Anti-modernization

Last updated

Anti-modernization (also known as anti-modernisation or retraditionalisation), [1] is "a societal and cultural reaction to the unsolved 'reality problems' in the modernization model". [2] This mostly refers to an abstract concept or mode of thought characterized by supposedly "non-western," or "less privileged" nations and/or people in those nations antipathy or opposition to movements that attempt to have those nations become more "western." This could include disfavor of movements attempting to spread democracy, capitalism, or certain themes of social life present in more "western" nations or cultures. [3]

Contents

Boris Rumer wrote in his book Central Asia at the End of the Transition (2005) that "anti-modernization is appearing in all spheres of culture and economics. The retraditionalization of social life, deprofessionalization of entire strata of the population, the anti-intellectualism emanating from above, the exodus of skilled personnel from the country these are all clear signs of the anti-modernization that characterizes the reality in post-Soviet Uzbekistan". [1] This constitutes an example of how some people in certain places view movements of modernization. People(s) involved with the anti modernization movement sometimes perceive that western societies live in a culture that leads its people to be dominated by the people above them either economically or politically. This can be seen as severely negative and as representative of oppression. [4]

Examples through history

There was an apparent anti-modernization movement in Iran in the 1960s and 1970s was said to be "an attempt to reconcile...modernity with the Islamic and Iranian contexts". [4]

There was an anticientificismo trend starting in Argentina c. 1962 that seemed to object to how their science was developing. [5]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fascism</span> Form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourse characterized by skepticism toward the "grand narratives" of modernism, rejection of epistemic certainty or the stability of meaning, and sensitivity to the role of ideology in maintaining political power. Claims to objectivity are dismissed as naïve realism, with attention drawn to the conditional nature of knowledge claims within particular historical, political, and cultural discourses. The postmodern outlook is characterized by self-referentiality, epistemological relativism, moral relativism, pluralism, irony, irreverence, and eclecticism; it rejects the "universal validity" of binary oppositions, stable identity, hierarchy, and categorization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Totalitarianism</span> Extreme form of authoritarianism

Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism. In totalitarian states, political power is often held by autocrats, such as dictators and absolute monarchs, who employ all-encompassing campaigns in which propaganda is broadcast by state-controlled mass media in order to control the citizenry. By 1950, the term and concept of totalitarianism entered mainstream Western political discourse. Furthermore this era also saw anti-communist and McCarthyist political movements intensify and use the concept of totalitarianism as a tool to convert pre-World War II anti-fascism into Cold War anti-communism.

A culture war is a cultural conflict between social groups and the struggle for dominance of their values, beliefs, and practices. It commonly refers to topics on which there is general societal disagreement and polarization in societal values.

The New Culture Movement was a movement in China in the 1910s and 1920s that criticized classical Chinese ideas and promoted a new Chinese culture based upon progressive, modern ideals like elections and science. Arising out of disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture following the failure of the Republic of China to address China's problems, it featured scholars such as Chen Duxiu, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Hengzhe, Li Dazhao, Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren, He Dong, Qian Xuantong, Liu Bannong, Bing Xin, and Hu Shih, many classically educated, who led a revolt against Confucianism. The movement was launched by the writers of New Youth magazine, where these intellectuals promoted a new society based on unconstrained individuals rather than the traditional Confucian system. The movement promoted:

Westernization, also Europeanisation or occidentalization, is a process whereby societies come under or adopt Western culture in areas such as industry, technology, science, education, politics, economics, lifestyle, law, norms, mores, customs, traditions, values, mentality, perceptions, diet, clothing, language, writing system, religion, and philosophy. During colonialism it often involved the spread of Christianity.

Modernization theory is used to explain the process of modernization within societies. The "classical" theories of modernization of the 1950s and 1960s drew on sociological analyses of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and a partial reading of Max Weber, and were strongly influenced by the writings of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons. Modernization theory was a dominant paradigm in the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s, then went into a deep eclipse. It made a comeback after 1991, when Francis Fukuyama wrote about the end of the Cold War as confirmation on modernization theory and more generally of universal history. But the theory remains a controversial model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">High modernism</span> Movement in modernism characterized by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology

High modernism is a form of modernity, characterized by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world. The high modernist movement was particularly prevalent during the Cold War, especially in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Intellectual movements in Iran involve the Iranian experience of modernity and its associated art, science, literature, poetry, and political structures that have been changing since the 19th century.

What constitutes a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall".

Jamshid Behnam was an Iranian sociologist, writer, and translator. He is known for his work in the development of sociology and modernization in 20th century–Iran. He was a published author of books on Demographics, Sociology of Iran, Family Structure, and Modernity.

