A World Changed?

There were two headlines at the top of yesterday’s Guardian front page – the first the predictable one about the observation of the 20^th anniversary of 9/11; the other about the US drone strike on Kabul which had mistakenly targeted an Afghan who turned out to be working for a US organisation and which also blew up several of his children. We are supposed to see the first as a “world-changing” event and the second as “collateral damage”. This is US exceptionalism at its most distasteful and hypocritical.   

The world did not change on September 11^th 2001 – and anyone who thinks so is out of their tiny mind. I can well believe that it shocked the American population to realise that they could be attacked on their own soil – but that just shows the scale of their imagined exceptionalism. And did the American voter realise that they were unleashing a military spend of some 8 trillion dollars??

But the question of global turning points is an important one….Virginia Woolf's famous assertion (in 1924) that “on or about December 1913 human nature changed” rather challenges my view that modernism started when Marx and Engels produced their “Communist Manifesto” in 1848. But her statement is matched by the equally questionable claim that “the modern world died at 3.32 pm  15 July 1972 in St Louis, Missouri when the notorious Pruitt Igou housing scheme was dynamited”. This is taken from an amusing article “Postmodernism – 10 key moments” written by the author of “Grand Hotel Abyss – the lives of the Frankfurt School” 

My recent posts have focused on such questions as

-       when modernity became postmodernity

-       whether postmodernity has played itself out

-       what will replace it

-       whether any of this matters 

Let me try to deal with each of these – briefly 

1.      Daniel Bell’s use of the phrase “post-industrial” in 1960 signalled the birth-pangs of post-modernism with 3 important books detailing the relevant social changes before the decade was out – viz in The Temporary Society by Warren Bennis and Philip Slater (1968); The Age of Discontinuity; by the famous Peter Drucker (1969) and Between Two Ages - America’s Role in the Technetronic Era by Zbigniev Brzezinski (1970) best capturing the transition pains… 

2.     Postmodernity is like a slow-burning fuse. The whole “fake news” saga is down to it – although I have tried to show in these posts that it has had its positive side eg our appreciation that the world can and should be seen from a variety of perspectives   

3.    So I think it’s a bit early to celebrate its death. We still haven’t managed to respond to the savaging it’s given to the belief we used to have in human reason – and how untruths can be exposed. Indeed it’s only recently that I, for one, have come across books which, 2 decades ago, made sterling efforts to deal with the challenges this posed to the various academic disciplines. Two of the best are Richard Evan’s In Defence of History (1997) and D McCloskey’s “The Rhetoric of Economics” (1998)  

4.     And yes, I do think it’s important to try to identify turning points in history. Global warming, Artificial Intelligence and Pandemics are the three factors which, together, seem now to be leading us in a new direction – as these 2 reports indicate “Artificial Intelligence and the future of Humans” (Pew Institute 2018) “Humanity is at a Precipice” (2019)