22 ms·

Are we really so modern?

99 points by beeandapenguin 10y ago

InclinedPlane 10y ago
Of course not. We tolerate mass injustice and violence (even state perpetuated, both at home and abroad), and racism, and misogyny. We think vengeance is justice. We savor "redemptive violence". We routinely believe that mercy is weakness. We harbor numerous misunderstandings and superstitions on vitally important subjects ranging from relationships to economics to science to mental illnesses to sexual orientation and gender to recreational drug use. Modern? We're practically medieval. But at least there is some glimmering of hope that we understand our problems and are working to fix them.
- mhurron 10y ago
  Ya, but checkout my watch.
- ysavir 10y ago
  You didn't read the article, did you?
- jasode 10y ago
  >Of course not. We tolerate mass injustice and violence [...] We harbor numerous misunderstandings [...] on vitally important subjects ranging from relationships to economics to science to mental illnesses [...] I get your point but the author in the article is talking about "modern" not in terms of "morals" but in the (meta) philosophy of existence. In his particular definition of "modernity", the world would meet that criteria when most of the inhabitants could look at themselves with philosophical detachment: e.g. Most of us would realize we have no special centrality in the universe (we're not the only higher life forms in the vastness of space). Our timeslice of humanity is but a microscopic blip in the 14 billion years of its existence. Most of us would seriously think it's possible that _we_ are digital avatars in "the matrix", etc. Furthermore, the author feels that assessing "modernity" by looking at the technological progress around us is deceptive and therefore it's a bad measurement. Instead, he thinks humans reach a threshold of "modernity" when a large percentage internalize deep philosophical questions like the way Descartes and Hume did.
  - panglott 10y ago
    "Modernity" is a term of art that refers to the physical conditions and philosophical preoccupations of the modern world (ca. 1600 CE Europe, and after). [0] Through this lens, it's kind of a circular question: of course we are moderns because we're engaged with the philosophical preoccupations of the modern period (humanistic and scientific philosophy rather than Christian theology). When you look at the philosophical questions of medieval Europe, they just have fundamentally different premises and methods; Thomas Aquinas just has very different concerns and methods than Francis Bacon. I'd think it was just a dud headline, were it not for the closing line. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
  - InclinedPlane 10y ago
    My point is, it's a bit much to ask for people to adopt philosophical modernity without having a "modern" values system first. (And on the flip side, having a "modern" philosophical perspective is often a ready conduit for bootstrapping a "modern" (e.g. humanist) values system.) The conceit of modernity is that we are so much superior to the "brutes" of the past. Because our values and our thoughts are so much more sophisticated, so much more true and fundamental. But actually our values are not our values (or, to be more precise, our claimed values are not our values as practiced) and our philosophy is not sophisticated, it's crude. My point is complementary. Our technological advancement, and our "values on paper" blinds us to the reality. In truth we are but brutes, we compare ourselves favorably against the past only because we fail at contextualizing the present in a way that strips away the illusion of modernity caused by technological progress.
    - jasode 10y ago
      >My point is, it's a bit much to ask for people to adopt philosophical modernity without having a "modern" values system first. [...] My point is complementary. I'm not convinced that "morals modernity" is a prerequisite for "philosophical introspection modernity". To me, it seems like those 2 are orthogonal. In other words, we could have both of these outcomes: - I believe we humans are the center of the universe and with Zeus by my side, I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race. - I believe we might be in The Matrix but can't prove it and I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race. It looks like both types of "modernity" can coexist. Perhaps the New Yorker shouldn't have put "modern?" in the title. At the bottom of the article, they disclosed that they used a different title (which emphasizes philosophy instead of morals) in other editions: >This article appears in other versions of the September 5, 2016, issue, with the headline “What Makes You So Sure?.” (Btw, I didn't downvote any of your posts.)
- tomp 10y ago
  Where (in the Western world) are racism and misogyny tolerated?
  - creshal 10y ago
    Just have a look at Europe. Discussions about migration here go from "complaining about genuine policy problems" to "blatant racism" in the span it takes people to get slightly drunk, and that's just the start. If I had a nickel for every time I hear random people insulting others as "fucking Jews"… Misogyny is definitely not as bad as it used to be, but it's still everywhere. And in many cases the victims don't report it for whatever reasons.
    - cloakandswagger 10y ago
      I've had the opposite experience: Saying one cross word against open borders or multiculturalism will have you branded as a racist, Nazi, etc. The vast majority of people I've met who challenge these "virtues" aren't frothing hate-mongerers, but their rhetoric naturally becomes more extreme when their questions are immediately dismissed with these ad hominem attacks.
      - bluecalm 10y ago
        Interesting that you were downvoted for making a genuine observation about your environment which relevant to the topic. I agree with you by the way. I see much racism in public debate about immigration problems. It's mostly about culture and religion issues and those are very different than racism.
