Epochalism is an attitude of respect for the progressive
spirit of the age and for social and technological advancement, which was contrasted by
Clifford Geertz
Clifford James Geertz (; August 23, 1926 – October 30, 2006) was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology and who was considered "for three decades. ...
with what he termed the (
essentialist
Essentialism is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity. In early Western thought, Plato's idealism held that all things have such an "essence"—an "idea" or "form". In ''Categories'', Aristotle si ...
) valorisation of traditional values. He viewed this distinction as a central social polarity pervading developing nations.
More broadly, the term used has been used to describe the
post-Fordist
Post-Fordism is the dominant system of economic production, consumption, and associated socio-economic phenomena in most industrialized countries since the late 20th century. It is contrasted with Fordism, the system formulated in Henry Ford's aut ...
,
postmodern
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by skepticism toward the " grand narratives" of moderni ...
belief that the current era or epoch represents a fundamental clean break with the past; is something unique in human history; and due to this radical change, previous rules will no longer apply.
Polarities in emerging economies
Epochalism in the developing world can be seen purely as a progressive force, favouring movement toward secularisation and industrial advance, as opposed to a regressive return to the traditional values of community and
Gemeinschaft
''Gemeinschaft'' () and ''Gesellschaft'' (), generally translated as "community and society", are categories which were used by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in order to categorize social relationships into two types. The Gesellschaft ...
. However, in practice the situation is likely to be more complicated: nationalist struggles for independence have often relied on essentialist appeals to authentic ethnic communities and cultural practices, as well as to epochalism, in order to free themselves from dependence on a Western
model
A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the Plan_(drawing), plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a mea ...
/Western control.
Internet epochalism
The rapid rise of the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
led many
digerati
The digerati (or digirati) are the elite of digitalization, social media, content marketing, computer industry and online communities. The word is a portmanteau, derived from "digital" and " literati", and reminiscent of the earlier coinage ''gli ...
to see it as an unprecedented human phenomenon, wholly divorced from all past experience.
Evgeny Morozov
Evgeny Morozov (Russian: Eвге́ний Моро́зов; be, Яўгені Марозаў; born in 1984) is an American writer, researcher, and intellectual from Belarus who studies political and social implications of technology. He was named ...
used the term epochalism to describe the prevalent 21st-century belief that "one is living in truly exceptional times – an intellectual fallacy I call 'epochalism. Previous technological advances, as with the age of railways or the age of broadcasting, had of course made very similar claims for themselves; and
A. E. Housman
Alfred Edward Housman (; 26 March 1859 – 30 April 1936) was an English classical scholar and poet. After an initially poor performance while at university, he took employment as a clerk in London and established his academic reputation by pub ...
a century before had denounced the mind "which commands no outlook upon the past or the future, but believes that the fashion of the present, unlike all fashions heretofore, will endure perpetually".
Late modernity
Late modernity (or liquid modernity) is the characterization of today's highly developed global societies as the continuation (or development) of modernity rather than as an element of the succeeding era known as postmodernity, or the postmodern ...
however, with its shortening of awareness of time-spans and its focus on the present, makes the short-sightedness of epochalism - with what Morozov saw as its dark fetishism of Internet-based solutions
[E. Morozov, ''To Save Everything, Click Here'' (2013) p. 36] - an increasingly plausible intellectual posture.
See also
References
{{Reflist, 2}
External links
"Against Epochalism: An Analysis of Conceptions of Change in British Sociology"by Mike Savage in ''Cultural Sociology'' July 2009 vol. 3 no. 2 217-238
Anthropology
Internet culture
Postmodernism
Social issues