When Humans Think They Know Everything

High Modernist Ideals

If the Age of Enlightenment brought a new clarity of thought. It also brought us the idea that we were the smartest beings on the planet. This led to the idea that we could plan and create anything. Anything at all.

That may in fact be true at some point in the future. But it is not true now. When we humans come up against natural boundaries that we didn’t even know existed, ugly failure, or even disaster has been the result.

High modernism was the philosophical idea that anything, any problem, could be organized and engineered, and ultimately solved from the top down by technical experts. This was not only a far more elitist attitude than had been the case previously, but it disregarded the myriad complexities of nature and human relationships. The idea that humans could plan something as complex as a forest, city, or economy, turns out to be a vast over-rating of our abilities and understanding of the world.

One of the first High Modernist ideas to be implemented was managed forestry. Scientific forestry started around 1764 in Prussia and Saxony. Traditionally, forestry was a matter of selectively choosing trees to harvest, cutting them down, removing branches, and using teams of horses or oxen to haul them to where they could be cut into useable pieces.

High modernism was growing the same kind of tree, in straight rows with nothing in between. Once methods for detailed assessments had been achieved, forests were cleared of new growth limiting species to only those with commercial value. Clearing underbrush, and geometric perfection were the external signs of a well-managed forest. For the first generation of trees, this tremendously increased the yield per acre. After that, the amount and usable board footage dropped dramatically. It seemed that 'organizing' a complex system had unintended consequences.

Another attempt was planning cities. It’s worth noting that when dwellings and businesses are tucked close together on tight, winding thoroughfares, the residents become difficult to count, name, and control. And the ideal of making streets neatly straight and numbered, and homes easily identifiable is a requirement if a state is going to collect taxes from its citizens. You can't tax people if you can’t track them in some way.

But high modernism went beyond that, to designing cities from the ground up. The architect's vision was from on high, the image designed so that only from a vantage point thousands of feet up could one adequately view the grandeur of that vision. Only a few such cities were ever built, and almost from the start, their planned layout was altered by pesky reality. In the case of Brazillia, the workers made an unscheduled place to live while they built. Like forests, cities are complex systems with rules and consequences. A mixed-use neighborhood is crowded and chaotic but with an underlying organization and trust among the residents that isn’t available in business-only districts.

One of the worst examples of the destructiveness of the high modernist attitude is the demise of the Aral Sea. When the leaders of the USSR decided to enter the market for cotton, they literally drained nearly an entire freshwater ocean. This created an ecological disaster of epic proportions. [Which BTW, was never reported on the news, because apparently, our disasters need to be curated.]

The government of the USSR was itself a function of high modernist thinking. The idea that an entire economy and social structure could be planned and implemented led to the deaths of millions.

Perhaps some humility is in order.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; four boyz and one cranky gurl. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, and the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition.