Beyond EuroModernism?
What comes after?
First, to quickly (re)evaluate.
EuroModernism , a North European innovation, was set off by the early experience of , and exposure to, antic Mediterranean Civilisation, gained in the centuries of the Crusades.
A taste for, and finally some knowledge of , Commerce , Trade, and Luxuries (not to mention modes and implements of War) was , thereby, indelibly attained.
The follow-up , and even more lucrative and educational, adventurism in the Americas ,and Indies, simply sealed the emergent scapes of the incipient new order.
Rome could, apparently, live with both commerce and classical Christianity for aeons, but North Europe, equally apparently, couldn’t.
Whence the impatient break with the restraints of Catholicism, and the construction of a new , far less cumbrous, and profoundly individuated, ‘faith’.
Society was swiftly, and suitably, ‘freed up’ – for the accumulation of wealth, mainly amongst the upper echelons.
That ‘freeing’ process , which disabled many, and enabled a few , was trumpeted via thunderous proclamations of a new , heroic, schemata of ‘emancipation’.
The more ignoble the means deployed to secure wealth (piracy, plunder, slavery) the more the rhetorical bombast that enveloped the aerial visions of ‘progress’ .
What were canny formulas for the rulers became, as such things go, solemn undertakings for the lower orders , who took up their own struggles under that same banner, paying, often, a grievous price for their delusions.
It took centuries for common laboring peoples to separate their struggles ,organizationally, though they yet retained , anomalously, and all but unconsciously, the meretricious ‘ideals’ of their oppressors.
So the new system broke all past, pre-existing, mirrors, signs, and guideposts - and helped separate all from the anthropic roots of their own social existence.
Entropy and alienation increased; kinship , communal , and tribal ties collapsed - and the tyrant’s hand lay firm upon factory and farm.
Social compacts were rent, social contracts were fabricated.
Convivial institutions were undermined/abandoned , replaced by commercial fiats ‘legalised’ by the newly developing unit of market-cum-administration :the ‘nation-state’.
Peasant properties were seized, their traditional rights abrogated, their commons confiscated.
Anthropic evolution was arrested, and a mutant direction was taken, tragically , and paradoxically, under the name of a new-fangled jargon, replete with tenet, maxim , and edict - of ‘humanism’.
Antique conceptions/ordinances of societal means and ends were warped: affective , emotive, ties devalued, and trivialized - and a ‘brave new’ and ‘rational’ order was forcibly imposed.
Speaking in metaphor, Mammals were smoothly morphing into reptiles, with the EM governors reveling in it.
The new philosophers rationalised this novel monstrosity distancing all from the now disparaged , quasi-religiously ordained , ‘ancien regime’.
A system of ‘universal egoism’ with devil-take-the –hindmost mores – i.e. civil society - was unleashed, catapulting the rabid ambitions of commerce and finance to a nicety.
Europe had, of a sudden, left the human world behind.
It had become ‘developed’ (to use a later phraseology).
It now embodied a self-proclaimed, nay flaunted!, catechism of ‘progress’.
It also embraced, and enshrined , a corybantic materialism to the point of supplanting all other pre-existing norms.
Materialism was Science.
Materialism was Philosophy.
Materialism was , even more, the general rubric of All societal drives and motivations, insinuating itself into both means and ends.
It was armed both with the glib canons of ‘universal rights’, and the even more palpable cannons of munitioned might.
There was no further recourse to confiscate in the name of King, Country , or Christ.
It would now expropriate in the grand name of Civilisation
It was , in other words, ready to pillage, plunder, and rule, the world.
And it did this, and still does it!, on a scale unimaginable.
(ii)
How is it all to be transcended?
Let us return to a realist human anthropology, the only science we need , in understanding ourselves.
Contrary to Modernist dissimulations (which have gulled us all), morality and civilization (understood in the sense of a pacification of the conditions of human existence, both natural and social) are not ‘choices’ exercised by sovereign individuals , standing on the bold high ground of the Modernist escarpment.
It is a perennial anthropic necessity , imposed by indefeasible aspects of our very species-being.
The need to raise the human infant safely through its early, vulnerable years ,demands it: and women , given their intimate connection with this process cross-culturally, become the first guarantors of minimal societal peace.
