Anyway this process is happening in other countries and to people all over the world as some class of them are moved into the ranks of an international culture---certainly of technology, science, history, and politics. The modernity-postmodernity complex is this international culture, and it is precisely what a very large number of Americans have rejected.
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So in my conversations with Angela (not Davis) I tried to make the case that the reason I had no experience of it, was only partially explained by being from the white majority. The more important reason was that I was almost entirely raise within an already internationalized technocratic modernity. I had no `roots' as such or rather these non-roots were my roots.
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I can directly relate to this.
I come from a very religious background. Portraits of Christ and fear of damnation were both part of my developmental years. I have zero problems understanding both the high church and "just Christian" points of view.
There was that moment as a boy when, instead of reading the assigned Sunday School lesson, I was hiding a paperback copy of "1984" behind the weekly reader, eagerly taking in "The Principles of IngSoc".
I remember this as if it happened moments ago. I felt a shock of recognition of something beyond the simple ideas (for example, the endless admonitions to avoid pre-marital sex) I was constantly fed.
It was very exciting in that simultaneously vaporous yet tangible way ideas excite.
Orwell's fictional political theorizing combined with the science fiction frame of reference - the Earth as a planet, an insignificant thing really, in the overall scheme - to hurtle me into the modernist camp. I'd found a home for tendencies of thought that had previously been directed towards memorizing Bible verses and debating God's inescapable consciousness (both omnipotent and omnipresent we were told).
This led to new friends and experiences. A certain alienation from the traditions I grew up with (including the necessarily self protective ethnocentrism of my particular Black community) set in.
The motions were still gone through: Thanksgiving prayers, a nod of the head when a respected elder mentioned the "goodness of God" - other harmless gestures.
But my heart was no longer in it. The church went from being the conduit to God's grace to an effective and pleasant social body. A good help for tired people but nothing more (though that's enough, yes?).
The total traditions of my community went from being something in need of fierce defense to time caught phenomena - bound to wane sooner or later. People should be defended and their right to life and security guarded to the death if necessary. But specific, romanticized cultural elements? I lost attachment to them, seeing them as being in a constant state of melting into new forms.
All sorts of problems flowed from this development, which I won't go into.
Suffice to say that I see, quite clearly, the schism between those who accept the modern situation of newness and international cross-pollination as the natural state of things and others who want to protect or recreate what I'll call bubble universes of traditional practice.
...
In one of my favorite sci-fi novels as a kid a sub-culture of people, weary of the complexities of a world in which tech is so crisp and smooth it's nearly indistinguishable from magic, undergo a DNA re-config to return to an earlier human form. They live on a reservation, hunting and gathering and avoiding stellar age problems.
Sometimes I think of this when I encounter pre-enlightenment ideas. The problem it seems, is that some people want the whole world on that reservation and will stop at nothing to get us there.
.d.