Agh, somebody make me stop!
Here's another philosophical/social essay, trying to put in perspective what I see going on all around. I have GOT to flee from all this into fiction....
Comments welcome.
db
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Is the Radical Notion of Modernism Relevant for the Twenty-First Century?
by David Brin (Draft: 12/04 limited circulation) http://www.davidbrin.com/
Modernism appears to be at a nadir after 40 years in retreat. Even its supporters seem abjectly apologetic, that is, if you can find anyone who will admit using the word at all. The term is now largely associated with some outmoded and rather ugly architectural styles, far more than with its former meaning -- an over-arching dream of ambitiously making a better world through human creativity and will.
I will deliberately avoid dealing with "modernism" in the sense of an artistic or fancy intellectual movement. Grandiose theories serve largely to undermine a worldview that is - at-heart - based upon gritty pragmatism. Modernism, to me, has to do with something much more fundamental. Confidence.
Confidence that rising knowledge, skill and creativity - propelled by both competition and cooperation - can empower each generation to confront a myriad challenges that their parents found daunting. A confidence that is easily ridiculed as either naive or arrogant, growing out of the enthusiasm that children often express, when they declare an eagerness to "be something" when they grow up, and to have a significant impact upon the world.
Despite cynical diagnoses that modernism is all-but dead, it clearly remains a vital force in the world. Taking into account the inevitable mistakes, tragic blunders and unanticipated outcomes that accompany any bold endeavor, it would nevertheless seem obvious that scientists, engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs, economists, civil rights activists, environmentalists and social reformers have a better track record at confronting age-old human problems and injustices than all of the kings, wizards and priests from past eras, combined.
Moreover, modernism suggests that bold measures - moderated by the accountability of open criticism - may even improve upon humanity itself. Perhaps not through garish means, like genetic engineering, that deserve healthy skepticism. But certainly in the incremental sense we see as generation after generation achieve higher levels of education and, yes, higher IQ scores.
The core belief - and one that most-riles the opponents of modernism - is that children can - at times - learn somewhat from the mistakes of their parents, and thus not repeat them.
Of course, most societies would have punished even minimal expressions of such confidence as heretical hubris. Today, that same loathing bubbles and froths from countless wellsprings. spanning every spectrum, from left to right, from academia to the ill-educated, from religious to secular. The major common theme that's shared among scoffers in almost every quarter appears to be a deep distrust of the can-do spirit of Enlightenment pragmatism.
Elsewhere (http://www.davidbrin.com/tolkienarticle1.html) I talk about how this reaction has manifested in the arts. Using as a core example JRR Tolkien's popular Lord of the Rings Trilogy, as well as the Star Wars series, I discuss how romanticism systematically rejects a complete range of Enlightenment values and beliefs, as if from a checklist. (Even Communism and Capitalism do not glare at each other across such a complete catalogue of opposites.)
In another article, I comment on this same rejection in _political terms (http://www.davidbrin.com/realculturewar1.html)
Here I'll take a different perspective, looking not at the enemies of modernism, but at modernism itself.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CAN-DO ERA
I perceive several phases to this movement, starting with the classic Enlightenment of the 18th Century, a time before romantics turned their backs on tomorrow, when you even saw a few characters like Thomas Jefferson, in whom romanticism and enlightenment seem quite joyfully mixed. Of course, Benjamin Franklin was the quintessential modernist of that era, setting tone for the American wing of the Enlightenment. A tone of pragmatism combined with a deep suspicion of generalities and ideologies. A view that human beings are all self-deceivers and potential tyrants -- but that a system of living might be designed that maximizes opportunities for our better natures while minimizing opportunities for oppression.
A simple notion, though - as Pericles discovered much earlier - devilishly hard to implement in practice.
Ironically, the one who best appraised this era was a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. While the Enlightenment in France veered off-course, beguiled into a quasi-mystical belief in abstractions - in Platonist essences, logic and philosophical "reason" - de Tocqueville seemed thrilled by the no nonsense practicality of the Anglo-American Enlightenment, manifested in Locke, Burke, Franklin, Madison, the US Constitution, and in town meetings that took place in vibrant little villages across the land.
