What are problems people mistakenly attribute to modernity when they’re really the fault of specific systems, ideologies or policies in whole or in part?
An example would be social media. People decry the various pitfalls of social media (for good reason) but their criticisms are vague and make it seem like the problems are inevitable rather than the deliberate decisions of the corporations themselves to keep users on as long as possible and get them addicted.
You have it backwards IMHO.
The problems with social media are inevitable because the providers of social media are inevitably going to be motivated to use the most effective means of attracting and keeping eyeballs, regardless of the broader negative social consequences.
The idea that the problems with social media derive only from the specific policies of particular social media companies is a comfortable furphy that permits people to avoid facing up to the uncomfortable truth we have discovered about the nature of the human animal. Better to blame some big bad corporation than look ourselves in the eye and realise what we are like.
I agree with part of what you said, that the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world want more eyeballs on social media. What I don’t agree with is that social media must inevitably come with problems. It’s a problem because parts of our culture are dysfunctional, and that dysfunction gets carried on to the social media platforms. The dysfunction isn’t due to Facebook, Instagram,or TikTok. It’s due to a long history of regressive culture that refuses to punish bullies, beliefs that “boys will be boys”, beliefs that authoritarianism is a good system, willingness to believe any obvious lie as long as it somehow benefits “your side”, and so on. Those elements of our culture were there before social media, before the internet, before TV, and much further back.
IMHO in a hypothetical society in which the progressives won (something like what is presented in Star Trek TNG), social media wouldn’t bring those sorts of problems with it, because they wouldn’t be present in the culture. At worst there would be a few folk like Reginald Barcley, who was addicted to the holodeck. The major social problems, however, wouldn’t be there, because of the absence of underlying cultural dysfunction.
I just want to thank you for teaching me this word.
Thank you for making me look it up. I never realised it was an Australianism. I thought it was a well known term. Learn a new thing every day.
I disagree. I believe that any given technology has intended uses and unintended consequences of that use, including fire, the wheel, the lever. Modern technology is no different. While some of the many damaging consequences of modern tech can be laid at the feet of unregulated capitalism, it is those technologies that enable that particular facet of unregulated capitalism to be unleashed. The reason we don’t foresee the often horrible consequences of new technologies is because there is money to be made by pretending those are minor.
The reason that the Amish eschew most – not all – modern inventions is exactly because of this phenomenon. Technology has consequences. Because of capitalism and the glorification of greed and selfishness which is inherent to it, we believe that “progress” is inevitable and there is nothing to be done but lie back and let the juggernaut roll over us. That, however, is a choice we as a society made.
It looks like we will keep making it until everything is dead that we can kill.
That may have been the reason the initial group of Amish made that decision. It hasn’t seemed to have helped them. The Amish have problems just like the rest of us, probably worse than most of the rest of the US. If the Amish represent some kind of utopia that can be achieved by eschewing technology, then give me technology and all the problems it brings.
I think that there are a lot of basic human nature behaviors and attitudes that a lot of people in the younger generations are mistakenly attributing to the post-war generations. Stuff like an emphasis on profit first, lack of worker protections/concern, lack of universal healthcare, willingness to display force in foreign policy, and so on.
That stuff has been around as long as people have. The baby boomers didn’t invent putting profits ahead of everything else; in fact, they weren’t even as good at it as their grandparents’ generation was.
Similarly, the idea that capitalism is problematic isn’t anything new either. (but the Gen Z/Millennials seem not to read history books, so they didn’t see how socialism/communism panned out in the real world).
Same for environmental problems; in fact with the exception of climate change, the environment is generally better than it was 60 years ago due to environmental legislation.
I kind of disagree this is an example of mistakenly attributing a problem to modernity. Sure there are some elements of “the youth are lazy and immoral, and I worry for the future” when it comes to criticism of social media (which is as old as society as itself), but the rise of social media did fundamentally change social interaction in ways that did not exist previously.
There are plenty of examples of the OP though. I’d say the criticisms of the younger generation for being selfish and not having the discipline to make long terms plans, and so not having kids, buying houses, etc. is totally this. The entire modern economy (house prices, job market, college costs, etc.) has been setup to make doing those things responsibly financially unfeasible for most younger people.
I wasn’t saying the Amish have a utopia. I’m saying they made a different choice. There are also other choices between the Amish and destroying the world.
I partially agree. Those are behaviors of human nature that are innate a lot of us, but not everyone. If everyone thought that way, we would never have had an Enlightenment and the subsequent eventual development of the western democracies with their emphasis on human rights.
Agreed that there are other choices. One of those choices involve embracing both technology and progress. What holds us back isn’t the technology, it’s the regressive people among us (all over the world, the United States, Europe, the Islamic world, China, Russia, Africa, you name it), who will either end up dragging us down or be dragged forward kicking and screaming. At this point I’m not sure which one of those two will end up happening, but either way, I won’t blame technology for a bad outcome.
I just meant that a lot of that stuff seems to be innate to a lot of people, or at least a lot of cultures, and isn’t anything new at all. I wasn’t trying to imply that ALL people think that way instinctually or anything like that.