        cloakandswagger 10y ago
        It's disappointing but unsurprising. Stifling people you disagree with in such a way serves to create the extremism the original comment alludes to, but it feels a lot better than having an open discussion.
        creshal 10y ago
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  Ah, so many downvotes. And I see people are so mad that they've gone out of their way to downvote other, unrelated posts of mine. Oh well, I guess it's not surprising that HN has become infected with the same virulent "anti-SJW" folks that have been running rampant everywhere else. To be honest I'm somewhat looking forward to proof that HN has sunk into an irredeemable slide into the abyss, it would probably increase my productivity if I avoided this place.
  - hx87 10y ago
    You know a place is in the sweet spot when people complain about it being too left wing and too right wing at the same time.
    - InclinedPlane 10y ago
      Not at all. You know a place is in the sweet spot when people say "I really value the discussion here, it's often very enlightening and interesting." Being left/right/center or whatever is an oversimplification of "political" discussions, and claiming that having a "balance" is healthy is the same silliness that leads to things like "Crossfire" on CNN. What matters more is ensuring that productive debates on potentially thorny topics can occur.
      - hx87 10y ago
        And in my experience at least, I have seen and participated in many, many valuable, interesting and enlightening discussions here on HN, and see little evidence that it is going away from that. True, badly made arguments are treated rather harshly, but that is more of an advantage than a disadvantage for a discussion forum.
  - GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
    From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
euroclydon 10y ago
Among other things, I would judge how modern a community is by what their solid waste disposal facilities look like. All those plastic toys, furniture, building material, packaging, etc, being pressed into a mound! Or, head down to the cancer treatment facility, and imagine what Dr. McCoy would have to say.
- ysavir 10y ago
  You didn't read the article, did you?
- melling 10y ago
  Imagine what people who grew up watching Dr. McCoy would say. This isn't the future we were expecting. If you were born 100 years ago, you might think the world has changed dramatically. However, if you were born 50 years ago, the future has been slow to arrive.
  - bbctol 10y ago
    Interestingly, I think technological progress really has been faster over the last 50 years than the 50 before that (although it's decidedly close.) But the progress of the first half of the 20th century so spurred our hopes for rapidly accelerating futurism that even the fast pace of computing, transportation, and communication tech development seems dull if it doesn't get us to space.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    Technology seems to follow either a sigmoid or a bell curve. And invariably during the climb to the plateau, the humans living at the time envision the climb to go on forever. So when people looked at the rapid growth of computing power as transistors and ICs replaced radio valves, they envisioned the computing power hitting the point where it would rival neurons. But now we are reaching the plateau, and it has come far short of the early visions.
    - romaniv 10y ago
      50 years ago was 1966. Judging by many SF novels from that time, people were actually rather pessimistic about computing power we would have right now. Almost universally, authors predicted some progress, but still thought computers would be expensive, large and not as powerful as what we have now. On the other hand, they were very optimistic about space travel, AI algorithms, robotics, energy prodution/storage tech, personal transportation and the state of industrial engineering.
Etheryte 10y ago
While I generally don't comment on the appearance of sites, the font The New Yorker uses makes the text very hard to read, at least on my screen. Simply using Times New Roman or something similar would already be an improvement.
- ysavir 10y ago
  Irrelevant, but at least you read the article.
  - panglott 10y ago
    Seems like nearly every HN thread has a discussion of the linked article's web design. Maybe not relevant to the author, but relevant to the audience.
    - ysavir 10y ago
      I kind of wish your response mimicked the article. "Are comments really so irrelevant?". "Rather, relevance is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that comments are in some profound sense the same as the content that came before them. "
- Eric_WVGG 10y ago
  Not sure what you mean. The typeface is much larger than the type right here, and serif typefaces are more readable than sans-serifs.
  - zingermc 10y ago
    Maybe serif fonts are more readable on a high-resolution phone screen or "retina" display, but not on my monitor. The edges of the serif font on the New Yorker's site just look blurry to me.
faktorialas 10y ago
People like trusting their intuitions. In many cases, they trust them so much they even deny that there's an argument to be made about their content - especially if people surrounding them share them. This leads to people being ignorant of and confused about philosophical issues, but more importantly, it leads to them dismissing them without looking at them. Which doesn't make a worldview void of philosophy, instead it makes one with an unquestioned amateur philosophy. It's a lot like many in politics assuming that our time is different, and historical examples are irrelevant, even when there is no good reason to believe that. Our modernity is a lot like that.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Hm. This seems right to me. Other people like trusting their intuitions. :)
