Part 4: Enter the Modern-verse

Once a governing body and taxes have been established, it’s time for corruption to set in. There’s money to be exploited, special interests to push, and guilt to be peddled.

As 19th century British politician Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

As I’ve lived, I’ve come to see that people who can handle even a small amount of power are rare. Far rarer than I’d hoped.

Leaving Behind the Classic to Usher in the Modern

The first step is to attack the spiritual and abstract, labeling them as primitive while elevating the physical. In this way, the governing body chips away at the freedoms of its citizens until the balance of power shifts lopsidedly toward the government and away from its people.

The less freedoms people have, the more compliant they get. The more compliant they get, the more brazen the profiteering will be. And it’s all done under the guise of being a “more civilized” country, leading to the promise of a more hopeful future. A utopia.

The people from the classic age greatly loved their children and wanted them to partake in this newfound country, this beautiful new society.

But since those who lived in the classic age elevated the spiritual and abstract more than their children and children’s children, some can’t help but see their ancestors as uncivilized and primitive. The effect is subtle, but immediate. Wisdom is less respected. People get less creative.

Unshackled from spiritual and abstract ideas, the physical–facts, definitions, even beauty itself, are now malleable, free to be explored, abstracted, and questioned. This seems freeing at first, until you notice artists and art critics alike begin to diverge from classic beauty and elevate ugliness, challenging previously believed conventions. (The art world is the leading indicator of the Progressive Movement.)

Natural Law depends on the spiritual and abstract. Without it, morality starts to get corrupted by the seven deadly sins. For example, to elevate the physical, the mainstream must play up materialism, material wealth, and hedonism (greed, gluttony, & lust) and try to present these physical things as the ultimate goals in life, superior to the spiritual alternatives. This slippage of morality is called demoralization.

Many people think of demoralization as simply a loss of morale, losing the will to do something due to some oppressive force, such as hearing a bad speech from a coach before the big game. But the true meaning of the word is the subversion and corruption of society’s morals.

This is how the Modern Age begins, an age where the government creates laws not because they’re needed, but because it’s routine to do so. An age where the means of money production is seized first from the people, then from the government itself.

War tax isn’t enough anymore. Income tax is introduced and continues even when the war has ended.

The goodwill journalists had earned during the Classic age is leveraged to gently guide morality off-course while sustaining people’s trust. They are following marching orders, but the manipulation is subtle.

The scientific method is introduced to students via “Natural Science”, updating traditional science books to inject Scientific Positivism into the mainstream. This reinforces the idea that anything which cannot be scientifically measured should be thrown out and considered meaningless (including religion).

The introduction of Natural Science begins a slow drift separating not only science and religion, but school and religion, leaving no room for a priori. For the same reasons, Science Fiction and Fantasy begin to drift apart.

Science Fiction as a genre is stifled and pigeon-holed to reflect this new Scientific Positivism world, caging the creative freedom it previously enjoyed. Any stories that contain elements which cannot be measured in real life get labeled as “Fantasy” to be scoffed at by literary scholars, while the award-winning science fiction authors that manage to distance themselves farthest from Fantasy grow all the more smugly intellectual.

Fantasy then gets shackled by its gatekeepers with artificial limitations, such as being forced to conform to a particular template in order to get published.

Meanwhile, science fiction goes unapologetically Science Positive with a stuffy air of authority over every genre not called “non-fiction” or “literary fiction”.

Enter Cowboys and Spacemen

Gruff, lone heroes who face moral conundrums to which all the higher authorities have no answer start appearing more in fiction, where the main hero has to make a difficult decision, and the final choice must come from within. This is an internal moral code based only on one’s physical observations during life, and it makes for a believable character in the Modern era due to most people still being sane and following the ascribed morality.

These “lone hero scenarios” are unlikely situations designed specifically for the church and legal system to shrug at, while forcing the main character into making dubious judgment calls of his own. These decisions are completely uncoupled from religion, backed instead by “heart”, a “gut feeling”, or by scientific observation and investigation.

Religion and the virtues still get mentioned and even somewhat honored (because a modern age society is not yet ready to part with all its morals), but religion, virtues, and morality still play second-fiddle to this new theme. While heroes are still around and celebrated, it becomes clear the hero’s path isn’t quite as certain as it once was.

Caricatures of bullies are portrayed often in these stories as bad guys who cannot be reasoned with. They’re not compatible with this new age of reason, of mental calculation, of enlightenment, and they cannot understand the concept of only having to fight as a last resort.

Fascination lessens as scientific authorities assure people they understand more than they actually do about the Earth (often using their talking points as political tools to affect change). And so what’s left of the fascination brought on by the Classic age gets turned away from the wonders of the Earth and toward the void of space itself, leading more sheep into the Scientific Positivism way of thinking through the lure–and lens–of Modern Science Fiction.