Modernity denotes an age that never ends. It is just contemporaneity. To that extent, modernity, postmodernity, the ancients: all of it fails to describe their epochs: the temporal markers are derivative streams that lack substantive content. Philosophical definition sought final anchors, necessary and sufficient conditions that identify the subject according to its content, not relative time.
To that extent, we can describe today as globalized digital, industrialized oligarchy. The main media and the content on them are owned by a few corporations, the corporations that are around are subsuming the rest of them, the government is in bed with the rich and the everyone else is distracted from the fact that they have volition.
My quest for today is to wake myself into the power of my intellect, will and body. The problems of our time–like the lack of social cooperation, the problem of professional specialization, the lack of trust–lead to the large-scale social problems: corruption, crime and meaninglessness. In many ways, we have entered a crisis of human character today, not merely an unjust social system. The 20th century led to the demise of most forms of social idealism: Marxist, socialist or fascist. Seeing the gulag in the Soviet Union, the fragmentation of Yugoslavia after the death of Tito, the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps, or the capitalist-communism of China, the vision of the future has blurred in a fog of passivity and popcorn, resigning the hearts and souls of many to variant forms of Western capitalist-oligarchy.
It is time to realize that the ideals of the past need to update with what is happening today. The United States government is not a, strictly speaking, capitalist society, inasmuch corporations are supported, subsidized and saved from failure by our government. To the extent that the government supports and protects corporations, we live in a socialist or fascist state. Then, the TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) bailout in 2008 is not merely aid by the federal government for banks like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase, but is a further development of public-private partnership, as the forces of commerce, finance and business meld and influence the government branches that should independently oversee, regulate and control them by, for and of the people.
A completely equal distribution of goods and wealth does not help society, despite the apparent good feeling this idea brings. This is because people do not create material wealth equally. Whatever social order one desires, it must fundamentally deal with the character and motivations of the human being, as whatever incongruities exist personally will attempt to be brought into social alignment through reform or revolution. For example, people that receive the same amount for working and for not working incentivizes free-loading, creating personal benefits for those who do not work and social costs because production is needed for the continued production and selling of goods and services, let alone the personal envy in the productive workers that such a situation creates.
The incentives of one’s society must help the individual to better their personal situation and that of their community. Instead of a government enforcing the equal distribution of resources, a government should instead support each of its subjects personally, bringing everyone, those with power and those without it, to responsibility. This involves, in our American Republic, i.e., the American public thing, helping those with less power more, because negative consequences will be harder on them, and bring them to exercise their power in a democracy.
A subdivision of TARP, the 2008 bailout, named the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) intended to help at least three million endangered homeowners, but it only helped about five hundred thousand, with more than seven hundred thousand cancellations. This was largely because the government did not compel loan servicers to comply with the program. They made a law to help the American citizen and did nothing to guarantee its success. Meanwhile, the direct aid, without loan servicers, to more than 900 corporations surpassed $700 billion. During the TARP bailout, the average American citizen was left out to dry, and in many cases those who themselves caused the crash, like J.P. Morgan, were directly helped. Average American citizens had over ten million foreclosures after 2008.
I am more than a consumer, a laborer or an entrepreneur. I am more than a user of technology, a student or a citizen. I am a human being. I have a moral character. I have ethics. What happens in our world, 9 million people dying yearly of malnutrition, for example, is wrong.
Much of the discussion today, if placed in the context of dying people, is unimportant. What, exactly, is the point of reified academic discourse about philosophy of mind when children are dying?
The most absurd term in theoretical discourse is the postmodern, denoting as it does the after-now, as modern simply means to be contemporary. The period in which I was born defines itself as past the present. Can anything happen past the present time while we are still in the present? No wonder this results in next to nothing of note happening across the Western world since the 60s. Conceptually, we have restricted it from the possibility. Worse employment, worse family structure and degenerate moral character. I could go on.
I agree with the work of Cornelius Castoriadis in this respect. Rather than postmodern, he describes our time of complacency since World War 2 as the Age of Generalized Conformism. He faces backward and forward, announcing that we have failed in the goals that began modernity (liberty for all, the freedom to think and government of, by and for the people). Instead of pursuing these goals, we have sighed, shrugged and mumbled, with all the emotion of a tired teenager, “I’m over it.”
We’ve moved on, but much of the striving of the past is still inchoate and merely seeks partial satisfaction. The push toward freedom is directed toward new consumer goods that will inevitably fail, the freedom to think the ability to complain on social media, and government of, by and for the professional service providers. The noble stance, the one that looks at the world and others as a community, looking to the past for guidance and the future for a better present, will be revived. It is not enough to seek answers or meaning in the present. A person genuinely interested in progress must look to the past, to what has been left behind, and to even what is not seen in order to continue.
Describing the times as modernity is the clearest way to see that a culture is sleeping. The double-down is even worse, the “after-now” age.
The axe is lain at the root, pointing to a vacuity in the assertion, “It is happening now.”
Veracity as Virtue 