Futurism Is Alive and Well

Time is silent. Eons pass. Mind and matter come together and explode.
The Middle East, Greece, China. The founding and development of philosophy, art, law, religion, medicine, science and agriculture. The power of the collective--of society--takes hold around much of the world. The Shang and Zhou dynasties. The Roman Empire. Confucius. Democracy in Athens; military might in Sparta. The written, sacred story spins the wheel of history. Hippocrates, Democritus, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Buddhism, Hindu scripture. New powers, new struggles. Prolemaic cosmology, Galenic medicine. Then finally, at every level, conflict, war, then decadence and military excess. The bubble closes. The collapse of empire begins.
Again, a kind of silence descends. A great period of gestation. A harsh conformity to religious hierarchy weighs on the individual spirit. Turning and turning, time slows down. As consciousness dims, the memory of ancient civilizations drift into oblivion. With little sense of opportunity, life becomes a circle, repetition built upon repetition. Then, with all possibilities forgotten, a match strikes. A glow appears, dim at first. From the darkness, we step out into the Renaissance. Whoosh!
In a single year, the great modern physicist Galileo Galilei dies; the great modern physicist Isaac Newton is born.
"Enlightenment" has erupted, a celebration of possibilities, of building a towering utopia in which some people would be free from the punishing forces of nature and superstition.
Revolutions shake western Europe and America. The sheer force of the acceleration strips the moment of its vestiges of tradition, its shackles to "progress". Science is infused with adventure. Franklin's lightning rod, Whitney's cotton gin, Stephenson's locomotive, Morse's telegraph, Gatling's machine gun, Edison's light bulb, Bell's telephone, Benz's automobile, etc. A sudden shift in art and literature follows, a growing unease that the world is built of chaos. Gauss's non-Euclidean geometry threatens the unity of math and science; Stravinsky's "Rite Of Spring" prompts riots; Einstein crushes time and space; Joyce drags the novel into the river of consciousness. New freedoms are demanded, and reaped. And on July 20th, 1969, the old God Apollo is transformed into a modern back-slapping "good ol' boy" as Neil Armstrong takes one small step on the moon and nearly trips...
Where does the breakdown begin? Atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Twenty some million dead in Europe after a democratically elected regime embarks upon a so called racial Crusade? "Ethnic cleansing"? In some forgotten moment, modernism withers. Another new era of recognition begins, a celebration of hybrids and pluralities, of ambiguity and doubt, of fragmentation and irony, of meaning in multiple meanings; of "Big Brother Speak". With a now familiar suddenness, society embraces the many parallel worlds through which reality forms and is experienced. There's a man behind the curtain and pulls the strings of the puppets and he wears no clothes. The lies are bigger each day and they are many: truth is not truth, but power. Instability is opportunity, time is ether, objectivity is subjectivity, knowledge is being, essence is existence, reality is story, stories are language, language is a game. Science is ideology, ego is DNA, humanity is flesh, flesh is nature, nature is technology, technology is us. We are machines. Futurism as an art movement may be "out of fashion" but it's ideas and symbols flourish... The dream dies, but the dreamer awakens into the nightmare world of the philosophies behind Futurism that once held so much promise ever speeding into the colourful future that now dimly appears as a mass graveyard....