- brightball 10y ago
  The issue generally comes down to the source of trust. You're trusting your intuition or you're trusting a source saying something else is also trustworthy.
  - pklausler 10y ago
    And there's our little problem there in a nutshell: thinking that those are the only two choices, my ignorant assumptions and those of somebody else. Back in Enlightenment days, people also consulted empirical reality.
    - AstralStorm 10y ago
      There are also ignorant assumptions that are or aren't generally accepted. As in by many people. These we call society.
- wozniacki 10y ago
  It pays to keep this in the context of the events in our recent history which some argue have lead to a certain stripe of ideological stagnation in America, not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also their debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself. Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this : I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology. You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where actually believing that a better future is possible that you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually radically counter-cultural.[1] [1] Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like. http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-counter-culture/ http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-co... (or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM
6stringmerc 10y ago
Wonderful exploration of many similar / related / intellectual / belief / explanation systems regarding human existence! Coming across a lot of those names and concepts what feels like a decade ago (probably was, during graduate school and supplementing my Education track with hybrid Philosophy & Anthropology snippets) but they're very nicely presented here in my opinion. The sticking point is treating each as a belief structure, and looking to the human condition and our primal tendencies (e.g. "reasoning") as to why they have appeal. In a world were there are so few answers to genuinely big questions, seeking explanations or making them up seems reasonable and, as history seems to show, kind of inevitable. Interesting to keep in touch with, diversity I think helps understanding and/or appreciation (and also the ability to discuss in polity, heady company where there may be disagreement to chat about).
astazangasta 10y ago
This is the same argument made by Bruno Latour in "We were never Modern", that modernity is marked by the insistence on split between science, politics and philosophy - but this split cannot hold up, and we get "hybrids". Science is not a separate domain, but treads in politics and so on. My wife is fond of "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosopher", which argues the Enlightenment wasn't new, either, it was just pouring religion (the thirst for god) into new cups. Modernity, to me, is a more complex attempt at the same, to find a new source of unambiguous authority, a method by which the world makes sense. Again a futile gesture, but still it takes hold.
- user202020 10y ago
  > Science is not a separate domain, but treads in politics and so on. How does science tread in politics? I'm actually honestly wondering.
  - pklausler 10y ago
    It's not the fault of science that empirical reality tends to have a bias against conservativism (in its current American strain).
    - astazangasta 10y ago
      This is the opposite of what I was saying; you're asserting the existence of an empirical reality that is removed from (superior to) political consideration, I'm insisting this is impossible.
      - pklausler 10y ago
        There's a great reason to trust conclusions based on sound experiments in empirical reality: they tend to work. I do enjoy seeing VLSI microprocessors, optical networks, and sophisticated software being used for discussions on whether or not science works.
        10y ago
JackFr 10y ago
As an aside, I found Neal Stephenson's historical fiction the Baroque Cycle, to be a wonderful exposition of the invention of the modern in the 17th and 18th century. Apart from the swashbuckling, romance and intrigue what makes the books so compelling is the idea that so much of what we take for granted with respect to our worldview and our mindset was created at this time.
- Balgair 10y ago
  How so? I'm kinda going through the lead up and fall-out of the Peace of Westphalia right now and would love to know your opinion of Stephenson's work.
  - JackFr 10y ago
    I'm not sure I understand your question. As an undergraduate history minor I took electives all over the place, including 'The Glorious Revolution', 'The Scientific Revolution' and 'The Rise of Financial Capitalism'. Even though I kind of knew it, reading the Baroque Cycle it really hit home that all of these things were happening at the same time, and over the course of a generation or two, the world, and in the West the worldview, was really, fundamentally changed (WRT, the Peace of Westphalia - not sure where you're writing from -- but if you're ever in the neighborhood visit Muenster and check out the room where it was signed, as well as the cages for the Anabaptist leaders still hanging from the cathedral steeple.)
losteverything 10y ago
Lately I looked into writing history (and desire more) and was surprised one "fact" - many more people read than people who wrote (as centuries went on). I suspect the total number of studied writers is quite small wrt the articles mentioned sources. To compare to today, the keyboard and vocal cords afford many more authors. History is not taking the "average" of philosophical thought but if it was I wish there were more writers centuries ago.
- dajohnson89 10y ago
  That will certainly offer cultural insight, which is valuable, but I think you'd find essentially the medieval equivalent of the YouTube comments section.