The people who embrace planetary destruction come from every political direction. Technology gives us the means, it doesn’t dictate our choices unless we let greed, hate, and delusion decide for us. Which is exactly what we are doing. The right wing, for example, is all about hate, and the left, about delusion. And everyone is down with greed.
“Progress” is a concept full of suppositions that are either unverifiable or patently false. In reality land, there is only change. We do not “improve”, we just change, like the fabric of life itself. Some things get better, other things get worse. Our direction is toward much better for a certain percentage of the human beings, much worse for the rest, plus absolute disaster for all other living things.
Nothing in my life has given me any hope that we are “improving” anything as a species. The absolute opposite appears to be true, objectively speaking. The planet has never been in as much danger of irreversible damage as at this very moment, after all our “progress”. Everything lauded as ‘progress’ means destruction of something or someone we decided not to care about.
To pretend this isn’t true is the way we all continue to congratulate ourselves on “progress”.
People have griped about technology and modernity since the industrial revolution, often for very good reasons. The Luddites are held up as exemplars of stupidly refusing new technology, but complaining that a few capitalists were planning to exploit cheap labor at the cost of thousands of jobs and valued traditions is as valid today as it was then. (Unfortunately, it led Marx and Engels to assume that it could be answered in only one way and while that was obsolete almost as soon as it was written it had enormous influence anyway.)
Change rather than modernity is almost always the issue. People are the sum of their lives. The older one gets, the more baggage - more stuff to learn, to use, to contend with, to support or oppose. Younger people don’t feel as burdened by stuff. Most of the world is completely new to them so they spend more of their time expanding their knowledge, and they are doing so with a cohort of the same age and so can share knowledge about current interests because it’s their water - they swim in it. Older people deal with multiple generations of multiple interests, many of which are fixed in the past. They’re obviously going to find it much harder to discover the new music, the new social apps, the new games, the new science, the new mores. Fitting change into their lives takes time, energy, learning, and disruption. Some changes may be worth that. Many, many more aren’t.
I understand but I came up with an example off the top of my head rather than simply leaving a broad question with no elaboration.
IMHO part of the problem is that as a species we stopped making progress somewhere in the mid-2010s. Some of the bad stuff that has happened since then isn’t due to progress, but in fact due to the opposite, trying to turn back the clock on things that were hard fought for over the past few centuries. There are some things lauded as progress that turned out not to be, but I won’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. We have made actual progress.
Here’s one example. 200 years ago Black people in the US were treated as chattel. 100 years ago they weren’t allowed to vote along with many other restrictions and risk of violence toward them based on their skin color. 10 years ago we hadn’t completely eliminated the effects of that long history, but substantial progress had been made. Now, some of that progress has been reversed. The problem wasn’t the actual progress that was made, it’s that it’s been reversed.
Kind of ignores how that benefited millions of consumers instead just a few people (which is what the the thousands of skilled tradesmen were relative to the the consumers - or even the cheap labor). They - like the capitalists - were fine with only a tiny fraction benefiting, as long they were the tiny fraction.
All change is a series of tradeoffs, with some people benefiting and others being afflicted. Sometimes these tradeoffs are understood in the short term and sometimes they are not fully recognized until the long term. If you’re one of the short-term afflicted with no reasonable way of seeing the larger-scale benefits of the future, you have a perfect right to complain. You have a perfect right to complain even if you know some others will benefit at the expense of your total loss. Whether you are correct in complaining or whether you are being a luddite in its modern pejorative usage has no objective answer; the majority who benefits normally gets their viewpoint to prevail, although that can change over even longer-term scales.
We also need to remember that not changing the status quo creates some winners and some losers. Climate change will require millions of changes, small and large. It would be nice to say that everybody benefits from these changes in the long run, but that’s subjective and won’t be true for some people in the short term. I’d no doubt support the overwhelmingly majority of changes but I can’t be absolute and say that anything anyone will do has my stamp of approval. How society apportions winners and losers is probably the leading social issue of our era.
Change in general is a thing that people mistakenly attribute to modernity. As people get older, they start to notice the accumulation of change that has taken place during their lives, and (IMO), make the mistake of assuming this process only began some time after their own birth (which is sort of understandable - you weren’t around to see the changes that happened before you existed) - feeling nostalgia for some imaginary world that was more or less free of change prior to some point in their early life - leading to complaints that everything is getting worse - it happens a lot when people encounter new written or spoken language usage - but ignoring the reality that change is the process that got you to that state you now wish would stop changing
The Amish and Mennonites make a deliberate choice, congregation by congregation, about whether to accept or reject each significant new piece of technology. Occasionally a group changes their minds about a particular piece, after they’ve seen its effect on those who chose to adopt it and the effect on those who chose to reject it.
I disagree with rejecting a lot of what they choose to reject. But I’m not at all sure that’s not a healthier attitude than that of the dominant culture, which is all too often ‘yay! bright new shiny thing! Everybody start using it as fast as possible!’ – sometimes then followed by, ‘whoops, we screwed up the ozone layer ( or the effectiveness of antibiotics, or the entire climate, or whatever), maybe that wasn’t such a bright idea after all.’