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Were modern times always called modern times?

I am reading a biog on Jean Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir and there is a line in there where JPS has taken on editorship of a magazine called modern times or times modern... and this was 1944 ish... So I was thinking... we call NOW modern times... but it seems that modern is a very shifting thing...what we think of as the past and old hat was once ultra modern...

And all of this reminds me of one of the only quotes I can vaguely remember -“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” And I am always struck by how that could easily have been written yesterday... 

Perhaps times or basic human nature change very little?

Posted - July 4, 2017
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Responses


  • 46117
    Well the NOW is shifting. But it is always ever presence we are experiencing.  The past is gone.  The future is not here.  There is only what has always been.  Right now.

    It is presence in what is currently happening.  Nothing else really matters.  That doesn't mean don't plan for things.   It means be aware that you are planning and let it go.  The outcome. Let it go and don't get attached.   This is me talking to me, by the way.
      July 4, 2017 1:29 PM MDT
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  • 6477
    Well maybe you talking to you is something all of us should try to do a little more... funny enough I was talking to my new-ish work colleague today... we both have a daughter with special needs... we were saying how the good thing about it is that you know plans are never going to go how you expect them.. you get expert at finding ways round obstacles and disappointments/set backs... 

    But outside of that... I still find it fascinating, the idea that we think we are oh so modern, just as those back in the 40s did... but in reality there will come a time when our modern seems terribly quaint and a bit unenlightened.. 
      July 4, 2017 1:33 PM MDT
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  • "Modern" seems to be a synonym for "current".  And to the quote you present, one can Google Aristotle and Plato and read the same unfavorable descriptions of the youth of their day.  This, slamming the younger generation, seems a favored past time of the older generation.  So little has changed in 2,500 years.
      July 4, 2017 2:12 PM MDT
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  • 6477
    LOl well maybe the younger gen deserve it :P Leastwise they grow up and do the same thing to their kids :P
      July 4, 2017 2:27 PM MDT
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  • The older generation was once the younger generation and displayed the faults the older generation yaps about and pretends they were not subject to as youths.  Example.  I often berate the younger generation and the vileness of rap, audio excrement.  But when I reflect on Tull singing about pedophilia or Alice Cooper singing about necrophilia I have to curtail my denouncement.  What could be more repugnant and vile than necrophilia? This post was edited by Benedict Arnold at July 4, 2017 11:07 PM MDT
      July 4, 2017 2:43 PM MDT
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  • 13071
    Yes, in Modern Times.
      July 4, 2017 2:47 PM MDT
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  • 22891
    as far as i know
      July 4, 2017 4:37 PM MDT
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  • 5614
    Depends on how advanced wherever you are is. I doubt you would consider the Amish way of life "modern times". Modern is keeping up or existing above anything anywhere else in the world.
      July 4, 2017 5:10 PM MDT
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