“Modernity
cannot be identified with any particular technological or social breakthrough.
Rather, it is a subjective condition, a feeling or an intuition that we are in
some profound sense different from the people who lived before us. Modern life,
which we tend to think of as an accelerating series of gains in knowledge,
wealth, and power over nature, is predicated on a loss: the loss of contact
with the past. Depending on your point of view, this can be seen as either a
disinheritance or an emancipation; much of modern politics is determined by
which side you take on this question. But it is always disorienting.”
“If we are
looking for the real origins of the modern world, then we have to look for the
moment when that world was literally disoriented — stripped of its sense of
direction. Heliocentrism, the doctrine that the earth revolves around the sun
rather than vice versa, … was immediately experienced as a profound dislocation….
Modernity is a vertigo that began in the Sixteenth Century and shows no sign of
letting up.”
Source: “What Makes You So Sure?” by Adam
Kirsch: published in the September 5 (2016) issue of The New Yorker
magazine as a review of Anthony Gottlieb’s The
Dream of Enlightenment. Pg. 71.
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