Modern Began as the Term for Accepting Today’s Sorry State.

Modern is a word derived from the Latin “modus hodie” the way things are today. It started being used in the 11th century as the decay of the Roman Empire was just about total. The Roman economy disappeared with the Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean.

Rome was a tiny town where the Pope lived and pilgrims visited the mostly abandoned ruins. The great estates were cut off from all but their own lands and resources, becoming feudal fiefdoms. Worst of all, they vaguely knew that other folks were doing very well in the rising Muslim Civilization stretching from the Pyrenees all around the Southern rim of the Mediterranean to Jerusalem.

Europe was deep in the depth of decline. The glory days of the Roman Empire were long gone, though not at all forgotten. The great estates of the established families had developed castles to defend themselves since the Roman legions were long gone. They longed to keep their wealth and power, but their subsistence agriculture would not support them.

The Roman trade economy was destroyed. They had provoked a theological dispute with Islam and all access to the Mediterranean had been lost to Christendom. They still wanted to be great conquerors but they could not even keep the peace and feed all their children any more.

The younger sons and all daughters were sent away to find their fortune elsewhere. Those who survived and found wealth, very much hoped to travel home to win favor from the eldest son still holding the family estates. This established a need for better roads and new travel and trade revived.

The groundwork for the modern market economy arose from this special trade with the approval of the home town market place having special value beyond the objective worth of the goods sold. To have been thrown out of the great estate was tough on the daughters and younger sons. To truly make it up required that they bring great wealth back to the home market.

Other cultures and other lands were arising and developing new wealth. The European solution was to send a conquering army to occupy their lands and take their resources to sell back in their home markets. The modern meant accepting the glories of the past were gone and they could only hope to make things a little better in the sad state of the present situation with foreign wealth seized and stolen.

This Ideology of Adventure, in Michael Nerlich’s terms developed with the new millennium starting in 1001 CE and comes to flower by the 12th and 13th centuries. The modern he reasons arose in the Middle Ages and follows this spirit of adventure as it develops Western Capitalist consciousness into the 18th century.

He does not however deal with the sad, sordid underbelly of this adventure consciousness which is the true essence of the modern. It is the disinheriting of the daughters and younger sons in primogeniture that truly gives the notion of the modern its future orientation. The large and happy family grows up in the great castle ruling all they can see around them. Then they come of age and only the eldest son gets to keep that great life.

The others are kicked out and told to go away and only come back if they can bring great treasures from their travels and conquests. The daughters must find rich husbands; the sons must conquer some great treasure. They all dream of making it big and coming home wealthy heroes to visit their family estates.

Modern is a term that refers to the older generation’s pain which the younger folks know little about and care less. The survivors look to the future, not because the future is attractive, but the past is a traumatic sore they have to leave behind.

The future is always uncertain and scary. To have to look to the future for hope is the sign of a terrible past barely survived. Modern perspective began with the collapse of the Roman economy and the near destruction of the great families barely able to feed even a portion of their children. Then the Crusades that sent a vast army away to fight leaving a sad population behind for years.

By the 12th and 13th century feudal life of the Middle Ages was starting to work out. Trade, travel, conquest and wealth began to flow into Europe; things were going so well a shortage of precious metal for coins developed. The modern developed a positive side of all these new things replacing what had been lost with the collapse of the Roman Empire and economy. New Empires even formed.

Then the Black Death brought even worse terror and loss. Unknown sickness and death left bodies piled up as it destroyed at least half the population. It was not just three years of horrible epidemic, plague continued to ravage Europe for centuries after that. The ranks of the educated and trained were reduced to just a handful. Even common laborers suddenly found themselves special as survivors.

The survivors who inherited the land and wealth of Europe wanted to enjoy the privileges of the prior aristocracy. The serf survivors demanded better wages and conditions which set up a conflict that generated class struggle and massive inflation for the rest of the modern millennium. Like the Roman Empire before in Europe the new rulers were not the traditional great families but the successors who took over the reigns of power in whatever manner.

The Black Death was such a traumatic horror many of the best histories of the late Middle Ages do not even mention the Plague at all. The population returned within fifty years, the wealth remained to be seized by whoever survived to take it. Everyone wished to adjust to the new modern reality, turn toward the future and away from the past catastrophe.

Those who did not come into wealth in the immediate aftermath of the Black Death went off in search of new lands to conquer to get the gold which now was all folks could count upon to survive and hold real value. The New World opened up and was ripe for the taking, especially as the 100 million human populations of the Americas were totally unprepared for smallpox and other European diseases.

The global expansion of the European empires established the modern market economy and Great Powers. The Spanish Hapsburgs took the gold and silver of the New World and spent it lavishly buying whatever other countries offered for sale. The Spanish pumped so much gold and silver into circulation that they changed the whole economy from feudal lands to cash money trade.

The Spanish figured they only needed military force and treasure galleons to rule the world. They developed few new industries, preferring instead to buy everything from the fawning salesmen so eager to please and trade anything for just a small pile of the vast mountains of gold and silver brought from New World mines. This developed the British and Dutch industries, economies and maritime fleets which soon challenged Spain at sea.