The mother-child relation is the constituent building block of anthropic society, its very first social ,and moral, relation.
All other societal norms flow from this genetic, nucleic matrix, depending on the prevalent conjunctural balance of gender-struggles.
Men and women, universally, are equipped by nature with differing instincts: and so are , each, quite distinct sub-species of the human family.
In this struggle, women seek, eternally, to ‘build’ and preserve the artefacts of civility which men - whose feckless depredations, in the arenas of violence and domination require such measures - accommodate , according to their lights: now more, now less, ever fluctuating, in nip and tuck fashion.
In effect, women are , inescapably ,the trustees, the custodians, , of both civilization and morality.
We are , as a species, in essence, not ‘light-seeking’, but, rather, far simpler ‘heat-seeking’ animals: and no, ‘freedom’ is not an intrinsic anthropic value of any evolutionary consequence.
Modernism invented the doctrine to ‘free itself’ from all communitarian bonds such that it could go about its inexorable avarice in unbounded fashion.
As tribal entities we do not, instinctually, seek ‘freedom’, by any stretch, but rather the hospitality, security, and warmth of the societal sanctum wherein all our anthropic needs (survival/propagation) are met affectively and abundantly.
So, the grand litany of the hollow freedoms of Modernist fantasy, when/where swallowed whole, has ensnared the European to the point of being hopelessly lost in Two very vital senses: not knowing him/her-self, ‘internally’ , in this abnormal, individuated form; nor having a cradling societal sanctuary in which (s)he can find any extended rest.
These are the Primal Alienations of EM, for which there is No Salve: not yoga, not ‘socialism’, nor ‘humanism’ , nor ‘personal growth’: those being merely the desperate , even pathetic, ‘pillar to post’ avenues of a foredoomed path of escape.
This accounts for the turbulent vagabondage of spirit that informs the confirmed EuroModernist, defying the very notion of contentment itself as dire anathema (yes, we MUST ‘climb every mountain’, as the refrain goes)
Tragedy is that, plunged in ceaseless war with their own spirit, Europe exported this maleficent , misanthropic model to all peoples, over time, by dint of force, fraud, and attrition.
Given the foregoing, it may be readily understood that, for having made human existence, natural and societal, even more precarious than ever, Europe’s fateful trajectory has been only to streak straight from barbarism to decadence -wholly innocent of the critical desiderata of civilization.
As such it is trivially true that the earliest of human tribal societies attained , almost effortlessly by comparison, a far higher degree of civilization than any Modernist European entity.
Realism demands that we know ‘ourselves’ as tribal animals: hominids, gifted with ascertainable traits that make the world what it is, for better or worse.
In stark terms, anthropic society is , at base, an instinctual society wherein ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ coincide - with No ‘opposition’ between them.
Modernism, au contraire, ‘invents’ a novel societal order, culturally speaking, willy-nilly, with its philosophers spouting quixotic visions, ungraced by any anthropic insights, and with its prophets , similarly, proclaiming insensible , ignorant chimeras : but the limits of such unfounded intellections are all too quickly , and often very tragically, reached.
Indeed, the dominant Anglo-Am societies, today, have only revived, and restored, for all the vain proclamatory zeal of Smith, Locke, and Paine !, the grisly mores of the Modernist jungle, as the operative norms of public policy and everyday life .
Life as a Lottery is the great, Modernist, Anglo-Saxon contribution to history (Smith was wrong : not a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ – and trade is of much utility - as much as one of inveterate gamblers)
Indeed, the follies don’t stop even there: for now, their follow-through , imminent feint is to , ungently, move us all to an approaching Transhuman future built on biogenetic robotics : thereby bringing the hoary Project of Evolution to a dismal , abrupt, and depraved ,terminus.
EuroModern anthropology fails to comprehend any/all of this for being really a potent misanthropology, fatally disabled by its Two overriding system-imperatives:
a) the demands of Empire (i.e., of maintaining a ‘necessary’ distance between Europeans and Others, and between fact and fantasy: in its favor), and
b) a Judeo-Christian ideology that fails to equate ‘humans’ with ‘animals’ (of course , in the usual modus of apparently chronic ‘double-standards’ ,European ideologues happily consigned women and aboriginal peoples to ‘nature’ – think of the appellation ‘natuurvolk’, e.g., - whilst reserving, for themselves , the high trope of ‘culture’, free of animalistic attributes ).