In this pragmatic approach lay the core belief of modernism, that humans are improvable. And if humans can improve, it means that ideologies, no matter how persuasive, are at best only approximations. They should only be used as general suggestions, not as quasi-religious tracts. Because the next generation of smarter, more knowing people will be better judges of what's right and wrong than we are. (Indeed, why should they not also be more ethical and spiritually worthy?) We have no business prescribing beliefs for such people, other than those that are most general, moral and useful.
If human beings are improvable, then our towering concern must be to improve them, by any means that is both decent and practical. Our children will then be far better equipped than we are to make their own decisions about balancing market and social forces, competition and cooperation, personal property and specifics of moral behavior.
At least, that is the core Enlightenment value described by de Tocqueville (as viewed through modern eyes.) And while this attitude took many forms - some of them deeply spiritual (as in the case of abolitionism) - the core belief in human improvability stayed generally on course, while levels of health and education improved among average americans.
THE SECOND PHASE OF MODERNISM
The second phase of modernism was its era of golden ambitions. During the long stretch from the American Civil War until the First World War, an alliance of tinkerers and capitalists became ever-more convinced that nothing lay beyond reach. True, the robber barons cheated like mad, stole everything they could grab, and flaunted wealth to such a garish degree that it became known as a Gilded Age. But there was also a cheerfully egalitarian-meritocratic feel to it all. Fortunes were won and lost in a spirit of easy-come, easy-go and few resented the poor boy who - encouraged by all those Horatio Alger tales - turned pluck, inventiveness and good fortune into a mighty bonanza.
Driven by can-do individualism, by markets, by a roughshod, stoic willingness to endure periods of bad luck - and spiced with Wild West machismo - they took their social Darwinism with several shots of whiskey and several thousand grains of salt. Even those immigrants who slaved in sweatshops for low wages mostly believed, and mostly succeeded in their one-generation programs to uplift happier and better educated kids. You and I might envision people of that era lacking compassion. But you and I are a whole lot richer and have much higher standards for one reason. We stand on their broad shoulders.
Oh, and one more point about the Second Age of Modernism. We like to think that WE are experiencing rapid and disrupting change. But imagine that you live in 1910 and have just witnessed the arrival, in rapid succession, of wireless telegraphy, commercial radio, refrigerators, women politicians, telephones, washing machines, automobiles, airplanes, zeppelins, electric lighting, gas cooking, elevators, science fiction stories, skyscrapers, reliable indoor plumbing... and all of these newfangled things moving down the social ladder, transforming rapidly from extravagances for the rich to normal accoutrements of a burgeoning middle class.
Could anybody, witnessing all this, NOT believe in modernism?
Well, in fact, many people were deeply disturbed by it. They waxed eloquent about how much better things had been in former times, when children respected their elders, when women weren't uppity, when cities had not usurped self-reliance and yoeman farmers stood by their old-time religion. But while uneasiness and nostalgia won many social and political battles, the rejectors seemed helpless to prevail in any long term war against modernism and change, which had captured the imagination of their children.
Then came the first great setback.
MODERNISM TAKE A TUMBLE
In 1894, philanthropist John Jacob Astor wrote a best-selling novel about the year 2001 -- a future transformed by science, enterprise and human good will. Keeping with the can-do spirit of his era, when men used rails and canals to subdue continents, Astor foresaw progress vanquishing inequity, reducing poverty to vestiges, conquering ignorance and offering average folk privileges undreamt-of by his millionaire peers. And all of it happening under the leadership of a fluid but responsible entrepreneurial class.
Why not? At the end of the 19th Century, waves of immigrants shared those hopes, eager to feed, educate and advance their children as never before. Projecting this momentum to a time of future plenty seemed credible, not arrogant or silly.
Astor died with a famed flourish of noblesse oblige aboard the sinking Titanic -- the first of many garish calamities that began quenching this naive zeal for progress.
Soon, world war taught millions a brutal lesson -- the first use of new technology is often its horrid mis-use. Suddenly it wasn't just conservative preachers railing against modernity, but some of society's very brightest. Survivors of Flanders battlefields returned disenchanted with the Machine Age. Intellectuals, from Tolkien and Lewis to Eliot, veered toward romantic nostalgia while writers of the Lost Generation prescribed a compulsory literary template. Blend stylish cynicism with brooding suspicion of tomorrow. Never show enthusiasm, or admit hope for progress.