  - losteverything 10y ago
    Just thinking... I've never read you tube comments. I'll try next time. Ty
    - dajohnson89 10y ago
      Trust me, you're not missing anything. You've been warned :-)
- mhurron 10y ago
  > was surprised one "fact" - many more people read than people who wrote Why would that be surprising? Far more people are interested in learning than are capable of teaching and even more just want to be entertained. It seems that most people just do not have anything to say. When it costs money to print something, many thoughts without merit will not be printed. For example, if this post cost me money to make, or quite frankly anything I post online cost money, it would not be made. I have no compelling reason to spend money on any of this. That's before taking into account if anyone wants to publish it.
renox 10y ago
The article isn't bad but this part made me shake my head: > Gottlieb writes, “physical bodies are . . . not quite what they seem, but are only appearances somehow thrown up by monads” seems less extravagant in the light of contemporary string theory, which holds that everything that exists is the product of vibrating one-dimensional objects Poor string theory used to justify such nonsense..
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  String Theory is probably nonsense, so it's in good company.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    Mostly not nonsense, since it fits most or all experimental physics, just the mathematic description is quite extravagant and interpretation is even more alien than quantum physics or general relativity, which are already highly mind-boggling.
    - azemetre 10y ago
      I believe they were inferring that string theory isn't exactly falsifiable which teeters on the edge of poor science.
- ZeroFries 10y ago
  What nonsense?
throwanem 10y ago
I'm not sure I see the value in this article's protracted digression into a bestiary of philosophers. There is, though, much truth in the statement that to conceive of ourselves as detached from history is to conceive of ourselves inaccurately.
- codq 10y ago
  The article is, at it's base level, a review of a book called 'The Dream of Enlightenment'.
  - throwanem 10y ago
    Oh. Well, the presence of that latter two-thirds makes much more sense now. Thanks!
  - user202020 10y ago
    Yeah. If it told me it would be that in the title, I would be fine, but it didn't, so now I'm left yearning for thoughts on how or why we think of ourselves as being so modern, or how we aren't all that different at all. :(
- eric_h 10y ago
  I think actually one of the most thoughtful points preceded the (unnecessarily long, IMO) discussion of the various philosophers. "[...]the loss of contact with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by which side you take on this question"
  - throwanem 10y ago
    I suppose that's true. For most of my life I was, however unconsciously, on a side which considers ignorance of history to be emancipation; without speculating on whether or not that's accurate, I will say that, in discovering and gaining what knowledge and understanding of history I have, I found also that with greater knowledge of the past comes greater understanding of the present. But perhaps that's not true for everyone.
wahsd 10y ago
We are entering an era of destructive regression. As we celebrate our "modernity" and "disruption" with the glee of fools as Silicon Valley (as a term for the tech world in general) commences to deconstruct society in a process on the scale of Robber Barons of yesteryear, but which will not be named until the damage is fully identified and realized once they have fully extracted value and wealth from society for pennies on the dollar that they pocketed for themselves. We cheer as technology removed the need for human inputs to economy in the manner that the industrial revolution demanded, yet we do so without consequence or even consideration as we put the new age Robber Barons in Silicon Valley on pedestals. What becomes of the retail workers that will be put out of work by the likes of Amazon? What becomes of the truck drivers that will be put out of work by autonomous trucks? What becomes of the taxi drivers that are put out of work by autonomous taxis? What becomes of service workers as processes and systems are improved to where you don't need people's assistance? They will find new jobs ... is the cry. They will all be artists when we give them UBI ... is the cry. Yet no one wants to face the reality that there are no other jobs to be had in the numbers necessary to replace them or that there is no need for everyone to be artists and musicians with no incentives to regulate their lives. We are heading towards calamity and the only answer that is given is "we'll figure something out" without realizing that this time, this situation is different. We can't take out another payday loan, we don't have anymore jewelry to pawn ... the consequences that were piled up are teetering. But look on the bright side, the new iPhone is coming out. That will solve our problems as we import more people with incompatible views just at a time when humanity is shifting toward needing and, really, valuing human inputs to economy on a negative exponential curve.
ievahanordah 10y ago
I think people greatly mix up how advanced "objects" are, and how advanced people are. The true test is if you take away objects from a person, and then test their reason. Key word being reason, as the tests which are called iq tests do not test reason. What they do test, is how well a person is able to perform in a relatively small aspect, of a subset of American culture. Again what I just described are two separate things.
advertising 10y ago
With the idea that knowledge is an act of remembering, consciousness is a matter of matter, and gods/natures role in creating, seems to me that humans creating concious AI would potentially create that third era of modernity.

