Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality
Postmodernism in Pictures
Politics in Pictures
What this meant is that everyday life was thought of as a film which had all of the effects. Instead of a genre such as the Western or the film noir, it was a particular story in a particular universe. This meant that things such as politics needed to have a scope which was larger than merely policy or substance. Because politics was now in color, it meant that it was accessible to the viewer which was not the case when politics was in black and white, in letters and pictures.
This was a problem for Lynden Baines Johnson (1908-1973) because LBJ was a Modern-style president. This meant that he was very concerned with the citizens of the United States including those from nonwhite backgrounds, including African Americans. It also meant that if there was a war to be fought, then he expected to be able to draft as many people as it took to win the war. However, this Modernist view of the center-left as embodied by the Democratic party had certain features which were out of sync with the way the world was now run.
First of all, the world had been decolonialized. This meant that the people who were running a variety of states were not men out of Europe or Japan but native members who held no allegiance to a foreign power. This meant that the leadership of a country was not a settled amount of corruption sent back to the colonial power but needed to be examined in each and every case. This did not fit with the Modernist view of things where the level of corruption was set from the outside and the colonial power would get its share and not worry about the rest. Which often meant killing the lower class of people. In the Postmodern world, there was a difference between imperialism and colonialism. It is not that either one is generally positive, but they are different.
Second of all, the resources spent on chasing the moon were extraordinarily consuming. This was because it was meant to defeat the USSR by means of money. The USSR had technicians from Germany and a huge pool of mathematically trained engineers who could not figure out the best way of using fuel but could determine what would be adequate in most cases. The difference between the two space programs was stark: the US had enormous control planted in the hands of the astronaut and had a deeply designed feel to how much fuel could be used; contrariwise the USSR did not know exactly how much fuel could be used but gave almost the entire control to the ground station which could then give a rough estimate and then land the craft on the steps of Russia. In other words, the United States succeeded if it had the best (male) pilots and would lose if any feature was ill-designed or piloted wrongly; whereas the USSR was basically a designed missile that came down if its inputs were correct. Both the USSR and the USA blundered several lives away as well as reaching for the stars in their sphere.
This meant that the civil rights initiatives that LBJ pursued were extremely popular among the political class but had the problem of riots and demonstrations because they did not go far enough for the young people, and this was the baby boom so there were lots of these. But it was the fighting of the war which cost LBJ the presidency. First, he put in charge Westmoreland who was willing to bomb areas rather than fight man-to-man, he also tried to keep the intelligence off the fields of battle, because he knew that the bright people were essential to home success. Finally, LBJ did not listen to how corrupt the leadership was in charge. In fact, Kennedy and Johnson replaced one corrupt leader with another, repeatedly. The result was that South Vietnam was a corrupt and mismanaged country that no fighting force could correct because it was in the civilian administration where the problem was particularly mashed. For example:
As he has for four years, President Thieu of South Vietnam maintained that the North Vietnamese would try one more offensive before “fading away” and as American officials in Saigon and Washington have warned since the Tet Offensive of 1968: “The real battleground for Vietnam is capitol hill.” Nineteen seventy-four was the first year, however, when many officials thought they would actually lose the battle for a Vietnam aid appropriation, and there was genuine uncertainty among U.S. officials about whether the Thieu government and the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) could withstand a full-scale North Vietnamese offensive.i
It is not that the Republicans had better answers, but that the Democrats were in charge during the docs to go Tet Offensive: militarily the tad offensive was a disaster for the North Vietnamese but defeating it required huge resources that the United States was unwilling to bear. Nixon did not have the answers but realized that the best available answer he could come up with was “to get out.”
On the other end, the Iran-Afghanistan conflicts closed the Postmodern for exactly the same reason: there was no one who was willing to run corruption in a developed manner. It is not that there was no corruption, but the type of corruption was very specific: the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan were going to be given certain freedoms in return for a luxurious surcharge on their wealth. The corruption that was offered was the reverse: in both countries, political freedom would be quailed, one might even say kiboshed, in return for not having to participate in things such as the drug culture. The Taliban offered relief from Poppy cultivation in return for giving up the rights of women. To wit:
The drug economy continues to enable regional leaders to execute semi-independent rule and to establish quasi-autonomous territories under their jurisdiction and economic control. Identifying the main poppy cultivation areas in 1999, the centers of cultivation become obvious and a separation between the Taliban-dominated major part of the country and the northeastern part under Mujaheddin control is visible with Badakhshan as the focus of poppy cultivation…ii
This may seem a Mephistophelean choice, and that would be an understatement: but for the Afghanis, they made a different choice than the United States did. Which is why the US government is no longer in charge.
On the other hand, the United States did find willing partners to end Saddam Hussein’s regime of dictatorial power in Iraq, but again the partners are far from the level of sophistication to institute a Western-style hegemony over the entire country. This meant that instead of deposing Saddam Hussein and leaving the country to its own devices, there was a noble and demonical impulse to set up what looked like a parliamentary democracy over the entire region. The result is a failed state because the government cannot give individuals freedom from or freedom to some set of rights.
As in Vietnam, the US civilian public wanted an end to the adventure. By not realizing that there was a time limit and a corruption limit at home, with houses as the corrupt product, Pres. George W. Bush is not talked about but he was the end of the evolutionary phase of Postmodernism.
