In our globalized and pace-making world, as nations are trying to sync their heartbeats, the foreign and domestic political spheres undergo what I call "return and reject."
This ritual began after World War I, when the advanced nations of the world acknowledged that they were tied to one another, for better or worse. A cycle of aimless, existential complaint began to underwrite the political spectrum, as people shifted from proactive (policy-minded) to reactive (change-oriented).
It became less about the decision at hand and more about the sides of the argument: there were no longer an inconceivable amount of options -- there were two. For any question, the answer is now either For or Against. It's night and day; black and white.
Appropriately, culture and thought entered the Modernist age at the same time as this change. I don't have the hard evidence enough to prove they were correlated (I won't be quoting any collegiate journals), but I will lay down my thought process here:
Modernism is a philosophical movement that was a rejection of the Enlightenment era for the sake of being new. As cities developed into bastions of art and technology, those two realms began to be shaped by big picture progressives who wanted to see change for the sake of change: a trial-and-error for improvement. The "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" approach.
Then WWI came and the rest of the civilized world became disillusioned, arguing in favor of an open-ended exploration of society in the wake of the hard-nosed horror that swallowed Europe. (When your country and its neighbors tear each other apart for no reason, and then try to act like nothing happened, your view on life becomes rather existential; reactionary measures (like counterculture) are then born, as people try to figure out how to respond to an uncertain world with a kind of lifestyle that is objectively "the best.")
The Enlightenment had been a long period of rewriting the idea of "thought," away from the black-and-white that was the Monarchy and the Institutional Church, where lone, detached men and dogmatic inner circles controlled the realm of "acceptable" and "abhorrent" behavior. The Enlightenment led to grey-area thinking that said "it's okay to not know everything. We'll figure it out together."
This was in the wake of revolutions around the world, as the Catholic court toppled and kings lost their heads. The people reigned, and they understood that societies are complicated. They questioned religious certainty and instead embraced the scientific method (which is a manner of cautious experimentation: having a hypothesis and attempting to refute it until it proves itself to be true).
In this era of free thought, we more-or-less rediscovered the ideas of liberty, tolerance, fellowship, and democracy. We separated the church and state; we let the masses decide their nation's fate; we gave independence to each man, so that they may choose for themselves their own destiny.
There’s a reason we refer to it as "the Enlightenment."
As it may be evident to you, the cautious scientific method of the Enlightenment has been replaced in Modernism by the all-in fanaticism of fringe movements. Hypotheses are tested no longer by refuting tenets and reflective debates, but instead by heedless fighting and zealous commitment to concepts: asserting the grandeur of unproven ideas and pushing them until they break.
And that's where the 'return and reject' routine lives.
In classic Modernist sense, post-industrialization thinkers rejected religion outright, as well as the scientific method and the conclusions it reaped. Modernists aren't interested in conclusions -- they want "the one true conclusion." They want the secret sauce to a perfect world. They want a utopia, because they know there is no afterlife waiting for them. They need their perfection now, on Earth.
The Modernists had sought change for the sake of change: progress for the feeling of progress. The poet Ezra Pound proclaimed this belief in his tome of the moment, saying "Make it new!"
That was in 1934, when we were breeding futurists, fascists, communists, socialists, capitalists, tyrants, and demagogues... and when the middle was dissolving.
In a polarizing, divisive time of wild, grandiose ideas, the only alternative to anarchy was institutionalizing it. And when frustrated laborers shed the urbane facade, they realized the world was chaotic and made manifest by no higher power. They were afraid, and they ran to either side of the argument. They transformed that side into a party, which controlled a realm of society -- and when one side eventually won (through increased tensions and escalated conflict) the party became the dominion, and the dominion became the new normal.
Like humans are apt to do, we adapted to these new ways of life -- and then we became frustrated with that, too. And we rejected it, ran to the other side of argument (to the new poles, which sprang-up in response to this new question) and the cycle was renewed...