At any rate, given our ‘essence’, our deepest anthropic drives derive from an affective attachment to ‘family’ , ‘clan’ and ‘tribe’, far from Modernism’s tendentious imputations of our being just so many isolated , individualistically moved, ‘rationally’ (whence, materially!, in its confounding logic) calculating automatons.
Stated simply, emotive affections rule the human animal, en generale: it is this innate proclivity that is turned upside-down in EM conditioning that seeks to subdue/subvert it via the cold blooded ,instrumental, calculus of canny calculation of material advantage (as pointed out , Anglo-Am societies have ‘internalised; this geist - or is it an anti-geist?- early on, and far more completely, than any other societal grouping on the face of this planet: to momentous effect).
So long as the ‘material economy of interests’ delivers expected ‘goods’ the latter fantasy can be indulged (i.e., we can’t be persuaded to be pigs if the trough is empty!), albeit at cost of the far more meaningful ‘moral economy of affections’ that it perforce supplants: but the moment it cannot, which is where the EuroModern Economy is at today, the haze wears thin - and people return to the soon remembered bosom of their birthright very swiftly.
As such, all prolonged ‘depressions’ and ‘crises’ spontaneously revive calls for ‘socialist’ , communitarian, and kindred modes of economy and society .
Of course this ‘reactive’ force is strongest where EM has least penetrated popular consciousness: this might explain why socialism, contrary to Marxian expectation, took root in the East rather than the ‘advanced’ (i.e., the more deteriorated) West.
This process is already commenced, globally, and will gather steam proportionate to the ongoing subsidence of the Modern system.
Looked at more analytically, it is the entire world-view of a mistaken , and antiquated, materialism that is being - and needs be - jettisoned.
In Science, this has already been accomplished, with Physics serving as the lead discipline (via Quantum ideas) placing human subjectivity (in the collective sense of a communal ‘consciousness’) at the very centre of the world of the ‘things’ being examined.
The old ‘determinisms’ have given way to a more probabilistic, and less mechanistic, ways of understanding the universe, both social and natural.
EM Philosophy had adjusted itself , also, to the change, since Einstein, if in typically unhinged ways, with self-styled ‘Post-Modernism’ , at its apex, making a philosophical mockery of the real science underlying such changes in its vacuous ‘anything goes’ postures and dispositions.
The great Einstein , himself, was wrong; ‘god’ not only plays ‘dice’, but , apparently, all manner of incomprehensible games that keep us guessing - with the ratio of the known to the unknown an ever diminishing one.
The idle bluster of Stephen Hawking , made in his heyday in the closing decades of the Twentieth-Century that a putative ‘Grand Unifying Theory’ was just a hop and a skip away not only calls to mind another vacuous swank of one of his forebears (Lord Kelvin, circa 1900: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement."), but also illustrates the quintessentially triumphalist arrogance that has always marked EuroModernist scientism – and its Anglo-American avatar , in particular.
Abandoning a discredited materialism is not to embrace organized religion(s) (old or new), or any of its own brand of suppositional , and delusive, idealisms that deny extant realities in favor of a Utopia in the Afterlife: it is rather to understand that the real , anthropic world does not support such a priori noetic postures, though it can still yield us, within strict species-limits, an arguably provident life on the good earth.
Being ineluctably human, this sloughing off of the Modernist yoke is far from being difficult: it is easy , for being instinctive - and will presage a gradual return to our species-being, mortally traduced centuries ago.
However , old habits do die hard: and so Europeans will find it possibly harder to give up customary modes of thought than Non-Europeans who never really assimilated the perversions of their ideology ‘in their bones’.
Indeed, we may have to abandon many EuroModernist, divisive, binaries of like-nature: ‘Left vs Right’ , for example , that have deceptively mesmerized generations raised in dour EM tutelage.
Left vs Right are the vapid options within the arid world of EM: what is needed is a flat rejection of the world entire according to EM: tout ensemble and tout a fait..
Think again of the universal archetype of the human family: it is neither democratic nor egalitarian , nor ‘free’ (nor left-wing or right-wing): but it affords all humans what they crave most – sanctuary, conviviality, and societal affections.
