Modernism

 Where did it come from and what did it mean?

 

Modernism: a term fast achieving a posture of decline while some enthusiastically add the prefix: 'post'

 

But it represents an age of gross optimism, revolutionary theories and paradigm shifts in society, culture and politics. 

 An Age of the Ascent of Man or humankind that represented the rise of human reason over nature  and the world and its explanation. With the certainty of Bacon's  scientific method, the crucial ideas or the fundamentals were evident with vast loads of data potentially collected and interpreted.

 Many Historians stipulate this age began as Copernicus published: On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres. 
The time: year 1543. 
But wholesale transformative time had arrived with social and religious reformation of the medieval Church and the 'plain citizen' Progress, at first was slow, but proceeded, accelerating decades and centuries.

 

The Scientific Revolution had set the course of humanity for some centuries to come. Man, not God, became the ultimate measure. God began to take a backseat, he was not the driver any longer.  Seeds were planted,all was not as it seemed. While God and others were pushed to the margins, man continued his spectacular, amazonian march into the future, technologically driven and scientifically sound. Everything, no problem, was  unsolvable, nothing thwarted or is unyieldingly unavailable. Man, science and its sister, technology advances our agenda.

 

Women, often invisible, overlooked and unacknowledged were thrust into the mainstream with good results. More contributed, advancing humankind, then in my opinion, momentum stalled with some strange over- the- top conceptions. Men, in particular, white ,older males were to blame for all social ills. A new generation began to question and disrupt every tradition. Reversing ancient customs, norms and values with a few disastrous results.

War was declared on reason and critical thinking. Suddenly language had  some of its declared meaning, altered. If you didn't follow, you were annulled or cancelled.
Even girl and boyhood had its state of play re-conformed to multiple expressions of sexuality. Children became confused and had unscientific surgeries and reversed biological/ pharmacological sex treatments. (some tomboys became  permanent blended fe/males all in the name of scientific progress ?) Toddlers, as young as three, were being taught about gender sexuality, sex education for virtual babies?

Okay, i'll stop writing about the excesses and absurdities of what is known as 'post -modernist thought'. Uberreach or overreached nonsense.

i'll deal with it later in another essay.

 

thus to return to the word...

Modernism can be summed as the  title of Thomas Paine's book; The Age of Reason.

( by Digital Anvil) 

 

 (Post- Modernism is harder to define, more like a slippery eel of a term.)