Modernism

Philosophy Go Premium It’s good this Communism lark isn’t it? The JC looks deep into the well. Or abyss. Click ᐅ to expand: Philosophy Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

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 narratives 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.

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

• Modernism versus pragmatism
• Post-modernism and critical theory
• Elephants and turtles