You have to admire the sheer audacity of Modernity as it sought a full compass rollback of the effects of the Modern Era, under the sheep's skin guise of daring to lead this counter-revolution under the name of Modernity !
Albeit it was a subconscious counter-revolution ---- all of its varied proponents went to their graves convinced they were furthering the pace of the Modern Era and merely working to destroy some of its dangerous foes.
So some of the Modern Era's most dangerous foes (and also its biggest supporters) were socialism, liberalism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, totalitarianism.
Like some hair-brained firing squad, the entire world armed itself with intellectual rifles and formed a circle, with each ideology convinced that its opponent directly across the way was Modernity's worse enemy and the erstwhile 'friends' on either side of themselves were only a little bit better.
The Modern Era was notable for many things but it is possible to see that above all else was was truly new about it was the extreme mobility it brought to so many hitherto local human activities.
The increased reach, speed and universality of the flow in and out of local areas (and of entire sovereign nations) of capital, materials, products, patents, intellectual ideas, fashions and tastes, immigrants and warfare was extremely upsetting to most everybody at some time or other.
Reality now seemed seemed so complex, so diverse, so unpredictable, so rapidly changing as beyond human comprehension, let alone human control.
Modernity can thus be best seen as an intellectual claim that - contrary to this current false human sense about reality - a scientific study of Nature actually revealed that real reality was essentially simple, predictable and static, in uniformitarian equilibrium, and any change in it was so gradual as to appear invisible over the average human lifetime.
The Modern Era and Modernity were not one and the same train or even two trains running on parallel tracks, but two trains heading for a head-on wreck on the same track : WWI and WWII ....
Albeit it was a subconscious counter-revolution ---- all of its varied proponents went to their graves convinced they were furthering the pace of the Modern Era and merely working to destroy some of its dangerous foes.
So some of the Modern Era's most dangerous foes (and also its biggest supporters) were socialism, liberalism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, totalitarianism.
Like some hair-brained firing squad, the entire world armed itself with intellectual rifles and formed a circle, with each ideology convinced that its opponent directly across the way was Modernity's worse enemy and the erstwhile 'friends' on either side of themselves were only a little bit better.
The Modern Era was notable for many things but it is possible to see that above all else was was truly new about it was the extreme mobility it brought to so many hitherto local human activities.
The increased reach, speed and universality of the flow in and out of local areas (and of entire sovereign nations) of capital, materials, products, patents, intellectual ideas, fashions and tastes, immigrants and warfare was extremely upsetting to most everybody at some time or other.
Reality now seemed seemed so complex, so diverse, so unpredictable, so rapidly changing as beyond human comprehension, let alone human control.
Modernity can thus be best seen as an intellectual claim that - contrary to this current false human sense about reality - a scientific study of Nature actually revealed that real reality was essentially simple, predictable and static, in uniformitarian equilibrium, and any change in it was so gradual as to appear invisible over the average human lifetime.
The Modern Era and Modernity were not one and the same train or even two trains running on parallel tracks, but two trains heading for a head-on wreck on the same track : WWI and WWII ....