Our anthropic future need not rest, anymore, on the grim prospect of a permanently divided-Self - living precariously in an insuperably banal dog-eat-dog world (despite, in all irony and paradox, the hypertrophic paraphernalia of ‘equality’ , ‘liberty’ and ‘rights’, etc.) where the race , in a rigged game, is ever to the oligarchic captains of the commanding heights of wealth and power.
Centres do not hold, and it is likewise with epicenters.
Modernist entities have been held up only by sheer force, be it economic , political, or ideological: now that the force is found flagging, the exalted towers are , slowly, starting to lean.
At base, to continue the metaphor, we remain, intractably, instinctual.
When ‘superstructures’ crumble, the foundation becomes freed of its burdens.
So it is that, universally, centrifugal forces are compelling the human world , in these times., to adapt to an incipient great inversion: a return to our original, anthropic attributes.
In this rebounding is a restitution: nature and culture may ,yet again , coalesce, and be One.
The enduring anthropic pastime of irrepressible cultural innovation/differentiation can then resume: to adorn the planet with continuing variety, diversity and heterogeneity - reflecting ,once more , the unquenchable genius of our species.
And EuroModernism, together with its stultifying asphyxiations and the sub-continent that bore it, may all retire back, in time, into more proper, and just, historical ,and geographic , proportions.
Whence Evolution, perhaps, can yet again recommence its (rudely interrupted) immemorial , timeless , sway.
REFERENCES
R. KANTH, Breaking With the Enlightenment, 1997
---------, Against Eurocentrism, 2005
________, The Post-Human Society, 2013
---------, TWO LECTURES ON EUROCENTRISM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwQrpfom9M<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DZDwQrpfom9M&k=AjZjj3dyY74kKL92lieHqQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Ul8alR2l08keT7LU6kfGk%2FLPjA2GeWA1tJYXAdjLdto%3D%0A&m=l80kmrQP5oD9Yn9GW3wVClP85XRBN%2FmCVzJs2Jxsw8M%3D%0A&s=86a419fc904ebbfcaf93be689bd47970ffd28239a7951a7b16c96396fd034db4
[© RKanth 2014, Harvard University]
What comes after?
First, to quickly (re)evaluate.
EuroModernism , a North European innovation, was set off by the early experience of , and exposure to, antic Mediterranean Civilisation, gained in the centuries of the Crusades.
A taste for, and finally some knowledge of , Commerce , Trade, and Luxuries (not to mention modes and implements of War) was , thereby, indelibly attained.
The follow-up , and even more lucrative and educational, adventurism in the Americas ,and Indies, simply sealed the emergent scapes of the incipient new order.
Rome could, apparently, live with both commerce and classical Christianity for aeons, but North Europe, equally apparently, couldn’t.
Whence the impatient break with the restraints of Catholicism, and the construction of a new , far less cumbrous, and profoundly individuated, ‘faith’.
Society was swiftly, and suitably, ‘freed up’ – for the accumulation of wealth, mainly amongst the upper echelons.
That ‘freeing’ process , which disabled many, and enabled a few , was trumpeted via thunderous proclamations of a new , heroic, schemata of ‘emancipation’.
The more ignoble the means deployed to secure wealth (piracy, plunder, slavery) the more the rhetorical bombast that enveloped the aerial visions of ‘progress’ .
What were canny formulas for the rulers became, as such things go, solemn undertakings for the lower orders , who took up their own struggles under that same banner, paying, often, a grievous price for their delusions.
It took centuries for common laboring peoples to separate their struggles ,organizationally, though they yet retained , anomalously, and all but unconsciously, the meretricious ‘ideals’ of their oppressors.
So the new system broke all past, pre-existing, mirrors, signs, and guideposts - and helped separate all from the anthropic roots of their own social existence.
Entropy and alienation increased; kinship , communal , and tribal ties collapsed - and the tyrant’s hand lay firm upon factory and farm.
Social compacts were rent, social contracts were fabricated.
Convivial institutions were undermined/abandoned , replaced by commercial fiats ‘legalised’ by the newly developing unit of market-cum-administration :the ‘nation-state’.
Peasant properties were seized, their traditional rights abrogated, their commons confiscated.
