Confronting Modernity

Three great revolutions The Enlightenment:

new knowledge and endless progress

The Atlantic Revolutions:natural rights, legal equality, government of the

people

The Industrial Revolution:promise of universal plenty

Modernism:a world of unsettling images, words, &

sounds

O to be in EnglandNow that April's there,

And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf. While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

In England--now!---Robert Browning (1845)

Modern voice:uncertainty, isolation from the past and the future,

longing for redemption

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter. Come and I shall show you fear in a handful of dust.

---T.S. Eliot (1922)

Skepticism

1. Everyday world of sights and sounds is deceptive

2. Ability of reason or common sense to understand

that real world

19th-century Certainty

1. live in a world of quantifiable facts

2. science is the royal road to truth

3. science holds the key to human progress

Natural selection banished mystery from the story of life, leaving only facts in its place

Promise of science unfulfilled

Survival of the fittest

Herbert Spencer

Human beings & world mysterious NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The faintest and reddest objects (left inset) in the image are galaxies that correspond to "look-back times" of approximately 12.9 billion years to 13.1 billion years ago

Renewed interest in religion