Post Post-Modernity and Progress

"There is another proverb, "As you have made your bed,
so you must lie on it"; which again is simply a lie.
If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage coaches if we chose.
It might take some time to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do it;
but certainly it is not impossible as bringing back last Friday
is impossible. This is, as I say, the first freedom that I claim:
the freedom to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solution
the old patriarchal system of a Highland clan, if that should seem
to eliminate the largest number of evils. It certainly would
eliminate some evils; for instance, the unnatural sense of obeying
cold and harsh strangers, mere bureaucrats and policemen.
I claim the right to propose the complete independence of the small
Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city of Brixton or Brompton,
if that seems the best way out of our troubles. It would be a way
out of some of our troubles; we could not have in a small state,
for instance, those enormous illusions about men or measures which
are nourished by the great national or international newspapers.
You could not persuade a city state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman,
or Mr. Dillon a desperado, any more than you could persuade
a Hampshire Village that the village drunkard was a teetotaller
or the village idiot a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a
fact propose that the Browns and the Smiths should be collected
under separate tartans. Nor do I even propose that Clapham should
declare its independence. I merely declare my independence.
I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe;
and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because
they have been used." -G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

I have come upon something of an epiphany about this mortal life this morning that I thought I ought to share, rather than keep to myself.

[The whole notion of blogging, in fact, is sharing those thoughts that, in many instances, one might have previously kept to himself due to the cost of distributing them (having a physical conversation with everybody one knows is a high distribution cost; so is putting them into print). But the beauty of blogging is that distribution costs are zero. Consequently, if my marginal revenue from distributing my idle thoughts was high (conversations, books, printed materials) and my marginal cost was zero, I would not share. Now, however, my marginal cost is zero, thus matching my marginal revenue, and so I am free to publish and distribute thoughts which may or may not ever be read, and likely will not be remembered. But I get some sort of overall satisfaction for having shared them, and so it merits the brief amount of time required here to do the sharing.]

For some time, I have contemplated what would come after post-modernity. Post-modernity, essentially being the rejection of everything, could not sustain itself in perpetuity. It leaves a vacuum and a void. Chaos, historically speaking, always gives way to order, though frequently to bad order. The Post World War II Era has been philosophically chaotic. Skepticism reached its ugly extreme, where if Descartes had been writing in our present day, he would have never gotten past his First Meditation. In the wake of such philosophical (and thereby ethical) anarchy, the human race has splintered in its retreat to some ethic. Looking at the degeneration of society, the Left has retreated into two directions: Humanism and Environmentalism. The Right has retreated into Moralism and Religiosity. The Chinese have tried to retrench Marxism; the Middle East has embraced Radical Islam; the vestiges of genuine Capitalism have staked their claim in the camp of Individualism. Everybody has an ethic these days; the rejection of ethics could not last forever.

Yet, we have not found any new ethics, just old ones recycled. Environmentalism is nothing new; many cultures throughout history have worshiped the earth. Certainly the rise of Western religious fundamentalism is several iterations along. And so on. This, though, is what brings me to the purpose of quoting Chesterton. He was precisely right. "Progress," properly defined, is not about what is new, but rather what is right. This is why so many people embrace the term "progressive" when talking about their particular pet cause. What counts as progress is in fact the entirety of the ethical debate. Once that is defined, the other issues are minor.

In this light, it is interesting that King Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, talks of things being as they always have been, and that they will always be, and there is nothing new under the sun. He certainly was not speaking of inventions or gadgets or contraptions, but of the human condition itself. Perhaps Longfellow accurately sums up Solomon's counsel when he writes "Trust no future, however pleasant; let the dead past bury its dead." Chesterton, I imagine, would agree with that.

So the nature of the question, then concerns what we can in fact expect from the future. If it is not going to be some Brave New World and global Utopia, then what precisely will it look like? Well, if we focus on what it ought to look like, then it will be an amalgamation of the past. Those things of the past that worked pretty well, in different eras and cultures, for different people, all mashed up into one beautiful historical melting pot. That is the entire notion, in fact, behind America's "melting pot" mentality--assimilate people from all different cultures and backgrounds until you come up with the best practices, foods, etc. from all parts of the world. It has worked relatively well. It is the people who want to disassimilate who are the true regressives.