Spanish spending and other nations’ attacks brought a condition of massive war that took all the available cash and more. The ability of war to absorb all available resources became established, especially as the Spanish bought their war materiel and transport from their Dutch and British adversaries. The price with war premiums Spain paid rose until it also paid for Anglo-Dutch mercenary armies, supplies, transport and a hefty profit.

Paying for both sides of an all-out war eventually bankrupted the Spanish Crown even though they had absolute power and extensive, rich lands under their command. They also established vast securities markets in Britain and Holland to raise the capital needed for their campaigns. Not liking to bother about paying their interest on time, the Spanish King had to pay premium rates to get any loans at all.

This is what drove the Spanish Crown into bankruptcy and allowed the British and Dutch Empires to flourish. British and French quarreling over colonies and world domination gave rise to the American Revolution. Then the excessive spending of the French monarchy supporting America combined with the terrible tax system in France to force economic disruptions that combined with several bad years of terrible weather and resulting famine to produce the French Revolution.

Napoleon seized the opportunity to apply cynical, brutal force to the military power developed by Carnot to defend France and end up conquering most of Europe. The brutality of his warfare and the way he treated Divine Right Monarchs as minor clerks to be tossed out at will ripped the fabric of traditional Europe. In a world of armies of 30,000 with 200 cannons, Napoleon showed up with armies of 250,000 and 2500 cannon.

He would lose 20,000 troops in a battle, asking only that they take out a similar number of their opponents. His remaining armies were doing fine; his opponents had their small armies destroyed and their capitals at his mercy. Napoleon won everything until his opponents learned to field equally large armies, accept equally high casualties and re-organize their economies for eternal total war against civilian cities.

Napoleon brought about a new modern era. His generals were mathematical physicists as well. They claimed to have conquered all knowledge and modern science has kept that claim to this day. Napoleon’s supporters think of him as the champion of modern freedom, eventually done in by the evil old ways refusing to give their people freedom. Napoleon’s opponents point out he was a cynical dictator who lied about his interests in anything except his own power and glory.

The whole spirit of the modern is born in the personal interests and quirks of Napoleon himself. He was the essence of what the British prefer to call the Victorian Age. He set in motion the interest in faster transport and better military technology and industry which made the steam engine and railroad remake the world in the 19th century. Napoleon was the archetype of the modern though again his era was so traumatic that it has been suppressed except in specific histories devoted to him.

The modern myth of the mad scientist who sets out to conquer the world with his evil genius is the popular gossip about Napoleon. The military-industrial complex and the stock and bond markets that started to supply the capital for this total war flourished under Napoleon.

The Rothschild family was a minor dealer in rare coins with 5 sons in different cities in Europe. Their business was to buy up local special gold coins in the cities where they were just lumps of gold and sell them in the cities where they had special value to the inhabitants.

Under Napoleon they were able to move gold around Europe in service of the British. When there was a run on British war securities, the Rothschild bankers found the gold coin all over Europe to save the British paper. They also smuggled European rulers’ valuable securities out of Napoleon’s grip to be safely returned to them in London. This made the Rothschild bank the modern securities and gold brokers for Europe.

Modern always means the new acceptance of what survives after destruction and horror of the recent past. Modern means looking away from prior terrible losses and hoping the future will bring better things. What the journalist Alvin Toffler called Future Shock is actually the modern reality of grief over the horror recently past.

The cultural and social dislocation of the 19th century was infinitely greater trauma for the world population than the minor changes brought after the Second World War. The disruption of traditional society globally by the railroads and industrialized development of the 19th century was further worsened by the development finally of the technological insights of Roger Bacon back in the 13th century before the Black Death.

The gasoline piston engine allowed the creation of the cars, trucks, airplanes, submarines and guns Roger Bacon envisioned which became the modern destruction of World War I. This escalation of Napoleonic war principles was so traumatic, again it was suppressed until it came back as soon as possible in World War II. The modern has always involved surviving a great trauma and then looking forward to not grieve over the losses of the recent past.

Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted to avenge the slight he felt when he visited his British cousins decades earlier by raising a great navy and beating the British. He set in motion a regular battleship building program to accomplish his dream. His obstetrician had destroyed his use of his right arm in his poor forceps birth of the royal baby. From childhood Wilhelm was a bully obsessed with forcing his notions upon the world around him.

Actually, Wilhelm was very much like Oedipus in the Greek tragedy. His name means lame, and the entire play deals with the personal flaw being lame grew into in Oedipus. He was obsessed with being able to travel his way at his speed. He kills his father and his entourage in the fury of a lame man being impeded in his travel. The incest we focus upon with Oedipus was never important to the ancient Greeks. That is why Oedipus is allowed to be buried at the sacred grove in the third play.

Oedipus represents the mad pursuit of personal success that leads to disastrous violence. Oedipus attacks the King for not letting Oedipus have the right of way on the road. Wilhelm similarly started World War I in his mad obsession to have his cousins (now the crowned heads of Europe) recognize him as the best of Victoria’s grandsons. Personal problems made family feuds that in the modern context became devastating wars and social destruction.

