Half-Page 11/21/08

Austin Emerson
Half-Page 11/21/08

This week I made my way into the 70s in The Modern Mind, reading about the Moon landing, the counterculture, and the grotesque evolution of Capitalism, among other things. The chapters I read this week were an interesting bunch. One section was on historical reconstructions, examining past times and trying to reconstruct the thoughts and sensibilities of their people. I felt a pang of sympathy for these researchers.
One man, whose name I can't remember, looked at the history of Christianity, noting how there had been periods of Christianity marked by "magick" and superstition, while other periods were marked by a strict adherence to the scriptures. Elsewhere, archaeologists were busy digging up any and all evidence of the real Jesus, attempting to explain the past.
This was a difficult time for Christianity. The heavens were being tread upon by astronauts, biblical verses were being discredited as mere plagiarisms of other scriptures, and science was taking on God-like powers. Where I left off in the book, the author was explaining how two innovations would turn the world upside down. The first was information technology – computers. The second was biotechnology, the isolation and replication of certain gene strands. Scientists had finally figured out how to deconstruct and rebuild the basic building blocks of life.
One of the things I noticed when reading about this period was the diminished role of artists. Watson touches upon this briefly, noting that, increasingly, the bestseller list was full of scientific/sociological/pop-psychological books, rather than works of fiction. Pop art was the new thing in the art world, a phenomenon that the art purists of the early 20th century would have spurned. It is my belief that science had become so great a force that the role of the artist was irrevocably diminished. Art became self-conscious and ironic, a medium whose goal was "to produce new sensations in the viewer" rather than to effect any change in society or make any serious statements. Novels lost their popularity and spiraled into increasingly Postmodern forms.
The new society was too scientific, too urgent, to make room for art. It was during this period that scientists began seriously theorizing about the beginnings of the universe; what came before and what would come next. How could art compete with such claims?
It was also the period of the development of the counterculture, a loose conglomeration of Ivy-League sociologists, alienated university students, and fringe mystics. This is a testament to the turns society was taking, and how many disagreed. The word technocratic embodies this brave new world, and the technocracy can have only grown since then. At the same time, many accused the counterculture as being inconsolably narcissistic, subscribing to any ideas that allow them to shift the blame for their problems onto someone else.
In previous chapters, Watson identified a number of thinkers who thought that American society as a whole was marked by narcissism. The American people were "obsessed with their own psychological development," which results in a culture that is bereft of, well, culture.