But we cannot be denied the tools of the past, as Chesterton points out. If we are to create this cultural-historical melting pot of perfection, then we have to have access to all of the ingredients. We cannot get rid of our religion simply because it is old any more than we can reject our computers simply because they are new. We should not excoriate the notion of family because it has existed for thousands of years any more than we ought to decry the expanded definition of what counts as a family merely because it hasn't existed for thousands of years. To again quote Chesterton, he accurately notes that "The whole modern world has been divided into that of Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

We must fill the post-modern black hole with something, lest we all be sucked into its void. But what we fill it with should be a carefully considered mashup of the things we have observed to work that is free of the things we have observed that do not. Simply reverting back to old ways and old theories and old dogma while calling them new does not progress make.

Web 2.0 Expo Day 1

I am currently sitting in the morning session at the Web 2.0 Expo about Community Evangelism. The speaker just raised an interesting question: is it possible for Web media to become as timeless and valuable as a book, song, move, or other classic work of literature. The reality is that we do not frequently revisit a YouTube video, or a blog, or something of the like for its artistic value, unless perhaps it is something we decide to share with a friend, in which case we enjoy it again as we see our friend laugh or cry or smile at the same content that gave us that pleasure.

Yet it is not quite the same. I cannot think of a time when I contemplated the depth of a 5 minute YouTube clip, or a 500 word blog article, no matter how insightful. I haven't encountered anything on the Internet that has impacted my life as did Fyodor Doestoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I am not sure where the resolution to this is, but I hope for the sake of culture and society that we figure it out, for as we turn our time and attention away from classic literature, and book form itself, we need to nevertheless harness the deep creative powers of the human spirit in our new technological era.

More to come from the Web 2.0 Expo....

Epiphany on the Treadmill

Fly Me to the Hebrides
(Skinner Layne, April 10, 2007)

When tumult seems to come in threes
And there is no shelter from stormy seas
And my mind just wants to convulse and seize
Fly me then to the Hebrides.

Can I not hide my troubles in Fingal's Cave?
Where in such solitude my soul I save?
And watch that cold-crashing Scottish wave?
Or is such a dream the thought of a knave?

Is there an Alchemist there to give me advice
On how to make diamonds from Chinese rice,
Or how to make men out of household mice,
Or how to turn fire into Arctic ice?

Perhaps instead I would meet Plato there,
To ask him if we are even Aware
Of our estate in this pitiful trifling affair
Called Life, ye unfair tearing despair.

Nay, I shall find Elijah in the crag and rock,
His place of refuge (though quite ad hoc)
Where together we'll hide 'til three o'clock
When our escapist defeat Almighty God should mock.

So when next it strikes me to fall to my knees
Or fly to the ends of Earth to find the keys
I should know there are sorrows worse than these,
And never swim the Atlantic to the Hebrides.

------

The gym is a great place to eliminate frustration and difficulty, and to calm both body and mind. Today was no exception, and a great truth was revealed to me metaphorically as I sweat away my anxiety on the treadmill. I was getting a bit winded, and most certainly ready to cease my arduous run, in spite of being only half way through my pre-determined course. Mustering up the will to continue was becoming difficult with every passing second. I continued (stupidly) to look down at the treadmill interface every few seconds to see how much distance I had left, and I found myself running out of steam. So I said to myself, in true motivational spirit "Don't think about how far you have to go, think about how far you've already come."

Although it didn't make my shortness of breath disappear or the fatigue in my legs fade away, I finished my laps in the allotted time, and I reflected on my little motivational diddy that got me through the run. "How remarkably applicable to life," I thought to myself. Whether it is my perfectionism in my professional life, my family life, my personal life, or whatever else, I recognized that when I reflect on how far I have come, and how far those situations have progressed, I cannot even begin to despair or be unhappy that at the moment there are strains.

The lesson, though, would be lost if the analysis ended there. If I had merely looked back on the miles run and said "ah, look at all all I have accomplished, why should I press on any longer? What I have already done is perfectly fine and sufficient," then I wouldn't have had the great accomplishment of finishing my run, or the reward of that accomplishment. The lesson, thus, is that there is a two-fold necessity in being able to finish the run: recognizing all the distance run so far, and knowing that it can be repeated, and then pushing, pressing, straining through those last few miles to finish. That means more pain, not less. But looking backward lets one know that the distance to go is within reach.