Modernist Paradigms Never Die, They Just Fade Away

Abstract

The Modernist Epoch Each century begins, as each epoch must, with reference to the near or even distant past. Such acknowledgment is necessary to begin framing the culture-sustaining, reinvigorating, and metamorphosing concepts that achieve better futures. This century, at its start, acknowledged the sum of good and bad human intentions, conservative and adventurous ideas, constructive and destructive inventions, and the ambitious social engineering and experimentation which became, in some instances, culture sustaining and, in others, pernicious. Human memory's natural short-sightedness and selfishness is aggravated by the territoriality of schools of thought, arrogant national chauvinism, disdainful religious beliefs, and the baneful nostalgia that always transforms the more simple past into a cure for the more complicated future. The human heritage of previous thought and accomplishment is embedded in all present, from the philosophical to the religious to the political. The ideas, objects, and conventions flowing from it are both the culmination of cultural achievement as well as obstructions to identifying those obstacles to better futures. The roots of all ideas reach far back into history. They become obscure over time, yet their impact and inferences are durable and at times, permanent. Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, and their peers, thinkers, philosophers, historians, and statesmen, stand in the wings, concluding the Age of Enlightenment by ushering into existence Europe's major social revolutions. Martin Luther's emancipation of commoners, and Gutenberg's publishing venture and disseminating the resulting of knowledge, finally lead to the American social experiment and example-following declarations of