High Modernism Disrupted

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Banned
High Modernism was a movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that extended rationalization and optimization processes to society itself, which had been previously untouchable by social engineers. In short, they wanted to remake society, ignoring geographic, social and cultural ties in favor of visions imposed from above. They used science, technological progress and reason as justifications for the destruction of local communities and social structures. Some high modernist writers, such as HG Wells, foresaw a future where modernization was applied to the utmost and no irrationalities, like local cultures or religion existed. Both sides of the Cold War applied this to some degree, with the Americans promoting development theory in the third world, which argued that local traditions should be wiped out in favor of Westernization imposed by local elites, and the Soviets, who planned their entire economy and society from the top down, in theory. How can this model be disrupted?
 
Was that really high modernism? What both Americans and Soviets did doesn't seem any different from what rulers from everywhere did all time, predating the 19th century.
 
The decline of faith in technocratic solutions to the world's problems kicked in mid-century and was pretty cemented by the 1970s. Civil rights and the pseudo-problem of getting a person to the moon and bank are the last major problems that government appeared to solve with silver-bullet solutions or legislation. The failure of central planning in the Second World and import substitution developmentalism in much of the Third World helped discredit the modernist perception that the market competition and parliamentary democracy were chaotic, wasteful holders about to be replaced by "efficient" technocratic intellectuals.

If most of Paris was leveled in WW2 and Le Corbusier's plans for a Brazilia-type city were put into plan, that could seriously discredit high modernism. Once modernism emerged it was bound to run its course eventually, like all intellectual movements, but its hard to cut it short very early or keep it from emerging. A mid-century religious revival could also discredit the modernist notion that religion and nationalism are pre-modern holdover and in the future we'll all be esperanto-speaking atheist socialists or something.

The rise of religion in global politics and international societies around the world would be especially shocking to modernist authors. HG Wells' 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come takes modernist ideas to their ridiculous logical conclusions. In January 1940, a German-Polish war over Danzig begins an inconclusive conflict that ends in a massive global pandemic where the world never really recovers from the Great Depression.

The "Dictatorship of the Air", a group of benevolent technocrats and air pilots fill the gap by taking over the world and abolishing religion. Buddhism and Protestant Christianity are just assumed to have withered away without much resistance.

A committee of a dozen bureaucrats, mostly westerns with a token Chinese and a token African member, conclude that Islam is a barbaric superstition that is going to be abolished by the world state. Wells ridiculously depicts the air pilots just closing the holy sites in Mecca and Medina with no opposition, and destroying every mosque on Earth (with the exception of 20 preserved as museums for architectural reasons). For some reason Arabic speakers magically decide to start speaking English, the new global lingua franca, instead of their native language to the point where the Arabic language is dying out.
 
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