Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality
The Neoclassical Paradox
The Neoclassical Paradox
What this meant was that the Neoclassical could dominate a country but had only limited resources to wage war, limit famine, or contain corruption. This means that if the nation could remain at relative peace with only minor insurrections or wars it enjoyed stability and in most cases profit and the organization of corporations. This meant that the government had more power to do things such as setting up time zones. This is a good example of the government taking over what had been a private enterprise. In 1840, the Great Western Railway started to use telegraph to transmit GMT for use on chronometers for their trains and this became standard among the railways leading to “Railway Time.” However, local businesses and others resisted making the change to their clocks, which was the way that local people set their time and eventually, the government stepped in and mandated that GMT was the standard, and this happened only in 1880.
The process in the United States was a bit more complex because unlike Britain the logical division is into four different time zones in the continental United States. Several people tried to get a standard in the 1860s, but it was only in 1883 when Cleveland Abbe, the chief meteorologist for the US government, convinced the railroads to use a standard division based on the division he made as he recorded in 1879; the next year the United States government adopted a similar approach leading to “The Day of Two Noons” on November 18, 1883. Once again local communities were free to set their own time and some did so the largest single example is Detroit which held out until 1915. This was followed by the US government to adopt the Standard Time Act on 19 March 1918.
In other words, governments had more power but it was sharply limited because the local governments could often refuse, or if the centralized government crimped the power of the local government it often did so by too much, as Alexander III of Russia did with земство (zemstvo derived from земля or “state”) which meant that the local government could not do anything about emergency events such as famine. This means that there was a tremendous opportunity for invention because the Industrial Revolution was reaching a large number of countries or cities within a country, but also disease, fraud, and extortion as was seen in books such as How the Other Half Lives.
This is why the First Battle of the Marne was a breaking point: a leadership thinking that they were Neoclassical in their limitations but strengthened by the Modern production thought that they could fight onwards because the short war idea was abolished with their organization, production, and logistical apparatus. What they did not realize is that these tools required a new synthesis of people who had reason to be top rather than have been born there. It also meant that laissez-faire economics did not offer control of the manufacturing sector such that normal people could not trust what they bought. While the radicals and politicians subscribed more and more to Marxism, even the liberals felt that changes needed to be made by the hand of the government.
It should be remembered that the lengthening of the “Great War” could have been avoided but that other consequences would have disrupted the Neoclassical age eventually. For example, if England did not enter the war then France would be defeated and a new trade order would be set up with Berlin as its focus. But then a number of countries would not have joined and it would have gone into squabbling because the idea that one could force a nation into joining an international body was unthinkable. Which is what stopped the League of Nations from working.
And this does not even begin to touch the advances in science, industry, culture, and economics. Each of these needed to have a new synthesis under a new form of government which had a more complete form of organization. This meant that women could no longer be denied even the vote, African-Americans in the US needed to be able to move to where there were jobs, children needed to be schooled rather than work to death, and so on. The ideas had been obvious for some time but there was no way to get them to function without the economic resources and a different form of logic.
This is why later generations would cite that protectionism and nationalism were the demise of the old order. It is precisely such protectionism and nationalism that were the defense of smaller states out of the pressure from Great Britain, the sole superpower of that age, to open their markets. For example:
When around the 1870s a general protectionist movement—social and national—started in Europe, who can doubt that it hampered and restricted trade? Who can doubt that factory laws, social insurance, municipal trading, health services, public utilities, tariffs, bounties and subsidies, cartels and trusts, embargoes on immigration, on capital movements, on imports—not to speak of less open restrictions on the movements of men, goods, and payments —must have acted as so many hindrances to the functioning of the competitive system, protracting business depressions, aggravating unemployment, deepening financial slumps, diminishing trade, and damaging severely the self-regulating mechanism of the market?i
The reason for these protectionist movements was quite simple: the national capitalists were threatened by the international capitalists, based in the United Kingdom, and wanted to protect their national markets for the national elites. This is not unusual, but it does make it clear that the market and nationalism were antithetical at this particular time in the 1870s and 1880s. thus be populous had to decide whether they wanted prosperity or nationalism, and almost without exception, they chose nationalism since there is no guarantee that they would dissipate in the prosperity since they have no say in either the market or the government which decides who is to participate in the prosperity.
Neoclassical Markers
The key markers of the neoclassical age are from the beginning, the key Revolutionary paper was in 1855 though it had been stated as the law of squares in 1854, and the end of the Battle of the Marnes in 1914. But the visionary was before this and one can take 1843 with Dicken’s A Christmas Carol as one of the publications which captured the notion about Christmas being an element of a new ritual of exchanging gifts on the day of Christmas as the start, and the Great Exhibition in 1851 as its expression in commercial terms.
We can thus lay out the steps of the neoclassical age as follows:
Visionary: a new publication system is developed and a marker as to its development can be set somewhere in the early 1840s, but also the placement of Christmas as a commercial holiday with the exchanging of gifts being set at the end of the new year. Also the identity of purchasing stocks and other forms of debt in companies started to boom on the London Stock Exchange. The key aspect of this product of the industrial age was that there needed to be an exchange of trade so that the gifts could be shown. This was turbocharged by the Great Exhibition of 1851 because of the manner in which the exhibition was financed and presented in the Crystal Palace at a specific place and at a specific time. The old features that were derived from the Napoleonic wars, including the battle of Waterloo, were replaced by a new vision of a global world of trade and the instant communication of stocks and other prices which gave the new commercial world a fixed value that could be transmitted instantaneously.
