ANICO - POST-CLASS REPLY TO POST-CLASS POST

I am replying to a post by Ann, because I’m lazy and incapable formulating my own crap. I’m trying to answer her question “why is everybody so obsessed with becoming more modern? “ In the terms of how I’m understanding modernity, metanarratives, and neoconservatives. The post can be found HERE.

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If you go back to the very first definition of Modernity that was presented to us from the Oxford Art Online sheet, the very first sentence states it is “the cultural condition in which the seemingly absolute necessity of innovation becomes a primary fact of life, work, and thought.”

Being modern is about being forward-thinking and always looking for the knowledge to make something better. I don’t think that is ever going to end. Human curiosity and innovation is always going to look for something to fix or discover. Although how the general populace reacts to the condition of modernity (your example of people sitting staring at a screen all day) I feel is a different matter. Hell, maybe sometime in the future, people are going to think that going outside to play in the sun rather than playing video games is a postmodern idea. Postmodernism loves irony. I’ve come to understand the relationship of modern and postmodern as some strange cycle, but I’m not 100% on that (I figure I will be by the end of the class.)

But if you like the free market, you have to like modernism. You just stated that “I think their needs to be a free market in order to motivate people to create new things and ideas“. The free market is a manifestation of modernity. It says everyone is free, intelligent, and innovative enough to be entitled to control their own economy without regulation. Obviously, in the light of recent economic mess, that’s not true. I like that you recognize that there is still a need for regulation to protect the poor, but I personally feel that acknowledging that is itself undermining the metanarrative of a free market. Which is good, because we’re here to criticize metanarrative, but the way you formulate it could be taken as being an absolute believer in it, please clarify if you can.

Neoconservatives are also a metanarrative and also fundamentalists, so I say be careful about agreeing with them. They may say they are for helping other countries with political and financial issues, but they also believe in manifest destiny. It swings to both extremes. We said were told we were helping Iraq by invading it. How does that kind of hypocrisy work? Neoconservatives are rational and technical maybe about their own agenda, but they don’t acknowledge the balance necessary (as do many fundamentalists) nor do they try to find the cause of things, just to name an entire polar opposition and blame everybody’s problems on that.

In a sentence or two, I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can’t have a free market without modernity and fundamentalists ruin everything.