Modern to Post : why did MO go PO ?

Virtually everyone who thinks about it at all agrees that Modernity (1875-1965, R.I.P.) has morphed into Postmodernity, MO has gone PO, gone Postal.

Almost all of the serious thought ever since has gone into determining 'what exactly is this new Post-Mo thing anyway?'

But I am much more interested in asking why, after a 500 year long successful run, did the Enlightenment Project (Modernity simply being its latest variant) fail ?

And fail so abruptly too --- just after its supposed greatest success : winning WWII, against great odds, defeating the supposed Axis of Anti-Modernity.

If I had to describe the general tenor of postmodernity - down among the non-academic types, among the little people like you and me - I 'd describe it as a sense of being at ease with variety, diversity, the plentitude of life and reality.

Nay - more - a craving to taste as much of that variety as possible.

PostMO = Plentitude

By contrast, great-grandma's generation was only comfortable with a synthesized simple predictable order being judged worthy of life.

Complex unpredictable natural chaos was greatly feared and judged unworthy of life - hence subject to being plenticided as quickly and quietly as possible.

MO = Plenticide

Modernity arose in an era - and against an era - of Romanticism , which tends to welcome plentitude.

It might even be seen as mere re-fried Classicalism --- done up in the new Modern Science's clothing.

Modern Science's industrious spadework had revealed a much greater natural plentitude than hitherto known .

This process of discovery started ,not at all coincidentally, in the same mid-1870s that churned up the scientific ideology of anti-plentitude Modernity.

Buecause all that new plentitude was not what modern scientists had expected or wanted.

In response, they reluctantly manned-up and said they hadn't actually reached the innermost core of pure simplicity as they had originally thought - that the true core actually lay much deeper.

'Just give us more tax money for more expensive equipment and we will yet find that core of ultimate simplicity that our Faith tells us must be there'.

I am Catholic, but let me tell you, I've never met anyone who displays half as much faith as an atheist scientist convinced - beyond all the current evidence to the contrary - of the inner simplicity and order of reality.

Forget Darwin - Plato is the true GOD of the atheist and the scientist.

(Am I not being a tiny bitter harsh ? Aren't some scientists also Christians and other religions ?

No --- they are naturalists , more attuned to Natural history than Natural Philosophy.)

So after atoms turned out not to be the ultimate building blocks of reality, new equipment was brought in and layer by layer, the onion of physical reality was slowly peeled back.

Each time, the innermost core soon proved to be anything but and ever more expensive equipment was ordered up to reach the innermost sanctum.

Hadron Collider world's largest and most expensive religious building

I'm betting replacing today's already incredibly expensive and already outdated Hadron Collider will approach the F-35 fighter aircraft project in terms of cost.

I even could cheer to think governments are actually now willing to spend as much on peaceful science machines as on war machines.

But if the Hadron replacement does ever produce a theory of everything, knowing that all the known forces in the universe are united in some fundamental sense may produce little immediate change in life on earth.

Bits and pieces of general scientific advance have always been highly valuable at the level of giving us the very useful machines now found in all homes.

The billions of smart phones found even in the poorest nations being a prime example.

But whether a unified and simple model combining both the tiny sub-sub-sub atomic world and the massive supra-galaxy world will give us new household wonders is to be greatly doubted.

But won't Plato and all his modernity disciples be cheering in their graves ?

But at the level of lived life, physical reality is and always will be a plentitude - complex, chaotic, as unpredictable and as unknowable as the weather four days from now ...

why global commensality is/isn't ROMANTICISM

   In a commensal world ,humanity dines with reality - not upon it.
   Hitler cherry-picked much from the Romantic Era - above all he saw that humanity could, be sheer force of will , create vast mental universes.

   But is was his great error was to imagine he - or anyone - could successfully impose these mental universes upon the physical universe (or universes).
   Romantics saw the physical universe, Nature, as endlessly dynamic , a constantly changing kaleidoscope of possibilities.
   They imagined the human individual was also a kaleidoscope of mental possibilities.
   The Modernists, such as Hitler and Einstein,  had a great weakness .
   It was to presume there was something they could drag into this Romantic Era from earlier (Plato to the Enlightenment) ages.
   They envisioned that one could fully know this natural kaleidoscope, fully know it to the point of freezing it and then re-molding it in your own mind-created kaleidoscope.
   They saw all of Nature's unceasing variety as a mere rococo surface, a showiness, because deep underneath, fundamentally, Nature was made up of a few knowable laws.
   Compared to the human mental universe, the physical universe they saw as much simpler.
   Now commensality agrees with the modernists that a single human mind might not just be able to convince itself, but all humanity, that cherry trees bloom year around on the top of Mount Everest.
   Virtual Reality behold yourself !
   But commensality argues that the physical reality remains equally successful in insisting that that no cherry tree ever blooms on the top of Mount Everest.
  Our mental universes are as free as the Romantics  and their foes, the Modernists,said they were, but they remain in, horizontal with, the physical universe, not superior to it.....