That seemed accurate. The 20th Century spent its first half wallowing in horror - the second teetering at an abyss. Television brought countless tragedies right into our homes. Vague Sunday sermons about apocalypse were replaced by hourly talk of a civilization, a species, a planet imperiled by our cleverness, doomed by our own skilled hands.
What's the most widely shared truism - or eternal verity - provoking sad nods from all, conservative or liberal?
"Too bad wisdom hasn't kept up with technology."
This dour cliche was ripe for the contrarian riposte Gregg Easterbrook supplies in The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, arguing that modern civilization has accomplished not one, but two, bona fide miracles. We seem verged on saving the world. And we seem incapable of noticing.
But more on that later.
What is significant is that the First World War did not kill modernism. For a while, the rebellion against it seemed limited largely to religion and the arts.
(Ironically, both decadent artists - pushing the limits with prurient content - and the prudish conservatives who railed against them, were allies at a deeper level, united against any notion that the future might be a good and desirable destination, subject to intelligent design. This is an alliance we see today, between anti-science fanatics of both left and right. Between those who rage to offend conventional normality and those obsessed with defending it. What they share is a detestation of mild, inexorable, calm and rational reform.)
Despite rumblings among the intellectual elite and from ten thousand pulpits, even the Great Depression did little to dampen the belief of millions that human sagacity and problem solving could get to the heart of matters and make things better.
Only now, in the Third Age of modernism, there was more cynicism. The blithe trust that Astor and others gave to a monied aristocracy - belief in top-down entrepreneurial innovation managed by capitalists - had been rocked first by war profiteering and then Depression mismanagement.
Now, modernist thinking swung away from faith in entrepreneurs, turning instead to ideological prescriptions for how the modernist efforts should be _organized. Variations on Marxism were attractive to millions, offering incantations that sounded oh-so scientific, but other schemes flowed from ten thousand pens, presses and fervid imaginations. To many, it seemed obvious that socialism offered a better, more rationally-planned approach, than tossing greedy capitalists into a market stewpot with seething, angry workers and hoping for the best.
Of course, the nastiest version of this turn toward socialist-modernism was German Nazism. But the Grand Deceit of Stalin's Soviet Union - masking the horrors while showing newsreel footage of glorious dams - also had millions in the West fooled.
In America, the extravagant ideologies of Marx and Hitler never took hold, but a less ideological social-modernism did tickle the public's fancy. In 1932 the Technocracy Movement got a lot of attention in magazines and on radio. It was the brainchild of Howard Scott, who suggested that engineers be given a chance to do things right. Replace capital with brains. Give the smartest a chance to do the allocating, for a change. They should be the ones best equipped to apportion resources fairly and well. Move things from where they are glutted to where they will do the most good on a supply-need basis. Give all citizens shares in USA Inc. and then simply do whatever is pragmatically needed. Socialism without ideology or oppression. A similar approach is illustrated by H. G. Wells in his novel Things to Come.
Fortunately, technocracy was never put into effect, or modernism would not have survived the inevitable miscalculations, disasters and disenchantment. As we learned from the collapse of "Japan Inc." during the late 1980s, nobody knows how to allocate a society's bewildering array of talents and resources from a plan. To even imagine that it's possible is romantic mythology. In this sense, the believers in market magic proved right, after all. (There are other ways in which they appear to be wrong.)
FDR's more tepid approach to modernist stimulation did help ease the Depression and restored some public confidence. It featured many projects that expressed can-do in ways that did much incremental good, without plunging into a weird, ideological experiment.
Still, it took war -- a time when technocratic allocation works, because it is applied toward a simple, ferocious end -- for a version of Scott's Technocracy to achieve real economic magic. And while a war economy is not a good model for a general economy, it certainly mobilized everyone to defeat fascism.
Inarguably, the nation that emerged from WWII was vastly stronger than the one that entered.
THE FOURTH AGE: POST WWII
In a rich irony, the America that emerged from WWII was both chastened by the terrors of technology and filled with can-do spirit. Never before had a nation taken on so many challenges successfully. And never before did a generation find itself rocked by the very image of oblivion - in the terrifying mushroom cloud of an atom bomb. Now Doomsday was no longer a Sunday sermon. It lay within the grasp of human hands.
