Modernism - an Introduction to the Semester - (3/9)
The End of the Age of Modernity?
- Postmodern discourse relates that Modernity died about thirty years ago with the riots in Paris (1968)
- students, with the support of prominent scholars, demanded radical changes in a very rigid, closed, and elitist European university system
- this is also the beginning of a period marked by the rapidly evolving and spreading high-technology developments which are producing a changing social order requiring new concepts and theories
- Postmodernists critical of Modernity list the ills of the period as:
- suffering and misery of the masses under monarachies and dictatorships
- the oppression of workers under capitalist industrialization
- the exclusion of women from the public sphere
- the colonization of other lands by imperialists
- the destruction of indigenous peoples
- the destruction of the environment
- Modernity they would say leads to
- social practices and institutions that legitimate domination and control by a powerful few over the weak many
- This is ironic as Modernists promises equality and liberation of all.
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