Of course not. We tolerate mass injustice and violence (even state perpetuated, both at home and abroad), and racism, and misogyny. We think vengeance is justice. We savor "redemptive violence". We routinely believe that mercy is weakness. We harbor numerous misunderstandings and superstitions on vitally important subjects ranging from relationships to economics to science to mental illnesses to sexual orientation and gender to recreational drug use. Modern? We're practically medieval. But at least there is some glimmering of hope that we understand our problems and are working to fix them.

mhurron 10y ago
Ya, but checkout my watch.
ysavir 10y ago
You didn't read the article, did you?
jasode 10y ago
>Of course not. We tolerate mass injustice and violence [...] We harbor numerous misunderstandings [...] on vitally important subjects ranging from relationships to economics to science to mental illnesses [...] I get your point but the author in the article is talking about "modern" not in terms of "morals" but in the (meta) philosophy of existence. In his particular definition of "modernity", the world would meet that criteria when most of the inhabitants could look at themselves with philosophical detachment: e.g. Most of us would realize we have no special centrality in the universe (we're not the only higher life forms in the vastness of space). Our timeslice of humanity is but a microscopic blip in the 14 billion years of its existence. Most of us would seriously think it's possible that _we_ are digital avatars in "the matrix", etc. Furthermore, the author feels that assessing "modernity" by looking at the technological progress around us is deceptive and therefore it's a bad measurement. Instead, he thinks humans reach a threshold of "modernity" when a large percentage internalize deep philosophical questions like the way Descartes and Hume did.
- panglott 10y ago
  "Modernity" is a term of art that refers to the physical conditions and philosophical preoccupations of the modern world (ca. 1600 CE Europe, and after). [0] Through this lens, it's kind of a circular question: of course we are moderns because we're engaged with the philosophical preoccupations of the modern period (humanistic and scientific philosophy rather than Christian theology). When you look at the philosophical questions of medieval Europe, they just have fundamentally different premises and methods; Thomas Aquinas just has very different concerns and methods than Francis Bacon. I'd think it was just a dud headline, were it not for the closing line. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity
- InclinedPlane 10y ago
  My point is, it's a bit much to ask for people to adopt philosophical modernity without having a "modern" values system first. (And on the flip side, having a "modern" philosophical perspective is often a ready conduit for bootstrapping a "modern" (e.g. humanist) values system.) The conceit of modernity is that we are so much superior to the "brutes" of the past. Because our values and our thoughts are so much more sophisticated, so much more true and fundamental. But actually our values are not our values (or, to be more precise, our claimed values are not our values as practiced) and our philosophy is not sophisticated, it's crude. My point is complementary. Our technological advancement, and our "values on paper" blinds us to the reality. In truth we are but brutes, we compare ourselves favorably against the past only because we fail at contextualizing the present in a way that strips away the illusion of modernity caused by technological progress.
  - jasode 10y ago
    >My point is, it's a bit much to ask for people to adopt philosophical modernity without having a "modern" values system first. [...] My point is complementary. I'm not convinced that "morals modernity" is a prerequisite for "philosophical introspection modernity". To me, it seems like those 2 are orthogonal. In other words, we could have both of these outcomes: - I believe we humans are the center of the universe and with Zeus by my side, I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race. - I believe we might be in The Matrix but can't prove it and I'm also going to kill a million people to purify my race. It looks like both types of "modernity" can coexist. Perhaps the New Yorker shouldn't have put "modern?" in the title. At the bottom of the article, they disclosed that they used a different title (which emphasizes philosophy instead of morals) in other editions: >This article appears in other versions of the September 5, 2016, issue, with the headline “What Makes You So Sure?.” (Btw, I didn't downvote any of your posts.)
tomp 10y ago
Where (in the Western world) are racism and misogyny tolerated?
- creshal 10y ago
  Just have a look at Europe. Discussions about migration here go from "complaining about genuine policy problems" to "blatant racism" in the span it takes people to get slightly drunk, and that's just the start. If I had a nickel for every time I hear random people insulting others as "fucking Jews"… Misogyny is definitely not as bad as it used to be, but it's still everywhere. And in many cases the victims don't report it for whatever reasons.
  - cloakandswagger 10y ago
    I've had the opposite experience: Saying one cross word against open borders or multiculturalism will have you branded as a racist, Nazi, etc. The vast majority of people I've met who challenge these "virtues" aren't frothing hate-mongerers, but their rhetoric naturally becomes more extreme when their questions are immediately dismissed with these ad hominem attacks.
    - bluecalm 10y ago
      Interesting that you were downvoted for making a genuine observation about your environment which relevant to the topic. I agree with you by the way. I see much racism in public debate about immigration problems. It's mostly about culture and religion issues and those are very different than racism.
      - cloakandswagger 10y ago
        It's disappointing but unsurprising. Stifling people you disagree with in such a way serves to create the extremism the original comment alludes to, but it feels a lot better than having an open discussion.
      - creshal 10y ago
InclinedPlane 10y ago
Ah, so many downvotes. And I see people are so mad that they've gone out of their way to downvote other, unrelated posts of mine. Oh well, I guess it's not surprising that HN has become infected with the same virulent "anti-SJW" folks that have been running rampant everywhere else. To be honest I'm somewhat looking forward to proof that HN has sunk into an irredeemable slide into the abyss, it would probably increase my productivity if I avoided this place.
- hx87 10y ago
  You know a place is in the sweet spot when people complain about it being too left wing and too right wing at the same time.
  - InclinedPlane 10y ago
    Not at all. You know a place is in the sweet spot when people say "I really value the discussion here, it's often very enlightening and interesting." Being left/right/center or whatever is an oversimplification of "political" discussions, and claiming that having a "balance" is healthy is the same silliness that leads to things like "Crossfire" on CNN. What matters more is ensuring that productive debates on potentially thorny topics can occur.
    - hx87 10y ago
      And in my experience at least, I have seen and participated in many, many valuable, interesting and enlightening discussions here on HN, and see little evidence that it is going away from that. True, badly made arguments are treated rather harshly, but that is more of an advantage than a disadvantage for a discussion forum.
- GrumpyYoungMan 10y ago
  From the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html): "Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