Anthropic evolution was arrested, and a mutant direction was taken, tragically , and paradoxically, under the name of a new-fangled jargon, replete with tenet, maxim , and edict - of ‘humanism’.
Antique conceptions/ordinances of societal means and ends were warped: affective , emotive, ties devalued, and trivialized - and a ‘brave new’ and ‘rational’ order was forcibly imposed.
Speaking in metaphor, Mammals were smoothly morphing into reptiles, with the EM governors reveling in it.
The new philosophers rationalised this novel monstrosity distancing all from the now disparaged , quasi-religiously ordained , ‘ancien regime’.
A system of ‘universal egoism’ with devil-take-the –hindmost mores – i.e. civil society - was unleashed, catapulting the rabid ambitions of commerce and finance to a nicety.
Europe had, of a sudden, left the human world behind.
It had become ‘developed’ (to use a later phraseology).
It now embodied a self-proclaimed, nay flaunted!, catechism of ‘progress’.
It also embraced, and enshrined , a corybantic materialism to the point of supplanting all other pre-existing norms.
Materialism was Science.
Materialism was Philosophy.
Materialism was , even more, the general rubric of All societal drives and motivations, insinuating itself into both means and ends.
It was armed both with the glib canons of ‘universal rights’, and the even more palpable cannons of munitioned might.
There was no further recourse to confiscate in the name of King, Country , or Christ.
It would now expropriate in the grand name of Civilisation
It was , in other words, ready to pillage, plunder, and rule, the world.
And it did this, and still does it!, on a scale unimaginable.
(ii)
How is it all to be transcended?
Let us return to a realist human anthropology, the only science we need , in understanding ourselves.
Contrary to Modernist dissimulations (which have gulled us all), morality and civilization (understood in the sense of a pacification of the conditions of human existence, both natural and social) are not ‘choices’ exercised by sovereign individuals , standing on the bold high ground of the Modernist escarpment.
It is a perennial anthropic necessity , imposed by indefeasible aspects of our very species-being.
The need to raise the human infant safely through its early, vulnerable years ,demands it: and women , given their intimate connection with this process cross-culturally, become the first guarantors of minimal societal peace.
The mother-child relation is the constituent building block of anthropic society, its very first social ,and moral, relation.
All other societal norms flow from this genetic, nucleic matrix, depending on the prevalent conjunctural balance of gender-struggles.
Men and women, universally, are equipped by nature with differing instincts: and so are , each, quite distinct sub-species of the human family.
In this struggle, women seek, eternally, to ‘build’ and preserve the artefacts of civility which men - whose feckless depredations, in the arenas of violence and domination require such measures - accommodate , according to their lights: now more, now less, ever fluctuating, in nip and tuck fashion.
In effect, women are , inescapably ,the trustees, the custodians, , of both civilization and morality.
We are , as a species, in essence, not ‘light-seeking’, but, rather, far simpler ‘heat-seeking’ animals: and no, ‘freedom’ is not an intrinsic anthropic value of any evolutionary consequence.
Modernism invented the doctrine to ‘free itself’ from all communitarian bonds such that it could go about its inexorable avarice in unbounded fashion.
As tribal entities we do not, instinctually, seek ‘freedom’, by any stretch, but rather the hospitality, security, and warmth of the societal sanctum wherein all our anthropic needs (survival/propagation) are met affectively and abundantly.
So, the grand litany of the hollow freedoms of Modernist fantasy, when/where swallowed whole, has ensnared the European to the point of being hopelessly lost in Two very vital senses: not knowing him/her-self, ‘internally’ , in this abnormal, individuated form; nor having a cradling societal sanctuary in which (s)he can find any extended rest.
These are the Primal Alienations of EM, for which there is No Salve: not yoga, not ‘socialism’, nor ‘humanism’ , nor ‘personal growth’: those being merely the desperate , even pathetic, ‘pillar to post’ avenues of a foredoomed path of escape.
This accounts for the turbulent vagabondage of spirit that informs the confirmed EuroModernist, defying the very notion of contentment itself as dire anathema (yes, we MUST ‘climb every mountain’, as the refrain goes)
Tragedy is that, plunged in ceaseless war with their own spirit, Europe exported this maleficent , misanthropic model to all peoples, over time, by dint of force, fraud, and attrition.