The general mood in the first 14 years of the 20th century carried on the thinking of the final decades of the 19th century. They were very modern in many ways, but not too bright overall. When the Titanic sailed its modern hype called its new design unsinkable although it was clearly something less than that. The maiden voyage was not a shake down cruise although there were many problems to be corrected.

Many of the leading figures of society of the time were on board the R.M.S. Titanic when it sailed and when it sank into the North Atlantic. The owner and the designer of the ship were on board, looking forward to setting a modern transatlantic speed record. They figured they could outrun any problems, even icebergs, although the steering wasn’t working very well when they left port.

In the official testimony in the 1912 disaster hearings of the U.S. Senate, there were many similar accounts by men who survived. The accounts of three women to testify told a far more telling modern story. Mrs. J.S. White was hobbled by a foot injury when she boarded the Titanic at Cherbourg. She stayed in her cabin even after the collision which felt and sounded minor to her.

She got into a lifeboat easily by the care of the crew. She noted that no one on board the Titanic had the slight inkling the ship would sink. Some of the men remaining on board, taunted the women and children boarding the lifeboats saying they would need their boarding passes to get back on the ship in the morning. They assumed this was all just an exercise for the lesser passengers. They were important men and their comfort could not be disturbed, and surely their ship could not sink and drown them.

Daisy Minahan noted at the end of her personal testimony that a stewardess they saved told them that after the Titanic left Southampton, a number of carpenters were working on the doors to the air-tight compartments. They had great difficulty getting them to respond and one remarked they would be of little use in an accident since they took so long to make them work.

Imanita Shelley testified that the heating system was not functioning in all of the second class cabins. Many of the toilet fixtures were still in their crates and not installed in her cabin. They could feel the cold and knew they were traveling through an ice field and asked if the ship would slow down, they were told no, it would speed up to get through faster. A boy sent to the Captain after the collision found him playing cards, telling them to go back to bed, it was a minor matter.

The early years of the 20th century were a time when folks expected things to go smoothly. Wilhelm assumed he could build his battleships and beat the British on his own terms. Unfortunately, British naval designers were making rapid innovations. New petroleum fired engines and far larger battleships would shape the new 20th century.

The German battleships were built safely distant from the North Sea where the High Seas battle with Britain would eventually be fought. The Kiel Canal which connected the High Seas to the German High Seas Fleet was not widened to allow the new large battleships out until summer of 1914. The war was launched the next Bank Holiday Sunday, which happened to be with Pluto newly moved into Cancer.

The military of all sides knew that their modern equipment and organization meant that once a mobilization order was issued; all other powers would have to mobilize as well. Once mobilized the vast, military structure would have to advance, it could not stay in place for long. Once the war was launched all the military leaders knew it would destroy everything they knew and loved. It was a simple, inevitable result that all knew and no one could do a thing to prevent.

The horror and futility of the First World War so shocked the world, that the earlier opposition to women voting was destroyed. The notion had been that only men could understand military matters. After the disaster of the Great War everyone agreed only women could prevent the men from destroying everything.

The First World War ended when the war of attrition had killed so many Germans they could no longer man the miles of trench front and take the constant shelling and death of that quagmire. The peace that followed refused to accept any notion of a just settlement. As soon as the population available for military service was replaced, war plans began again.

In the interim the modern disasters began to hit all over the world. Hyperinflation based in the unrealistic demands for German reparations destroyed the German currency which took a terrible toll on the German people. They feared they would not survive this crisis and became infuriated by the knowledge Jews had survived such crises at various times. The roots of the Holocaust grew in this suffering and resentment. Modern genocide, started in the Turkish slaughter of Armenians would expand in Nazi Germany.

The Smoot-Hawley tariffs intended to stop cheap foreign food imports allowed the world to shut down U.S. industrial exports. This not only brought more stress to the Great Depression, it allowed the Fascist governments to build up their industry and prepare for war. The modern world was too easily upset by emotional outbursts enacted into legislation. Pluto was discovered and its impact burst into human consciousness. Folks in the Great Depression felt they were suffering the end of their established traditional world.

The horrors of recent traumatic social events gave rise to the modern. The horrors of modern events kept folks looking toward the open future for hope and relief. The shock is not of the Future being any more unknown or frightening than it ever was. Moving from propeller planes to jet planes, from telegraph to cell phones, from typewriters to the latest version of windows are not at all what freaks society out.

The loss of the traditional, the destruction of the family, the imposition of eternal total war preparations all conspire to form the reality of the modern, the grief over the loss of our peace, freedom and connection to the sunshine over us all and the Planet Earth supporting us and our local horizon. Everything is being sacrificed to the tyranny of abstract percentage rate increases in final statements regardless of the human scale suffering involved.

The modern is a mechanized treadmill going nowhere at an always and all ways increasing percentage rate of increase. Fear of competitive loss keeps it going. Greed for next big score keeps all reasonable alternatives suppressed. It is a one way process that cannot survive another few increases. Generally the modern reality only deals with things as the survivors pick up the pieces of the last horrific collapse. Thus, everything is moving along in the traditional manner just fine. Good Luck.

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