And yet, the war's toll in actual human suffering and loss had been minimal to most Americans. The machine gun had done more to the psyche and confidence of their parents, after WWI, than the abstract terror of Hiroshima and Bikini did to US citizens in the fifties. For the most part, the nation seemed willing to take on challenges as never before. And not only challenges of industrial technology - like providing a fully functioning house to every family in the middle class - but also shattering class boundaries with measures like the GI Bill. And then, ambitiously, confronting demons that had benighted countless generations, like racism.
I perceive the high point of Fourth Age Modernism in the can-do Congress of 1964 - swept to office in the emotional outpouring that followed the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Spurred by newly re-elected President Lyndon Johnson, it passed the Civil Rights Act and War on Poverty, put environmental laws into motion, and boosted the NASA budget on trajectory toward landings on the Moon. Nor were Republicans wholly out of the picture. While Barry Goldwater expressed the skepticism of classic conservatives, Nelson Rockefeller led a large wing of the GOP that was just as gung-ho on progressive reform and Big Projects as Johnson.
University-building and scholarships got their biggest boost since the GI Bill. Post Sputnik endeavors in science education were kicked into high gear. Whole swathes of New York and other cities were bulldozed in grand Urban Renewal experiments. Throw in nuclear power plants, bikinis, transistor radios, the Peace Corps and the happiest days of rock n' roll. Wowzer.
And yes, this list of ambitious endeavors would seem to overlap with another word that's now in disrepute -- "liberalism." At the time, there wouldn't have been a razor's width of difference between liberal and modernist viewpoints. One word stood for an acute sensitivity to injustice and social need. The other stood for a can do willingness to take on any challenge.
UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES
Of course, all that hubris and overweening can-do pride led to trouble, as it had to. Political rebellion in the Old South. Social disorientation and a generation gap. Pent-up frustration in the ghetto, suddenly released by hope, flash-boiled into race riots. Modernist architecture proved devastatingly wrongheaded as high-rise "projects" for the poor exacerbated every social ill, instead of helping to ease them. Few superhighways were built to allow for growth or flexibility. Many best-laid schemes came to fruition and quickly spawned unintended consequences.
Likewise, a well-meaning but ill-designed welfare system systematically destroyed families, undermined work and dissolved personal responsibility -- proving that Barry Goldwater could be right-on when it came to detailed criticism, even if he was dead wrong about the dire need to do something vigorous about poverty.
Alas, by that point modernist meddlers were too far gone down the road of arrogant sureness -- so full of their own certainty of what was right that they were incapable of even tweaking or adjusting their plans under intelligent criticism. Le Corbusier in Brasilia and ___ in New York City showed how far architectural pomposity and insolence had gone. Human occupants were no longer even consulted over their needs, but simply told what those needs were.
(For more on these flaws of technological arrogance, see Edward Tenner's Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences.)
And then, of course, there was the ultimate hubris, brought to us under the aegis of that quintessential modernist, Robert MacNamara. Believing we could do anything and everything... or, as JFK put it - "pay any price, bear any burden"... America embarked upon an insane land war in Asia -- exactly what old Ike warned us never to do. (Never let JFK off the hook for this. He expressed modernism in its fullness and pride, all the good and all the bad.) Vietnam reamed much of the spirit out of American society, deeply wounded its economy, and gravely injured our belief in our ability as a nation.
There are eerie parallels between MacNamara and the JFK brain trust -- on the one hand -- and today's leading neoconservatives. In both groups we see the same arrogance, elitism, pride, foreign adventurism, and utter, unquestioning belief in the proficient mastery of a core group. Like Alcibiades, during the era when Periclean Athens went off the deep end, their pride is limitless, while their willingness to endure criticism is as shallow and fragile as a cranky four-year old.
And yet, despite these common traits, the sixties modernists were completely different than today's imperious neocons, who exude all of the same hubris while offering none of the moderns' vision. All of the conceit, accompanied by none of the kindness. The same level of overweening ambition, but all of it funneled into benefiting a narrow kleptocracy, instead of a vast nation and world whose pain and shackled hopes should always inspire eagerness for change.
MODERNISM AT ITS NADIR
Oh, there are plenty of reasons for modernism to have lost its gloss. Just one piece of visual art -- the image of the atom bomb -- seared away much of the can-do aplomb from the man and woman on the street, warning that ambitious plans might lead us all off a precipice. The other great 20th century work of visual art -- the Apollo 8 photo of Earth floating as a fragile oasis in the desert of space -- preached a similar message about the importance of caution and remembering what's at risk.
