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As a resident of a neighborhood where there’s been a lot of new construction in the last 10 to 15 years, I can say with some certainty that that process comes with some side effects not the least of which is the sound that comes from construction crews assembling buildings of all shapes and sizes. Those two would seem to go hand in hand though news on the ground in at least one country suggests that there’s an alternative. …….Continue reading….
Source: InsideHook
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Critics:
The era of modernity is characterised socially by industrialisation and the division of labour, and philosophically by “the loss of certainty, and the realization that certainty can never be established, once and for all”. With new social and philosophical conditions arose fundamental new challenges. Various 19th-century intellectuals, from Auguste Comte to Karl Marx to Sigmund Freud, attempted to offer scientific and/or political ideologies in the wake of secularisation. Modernity may be described as the “age of ideology”.
Critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno and Zygmunt Bauman propose that modernity or industrialization represents a departure from the central tenets of the Enlightenment and towards nefarious processes of alienation, such as commodity fetishism and the Holocaust. Contemporary sociological critical theory presents the concept of rationalization in even more negative terms than those Weber originally defined.
Processes of rationalization as progress for the sake of progress may in many cases have what critical theory says is a negative and dehumanising effect on modern society. Consequent to debate about economic globalization, the comparative analysis of civilizations, and the post-colonial perspective of “alternative modernities”, Shmuel Eisenstadt introduced the concept of “multiple modernities”.
Modernity as a “plural condition” is the central concept of this sociologic approach and perOne common conception of modernity is the condition of Western history since the mid-15th century, or roughly the European development of movable type and the printing press.
In this context the modern society is said to develop over many periods and to be influenced by important events that represent breaks in the continuity. spective, which broadens the definition of “modernity” from exclusively denoting Western European culture to a culturally relativistic definition, thereby: “Modernity is not Westernization, and its key processes and dynamics can be found in all societies”.
Of the available conceptual definitions in sociology, modernity is “marked and defined by an obsession with ‘evidence’,” visual culture, and personal visibility. Generally, the large-scale social integration constituting modernity, involves the:
- increased movement of goods, capital, people, and information among formerly discrete populations, and consequent influence beyond the local area
- increased formal social organization of mobile populaces, development of “circuits” on which they and their influence travel, and societal standardization conducive to socio-economic mobility
- increased specialization of the segments of society, i.e., division of labor, and area inter-dependency
- increased level of excessive stratification in terms of social life of a modern man
- Increased state of dehumanisation, dehumanity, unionisation, as man became embittered about the negative turn of events which sprouted a growing fear.
- man became a victim of the underlying circumstances presented by the modern world
- Increased competitiveness among people in the society (survival of the fittest) as the jungle rule sets in.
This means that modernity overlays earlier formations of traditional and customary life without necessarily replacing them. In a 2006 review essay, historian Michael Saler extended and substantiated this premise, noting that scholarship had revealed historical perspectives on modernity that encompassed both enchantment and disenchantment.
Late Victorians, for instance, “discussed science in terms of magical influences and vital correspondences, and when vitalism began to be superseded by more mechanistic explanations in the 1830s, magic still remained part of the discourse—now called ‘natural magic,’ to be sure, but no less ‘marvelous’ for being the result of determinate and predictable natural processes.”
Mass culture, despite its “superficialities, irrationalities, prejudices, and problems,” became “a vital source of contingent and rational enchantments as well.” Occultism could contribute to the conclusions reached by modern psychologists and advanced a “satisfaction” found in this mass culture. In addition, Saler observed that “different accounts of modernity may stress diverse combinations or accentuate some factors more than others…
Modernity is defined less by binaries arranged in an implicit hierarchy, or by the dialectical transformation of one term into its opposite, than by unresolved contradictions and oppositions, or antinomies: modernity is Janus-faced.
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