Modern
The word "modern" is often used simply as a SynonymForGood. When I use the term on this bliki, however, I have a specific meaning in mind.
I believe the essential idea of modernity is that fictitious, abstract constructs can have profound real-world effects, and provide leverage over real problems, because of their structural properties. A related idea is that "the structure of a thing is what it is"—i.e. KranzsLaw. This view of structure affects how we ascribe moral value to things. Whereas premodern thought sought to explain and justify patterns of organization like governments and cultural traditions by reference to supernatural deities or axiomatic values, modern thought seeks to explain them as cyclically-referential structures in reality—that is, to explain reality solely in terms of itself.
This focus on self-reference and the search to explain the universe in terms of itself has had a few major consequences:
- An increase in self-awareness in art and philosophy. This is because, if you can't use moral and aesthetic axioms to justify your thinking and art, you have to be self-aware.
- Nihilism. The loss of moral and aesthetic axioms has led people to (naïvely, IMO) believe that nothing is objectively valuable, that there is no objective difference between good and bad.
- The development of complex structures of ideas (not things) that are able to do some kind of useful work because of their structural properties—for example, LISP, the Internet, and cryptocurrencies.
- The inklings of a Biophilic philosophy that seeks to explain human values as an instance of an objective type of life, or health, or wholeness, or quality, that exists structurally in the universe. This is essentially the opposite of nihilism. ChristopherAlexander and RobertPirsig are two of the main exponents of this philosophy.
- bitcoin
- corporations
- structural oppression
- ChristopherAlexander's concept of Wholeness
- the concept of a scientific theory not as "true" or "false", but rather "useful and falsifiable"
- the number zero
- numbers and mathematics in general
- evolution
- SystemsThinking
When you become aware that the essence of a thing is its structure, it's natural to start analyzing that structure—teasing apart its constituent pieces and dimensions—and re-synthesizing them to create new structures. For example, we can analyze the concept of "art" as a set of structural relationships:
- it hangs on the wall
- people will pay for it
- it's pleasant to look at
- it portrays scenes or people, either realistically or idealistically
- it represents mythologically important ideas
- it's made with materials that are more or less permanent
- it has a more or less fixed physical form
Modern art plays with these elements of structure—mostly by selectively removing them, or narrowly focusing on some of them to prove a point (e.g. "what's the weirdest thing I can make that people will pay for?") At best, this leads to innovative new forms that have lasting aesthetic and moral value—i.e. that solve the "problems" art addresses in new ways that are a good fit for their context. At worst, it becomes an exercise in the bizarre, banal, and inhuman—which people often misinterpret as an honest attempt to solve some aesthetic problem, because they are not in on the "joke".
Indeed, the main problem with modernity is that most people do not "get the joke". They forget, or never learn, that the modern idea I've outlined above is valuable because it solves real problems. Instead, they mistake the surface forms of the results of modern experimentation/play for the essence—they come to believe that those forms are somehow inherently valuable, even when they may just be an experiment, or a demonstration of a theoretical point. In short, they apply premodern thinking—essentially, magical, ritualistic thinking—to a modern context. This mistake has had disastrous consequences, and we are still making it today.
In software engineering, we often call this type of thinking a CargoCult. However, while the original cargo cult was completely ineffectual at achieving its goals, the modern industrial cult is especially pernicious because it seems to almost work. The cult produces things that do serve some purpose—they just aren't efficient in how they do it.
For example, the form of modern architecture derives from the idea that a building's main—or even only—purpose is to serve the basic physical needs of its occupants: shelter, light, water, privacy, energy-efficiency. This concept of what a building is for is produced by the analysis and re-synthesis process described above, in which the re-synthesis selectively excludes concerns that have traditionally been the responsibility of architects: beauty, comfort, relatedness, community, a sense of place, a reverence for nature. The stance of modern architecture is not that these concerns are not important, but rather that they should be addressed by something other than architecture.
On the surface, this seems sort of reasonable—except that in practice, it is absurdly inefficient. The occupants of modern buildings have to go out of their way to meet psychological needs that those buildings could address, but don't. The same removal of psychological supports is now occurring in software UI design as well, where the recent trend is to remove or hide anything that isn't "content"—no matter what its positive externalities might be.
But this is only the beginning. The choice to design a building, or a UI, that addresses a subset of the user's needs is a choice that one could theoretically make—the tradeoff might be worth it in certain contexts. The main problem happens when people start cargo-culting the forms of those solutions without even being aware that there is a tradeoff.