Summary of the last lection about the Modern Age

The Modern Age is a period which goes from the end of the XIX century to the beginning of the XX century. This period is characterized by a lot of tensions in Europe and all around the world. First of all the British power on the other countries went to an end. The European countries started to make alliances which would help them to defend themselves from war attacks. As a matter if fact in the 1914 the First World War started. A lot of lands were destroyed and all people lost their faith in democracy and in the idea of progress which was on the base of the Victorian society. After the First World War there were new world power, the USA and Russia. They influenced all the countries in the World. As a matter of fact European economy went to a depression and the European society was characterized by a big unemployment. It was very difficult to live the modern life. So the state had to look for a solution. This solution was found in the Welfare State which provided social help to the poor and free medical treatment to everyone. Other important changes in Europe and the World were the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and Marx's Communist Manifesto which underlined the social inequalities in the World. In addition to all this in the Modern Age there were a lot of new discovering. One of the most important is Darwin's theory according to which the human being isn't a product of God's creation but a consequence of natural effects. So people entered a big crisis and they could no longer believe in the previous values. The human being lost its self-confidence and had to find a sense of life.
The Modernism is characterized also by some changes in literature, science and philosophy. As for literature, Modern novels the narrator isn't important as he was before. The using of the shift of point of view made the reader enter in the character's mind and made him more free but also more responsible. But why does the narrator use this new technique in this period? Because before this period the system of values was different. If we talk about science in Modernism we can see that the old theories of Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics were revisited and Einstein's Theory of Relativity changed the idea of space and time. According to this theory space and time did not exist as separated but changed according to the point of view of the observer. The idea of time was revisited also in Philosophy. As a matter of fact there were three idea of time:
-Chronological time, which is the time of Maths
-Philosophical time, which is the time we feel in ourselves
-The time expressed by verb tenses, past, present and future.
According to the new modern idea present time was expressed by simultanety between past time and future time.