Modernism

This is the second in my series of blogs attempting to flesh out what is wrong with the world today.  My first post was concerning ideology, but now I am interested in discussing the most dangerous ideology... Modernism.

I will not be able to flesh out the entirety of the Modernist program in a single blog post, but I do want to identify its fundamental components.

Modernism is the fundamental belief that humans are the measure of all things and that we create the distinctions between Good and Evil.  Modernism is able to assert this because it postulates that all relationships are power relationships and that power is the ultimate arbiter of Truth.  This is the ideology of tyranny and is most represented in contemporary ideologies like Marxism, Nazism, Fascism, and the like.

This is not something original to the Modern world, but exists as early as Classical Greece.  Plato presents Socrates as arguing primarily against this world-view as embodied by the Sophists. The Sophists would teach young men that the pursuit of power was the most valuable pursuit, superior to the pursuit of Truth, because Truth was determined by those with power.

The first Modern ideologue to articulate this point of view effectively was Machiavelli; in both The Prince and The Discourses on Livy, he presents a new model for human behavior and political leadership.  Machiavelli presents a justification for this very pagan approach to politics and ethics; essentially, he argues that anything is justified in the pursuit of power and that this pursuit not only is, but should be, an end in itself.

One seeks power primarily to possess it and spends most of the time one possesses it, protecting it from others.  Now, Machiavelli does suggest some ideas about how one should rule, but even these suggestions are devised primarily with an eye toward maintaining power.

Machiavelli, like most Modernists, believes that vice, properly practiced and focused, can become virtue.  In fact, Machiavelli redefines the entire concept of virtue as the ability to gain and maintain power; therefore, cruelty and greed become virtues.  We can see this developed more thoroughly in later thinkers such as Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes.

I will delve into more of this later, but I wanted to get this down before I moved on to more complex topics.