Conversation

“Balance in the universe” concepts (karma, what goes up must come down, what goes around comes around, Golden Rule) are authoritarian high modernism in culture and myth-making. The universe does have balancey things going on but they aren’t THAT crude. Takes artifice to force it
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These ideas predate modernism so are you saying high modernism embraces them? But authoritarian high modernist states reject many of these cyclic ideas; consider the thousand year Reich, the end of term limits, etc. they sure don’t Golden Rule
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My understanding of high modernism is that it is sited specifically in history, rising in the 1950s. You seem to be saying that AHM tendencies are a consistent part of the postagricultural human psyche: pyramid builders, Chinese dynastys, Roman roads. (Sapiens would agree.)
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The initially referenced folk homilies and maxims are examples of “common understanding of social life” which predate the era Scott associates with HM. So I’m puzzled by the assertion that these particular principles can be said to serve an “eternal” AHM.
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The slogans of the Cultural Revolution and of other AHM states in the 1950s–1980s period looked nothing like the Golden Rule or “what goes around comes around.” There may have been symmetry-seeking in AHM art but there is plenty of symmetry-seeking in non-AHM art also.
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The difference is the use of agency/power to shape the reality of others. There’s a difference between making a pleasingly symmetric sculpture and forcing people to live in a symmetric city or within a karma-designed caste system.
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And the tendencies toward that do predate what Scott defines as the AHM era; we see it in Haussmann’s city planning of Paris in the 1850s, which we could label early modernism. But help me see how “what goes up must come down” type principles contributed to that sort of outcome?
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