euroclydon 10y ago

Among other things, I would judge how modern a community is by what their solid waste disposal facilities look like. All those plastic toys, furniture, building material, packaging, etc, being pressed into a mound! Or, head down to the cancer treatment facility, and imagine what Dr. McCoy would have to say.

ysavir 10y ago
You didn't read the article, did you?
melling 10y ago
Imagine what people who grew up watching Dr. McCoy would say. This isn't the future we were expecting. If you were born 100 years ago, you might think the world has changed dramatically. However, if you were born 50 years ago, the future has been slow to arrive.
- bbctol 10y ago
  Interestingly, I think technological progress really has been faster over the last 50 years than the 50 before that (although it's decidedly close.) But the progress of the first half of the 20th century so spurred our hopes for rapidly accelerating futurism that even the fast pace of computing, transportation, and communication tech development seems dull if it doesn't get us to space.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Technology seems to follow either a sigmoid or a bell curve. And invariably during the climb to the plateau, the humans living at the time envision the climb to go on forever. So when people looked at the rapid growth of computing power as transistors and ICs replaced radio valves, they envisioned the computing power hitting the point where it would rival neurons. But now we are reaching the plateau, and it has come far short of the early visions.
  - romaniv 10y ago
    50 years ago was 1966. Judging by many SF novels from that time, people were actually rather pessimistic about computing power we would have right now. Almost universally, authors predicted some progress, but still thought computers would be expensive, large and not as powerful as what we have now. On the other hand, they were very optimistic about space travel, AI algorithms, robotics, energy prodution/storage tech, personal transportation and the state of industrial engineering.

Etheryte 10y ago

While I generally don't comment on the appearance of sites, the font The New Yorker uses makes the text very hard to read, at least on my screen. Simply using Times New Roman or something similar would already be an improvement.

ysavir 10y ago
Irrelevant, but at least you read the article.
- panglott 10y ago
  Seems like nearly every HN thread has a discussion of the linked article's web design. Maybe not relevant to the author, but relevant to the audience.
  - ysavir 10y ago
    I kind of wish your response mimicked the article. "Are comments really so irrelevant?". "Rather, relevance is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that comments are in some profound sense the same as the content that came before them. "
Eric_WVGG 10y ago
Not sure what you mean. The typeface is much larger than the type right here, and serif typefaces are more readable than sans-serifs.
- zingermc 10y ago
  Maybe serif fonts are more readable on a high-resolution phone screen or "retina" display, but not on my monitor. The edges of the serif font on the New Yorker's site just look blurry to me.

faktorialas 10y ago

People like trusting their intuitions. In many cases, they trust them so much they even deny that there's an argument to be made about their content - especially if people surrounding them share them. This leads to people being ignorant of and confused about philosophical issues, but more importantly, it leads to them dismissing them without looking at them. Which doesn't make a worldview void of philosophy, instead it makes one with an unquestioned amateur philosophy. It's a lot like many in politics assuming that our time is different, and historical examples are irrelevant, even when there is no good reason to believe that. Our modernity is a lot like that.

