Why I am still a Modernist
As a professor passing through the heartland of America, I want to point out a series of concepts that I find interesting.
The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard known for such great books as Simulation and Simulacra wrote a type of diary of his experience in the US, titled “America”.
He traveled through the horizontal of the prairies, and deserts. He found that America is (by design) a made-up nation, where there are two concepts: a utopia or a territorialization (British citizens making a nation) and de-territorialization, a dystopia (the erasure of the people who inhabited the land earlier.)
And it’s this process that permeates our (I say “our” because I also choose to be a US citizen) thinking of the world.
Therefore, we have this power to choose our reality, as a clean slate no matter what the world throws at us.
In his book or journal, he comments:
“Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity”
In regards to living in this moment of “Corona Virus” what is now being described as a cliché is affecting many people worldwide especially in the “developing” world. Different from our reality, they cannot wear masks all the time or work from home, they gamble with their life because its either poverty or virology that will defeat them.
I want to share this thought regarding how humanity transcended the past world crisis.
During WW2, the world thought collectively on how we could overcome a crisis, such as totalitarian governments, i.e. nazis, and fascism.
People around the world enlisted in the military without any objection; global governments united to battle together, and industrialist made products that would support the struggle for world peace.
Today, we face a similar crisis, yet it is not an ideology but a biological agent.
So far during this pandemic, we have not been able to come together as a society, government, and industry, to solve- as we once did – our global adversary.
Today, every faction of society has a reason for how the crisis is affecting them. All have individual objectives; the young generations can’t cope with the psychological tension, the economy of nations struggle due to the preventive state public health measures and science wrestles to integrate into the world psyche the importance of medical facts and objectives.
Today our global society is not a unified cause against this crisis. Therefore, unless we pause our differentiation and postmodernism for a moment, we might return to a future of a diverse and safe world.