High Modernism

16:32 – The final term (for now) is “High Modernism”.

This is necessarily somewhat vague because we’re talking about periods of history, and those don’t have clear boundaries.

Roughly, plain old modernism is the product of the Enlightenment and the industrial age. It’s associated with the idea of both technological and political progress, that the future will be better than the past, and that human action can *make* it better. It also sees a trend toward increased individualism and the idea of self-improvement. As political institutions like the nation state take hold, the idea that people can improve themselves tends to shade into the idea that the state should improve them. For example, in the Russian Stolypin reforms of 1906-1914, quote, “The state officials and agrarian reformers reasoned that, once given a consolidated, private plot, the peasant would suddenly want to get rich and would organize his household into an efficient workforce and take up scientific agriculture.” That didn’t work, as the Czar and his ministers found out in WWI. Later, the USSR would double down on creating what they called the New Soviet Man, with even worse results.

17:52 – Modernism shades into *high* modernism. High modernism has a strong Fetish for technology and science; it tends to assume that an elite knows enough, right now, to construct a better, even utopian, future. (It doesn’t care much about the present and tends to think the past provides only negative examples.) The elite assumes that they know better than the common people how those common people should live their lives, and what the social order they live within should look like.

18:24 – Brian Marick finds it hard to express the difference between the high modernist and modernist attitudes toward people. Here is the best way he has found to express it:

- when Prussian officials rationalized the forests, they really hurt the peasants. Peasants no longer had underbrush for their animals to graze on, they had nothing to hunt, they couldn’t gather medicinal plants, and so on. If an official had been informed of that, his attitude would likely have been, “Huh. Sucks to be them.” The state has the model of reality that matters to it, and it’s indifferent to what falls outside the model.

- the high-modernist ideologue, informed of the same thing, would have the reaction, “They’re just *wrong* to care about such things.” The ideologue believes he has an abstract, global, platonic, scientific, and *complete* list of what should matter to the people whose lives he’s rearranging. Depending on the situation, he may ignore their desires or adjust his plan to “fix” the people. In the planning of Brasilia, the desires of the future residents were ignored. The Soviet Union put a lot of effort into fixing the peasantry.

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