Writing

Modern society is characterized by an ambiguity. Progress is tightly bonded to man’s relationship with technology; yet it is technology which threatens to take away our humanity. This anxiety resulted in the dual modernities of the sciences and the humanities The Enlightenment was equally committed to human understanding and liberation. Under the strain of urban industrialization, Modernity manifested itself as an open hostility between the scientific quest for progress and the humanistic desire to preserve the human spirit. Positivistic Modernity entrusted human destiny to rationality’s ability to produce a culture of optimistic, and benign technology. Aesthetic Modernism, suspicious of technology, sought its constrain in order to safeguard freedom and morality. Fearful of technology’s domination of human caprice, the arts in particular practiced the hermineutics of suspicion; appointing themselves as the watchdog of human sensibility. In the mist of this dispute, the growth and the expansion of the market subverted both the sciences and the humanities. resulting in a contemporary landscape in which both progress and morality must stand on the grounding of profit.

Humanity exists in a flight of hope between what is and what is possible. But today, we have become so ensnared within the webs of technology and consumerism that it has become virtually impossible to liberate our spirits. The result is that flight has turned into falleness, hope into despair. Modernity had called upon the spirit to counteract consumerism; however, its quest for interiority had the net result of splitting society into the Dual cultures of Bourgeois and Aesthetic Modernism. This Dual Modernism for a time maintained critique and counter critique balancing each other; but eventually aesthetics sensibility was appropriated by the marketing structure, which perverted it into an anesthetic for the purpose of inoculating society and silencing any real external critique of itself, thereby.