Status Updates From The Consequences of Modernity

Friendship has been transformed by modernity.

… honour is replaced by loyalty which has no other support save personal affection, and sincerity is replaced by what we can call authenticity: the requirement that the other be open and well-meaning.

A friend is not someone who always speaks the truth, but someone who protects the emotional well-being of the other.

Trust in abstract systems is the condition of time-space distanciation and of the large areas of security in day-to-day life which modern institutions offer as compared to the traditional world.

Yet… trust in abstract systems is not psychologically rewarding in the way in which trust in persons is.

“A faith in the caretaker's love is the essence of that leap to commitment which basic trust—and all forms of trust thereafter—presumes.”

While “normal” individuals may regard such anxieties… as irrational, these feelings are more the result of emotional supersensitivity than irrationality.

Why is everyone not always in a state of high ontological insecurity, given the enormity of such potential existential troubles?

"Normal" individuals… receive an emotional inoculation which protects against the ontological anxieties… [from] the mother.

You can’t avoid working with abstract systems nowadays.

“Individuals in premodern settings, in principle and in practice, could ignore the pronouncements of priests, sages, and sorcerers and get on with the routines of daily activity. But this is not the case in the modern world, in respect of expert knowledge.”

“We have not moved beyond modernity but are living precisely through a phase of its radicalisation.”

“In science, nothing is certain, and nothing can be proved… In the heart of the world of hard science, modernity floats free.”

“The separating of time and space and their formation into standardised, "empty" dimensions… [creates] manifold possibilities of change by breaking free from the restraints of local habits and practices.”

Studying modernity is helping me make sense of my cross-cultural hopscotch.

The disorientation [we feel]… results primarily from the sense many of us have of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part outside of our control.

We have to look again at the nature of modernity itself which… has been poorly grasped in the social sciences hitherto.

“(…) yaşamın bazı yönlerinde, geleneğin bazı özelliklerini anımsatacak yeni bir değişmezlik niteliği hâkim olacaktır. Böyle bir dünya ademimerkezi örgütlenmelere yol açacak bir biçimde “dışa doğru çöken” bir dünya da olmayacaktır; ancak, kuşkusuz yerel ve küreseli karmaşık bir biçimse birbirine iliştirecektir.”

“Poets and the religious are wont to argue that if an individual compares the very considerable time he is slated to spend dead with the relatively brief time allows him to strut and fret in this world, he might well find reason for viewing all of this life as a very hateful okay of very short span, every second of which should fill him with anxiety about what is used up” Erving Goffman SHUT UP

PAIN!