Still, isn't that the point? We didn't go off the precipice of nuclear war. In many ways, the bomb -- or at least its searing image -- may have been the very thing that saved a generation from the next world war. And that picture of our oasis planet stirred environmentalism as no verbal argument ever could. Both were sermons about maturity and responsibility. And both sermons were created by engineers, by scientists, by modernism itself.
Above all, those sixties modernists can say this. Their mistakes were - in the long run - dwarfed by towering accomplishments. Take civil rights, womens' rights, and the beginnings of environmentalism. Take the quadrupling of attendance at those new universities, or the blatant success of anti-poverty programs in places like Appalachia and the New South. Or weather and communication satellites. Take the internet and cell phones. Take Los Angeles, where ten times as many cars make one tenth as much pollution -- a mixed and congested blessing but one that still attracts millions. Take any ONE of these things and you have proof, positive, that modernism could work, if supplemented with some common sense.
It got a bad rap.
And not just in governmental programs, but socially. I mean, would even the neocons want to go back to segregation? And who could complain about that music? All that incredible music.
But reaction had already set in before the can-do Congress of 1964 went cold. There had always been romantics on both the left and right who hated modernism. They found justification in Vietnam and urban riots, Three Mile Island and the Exxon Valdez, and a long list of costly errors.
On the left, dogma-driven romantics warped the natural American suspicion of authority (SOA) into a never-ending list of political axes to grind. The fight for civil rights was such a heady and successful thing - overcoming ages of stereotypes and reflex discrimination - that soon every rock had to be turned over, seeking the next and then the next intolerance to expose, amid a drug-high of indignant fury. Make no mistake, it was a good thing to extend this trend to gays, the handicapped and even to Wiccan tree-worshippers. But along the way it became less and less about equalizing basic opportunity and ever-more about creating and stoking a movement. A movement that came equipped with ideologies, litmus tests, enemies lists, and long catalogues of forbidden words. Forbidden topics of conversation.
And forbidden technologies, forbidden projects, forbidden ideas. Former allies found themselves ejected from a liberalism that was fast becoming a dogmatic faith, led by an elite priesthood. First to go were spaceflight and nuclear power, though both had done wonders for the planet and its people. Then the military, although its desegregation under Harry Truman and George Marshall had been the event that gave civil rights irresistible momentum. Then polite dissent within a thousand academic departments. Then the churches, forgetting how men and women of faith had helped to resist the moral error of Vietnam. And finally, that quintessential hippie, Jesus, got the boot from a movement that he probably would have helped to establish, at Woodstock.
Liberalism began reflexively assuming that everything white, rural, American, or socially demure was automatically suspect, until the very word "liberal" became a weapon in the hands of its enemies. When this happened, the movement's elites only made things worse by diagnosing that the common citizens had been brainwashed by propaganda. Contempt for the masses, invigorating and satisfying, thereupon displayed its deadly side-effect -- political suicide.
(Contempt is ultimately lethal, once the voting masses find out how you feel. We can hope this will be the comeuppance of the haughty neocons, before they do too much more harm.)
But the biggest break was between liberalism and modernism. Every ill-conceived or ill-executed error of the ambitious modernists came under scrutiny. Not for its pragmatic success-failure ratio, but for whether it met the Left's growing list of litmus standards. The nerds and engineers and technologists who had been at the core of liberal-modernism's can-do spirit were progressively alienated, until you can hardly find one who will even talk to a liberal anymore.
Meanwhile, scientists were being driven off by conservatism. For that movement, too, had been taken over by dogmatists. By a triple alliance of groups who actively hate science and all that it represents. By a clique of aristocratic kleptocrats who do not believe in economics. By apocalyptic sects that reject geology and biology. By neoconservative imperialists who repudiate climatology, ecology, chemistry, pharmacology and... ultimately... history.
Why has nobody commented on this? The Left has nothing but contempt for engineers, spurning can-do projects in favor of a single party line prescription for saving the world. Puritanical conservation. We must quickly abandon our cars and shiver in the dark. (Political suicide, but boy does it feel virtuous.)