The Enlightenment had been deemed obsolete because it was too introspective, and the Modernists believed there is nothing beneath the surface. (See: pop culture.) And as with Modernists, each successive movement is deemed obsolete on the grounds that it, too, was shallow and ineffective. The hope was that the movement would revolutionize the way humans interacted and advanced, but instead we resorted to old ways (such as animals of habit would) and we found a way to adopt our "innate but outdated communal practices" into the New Way, thus tainting it and proving it to be objectively unsuccessful. With such a downward spiral, this New Way had shone to be wholly irredeemable, and the only appropriate response was a drastic change into something even more modern.
Or so they say.
Modernists shook up art, technology, and society for the sake of shaking things up. "The economy was stale, so we electrified it," they'd say. "The old party was wrong," they'd argue. "It was the other guys -- they were misguided fanatics, and they were wrong. But us? We know what we're doing," they'd purport, with an air of wide-eyed ignorance.
And as the young third generation of Modernists watched globalization and industrialization churn societies into shattered, shallow pools of fearful, frustrated people, they said "this, too, does not work."
The rise of corporations, suburbia, and the War in Vietnam proved a new era of distrust, detachment, and disillusionment. The third generation of Modernists rejected their ideology altogether, and appropriately [and unimaginatively] became "Postmodernists."
Where Modernism concerned itself with the search for "the one true way of life," Postmodernists turned the existential angst up to 11 and said that society was dead. "We have been forsaken by ourselves, and we must repent," they'd say. "We must ascend above ourselves if only to avoid reality, but with the dream of someday stumbling upon a noble truth. Through struggle and cohesion, we will try."
Postmodernists want to experience life in the moment. There is no time for experimentation -- only action. "Life is short, and the world is busy."
The Enlightened believed the destination is worth the journey. Modernists believed the potential self-discovery of the destination is worth the potential self-destruction of the journey. Postmodernists are purely interested in the journey; they don't know where they're headed, and they don't care. They don't believe in the afterlife and they don't believe in utopia; even if they say they do, their actions would say otherwise.
Postmodernism is, for all intents and purposes, Modernism, albeit without the hope or the passion. -- Hope for the future is instead fear for the future, and passion is instead frustration.
((Modernism - pizzazz) / dreams = Postmodernism)
Postmodernists pursue the idea of universal truths -- not in life, but in the way of life (as was the case with modernists). They believe there are ultimate truths and that we are far from them; that to attain them means to fight our way to them, like a fencer in the video game Nidhogg: constantly pushing your way to the truth, but all-the-while facing opposition of your equal.
Postmodernists believe in black-and-white universal ideas across all humans, as one group. Yet, they do not believe in society: they believe in the species, though they are too caught up in the components of the species that are not yet in harmony (being, incidentally, societies and cultures). Additionally, they think of humanity as a species but not as an animal.
Since the era of Modernism began, humans for the most part have envisioned themselves as "above animals." Whereas the religious ages had us accepting ourselves as equal creatures of God's work, and the Enlightened had considered us as advanced animals in a continuous evolution, Modernists had detached humans from the animal realm and came to consider their species to be of some greater third province: elevated consciousness and superiority over the rest of nature, rather than a part of it. (Always the shepherd, never the sheep.)
Postmodernists are the same, as they forget we're animals, with long-instilled traits that are so inherent to our character that we can't shake them just because of a policy change. These traits can't be denied or changed; and as creatures of tradition, we have anthropological roots going so deep that our particular cultures manifest themselves in our behavior, speech, and thought.
Yet they want to upend all of that and blur borders -- and however noble that is, you cannot force such a change. Humans are creatures of adaptation, true, but we require decades to effectively change. Industrialization has sped up every aspect of our lifestyle, but one thing it cannot change is the functioning of the human body and mind.
