#modern

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age. ↗

— Ivan Illich

#economics #modernity #age

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#dissatisfaction #modern-age #possibilities #wealth #age

You are the hybrids of golden worlds and ages splendidly conceived. ↗

— Aberjhani

#faith #haiku #haikus #humanity #hybrids

We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it... But it has become our historic responsibility to acknowledge the continuing importance of myth, at a level beyond science, in realizing a more organic, holistic relation to the world. A future social ecology would transcend both anti-Enlightenment reaction and [a] reified Enlightenment counter-reaction, which remain only fragmented polarities within bourgeois modernity. ↗

— David Watson

#modernity #myth #science #social-ecology #age

In his own way the modernist becomes as irrelevant as the fundamentalist. The fundamentalist has something to say to his world, but he has lost the ability to say it. The modernist knows how to speak to his age, but he has nothing to say. ↗

— William E. Hordern

#modernism #age

In the early Middle Ages the dominant form of political organization in Western Europe was the Germanic kingdom, and the German kingdom was in some ways the complete antithesis of the modern state. (p. 13) ↗

— Joseph Reese Strayer

#germanic-kindgom #modern-state #age

It shows a mediocre architect at the top of his game [on the Beetham Tower in Manchester] ↗

— Owen Hatherley

#criticism #manchester #modern #architecture

It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one's arms again. ↗

— Mark Rothko

#colorfield #modern #rothko #art

Modernist discourse [...] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open. ↗

— Phillip E. Johnson

#modernity #naturalism #naturalism-as-science #presuppositions #science

Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be expected to sacrifice itself incessantly to the future. The generation which is in its turn passing over the earth is not forced to abridge its life for the sake of the generations, its equals after all, whose turn shall come later on. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#sacrifice #selfishness #equality