“Thinking that a demonstration of the New Psychology’s practical applications might make it less threatening to traditionalists, Hall delivered a series of lectures on education in Boston (arranged by Charles Eliot). To devote oneself to the business of preserving and reproducing the culture of one's group is to risk one of the most terrible fates in modern societies, obsolescence.” Modern societies do not simply repeat and extend themselves they change in unforeseeable directions, and the individual's contributions to these changes is unspecifiable in advance. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. In modern societies, the reproduction of the custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given they are thought to be discovered or created. People know what their life's task is, and they know when it has been completed. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. “Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical.
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