We each are undeniably individual and yet equally group-oriented; asserting globalization does not mean we can so easily apply our tribe formula of yesteryear to the whole of the planet.
Humans need space, and they need relationships. When we lived in towns, we had cohesive and self-sustaining systems. And then the city came, because (like humans to towns) towns gravitated towards cities, as all natural beings logically pool to a central source (for the sake of logistics, resources, production, safety, opportunity, etcetera). The city was inevitable for humanity, but it tore the fabric between tribes when cities blended into nations, and when nations blended into globalism.
It's a time of anxiety, frustration, and depression, because nobody knows who they are anymore. Many are trying to rediscover their identity (individual and collective alike) and everyone else is trying to turn them into something they're not. (They're trying to do the same thing with their own vision!)
If the Enlightenment was the construction of the Titanic, and Modernism the sailing of it into an iceberg (and the frantic frenzy that arouse as it sunk), then Postmodernism is the thrashing struggle of terrified men and women, in the cold, deep, foreign waters and the cold, dark, isolated night... Overboard passengers climbing atop their neighbors, to escape the anxious, ominous void -- even if it means drowning their kin in the process...
Postmodernists want globalization (they want total equality, and collectivism) but what they truly want is individualism -- even if they don't know it. They are more obsessed with identity than ever before.
They want their personal wrongs righted in a public and official manner. They want to feel grounded and whole, and they demand the world bend to their needs instead of meeting nature in the middle. -- Does this sound like anyone you know? (Your grandpa calls them millennials, or snowflakes.) They are the third generation of Postmodernists: those who have known only this way of life, and thus are the ones more able to see its faults and most willing to point them out.
Remember -- World War I was inevitable given the tensions of archaic systems in an Enlightened world, but World War II and the Cold War were direct products of Modernism. And now globalism is the product of Postmodernism.
You don't like the USA's meddling in the Middle East, or the resident advisor of the freshman dorm that is the European Union? Well that's your globalization at work! You want to make all people equal, but you also condemn the loss of cultures? Well you can't have it both ways!
The USA and EU are well-meaning micro-managers, like that one boss you had at that menial job when you were younger. But eventually you got a better job and you ascended out of that world...
Well, we might be doing the same now.
We've rejected the last globalist swing as the right and left have become noticeably more polarized: one fearfully aware that their culture is disappearing, and the other heatedly insisting that it's best if we shed our unique identities in favor of a shapeless collective. (The issue is that one side favors individual identity and the other favors total equality, and you can't have both. But neither side will debate on these tenets because they either don't know that it's the true issue or they simply prefer arguing about symptoms and dumb shit. Either way, they won't negotiate or compromise, and instead they want to fight over economics or race or the uterus, because that solves everything... But that's a discussion for another time.)
Still, I think there's merit in addressing such a postmodern disharmony: we're certain that there is nothing beneath the surface. We are sure the symptoms are the issues, and that's why we argue about them. Ironically, this is the age of therapy, where we dig deep inside ourselves for the source of our personal issues -- but nobody seems to be applying such techniques to our blistering society. That, or nobody's listening.
We are unaware of the source behind our anger, and perhaps we don't want to know. We argue and bicker with the verbalized intent of finding a solution -- but if we truly wanted to find a solution then we wouldn't be fighting each other, we'd be working together. The way it appears, we're fighting because we love the thrill and camaraderie of fighting. We love the chaos, because we believe there is no order to the world.
"If there was order, tell me, how come there is poverty, and crime, and war, and starvation, and senseless death? If there is order, then why was I bullied in youth, why was I given false hope, why was I loved and thrown away, why am I poor even though I try so hard, why did I pursue this career just to be unhappy, why do I feel alone in the company of others, why do I seek an escape from my life, why do I hurt? Huh? If life was fair and orderly, then why do I hurt?" asks the Postmodernist.
We are self-loathing, self-referential, and objective. We live for schadenfreude and black humor, and yet concurrently we detest derision, criticism, and inappropriate content. When something upsets them, they revolt -- and quickly.
