raging about how "those fucking sand-niggers" are genetically inferior and "deserve" getting killed in wars "because the middle east is their fault anyway".
> after all, religion is a choice, and disliking it
Calling a random person a "fucking hook-nosed jew" because they don't want to lend you money is not criticizing the Jewish religion. It's racism.
In many parts of the world it really isn't. If your parents where catholic then you are catholic, if your parents where jews then you are a jew, if you parents where muslim then you are a muslim etc. What you (or your parents) actually believe and don't believe in is rarely factors into it.
It is here, though. In Germany and Austria, a quarter to a third of the population are not part of a registered religion; and many more aren't practising their stated religion.
No, we aren't that much more modern when tribalism is still rampant.
Where do you live?
Sure, racism is a solved problem. Pull my other leg.
This is typically what is meant by the term "white privilege". What is actually meant is that someone has a different set of experiences, so they are comparatively blind to experiences that are common to people of other races. This is a very common phenomenon. Most people when they are growing up think that their experiences are universal. That the way their family works is the way everyone else's works, and so on. It's only when they get older that they realize that maybe their experiences have been abnormal, and also that experiences different from one's own are possible, perhaps even commonplace (such as growing up with divorced parents, growing up poor vs. rich, etc.) This is extremely true when it comes to race, because until recently the experiences of people of color have often not been very well publicized. But they absolutely do. If you're black, or brown, or a muslim, your experiences in the developed world are going to be different from those of a white non-muslim. You're going to get stopped for "random" searches when flying more often. You're going to be stopped by the police while driving more often. Your interactions with police will be more tense and less cordial. And so on and so on.
These are just facts. In the US whites actually use illegal drugs at a slightly higher rate than blacks. But blacks are stopped more often on suspicion of drug activity, they are prosecuted more often, and they receive much harsher sentences. That's why despite the lower rate of drug use and the lower population, the number of blacks in prison for drug offenses is vastly higher than for whites. If you're white, drugs might as well be legal, as long as you're not transporting kilos of them around. If you're black, you are more than ten times as likely to be incarcerated for drug use than if you're white, much more. That's systemic racism and injustice, and that's just one tiny example.
There was a study where job applicants sent in resumes. The names on the resumes were changed, some had "black sounding" names, some had "white sounding" names. The resumes with the white names had a much higher rate of callbacks than those with the black names.
There are many, many more examples. To pull one from the headlines. Consider the examples of two different athletes: Ryan Lochte and Colin Kaepernick. Ryan Lochte committed a crime, and the general sentiment among many is "boys will be boys" (despite him being over 30). Kaepernick exercised his 1st amendment rights to make a statement against police brutality, and he has received a torrent of death threats and insults, including many using the n-word. If that doesn't tell you that racism is alive and well in the western world, then I don't know what to tell you.
Yes, we've made progress on racism. Yes, being an open, avowed racist often results in swift negative consequences. But that does not define the boundaries of the problem of racism, there is still a lot of very difficult work to be done, our world is far, far removed from one where racism is no longer an issue.
The modern world is not immune to racism; rather, the invention of "races" is an artifact of the development of nationalism in the 17th through 19th centuries, and so racism is a feature distinctive of the modern era.
"Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
According to my current working theory of comedy, you have to go all the way to commenting about commenting about commenting about commenting about being downvoted before the meta-introspection hyperbole counteracts the boredom and raises the humor potentials back to positive values.
So please carefully read any response to this comment, and take detailed notes as to how humorous you found it to be, measured to the nearest milliguffaw. Please be honest; this is for science.
And if you choose to respond to this, please avoid commenting about downvoting, commenting about commenting about downvoting, or commenting about commenting about commenting about downvoting. It is critically important that your comment be exactly three steps removed from the thing already declared to be boring. Also, try to preferentially use words with more 'p's and 'k's in them, whenever possible--using "pants" rather than "trousers", for instance.
And lest you start to believe that this post is itself off-topic, only a deconstructed modern comedic calculus such as mine is even capable of explaining why those New Yorker single-panel cartoons are only funny to readers of the New Yorker, and only when published in the New Yorker! From there, the fully automated joke-writing machine is only just over the horizon.
The edges of the serif font on the New Yorker's site just look blurry to me.