Meanwhile, the Right - while willing to pay engineers for near-term guns and toys - will have no truck with ambitious research into technologies that might save a planet through assertive conservation -- vastly improved efficiency standards and sustainable energy supplies. Neoconservatives smile and shrug at petitions signed by scores of Nobel Prize winners, since egghead boffins cannot possibly possess any common sense. Their oft-expressed contempt for objective reality -- as opposed to a subjective/ideological model of the world -- mimics that of the postmodernist left with eerie perfection. (Foucault or Leo Strauss? The common theme is a belief that elites can redefine reality however they like, as a matter of magical will.)
While rejecting science, both movements are infested with romantic nostalgia for a better past-that-never-was. The future cannot be a realm of promise and opportunity. Oh, the Left is certainly sincere in fretting about tomorrow's dangers. But meanwhile, no one seems to notice how closely their dark forebodings of ecological collapse resemble the apocalyptic visions of right-wingers who confidently expect an imminent end to this world, amid a reckoning foretold in Revelations. These gloomy visions are not only eerily similar, they are chillingly compatible.
It all came to a head during the election of 2004. While the Democratic Party seems equally divided between moderates and radicals, there can be no doubt any longer that Barry Goldwater's version of conservatism is stone cold dead, replaced by a "conservatism" that bears almost no resemblance to progressive libertarianism. I discuss this transformation of the Republican Party at http://www.davidbrin.com/realculturewar1.html. All three of the major elements controlling the GOP clearly despise science and modernism with maniacal passion. That is why the demographic dividing line has become rural-vs-urban, evangelical-vs-secular, and above all, past-vs.-future.
And now? From the Left we now hear cries that the Democratic Party should copy the radicalism of the New Right. A totally unworkable approach, since the most powerful anti-modern elements of society have already been harnessed by the GOP.
In rationalizing this call, leftist radicals claim that Democrat-moderates are tepid compromisers, pushing "republicanism-light." It is effective polemic... and completely untrue. Members of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) believe in all the same things that are promoted by general liberalism -- an ongoing program to promote tolerance, education, openness, and opportunity while alleviating outrageous suffering. They are not more tepid in these desires. But they are vastly more willing to negotiate, find compromise, mix market and social solutions, and experiment with pragmatic innovations, rather than hewing to an ideological catechism.
Both radicals of the left and right assail their own moderates with this charge -- that they are lilly-livered and uncommitted. This charge is flung so relentlessly that moderates have come, to a large degree, to believe it themselves.
But it is a lie, hurled by romantic indignation junkies whose sole common trait is a loathing for modernism. In fact, American moderates are not tepid. They (to a large degree) are different than the radicals in fundamental ways. And when the moderates realize this, they will rally around the only thing worthwhile -- the goal of pragmatically making a better generation. One that can avoid both kinds of apocalypse and forge a great civilization.
CAN CONFIDENCE REBOUND?
My contrarian sense of balance makes me willing to speak up for a worldview that, in fact, made a lot of mistakes. And yet, I cannot look at my own children and give my fealty to any other way of thinking. They are smarter and better than me. I have to believe that has happened for a reason.
Can children can be better than their parents?
If it is true, then pragmatism is the only possible philosophy, since we are obliged to be the utter servants of those smarter and better heirs. If we succeed, pragmatically, at creating superior replacements -- superior intellectually, ethically, morally, and in the trait of common sense -- then they will understand philosophy and all the other quandaries far better than we can even formulate the questions.
Hence, it is clear that all philosophies other than pragmatic modernism and Enlightenment must be versions of romanticism, sharing the romantics' core premise. That human beings are not improvable.
In fact, we do not know whether this daring notion of improvability is true or not. Most civilizations would have called it toxic, a lethal notion, filled with hubris and inviting retribution by angry heavens.
And yet, there is evidence for this wondrous notion of the modernists. Moreover, there is beauty to the can-do pragmatism that has made America everything that's different and better. A can-do confidence that may -- at certain levels -- even be seen as spiritual, in the gritty way that high-achieving and daring children ought to make any Father proud.
In the end, this is not a matter for persuasion, but of personality and deep inner belief. No modernist needs to be cajoled by essays like the one that I have just written. No foe of modernism will be convinced by argument. It is the great divide that has split this nation since its inception, and at no time greater than today -- a time when the future seems to bee rushing toward us filled with crises and opportunities.
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