That brings us to my main point: what I call "return and reject."
Since the Modernism movement began, we have been wavering between the poles of whichever theme our political discourse is on. Americans have always done this (first, the national bank; then, expansion; then, slavery; then, imperialism; etc) but only since the end of World War I has this been on a global spectrum.
An ideology will emerge that claims to have the answers, and a following will grow behind it. The ideology will break through the mainstream with a revolutionary fervor, and it will ascend into a policy system, where it may dictate change. And it does.
And when that change becomes unpleasant, or turns out to have been false promises, or feels stale and inflexible, or is revealed to be corrupt, the people will shift to another competing ideology, drastically different enough to feel like progress while also avoiding the pitfalls of the previous administration.
This cycle of searching for trust and fulfillment is like the ouroboros: continuous and unaware of such. The majority's place among the spectrum swings back and forth like a pendulum.
First they'll reject the failed apex ideology for another, after enduring it for some time. Then they'll seek the radical alternate, which will eventually become normal: institutionalized to the point of rigidity and ineffectiveness. The people will then return to the previous end of the spectrum, to a moderate degree, as if to recapture the essence of the old ways: after all, something had been alluring and effective about it. But, alas, it is proven definitively stale, and the spectrum shifts again to the other side; this time, a glimmer of 'what could have been' is glimpsed, but it remains unobtainable.
After all those broken promises and shattered hopes for a realized vision, a new ideology emerges... and the people reject the old ways for this new proposed bastion of idealists, and the fire within their souls is ignited once again, and the ideology breaks through and dictates change, and so on, and so on...
Pursuit, installation, change, stagnation, rejection...
Return, and reject...
And again...
Mussolini in, Mussolini out...
Hitler in, Hitler out...
Khrushchev in, Khrushchev out...
Mugabe, Castro, Perón, Reagan, Obama...
Every ideology is a reaction to another.
We got Obama as a reaction to Bush, who was a reaction to Clinton, who was a reaction to Reagan, who was a reaction to Carter, who was a reaction to Nixon, who was a reaction to Johnson, and so on, and so on...
Red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, and now America has a demagogue in the executive office.
Pursuit, installation, change, stagnation, rejection...
Return, and reject...
And again...
Even today -- and especially today.
That's right: we're undergoing another political rejection already. You're probably aware of this. You've seen the news.
It's been tumultuous for long enough that now our philosophy is changing, again. But will we carry flags for a supreme ideology, as with Modernists? Or will we act more like the pugnacious underdogs of Postmodernism? How will post-Postmodernists define themselves? How will they save and better humanity?
Because right now, it appears we're just tearing ourselves apart...
If sports are any indication (if a lust and nostalgia for war, murder, and disaster aren't enough of a conviction -- though the modern media would assure you that it is) humans are inherently combative.
We form tribes, we establish dominance, the winners impose their will, and we grow from that point on. It's how we got from being apes to being globetrotters. We're persistent, cunning, and selfish.
Even the laziest person has a stubborn survival instinct. Even the dumbest person could manipulate others, or solve their way out of a bind. Even the most giving and friendly person looks out for their own interests.
Likewise, we all have a penchant for quitting, failing, and sacrificing. It's in our blood. It's what makes us human.
We form communities, we establish customs and traditions, we build utilitarian systems for maximum efficiency, and we grow from that point on...
And now we're introducing automation and artificial intelligence into the equation...
If we were struggling before, to acclimate to the industrialization that's rapidly outpacing us, I can't imagine how hard it will be for us to adapt to this new future sponsored by the Fourth Industrial Revolution...
Journalists continue to speak of the tech industry in saying "X-service is going to disrupt Y-industry." That's snazzy verbiage and all, but "disruption" isn't a good thing. If it's once, it's uncomfortable; if it's for growth, it's necessary. But if it's for every aspect of our society, across all industries and ranging from institutions to lifestyles, that's just so much upheaval... Humans require consistency and norms; we're creatures of habit and structure.