Given the foregoing, it may be readily understood that, for having made human existence, natural and societal, even more precarious than ever, Europe’s fateful trajectory has been only to streak straight from barbarism to decadence -wholly innocent of the critical desiderata of civilization.
As such it is trivially true that the earliest of human tribal societies attained , almost effortlessly by comparison, a far higher degree of civilization than any Modernist European entity.
Realism demands that we know ‘ourselves’ as tribal animals: hominids, gifted with ascertainable traits that make the world what it is, for better or worse.
In stark terms, anthropic society is , at base, an instinctual society wherein ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ coincide - with No ‘opposition’ between them.
Modernism, au contraire, ‘invents’ a novel societal order, culturally speaking, willy-nilly, with its philosophers spouting quixotic visions, ungraced by any anthropic insights, and with its prophets , similarly, proclaiming insensible , ignorant chimeras : but the limits of such unfounded intellections are all too quickly , and often very tragically, reached.
Indeed, the dominant Anglo-Am societies, today, have only revived, and restored, for all the vain proclamatory zeal of Smith, Locke, and Paine !, the grisly mores of the Modernist jungle, as the operative norms of public policy and everyday life .
Life as a Lottery is the great, Modernist, Anglo-Saxon contribution to history (Smith was wrong : not a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ – and trade is of much utility - as much as one of inveterate gamblers)
Indeed, the follies don’t stop even there: for now, their follow-through , imminent feint is to , ungently, move us all to an approaching Transhuman future built on biogenetic robotics : thereby bringing the hoary Project of Evolution to a dismal , abrupt, and depraved ,terminus.
EuroModern anthropology fails to comprehend any/all of this for being really a potent misanthropology, fatally disabled by its Two overriding system-imperatives:
a) the demands of Empire (i.e., of maintaining a ‘necessary’ distance between Europeans and Others, and between fact and fantasy: in its favor), and
b) a Judeo-Christian ideology that fails to equate ‘humans’ with ‘animals’ (of course , in the usual modus of apparently chronic ‘double-standards’ ,European ideologues happily consigned women and aboriginal peoples to ‘nature’ – think of the appellation ‘natuurvolk’, e.g., - whilst reserving, for themselves , the high trope of ‘culture’, free of animalistic attributes ).
At any rate, given our ‘essence’, our deepest anthropic drives derive from an affective attachment to ‘family’ , ‘clan’ and ‘tribe’, far from Modernism’s tendentious imputations of our being just so many isolated , individualistically moved, ‘rationally’ (whence, materially!, in its confounding logic) calculating automatons.
Stated simply, emotive affections rule the human animal, en generale: it is this innate proclivity that is turned upside-down in EM conditioning that seeks to subdue/subvert it via the cold blooded ,instrumental, calculus of canny calculation of material advantage (as pointed out , Anglo-Am societies have ‘internalised; this geist - or is it an anti-geist?- early on, and far more completely, than any other societal grouping on the face of this planet: to momentous effect).
So long as the ‘material economy of interests’ delivers expected ‘goods’ the latter fantasy can be indulged (i.e., we can’t be persuaded to be pigs if the trough is empty!), albeit at cost of the far more meaningful ‘moral economy of affections’ that it perforce supplants: but the moment it cannot, which is where the EuroModern Economy is at today, the haze wears thin - and people return to the soon remembered bosom of their birthright very swiftly.
As such, all prolonged ‘depressions’ and ‘crises’ spontaneously revive calls for ‘socialist’ , communitarian, and kindred modes of economy and society .
Of course this ‘reactive’ force is strongest where EM has least penetrated popular consciousness: this might explain why socialism, contrary to Marxian expectation, took root in the East rather than the ‘advanced’ (i.e., the more deteriorated) West.
This process is already commenced, globally, and will gather steam proportionate to the ongoing subsidence of the Modern system.
Looked at more analytically, it is the entire world-view of a mistaken , and antiquated, materialism that is being - and needs be - jettisoned.
In Science, this has already been accomplished, with Physics serving as the lead discipline (via Quantum ideas) placing human subjectivity (in the collective sense of a communal ‘consciousness’) at the very centre of the world of the ‘things’ being examined.
The old ‘determinisms’ have given way to a more probabilistic, and less mechanistic, ways of understanding the universe, both social and natural.
