In our day everything Modern has been slandered, misrepresented and demonized when this has been the most humane era of any time in Mankinds history. I do not use the word 'modern' in the sense of the 'current time period' but as a world view typified by the people who adapted to modern industry from about 1500.
The Modern world view was ironically enough established by clerics like St Thomas Moore who led the crusade to clean up the corruption in Catholic monasteries of his time. Moore wrote a book on Utopia that inspired generations since and promoted the value of a strong central government to save mankind in the name of God and humanity. Objective Truth was a given to the philosophers of that time, and the use of 'Natural philosophy' to explore what we know of how nature works was promoted across Europe, not only to ease the lives of the people but also to enhance profits of private businesses and strengthen the power of patronizing governments. This world view was adopted by Western elites in order to survive the devastation of the Saracen, Vikings and Magyar invaders and the sweeping plagues of the
Second, Third and Sixth centuries, and the Bubonic Plague of the 14th.
This world view enabled the three key events that completely turned the Old World upside down; the ubiquitous
rifle, the ubiquitous
printed media of various kinds, and the discovery of
Celestial Navigation which allowed repeatable passage to the American continents. The rifle making technology became common tech that any blacksmith could replicate by 1750 which truly put real power into the hands of the people, potentially when they finally realized that they had such power in the English Civil War. The printing technology led to an explosion in discussion and controversy that fanned the flames of literacy across the Globe, changing us forever with the spread of science and modern medicine. Columbus used celestial navigation in his first two voyages along with dead reckoning and more traditional methods, relying on ocean currents to make his way, but by his third voyage his use of celestial navigation was so certain and reliable he abandoned using dead reckoning or any other method of navigation. This development of celestial navigation freed ocean commerce from hugging the coasts and allowed much faster voyages to any part of the globe and international trade exploded everywhere. It allowed Western Europeans to go around the Muslim controlled Middle East, flipping the economic advantage from the Muslim world to the Christian world till the development of the internal combustion engine and the need for petroleum products.
Since the 1500's, we have defied every expressed limit to human endeavor, knowledge and capacity. We feed hundreds of times more than Malthus whined the globe could handle, with no food riots or mass starvation anywhere that commerce is allowed to function unimpeded by local government. We have cured diseases that were once the deeply held fears of humanity everywhere, and no longer do people evacuate to the countryside when disease breaks out in our cities because we have confidence that our medical establishment can handle the problem. We fly through the air, land on the moon, instantly communicate to people on the other side of the Earth, and are now on the brink of Eternal youth.
But all this is now being put at risk by one simple thing; abandoning the world view that got us here and that is the Modern World View.
What is this 'modern' world view? Well originally it simply meant the thinking of our current time in each generation which was assumed to be anti-Catholic, pro-Nordic, and entirely Secular deterministic. But as it won the day in several controversies like the discovery of biological Evolution and modern physics, the Modern World View became embraced by nearly everyone across the Globe by 1900 as its advantages and power had become obvious to everyone. The Western World was seen as the epitome of Science, Progress, Art, literature and style. Western dress was required in most countries as a symbolic statement that they were trying to become Western which implied Modern.
Then came the First World war, a single act of complete insanity that slaughtered tens of millions of people, wrecked entire empires that had endured for centuries and it completely discredited Western culture. And if that wasnt bad enough, we followed the first calamity with a second act in the Second World War. No longer were Europeans seen as the great exemplars of Modern thinking and since 1900 we have slid down the slippery slope of an irrational Post-Modern thought that has inverted the basic tenets of the Modern World View that allowed us to achieve the wonders we have achieved. The rise of Communism (Marxist-Leninism), fascism/Nazism, and Identity Politics has cause the deaths of millions of people has over-riding rationales for the dehumanization of other people became universally justified through the appeal of tribalism, whether based on economics, genetics or culture.
Why would the benefactors of the Modern World View abandon that same world view?
Mostly I think because other world views are more entertaining, being not so boring like the MWV we have forced on us from grade school. An entire industry of Post-Modernists have found easy tenure and wealth selling to the public how 'evil we actually are' because of our blunders and they make up lies to fill in the rest, like asserting that Europeans deliberately spread malaria. And so the ignorant innocent are abandoning their greatest inheritance; the Modern Age.
And what are the consequences of our abandoning the MWV?
Well, firstly we will see more and more people ignoring the advice and prudence of Modern disciplinary ways of living, which were frugal, moral and emphasized planning for the future. No, that was too 'judgmental' and today everything must be immediate consumption, hedonistic, and living only for the moment.
Secondly, our view and understanding of technology has devolved into a mystical Black Box of unrelated functions that rob us of understanding how things really work in the world. We have people who drive their automobiles and yet have not the slightest comprehension of how an internal combustion engine works. We have millions of people flying around the globe who dont have the slightest notion of the
Bernoulli Principle. We have idiots who protest eating meat but who have no problem with wearing leather, getting vaccinations or using plastic all of which come from dead animals (as well as plants).
We are increasingly unable to see the connection between what we do and what we advocate, and so many of us ignorantly wind up advocating for things that are against our own interests, like the ignorant Red Stick Creek Amerindians who advocated in the own tribe for practices and policies that led to their forced removal, similar to 'war path Cherokee' who were forced to migrate to Oklahoma and the tragic 'Trail of Tears' as they erupted into a catastrophic Civil War that saw the deaths of many of their tribesmen and Cherokee as well.
We will lose the ability to comprehend the intent and real meaning of what other people say as our own subjective opinions trump any consideration what the opponent might have actually meant. Our sense of community and humanity will perish under the poison of intentional slander of the Other Kind.We will lose our trust in science as it becomes subverted into a new form of Lysenkoism in the service of political ideology. We will close our borders entirely due to the inability to have faith and trust in those 'not of our kind' as our incomprehension forces us to rely on trivialities like common appearance. Our governments ability to manage our nations policies and affairs, already well undermined, will completely collapse as the economic wherewithal falls far short of our exploding humane needs.
Of course none of this is a certainty. I am just connecting points on a hypothetical blank sheet, but if we do not restore the best of our Modern World View, the population of Planet Earth will fall to under a billion people by 2200, IMO, and most of that will be uncontrolled catastrophe and also applauded by nitwits who think it a good thing to happen.