On December 18, 2011, the final U.S. forces stationed in Iraq under Operation New Dawn (OND) crossed the Iraq-Kuwait border, bringing to a close the transition and withdrawal of U.S. Forces–Iraq (USF-I) that is the focus of this study. The U.S. war in Iraq is over. As characterized by USF-I Commanding General Lloyd J. Austin III, U.S. forces completed one of history’s most complex handovers of authority and retrograde of U.S. personnel and equipment with “honor and success.” The extraordinary effort, which began with detailed military and civilian planning in early 2009, was over. For Iraqis, of course, elevated levels of violence and political instability unfortunately continue.
In other words, it was a victory which looked a great deal like defeat. And the warriors thought that they had committed themselves quite well. Just ask them. It is just a matter of “transitioning.” In this case from an active and aggressive form of corruption to a passive form of corruption.
It is not that George Bush was alone, the production of the United Kingdom is also a sign that the neoliberal experiment has, for the moment, failed because it cannot adequately demand production at a higher level than it can otherwise import. The tremors are everywhere but it is logically impossible for men and women to recognize them if their payment is from not understanding. He also did not pick mortgages as the source of his income, because that is the way that capitalism works: President George Bush simply asked for the revenue knowing that it would eventually take in both legal and illegal forms of money.
This is not unusual. We will go through the Modern, the Neoclassical, and the Romantic and find the same pattern and we will deduce that Digitality will inflict the same problem when it gets to the point of the same praxis - when its theory can no longer be deduced in its practice. With every failure of an old system one of two things will happen: either there is a faith in the system and changes are made to revamp the system or there is somewhat less faith in the Cultural System and a new system is proposed to take its place. In the case of George W. Bush, first, the older system is propped up, as can be seen by Bush’s reelection in 2004, and then a revamped older system is put in its place. It is only when that system fails that there is a reassessment. This does not mean that the old system is discarded because there are individuals who profit from the old system but not from the new one and are willing to force the issue. For example, employees prefer to work at home in many cases, but employers prefer to have employees in one location. This fight is actually a Cultural Systems fight, where the employees are searching for new boundaries and the employers are eager to roll them back.
One of the other points that the Democratic party in the US did not understand was that in a Postmodern system, the government was conservative. In the end both the Republican and Democratic parties moved to the right, with the Republican Party becoming reactionary and the Democratic Party becoming far more conservative. This can be seen by the deficit of minimum wage and lower hourly and lower salaried employees. There are a sufficient number of graphs that show that the bottom half of the working population gets by on less. This has gone on for enough time that there are fewer and fewer ways of reducing lower class income especially since there is an increase in education. This was visible from the first term of Ronald Reagan’s presidency: he reduced income by making it extremely hard to join a union, and one of the primary benefits of being unionized was to increase salary.
It is also seen by the gap between lower housing and the most expensive housing, and because the US government does not regulate homebuilders, there are fewer low-end housing units being built and the US government does not take the lead in supplying low-end housing. Instead, it has gone back to the early 20th century by permitting gambling. Gambling promotes those people who have money, not those people who gamble. In the US pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise on television. The rate at which the whole of the US population pays for medical care is about twice that of the other developed nations. All of this fits in with the Postmodern economy. So, while the signature thinkers of Postmodernism are radical or liberal, in this case, we are talking about the Cultural System which does not care what your political alignment is.
This shift happened because in the Modern world developed nations fought more wars than in the Postmodern world. Therefore the government had to reward the survivors with things that the survivors cared about. In the Postmodern world, there are fewer wars and they consume a great deal less in terms of casualties. This means that the government does not need to reward survivors because there are fewer survivors. Instead, it can reward donors with the borrowings of future generations and call it “tax cuts.” The mechanism of conservative economics ranges from center-right to far-right, but the central idea is that there should be a minimum of taxation on the wealthy. This is not unusual, nobility from time immemorial wants to reduce the amount of money that they owe the government from sending troops to demanding that the nobility to pay no taxes as during the run-up to the French Revolution.
This means that names such as Milton Friedman, Robert Barro, and others have a responsibility to construct an economy that rewards lower-class individuals with less just as John Maynard Keynes had a responsibility to reward lower-class individuals with more because these are the men who fought and died for the state. What it tells us is that the government does what is necessary with no compunction about what is moral. In the Postmodern state, there is less of a reason to reward lower-income people and therefore the state will listen to those individuals who tell the state how to give them less.
However, remember that in many places the regime that controls the country is not a democracy however defined. In these places, there is considerably less real wealth than in democracies though there may be a small sliver of the very wealthy. In these places, since the expectation of riches is not an option for most people, engaging in a military lifestyle has advantages because one is then a member of the state. And therefore, the advantages that come with being a member of the state are more appealing since money and prestige are less of an option. In other words, the population already is getting less and so the military lifestyle has a greater appeal for the privileges that it offers. This is why the People’s Republic of China has the power to make Taiwan a nonstate actor even though Taiwan engages in all of the prerogatives of being a state. But it does not have the wherewithal to actually invade and take over the “Republic of China” as Taiwan calls itself. Small casualties can be maintained but large casualties cannot.
i Goodman, Allan E. “South Vietnam: War Without End?” Asian Survey 15, no. 1 (1975): 70–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/2643432. 70.
ii Kreutzmann, Hermann. “Afghanistan and the Opium World Market: Poppy Production and Trade.” Iranian Studies 40, no. 5 (2007): 605–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25597418. 610.