If you upturn and reinvent such a structure in a matter of years, there's going to be a lot of push-back. Hell, there's push-back if things move too fast in only a decade; we’re accustomed to gradual changes, across centuries. We are physiologically incapable of adapting that fast. -- And I'm not referring to the notion of learning to use a touchscreen or telling Alexa to turn the bedroom lights off. I'm referring to the socioeconomic and cultural implications of such a rapid change.
Our forms of transportation have graduated to the car, but if we automate roads, won't we lose that tribal knowledge? Won't be become dependent on those push-button systems? Will our work ethic decline if we don't have to put in effort to acquire resources or accomplish tasks? Won't we decrease our attention span, only making us more volatile? If everything is immediate, won't delays easily frustrate us? Would our dependence on these new systems make us more controllable? And if we lose the tribal knowledge of old systems, won't we become more compliant to the new ones?
In more immediate terms, won't the next generation and our own be torn by the discord of industrialization, just as what had happened with generations prior? During the transition from a working economy to an automated one, millions of people will become unemployable as they fall below the rising skill threshold. The demand for workers will shrink to only accommodate the most specialized and educated people, even though the supply of potential, eager workers will only grow as the global population increases...
Fifty years ago, we had millions of job opportunities across hundreds of blue collar fields (in both skilled and manual labor) just as we had had for the whole of our species' history, up to that point. Since we first created tools, we've needed skilled and manual laborers to produce and prosper. Capable yet otherwise 'unremarkable' people could find steady, well-paying jobs with relative ease, and without prerequisites.
This labor has largely now been replaced with automation, and the next generation has sought careers in business and technology (as opposed to jobs, which are now primarily in the service industry, because capitalism won the Cold War). These careers design and command the automation. -- Now, however, we're training computers to further take over those human systems that exist behind the automation.
What happens when there are no more jobs to be had? Will we all become musicians and filmmakers and artists, and we'll just buy each other's crafts in a cashless system of bartering? When the machines can both grow and harvest wood, and they also make the paper and the tables, and when the candlemakers and the shoemakers are robots, and when the fibers are all artificially generated and woven, and when you can then order all your tables and candles and sweaters to your house with the push of a button, and when a warehouse can autonomously assemble your order so that a flying drone or truck or monorail can autonomously deliver it to your apartment (because it will be an apartment; we're going to soon have too many people for everyone to have their own little house on two acres)... what will we be then?
Maybe we can do away with sheep shearing, and petroleum pumping, and plastic production, but what will we do with ourselves when we've taken the labor from the laborers? What will we be when we've changed what it means to be human? When specializations are taken, how will we be special? What role will we have in our society? Will we still have society, or will we all just be... hanging around? What will be our purpose if we have nothing to do? Will we all find passion in the arts, since only the intangible and creative parts of humanity will remain?
Will we have ultimate independence, or ultimate dependence? Will we be whole; fulfilled? Or will we be empty, and aimless? If everything is in the hands of the automatons, will we have any control over our systems? Can we become tycoons in such a scenario? Can we become tycoons if there are no jobs to create or reinvent?
Will we reinvent ourselves and blend ourselves with the machines, in order to become the systems and attain the next level of superiority over nature? Or will the third generation of us reject our automated ways and upheave it? Will they dismantle the systems and return to tribes and pastoralism? Will they take advantage of our mortal vulnerabilities and exploit the all-powerful systems against us? Will the inevitable disagreement about future philosophies and directions lead to a schism where humanity splits, and one half will embrace the machines while the other will revert to our old human systems?
I don't know. The possibilities are endless in such a time of explosive growth.
What I do know is that we will push forwards, ever-persistent, arguing about the best way to go about getting somewhere good.
Because we're human, and that's what we do.