emodendroket 10y ago
Hm. This seems right to me. Other people like trusting their intuitions. :)
brightball 10y ago
The issue generally comes down to the source of trust. You're trusting your intuition or you're trusting a source saying something else is also trustworthy.
- pklausler 10y ago
  And there's our little problem there in a nutshell: thinking that those are the only two choices, my ignorant assumptions and those of somebody else. Back in Enlightenment days, people also consulted empirical reality.
  - AstralStorm 10y ago
    There are also ignorant assumptions that are or aren't generally accepted. As in by many people. These we call society.
wozniacki 10y ago
It pays to keep this in the context of the events in our recent history which some argue have lead to a certain stripe of ideological stagnation in America, not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also their debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself. Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this : I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969. Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over the country. Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology. You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science. It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar, Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where actually believing that a better future is possible that you can have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually radically counter-cultural.[1] [1] Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like. http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-counter-culture/ http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-co... (or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IER50pX-FuM

6stringmerc 10y ago

Wonderful exploration of many similar / related / intellectual / belief / explanation systems regarding human existence! Coming across a lot of those names and concepts what feels like a decade ago (probably was, during graduate school and supplementing my Education track with hybrid Philosophy & Anthropology snippets) but they're very nicely presented here in my opinion. The sticking point is treating each as a belief structure, and looking to the human condition and our primal tendencies (e.g. "reasoning") as to why they have appeal. In a world were there are so few answers to genuinely big questions, seeking explanations or making them up seems reasonable and, as history seems to show, kind of inevitable. Interesting to keep in touch with, diversity I think helps understanding and/or appreciation (and also the ability to discuss in polity, heady company where there may be disagreement to chat about).

astazangasta 10y ago

This is the same argument made by Bruno Latour in "We were never Modern", that modernity is marked by the insistence on split between science, politics and philosophy - but this split cannot hold up, and we get "hybrids". Science is not a separate domain, but treads in politics and so on. My wife is fond of "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosopher", which argues the Enlightenment wasn't new, either, it was just pouring religion (the thirst for god) into new cups. Modernity, to me, is a more complex attempt at the same, to find a new source of unambiguous authority, a method by which the world makes sense. Again a futile gesture, but still it takes hold.

user202020 10y ago
> Science is not a separate domain, but treads in politics and so on. How does science tread in politics? I'm actually honestly wondering.
- pklausler 10y ago
  It's not the fault of science that empirical reality tends to have a bias against conservativism (in its current American strain).
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    This is the opposite of what I was saying; you're asserting the existence of an empirical reality that is removed from (superior to) political consideration, I'm insisting this is impossible.
    - pklausler 10y ago
      There's a great reason to trust conclusions based on sound experiments in empirical reality: they tend to work. I do enjoy seeing VLSI microprocessors, optical networks, and sophisticated software being used for discussions on whether or not science works.
      - 10y ago

JackFr 10y ago

As an aside, I found Neal Stephenson's historical fiction the Baroque Cycle, to be a wonderful exposition of the invention of the modern in the 17th and 18th century. Apart from the swashbuckling, romance and intrigue what makes the books so compelling is the idea that so much of what we take for granted with respect to our worldview and our mindset was created at this time.

Balgair 10y ago
How so? I'm kinda going through the lead up and fall-out of the Peace of Westphalia right now and would love to know your opinion of Stephenson's work.
- JackFr 10y ago
  I'm not sure I understand your question. As an undergraduate history minor I took electives all over the place, including 'The Glorious Revolution', 'The Scientific Revolution' and 'The Rise of Financial Capitalism'. Even though I kind of knew it, reading the Baroque Cycle it really hit home that all of these things were happening at the same time, and over the course of a generation or two, the world, and in the West the worldview, was really, fundamentally changed (WRT, the Peace of Westphalia - not sure where you're writing from -- but if you're ever in the neighborhood visit Muenster and check out the room where it was signed, as well as the cages for the Anabaptist leaders still hanging from the cathedral steeple.)

losteverything 10y ago

Lately I looked into writing history (and desire more) and was surprised one "fact" - many more people read than people who wrote (as centuries went on). I suspect the total number of studied writers is quite small wrt the articles mentioned sources. To compare to today, the keyboard and vocal cords afford many more authors. History is not taking the "average" of philosophical thought but if it was I wish there were more writers centuries ago.

