Modernism

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A 20th century cultural movement encompassing design, art, literature, architecture, town planning and ultimately government that sought to break entirely from the traditional western cultural narrative and instead create something new, rational, abstract, utopian and not dependent on the historical cultural contingencies and narratives which got us to the twentieth century and which the thinkers of the early 20th century concluded were mistaken: principally, religion, and the social structures that depend on it.

But moving away from that big idea — and all the little ones that had evolved in its ecosystem — meant substituting it with a new one, and both the “big ideas” of the early twentieth century — communism and fascism — though utopian and highly modernist in disposition, descended quickly into horror. The heyday of modernism was 1914-1945 — history buffs might note something familiar about those two dates — and so modernism’s track record didn’t really live up to its billing: one machine age, two hot world wars and the start of a cold one, two dominant political ideologies that murdered a hundred million people between them, and if that wasn’t enough, an enormous, decade-long recession in between the two wars.

So you would like to think that modernism’s had its day, but no. After the second world war there was a period of high-modernism — outside the Communist states not so murderous, but repressive all the same — and even when that waned in the 1980s, the promise of the information resolution ushered in a new dogma that we can somehow solve all the worlds problems with data, meaning over the last thirty years there has been a kind of neo-modernism.

Modernism is profoundly determinist, rationalist, assumes the world is therefore a static place which even the hardest problems can be solved — that machines can be built that can divine the answers to questions our mortal minds cannot handle, and in that sense is in equal parts utopian, delusional and lazy: it believes that difficult stuff can all be solved without upsetting the dynamics of the system, and once solved we will all live happily ever after.

• Quick
• Cheap
• Fast
• Scalable
• Efficient
• Abstract

But with standardisation comes a loss of flexibility and accommodation: People are expected to adapt to the design imperatives of the scheme, rather that the scheme catering for the imperatives of the people.

See also

• Post-modernism and critical theory
• Elephants and turtles