Revolutionary: transmission on the European continent was possible by the 1840s, having been subject to an intense wave of innovation to perfect the telegraph wire leading to a finalized version in 1838 by Samuel Morse. Within a few years, the idea of a telegraphic network on both sides of the Atlantic was produced but the problem of transmitting telegraphy over the ocean was the breakthrough that was needed. Because the Romantic Era attempted to overthrow the various monarchies in France, parts of Germany, and Italy, as well as changing the nature of the government of India from a commercial enterprise to a government-controlled Rajj, the line of 1848 marks the end of the Romantic age and the beginnings of a new governmental form. The key marker can be seen as the rise of the Second French Empire in 1852.
Evolutionary: with the establishment of both the German Imperial state and the state of Italy as well as the encapsulation of the electromagnetic theory of Maxwell it is clear that the new governmental system with its attendant industrial manufacture of the lightbulb and the Bell System as well as the Bessemer process for rapidly manufacturing steel, the form of the evolution of government took place around the same time. A good indicator is the last romantic war undergoing a thorough transformation to a neoclassical war in the American Civil War. The ideas that sparked the war were clearly modeled after the Romantic era, but the war was fought with innovations that clearly marked it as a neoclassical war. What this means is that the American Civil War was the basis for limiting the size of conflict to a neoclassical stage with railroads being key to the deployment of manpower in battle. It also must be clear that things such as tubes of paint allowed some artists to rapidly paint “en Plein air” making things such as the Impressionist movement gain a footing in the art world of the time.
Late stage: the tenor of architecture and ornamentation showed a change as the Arts Noveau became prevalent, especially in Paris. But there was also an international political dimension, as the countries propelled power to the top a new system of alliances gained traction. However, in the neoclassical era, the exact parameters of the alliances must be kept secret and each nation needed to surmise what the parameters actually were at the time. They also needed to plan for military operations which meant that logistics assumed an even greater level of planning than before. This then created a kind of war that the nations could direct but which had the downside of being larger than the neoclassical era could control. In other words, the nation-states were on a collision course where they could start a war that they could not finish. The marker of The First Battle of the Marnes is the moment when several nations needed to have an absolute victory in order to pay for the war which was already being fought. That meant that the skirmish had become “The Great War” because only a total victory would pay for the war.
Nostalgia: after the war was completed there were two opposite approaches to the resolution of the war. One was to exact a high enough price that the nations of Europe could recover but the offset was that new states had come up since the Russian Revolution in 1917 and were proliferated by the peace that followed The Great War. In other words, to have a Peace of Versailles, new states would have to take up what had been failed by the neoclassical states. Some introduction of the role of states was possible, for example, the making of alliances being open, but gradually the neoclassical age was consigned to a looking back on the 19th century past.
Second interlude - Capital Comes from the Past but is Paid Back by Labor in the Future
one of the many intricacies of capital and labor is that all capital comes from the past even the speculative capital. but all labor comes from the future to pay back this capital. this is actually a law of demand in historical terms and must be remedied in the ways that capital. and labor are distributed. However, anything that exists from the past can be known about and anything that exists in the future cannot be known about, even though we can surmise that it will be done.
This formula:
R(x) + C(x) → L(x+1) +… L(x+n)+R(x+1)…R(x+n) + C(x+1)…C(x+n)
his based on the future value being equal to the present value at each point in time or:
FV = PV(x+n)
We should note that the Hilbert space is present in this because the future value cannot go beyond the limits of the historical space. For example, in 1400 they did not know about the new world except a few people who were there. Therefore be present value cannot accurately measure the historical space.
It can be interpreted as the rent of the land and other holdings plus the capital at the time of asking, which must be precisely equal to the labor plus the rent plus the capital extracted from the known values.
But this means that unknown values can be distributed at the time that they became known: for example, before there was recording the recording profits could not be distributed because they were not put into contracts, which is another way of saying that they did not exist from the point of view of C. Once they were known they could then be put in to be capitalized until they. were known they could not be distributed.
However, the primary problem is that the people who do the labor, on the rents, or have the capital are not inside the equation. this is why. wars are fought: there is an attempt to induce distribution at the present time on all future generations. This is why in a democracy there is some attempt to rebalance the future holders of labor, rents, and capital. however, because the current holders of these three quantities and most especially the rents and capital are present while the future holders are only present in theory, this means that the current holders of rents and capital often distribute too much to themselves and not enough to the future holders.
If this seems abstract realize that in the Late Stage of a particular era, this is exactly what happens the present holders of rents and capital distribute far too much for themselves even to the point of not believing in scientific facts that are clearly demonstrable. this is because they are using tools which have not been adequately represented in their cultural system. That is the present borrowers take only be upside and do not realize that there is a downside
this means that the formula above can be transformed into a Laplace transformation where the future distribution can be estimated and therefore can be listed as another present holder. that is the future holders can be distributed so that the new formula is:
R(x) + C(x) + F(x) → ∑ R + L + C
And remember that the future values are not in this case known to the holders of present capital but are selected by another means. this limits the ability of current holders of rent and capital from doing anything that they want, but only