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{{a|philosophy| | {{a|philosophy| | ||
[[File:Modernism.jpg|450px|thumb|center|It’s good this Communism lark isn’t it?]] | [[File:Modernism.jpg|450px|thumb|center|It’s good this Communism lark isn’t it?]] | ||
}}A 20th century cultural movement encompassing design, art, literature, architecture, town planning and ultimately government that sought to break entirely from the | }}A 20th-century cultural movement encompassing design, art, literature, architecture, town planning and ultimately government that sought to break entirely from the western cultural tradition, instead creating something new, rational, abstract, utopian and independent on the historical contingencies and [[narrative]]s which got ''homo sapiens'' to the twentieth century, but which the modernist thinkers of the early 20th century concluded were mistaken: principally, religion, and the social structures that depend on it. | ||
Modernism was to wipe the slate clean; the legacy narrative — angels, devils, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords etc — was so broken, so profoundly ''disproved'' that it was best to just ditch it wholesale and start the process fresh, from the ground up. | |||
A French fellow by the name of [[Descartes]] had tried this once before, and had wound up back where he started, with God. The Modernists would go the whole hog, rejecting ''that'' Big Idea, and all the little ones that had evolved in the folds of its ecosystem. Well, most of them, anyway: the imperative for there to ''be'' a solitary organising principle — arguably a founding assumption of theism — stayed, so a ''new'' Big Idea was needed. In the early twentieth century they came up with two, both utopian, but neither worked out so well: fascism and communism. | |||
Modernism’s heyday was 1914-1945 — you don’t need to be a history buff to clock those two dates — and its track record didn’t really live up to its billing: one machine age, two hot world wars and 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. | 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. |