Islam and modernity is a topic of discussion in contemporary sociology of religion. The history of Islam chronicles different interpretations and approaches. Modernity is a complex and multidimensional phenomenon rather than a unified and coherent one. It has historically had different schools of thought moving in many directions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Boris Kagarlitsky</span> Russian sociologist and publicist

Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky is a Russian Marxist theoretician and sociologist who has been a political dissident in the Soviet Union. He is coordinator of the Transnational Institute Global Crisis project and Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO) in Moscow. Kagarlisky hosts a YouTube channel Rabkor, associated with his online newspaper of the same name and with IGSO.

Gharbzadegi is a pejorative Persian term variously translated as ‘Westernized’, ‘West-struck-ness’, ‘Westoxification’, ‘Westitis’, ‘Euromania’, or ‘Occidentosis’. It is used to refer to the loss of Iranian cultural identity through the adoption and imitation of Western models and Western criteria in education, the arts, and culture; through the transformation of Iran into a passive market for Western goods and a pawn in Western geopolitics.

Postdevelopment theory holds that the whole concept and practice of development is a reflection of Western-Northern hegemony over the rest of the world. Postdevelopment thought arose in the 1980s out of criticisms voiced against development projects and development theory, which justified them.

<i>The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity</i> 1985 book by Jürgen Habermas

The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures is a 1985 book by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in which the author reconstructs and deals in depth with a number of philosophical approaches to the critique of modern reason and the Enlightenment "project" since Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche, including the work of 20th century philosophers Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Cornelius Castoriadis and Niklas Luhmann. The work is regarded as an important contribution to Frankfurt School critical theory. It has been characterized as a critical evaluation of the concept of world disclosure in modern philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Postcolonial international relations</span> Critical theory approach to international relations

Postcolonial international relations is a branch of scholarship that approaches the study of international relations (IR) using the critical lens of postcolonialism. This critique of IR theory suggests that mainstream IR scholarship does not adequately address the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on current day world politics. Despite using the language of post-, scholars of Postcolonial IR argue that the legacies of colonialism are ongoing, and that critiquing International Relations with this lens allows scholars to contextualize global events. By bridging postcolonialism and International Relations, scholars point to the process of globalization as a crucial point in both fields, due to the increases in global interactions and integration. Postcolonial IR focuses on the re-narrativization of global politics to create a balanced transnational understanding of colonial histories, and attempts to tie non-Western sources of thought into political praxis.

This article delineates the history of modernisation theory. Modernisation refers to a model of a progressive transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society. The theory particularly focuses on the internal factors of a country while assuming that, with assistance, "traditional" or 'pre-modern' countries can be brought to development in the same manner which more developed countries have. Modernisation theory attempts to identify the social variables that contribute to social progress and development of societies, and seeks to explain the process of social evolution. Modernisation theory is subject to criticism originating among socialists and free-market ideologies, world-systems theorists, globalisation theorists and dependency theorists among others. Modernisation theory not only stresses the process of change, but also the responses to that change. It also looks at internal dynamics while referring to social and cultural structures and the adaptation of new technologies.

The anti-cosmopolitan campaign was a thinly disguised antisemitic campaign in the Soviet Union which began in late 1948. Jews were characterized as rootless cosmopolitans and were targeted for persecution.

In traditionalist philosophy, desacralization of knowledge or secularization of knowledge is the process of separation of knowledge from its supposed divine source—God or the Ultimate Reality. The process reflects a paradigm shift in modern conception of knowledge in that it has rejected divine revelations as well as the idea of spiritual and metaphysical foundations of knowledge, confining knowledge to empirical domain and reason alone. Although it is a recurrent theme among the writers of the Traditionalist school that began with René Guénon, a French mystic and intellectual who earlier spoke of "the limitation of knowledge to its lowest order", the process of desacralization of knowledge was most notably surveyed, chronicled and conceptualized by the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his 1981 Gifford Lectures that were later published as Knowledge and the Sacred.

References

  1. 1 2 Rumer, Boris (2005). Central Asia at the End of the Transition (via Google Books). Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe. ISBN   978-0-7656-1575-6.
  2. Buttel, Frederick H.; Mol, Arthur P.J.; Spaargaren, Gert (2000). Environment and Global Modernity (via Google Books). London: SAGE Publications. ISBN   978-0-7619-6766-8.
  3. Charlton, Bruce; Andras, Peter (2003). The Modernization Imperative. Imprint Academic. ISBN   9780907845522.
  4. 1 2 Mirsepassi, Ali (2000). Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization Negotiating Modernity in Iran (via Google Books). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-65000-7.
  5. Schoijet, Mauricio (1 February 2002). "Ultra-left science policy and anti-modernization in Argentina: Oscar Varsavsky". Science and Public Policy. 29 (1): 69–75. doi:10.3152/147154302781781173. ISSN   0302-3427.