#modernit

Modernity, though, is often surprisingly difficult to "locate." Certainly modernity cannot be defined as the surpassing of earlier forms of brutality. Perhaps it can be claimed that modernity should be equated with the possession of superior technology. But this response may itself reflect the modern fetishization of technology, which make it a magical solution for human problems. ↗

— Alexander Edmonds

#fetishization #modernity #plastic-surgery #plastica #beauty

I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization. ↗

— Peter L. Berger

#argument #comes #go #hand #i

Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#modernity #post-modern #post-modernism #values #values-in-life

The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things. ↗

— Sherwood Anderson

#modernity #nostalgia #men

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#modern-art #modernity #art

...my classical values make me advocate the triplet of erudition, elegance, and courage; against modernity's phoniness, nerdiness, and philistinism...many philistines reduce my ideas to an opposition of technology when in fact I am opposing the naive blindness to it's side affects - the fragility criterion. I'd rather be unconditional about ethical and conditional about technology than the the reverse. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#fragility #internet-addiction #modern-values #modernity #modernity-is-a-sickness

The critical method which denies literary modernity would appear - and even, in certain respects, would be - the most modern of critical movements. ↗

— Paul de Man

#certain #critical #denies #even #literary

Look at us. We build giant highways and murderously fast cars for killing each other and committing suicide. Instead of bomb shelters we construct gigantic frail glass buildings all over Manhattan at Ground Zero, a thousand feet high, open to the sky, life a woman undressing before an intruder and provoking him to rape her. We ring Russia's borders with missile-launching pads, and then scream that she's threatening us. In all history there's never been a more lurid mass example of the sadist-masochist expression of the thanatos instinct than the present conduct of the United States. The Nazis by comparison were Eagle Scouts. ↗

— Herman Wouk

#death #ground-zero #manhattan #modernity #sadism

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh Christianity The most modern European is you Pope Pius X And you whom the windows observe shame keeps you From entering a church and confessing this morning You read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloud That's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapers There are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteries Portraits of great men and a thousand different headlines ("Zone") ↗

— Guillaume Apollinaire

#billboard #catalogs #church #city #confession

The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative. ↗

— Guy Debord

#commodity-production #culture #modernity #the-last-man #nature