I suspect that this will be to the taste of very few peop...

I suspect that this will be to the taste of very few people who read this. But I think that this���and Marshall Berman's (1982) All That Is Solid Melts into Air http://books.google.com/?isbn=0860917851���is well worth your attention. One way to approach it is to note that back before 1500 humanity's collective technological and organizational possibilities grew at a proportion rate of something like 0.04% per year. Now they grow at 2% per year. Thus changes in what we can do and how we can organize ourselves to do it that used to happen over a 50-year timespan now take place in one revolution around the sun. Thus "modern" people must continually reinvent and reinvent ourselves in a way very foreign to all of the memory of our past historical experience. What are the consequences of this? Humanist late-twentieth century New York CUNY Marxist took a stab:

Marshall Berman (1984): The Signs in the Street: A Response to Perry Anderson https://newleftreview.org/issues/I144/articles/marshall-berman-the-signs-in-the-street-a-response-to-perry-anderson: "���To be modern���, as I define it... ���is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one���s world in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in this maelstrom... to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our own.��� Modernism aims ���to give modern men and women the power to change the world that is changing them, to make them the subjects as well as the objects of modernization.��� Anderson is willing to accept this as a vision of 19th-century culture and politics, but he thinks that it is irrelevant to our century, let alone to our day.... I could assail Anderson���s reading of modern and contemporary history in plenty of ways, but it wouldn���t do anything to advance our common understanding. I want to try something different. Anderson���s view of the current horizon is that it���s empty, closed; mine is that it���s open and crowded with creative possibilities. The best way to defend my vision might be to show what this horizon looks like, what���s actually out there as I see it.... A massive black woman gets on, bent under numerous parcels; I give her my seat. Just behind her, her fifteen-or-so-year-old daughter undulates up the aisle, radiant, stunning in the skin-tight pink pants she has just bought.... They continue an argument.... The mother still won���t look, but after awhile she lifts her eyes slowly, then shakes her head. ���With that ass,��� she says, ���you���ll never get out of high school without a baby. And I ain���t taking care of no more babies. You���re my last baby.��� The girl squeezes her mother���s arm: ���Don���t worry, Mama. We���re modern. We know how to take care of ourselves.��� The mother sighs, and addresses her packages: ���Modern? Just you take care you don���t bring me no modern babies.��� Soon I get off, feeling as happy and whole as the girl in the bus. Life is rough in the South Bronx, but the people aren���t giving up: modernity is alive and well...

#noted #2019-10-28