dajohnson89 10y ago
That will certainly offer cultural insight, which is valuable, but I think you'd find essentially the medieval equivalent of the YouTube comments section.
- losteverything 10y ago
  Just thinking... I've never read you tube comments. I'll try next time. Ty
  - dajohnson89 10y ago
    Trust me, you're not missing anything. You've been warned :-)
mhurron 10y ago
> was surprised one "fact" - many more people read than people who wrote Why would that be surprising? Far more people are interested in learning than are capable of teaching and even more just want to be entertained. It seems that most people just do not have anything to say. When it costs money to print something, many thoughts without merit will not be printed. For example, if this post cost me money to make, or quite frankly anything I post online cost money, it would not be made. I have no compelling reason to spend money on any of this. That's before taking into account if anyone wants to publish it.

renox 10y ago

The article isn't bad but this part made me shake my head: > Gottlieb writes, “physical bodies are . . . not quite what they seem, but are only appearances somehow thrown up by monads” seems less extravagant in the light of contemporary string theory, which holds that everything that exists is the product of vibrating one-dimensional objects Poor string theory used to justify such nonsense..

jomamaxx 10y ago
String Theory is probably nonsense, so it's in good company.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Mostly not nonsense, since it fits most or all experimental physics, just the mathematic description is quite extravagant and interpretation is even more alien than quantum physics or general relativity, which are already highly mind-boggling.
  - azemetre 10y ago
    I believe they were inferring that string theory isn't exactly falsifiable which teeters on the edge of poor science.
ZeroFries 10y ago
What nonsense?

throwanem 10y ago

I'm not sure I see the value in this article's protracted digression into a bestiary of philosophers. There is, though, much truth in the statement that to conceive of ourselves as detached from history is to conceive of ourselves inaccurately.

codq 10y ago
The article is, at it's base level, a review of a book called 'The Dream of Enlightenment'.
- throwanem 10y ago
  Oh. Well, the presence of that latter two-thirds makes much more sense now. Thanks!
- user202020 10y ago
  Yeah. If it told me it would be that in the title, I would be fine, but it didn't, so now I'm left yearning for thoughts on how or why we think of ourselves as being so modern, or how we aren't all that different at all. :(
eric_h 10y ago
I think actually one of the most thoughtful points preceded the (unnecessarily long, IMO) discussion of the various philosophers. "[...]the loss of contact with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by which side you take on this question"
- throwanem 10y ago
  I suppose that's true. For most of my life I was, however unconsciously, on a side which considers ignorance of history to be emancipation; without speculating on whether or not that's accurate, I will say that, in discovering and gaining what knowledge and understanding of history I have, I found also that with greater knowledge of the past comes greater understanding of the present. But perhaps that's not true for everyone.

wahsd 10y ago

We are entering an era of destructive regression. As we celebrate our "modernity" and "disruption" with the glee of fools as Silicon Valley (as a term for the tech world in general) commences to deconstruct society in a process on the scale of Robber Barons of yesteryear, but which will not be named until the damage is fully identified and realized once they have fully extracted value and wealth from society for pennies on the dollar that they pocketed for themselves. We cheer as technology removed the need for human inputs to economy in the manner that the industrial revolution demanded, yet we do so without consequence or even consideration as we put the new age Robber Barons in Silicon Valley on pedestals. What becomes of the retail workers that will be put out of work by the likes of Amazon? What becomes of the truck drivers that will be put out of work by autonomous trucks? What becomes of the taxi drivers that are put out of work by autonomous taxis? What becomes of service workers as processes and systems are improved to where you don't need people's assistance? They will find new jobs ... is the cry. They will all be artists when we give them UBI ... is the cry. Yet no one wants to face the reality that there are no other jobs to be had in the numbers necessary to replace them or that there is no need for everyone to be artists and musicians with no incentives to regulate their lives. We are heading towards calamity and the only answer that is given is "we'll figure something out" without realizing that this time, this situation is different. We can't take out another payday loan, we don't have anymore jewelry to pawn ... the consequences that were piled up are teetering. But look on the bright side, the new iPhone is coming out. That will solve our problems as we import more people with incompatible views just at a time when humanity is shifting toward needing and, really, valuing human inputs to economy on a negative exponential curve.

ievahanordah 10y ago

I think people greatly mix up how advanced "objects" are, and how advanced people are. The true test is if you take away objects from a person, and then test their reason. Key word being reason, as the tests which are called iq tests do not test reason. What they do test, is how well a person is able to perform in a relatively small aspect, of a subset of American culture. Again what I just described are two separate things.

advertising 10y ago

With the idea that knowledge is an act of remembering, consciousness is a matter of matter, and gods/natures role in creating, seems to me that humans creating concious AI would potentially create that third era of modernity.