Modernity
Article
Modernity is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 26, 2022 and August 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “their hope for Modernity was to preserve that tradition”; “making this about Modernity and not about the last 65 years of culture obscures the contours of the issue”. It most often appears alongside New Jersey, New York, 1917.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: August 26, 2022
- Last seen: August 12, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- New Jersey (2 shared issues)
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- New York (2 shared issues)
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- 1917 (1 shared issues)
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- aesthetics (1 shared issues)
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- All Who Go Not Return (1 shared issues)
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- American (1 shared issues)
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- Amica Terra (1 shared issues)
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- Amish (1 shared issues)
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- Amish (1 shared issues)
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- Apple (1 shared issues)
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- Ariel (1 shared issues)
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- Arkansas (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Besides his friendship/rivalry with Pound, there’s also one of those with T.S. Eliot. Eliot’s gimmick is knowing everything, being very cultured, very erudite, speaking every language, mastering and combining and quoting every poetic form under the sun. And while Pound took himself very seriously and Eliot was somewhat more lighthearted, both represent Western Tradition incarnate in mortal bodies, cultural classicists who felt everything was obviously better in ages past, and their hope for Modernity was to preserve that tradition, reprising old forms but, in Pound’s slogan, “Making Them New” so as to keep them alive and fresh and fascist. WCW is in the antipodes of all that. He looks ahead. When seemingly every single one of his friends expatriated to the Old World, to Paris or London in order to build their audiences there, he stayed in Rutherford, New Jersey, where he lived during most of his life. In America, he felt, everything was yet to be made, and Eliot, in his project of first somehow turning British and then knowing and preserving everything ancient in poetic jars of quotation, was robbing other American poets blind, contemporaries and even those yet to emerge in the future.
We ended the Gilded Age fractured and alone, and built up civic associational life, communitarian ideals, etc. from around 1900 to around 1960, after which all those indicators start plunging in all the charts you see everywhere today. But because we have been so focused on the last 60-odd years of data, we have missed the incredibly important context of the (titular) upswing that occurred in the first half of the 20th century in America and didn't require populism (in fact, the Populist movement in America was strongest right BEFORE the upswing began, ~1870-1900), and it was the Progressives that kicked off associational, communitarian ideals. This increase in community and togetherness was a strong trend through the Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Postwar years. It wasn't costless! There were reasons people rebelled against the reigning order in the 1960s and 1970s. But every solution creates its own problems, and I think making this about Modernity and not about the last 65 years of culture obscures the contours of the issue.