High modernism is used almost entirely as a pejorative these days
Has been very interesting to read the memoirs/notes of Jean Monnet and Harry Hopkins from pre/post WWII era as the most pro-high modernism writing I've read
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I was part of the bear party but now I kinda regret it and appreciate the good bits and am bullish on it
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It became clear that it was subtly transforming into a reactionary/trad anti-progress line of thought, often to anprim extremes. Happened a few years after I did my own review of Seeing Like a State in 2011. Scott’s argument somehow turned into a manifesto against all change.
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That made me do a double take, and I came to view high modernism, sans the authoritarianism, as a conscious clearcutting of tangled historical bullshit to make room for the future. A fuck-you to Chesterton’s fence and Lindy type arguments.
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This future-positivity is a deeper impulse than authoritarianism. High modernism as an aesthetic gravitates to c,ean lines and platonic symmetries and emptiness at least in part because it chooses to clear away the greebles of the past, which are uncritically held to be valuable
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I’m increasingly in favor of high modernism as a corrective to overindexing on the past especially where it affects fates of human built environments. Less so where it affects natural environments, but even there it helps question uncritical environmentalism.
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I think a big part of Elon Musk’s appeal is that he’s actually high modernist. The first-principles thing cloaks it in reason, but his is primarily an aesthetic posture first, an epistemic posture second.
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High modernism is a kind of defragmentation of the cultural hard disk
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And that’s the challenge — disambiguating between defrag and wipe.
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People rush to yell “wipe” so quickly, defrag basically doesn’t stand a chance today unlike 1920 where it was reverse