EM Philosophy had adjusted itself , also, to the change, since Einstein, if in typically unhinged ways, with self-styled ‘Post-Modernism’ , at its apex, making a philosophical mockery of the real science underlying such changes in its vacuous ‘anything goes’ postures and dispositions.
The great Einstein , himself, was wrong; ‘god’ not only plays ‘dice’, but , apparently, all manner of incomprehensible games that keep us guessing - with the ratio of the known to the unknown an ever diminishing one.
The idle bluster of Stephen Hawking , made in his heyday in the closing decades of the Twentieth-Century that a putative ‘Grand Unifying Theory’ was just a hop and a skip away not only calls to mind another vacuous swank of one of his forebears (Lord Kelvin, circa 1900: "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement."), but also illustrates the quintessentially triumphalist arrogance that has always marked EuroModernist scientism – and its Anglo-American avatar , in particular.
Abandoning a discredited materialism is not to embrace organized religion(s) (old or new), or any of its own brand of suppositional , and delusive, idealisms that deny extant realities in favor of a Utopia in the Afterlife: it is rather to understand that the real , anthropic world does not support such a priori noetic postures, though it can still yield us, within strict species-limits, an arguably provident life on the good earth.
Being ineluctably human, this sloughing off of the Modernist yoke is far from being difficult: it is easy , for being instinctive - and will presage a gradual return to our species-being, mortally traduced centuries ago.
However , old habits do die hard: and so Europeans will find it possibly harder to give up customary modes of thought than Non-Europeans who never really assimilated the perversions of their ideology ‘in their bones’.
Indeed, we may have to abandon many EuroModernist, divisive, binaries of like-nature: ‘Left vs Right’ , for example , that have deceptively mesmerized generations raised in dour EM tutelage.
Left vs Right are the vapid options within the arid world of EM: what is needed is a flat rejection of the world entire according to EM: tout ensemble and tout a fait..
Think again of the universal archetype of the human family: it is neither democratic nor egalitarian , nor ‘free’ (nor left-wing or right-wing): but it affords all humans what they crave most – sanctuary, conviviality, and societal affections.
Our anthropic future need not rest, anymore, on the grim prospect of a permanently divided-Self - living precariously in an insuperably banal dog-eat-dog world (despite, in all irony and paradox, the hypertrophic paraphernalia of ‘equality’ , ‘liberty’ and ‘rights’, etc.) where the race , in a rigged game, is ever to the oligarchic captains of the commanding heights of wealth and power.
Centres do not hold, and it is likewise with epicenters.
Modernist entities have been held up only by sheer force, be it economic , political, or ideological: now that the force is found flagging, the exalted towers are , slowly, starting to lean.
At base, to continue the metaphor, we remain, intractably, instinctual.
When ‘superstructures’ crumble, the foundation becomes freed of its burdens.
So it is that, universally, centrifugal forces are compelling the human world , in these times., to adapt to an incipient great inversion: a return to our original, anthropic attributes.
In this rebounding is a restitution: nature and culture may ,yet again , coalesce, and be One.
The enduring anthropic pastime of irrepressible cultural innovation/differentiation can then resume: to adorn the planet with continuing variety, diversity and heterogeneity - reflecting ,once more , the unquenchable genius of our species.
And EuroModernism, together with its stultifying asphyxiations and the sub-continent that bore it, may all retire back, in time, into more proper, and just, historical ,and geographic , proportions.
Whence Evolution, perhaps, can yet again recommence its (rudely interrupted) immemorial , timeless , sway.
REFERENCES
R. KANTH, Breaking With the Enlightenment, 1997
---------, Against Eurocentrism, 2005
________, The Post-Human Society, 2013
---------, TWO LECTURES ON EUROCENTRISM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwQrpfom9M<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DZDwQrpfom9M&k=AjZjj3dyY74kKL92lieHqQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Ul8alR2l08keT7LU6kfGk%2FLPjA2GeWA1tJYXAdjLdto%3D%0A&m=l80kmrQP5oD9Yn9GW3wVClP85XRBN%2FmCVzJs2Jxsw8M%3D%0A&s=86a419fc904ebbfcaf93be689bd47970ffd28239a7951a7b16c96396fd034db4
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