Here is an article about einstein in the context of the modernist movement. It is written in response to Time magazine's suggestion that einstein kicked off artistic and moral relativism. the author disagrees with this statement. It is a good article to understand einstein in the greater context of modernism.
From the 1870s onward, the ideas that history and civilization were inherently progressive and that progress was always good came under increasing attack.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection undermined the religious certainty
Karl Marx argued there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system
The miseries of industrial urbanism and the possibilities created by scientific examination of subjects brought changes that would shake a European civilization which had, until then, regarded itself as having a continuous and progressive line of development from the Renaissance. With the telegraph's harnessing of a new power, offering instant communication at a distance, the experience of time itself was altered.
it’s impossible to overstate the importance of peer production to the modern digital world.
What sounds on the face of it like the most utopian of collectivist fantasies — millions of people sharing their ideas with no ownership claims — turns out to have made possible the communications infrastructure of our age.
Peer networks laid the foundation for the scientific revolution during the Enlightenment, via the formal and informal societies and coffeehouse gatherings where new research was shared. The digital revolution has made it clear that peer networks can work wonders in the modern age.
We have an endless supply of folklore about heroic entrepreneurs who changed the world with their vision and their force of will. But as a society we lack master narratives of creative collaboration.
what the Internet and its descendants teach us is that there are now new models for doing things together, success stories that prove convincingly that you don’t need bureaucracies to facilitate public collaboration, and you don’t need the private sector to innovate
Fascinating! You could subscribe to the Boston Globe to read "The Word" written by this author, or you could read her blog. I'm thinking: open source, free media, etc.
Jan Freeman has written The Word, a weekly Boston Globe column
Today we have a modern equivalent of the printing press in the Internet and all that it means. The Internet allows everyone to be a publisher, to have their voice heard,
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New Media is facilitating a world-wide conversation on almost every subject including religion, and nearly everyone can participate. This modern equivalent of the printing press is not reserved only for the elite.
may I ask that you join the conversation by participating on the Internet, particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and to explain in simple, clear terms the message of the Restoration
we have a major responsibility as Latter-day Saints to define ourselves, instead of letting others define us
Every disciple of Christ will be most effective, and do the most good by adopting a demeanor worthy of a follower of the Savior of the world.
This is your world, the world of the future, with inventions undreamed of
that will come in your lifetime as they have in mine. How will you use these
marvelous inventions? More to the point, how will you use them to further the
work of the Lord?
The printing press and other media have allowed us to take the Lord’s message to
almost every corner of the earth.
Make sure that the choices you make in the use of new media are choices that
expand your mind, increase your opportunities, and feed your soul.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into
air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
Capitalism has taken over the world, and those that were slow to buy into the idealology are being left in the dust, and dependant on others, which they don't like.
Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence,
too much industry, too much commerce.
Paints these people as the suffers, clearly appealing to them to call for "equality"
Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class,
and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine,
by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer
himself.
Conflicts with the MIT lesson, except for those that have to work. (in regard to females working) again an appeal to the working class people, who are the masses to revolt. This works less well in America because of the American dream and the possibility for change fostered by it.
At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered
over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition.
Reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984, they hope lies in the masses of uncontrolled people
Thereupon,
the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois;
they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent
associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional
revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
Can someone help me out here? Is he being sarcastic? He says capitalizm is bad then says that the bourgeoisie 'rescued' people from the 'idiocy of rural life' Thomas Jefferson thought the rural life was the ideal and to be sought after. I can't tell if Marx is for or against it.
By bourgeoisie
is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social
production and employers of wage labour
By proletariat,
the class of modern wage labourers who,
having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in
order to live.
immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the
most barbarian, nations into civilisation
Notice how we are in the same situation now as were were then - the facilitation of communication with the internet and how it shapes the world to become more homogenous.