123 School Work

Post Modern Age

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  Introduction:
  
  Post-Modernism can be described as a particular style of thought. It is a concept that correlates the emergence of new features and types of social life and economic order in a culture; often called modernization, post-industrial, consumer, media, or multinational capitalistic societies.
  
  In Modernity, we have the sense or idea that the present is discontinuous with the past, that through a process of social, technological, and cultural change (either through improvement, that is, progress, or through decline) life in the present is fundamentally different from life in the past. This sense or idea as a world view contrasts with what is commonly known as Tradition, which is simply the sense that the present is continuous with the past, that the present in some way repeats the forms, behavior, and events of the past.
  
  I would propose that traditional ways of life have been replaced with uncontrollable change and unmanageable alternatives, but that these changes and alternatives eventually create something that may result in the society that traditionalists actually seek after; the balance between Nature and Technology. Modernity itself is merely the sense that the present is a transitional point, not focused on a clear goal in the future but simply changing through forces outside our control. I will first describe how "Modernity" came about, and then to indicate some of the features for which "Post-Modernity" is meant to be a reaction, response or addition to modernization.
  
  Beginnings of Modernity:
  
  First, I aim to give a broad historical picture against which we may understand the rise of Modernity as an idea related to science and society or as a framework for a view of rationality. We know that we experience change as either progress or transition, that is, we view our historical situation and our lives presently as deriving meaning and value in some unrealized future.
  
  The shift from Renaissance humanism to Modern rationalism can be understood in terms of four shifts: (1) from an oral culture in which the theory and practice of rhetoric played a central role to a written culture in which formal logic played a central role in establishing the credentials of an argument; (2) from a practical concern - with understanding and acting on particular cases to a more theoretical concern with the development of universal principles; (3) from a concern with the local - in all its stable diversity, to the general - understood in terms of abstract multi nationalisms; and (4) from the timely - a concern with making practical decisions in the transitory situations which demand wise and prudent responses, to the timeless - a concern with understanding and explaining the enduring, perhaps eternal, nature of things...