East and West
Aeons ago, when I commenced my academic avocation, as an Asst .Professor at the then newly opened , and highly innovative, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in India, at the ripe, green, age of 21, I had , sub rosa, but one real ‘quest’.
To discover the ‘essential’ (I use the word advisedly) difference between the classically stereotyped ‘east’ and ‘west’ (for those innocent of such genre of old hat, I commend Kipling’s ringing, heroic, ballad, ‘the Ballad of East and West’ that immortalizes that ‘divide’).
Only very recently, about 2007 , did I finally put it all together.
Yes, it is true: I , now, have – if only to my own satisfaction! - the Unholy Grail.
If there were false starts, and mis-steps , along the way I am unaware of them, since I feel I had my eye on the ‘ prize’ from the start.
But, there was a certain streak of Brahmin perfectionism (much is made of the Protestant Ethic: but it pales, like a lover’s face in moonlight, before its sovereign Brahmin predecessor) that wanted every Argument to be in place before I announced it to the world.
This I did, on January 04, 2007, at my Festschrift, at the Chicago Meetings of the American Economic Association.
My Book Against Eurocentrism (Macmillan, 2005) , but ,more so, my other Book , The Challenge of Eurocentrism (Macmillan, 2009) spells out the Thesis in much detail.
I had doled out bits and pieces of the Argument , at various invited gatherings , but given that most at such events were Economists , the ideas, likely, went past all but a handful.
At more mixed public gatherings , there was enthusiasm, but I was not always sure of genuine comprehension.
My very early correspondent friends (and I have been really blessed with the best) – the late Robert Heilbroner and Paul Sweezy; Noam Chomsky, and Roger Owen – probably got what I was driving at: but maintained a certain – necessary?- discretion vis a vis my ideas.
Immanuel Wallerstein also read bits of my work ( commending it publicly, if cautiously).
I had met Roy Bhaskar early on (Oxford, 1987) and liked him and his work; but it was apparent (at least to moi) that my own ideas were heading in quite another direction(though his more recent work it is said, may run at least tangentially close).
However , the one I met very late – in his short life – the inimitable Paul Feyerabend, was hewed of another clay.
If the above were all canonical saints, he towered over them like a god.
In him, and his work (for the twain were the same), I found Total Empathy.
I still treasure his beautifully handwritten epistle, but a few months before his tragic passing, bemoaning the fact that only a few really understood where this chaotic Age of ours was headed.
I must not omit Vandana Shiva who helped, like Feyerabend, to foster a critical attitude toward scientism. Shiva and Maria Mies (like their own predecessor, De Beauvoir) also emboldened my latent Feminism - and , importantly, brought its intimate connection with Nature into play.
I must mention Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak , also: though with them it was ever a feeling of travelling along parallel tracks, if not within the same Arena.
David Bohm and Krishnamurti also helped in strengthening my convictions, though I found the former by far the more insightful one, with his brilliantly discursive style of open discussion.
Just when I thought all the ducks were, at last, in a neat row – no, not to be shot at, but to be admired as a formation – I ran into the lone work of Amit Goswami (now a cult hero) that patched the very last pieces on to the evolving tapestry.
He is, I think, amongst the most gifted of contemporary physicists (and , also, happily, likes my work).
Other than Heilbroner and Sweezy (though they were anything but conventional economists), I have not mentioned ‘economists’ in this story, owing to the simple fact that economics is a barren, sterile , and axiomatic, discourse that needs be wholly overhauled , if one is to further an understanding of the human condition.
If Economics is to be vindicated as a discipline that yields any usable fruit, I can only think of Ravi Batra’s brilliant ‘The Myth Of Free Trade’ work , which patiently, and with painstaking gathering of data, indefeasibly disables the very Greatest Myth of Classical Economics. The only other Project I am aware of, that finally, after two centuries of fantasizing, attempts to place the subject , on some kind of an empirical footing, if only in preliminary, introductory text-book form, is the work pioneered under the stewardship of Neva Goodwin at the GDAE (Tufts).
Now, I have saved mention of Classic, Canonical , Scholars, who did not jump on the Modernist bandwagon, to the last.
I will single out but a few: F Nietzsche, S Kierkegaarde, C. Jung, on the Continent and J.Ruskin, W.Carlyle, W.Wordworth, R. Southey, and O.Goldsmith, in England were grappling with issues whose unravelment helps unmask many of the High Pretences of Modernism.
On the India side to this, I must mention the bejewelled tradition of Vedic Ideas(which so influenced Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenheur, Emerson, Jung, et. al.) , as distilled by Adi Shankara, and including its Greatest Critic::Siddhartha , the Buddha.
Many were the laden nights that I listened, in awe (in translated audio text) - at their prismatic insights into the Human Dilemma.
Closer to our times, Vivekananda and Gandhi , who straddled the awkward gap between Tradition and Modernity – if, in different ways - helped me think through many issues that are part of the ratiocination of a distinguished , but rather convoluted, Vedic lineage.
Now let me state a very important axiomatic of Eurocentrism (and many named above are wholly within a Eurocentric paradigm, though they are all, a la Shakespeare, honorable men and women): it simply will not allow perspectives outside of its Universe.
In effect, and in all irony, the “Other’ is compelled to borrow , even its very Critique of Eurocentrism , from European thought, if it is to get a hearing!!
Only the ‘loyal opposition’ is granted play: If one dares to ‘break’ with European ideas altogether, one is dismissed as , the ultimate insult!, a ‘Nativist’.
Well, I have ‘broken with the Enlightenment’: and I am wholly at ease with name-calling (believe me , and I know: it doesn’t stop with name-calling…), of any kind.
2
The ‘East-West’ dichotomy, is, in this context, a rather bland misnomer.
The ‘difference’ , today, really , is between Tradition (in this case Late Tradition) and Late (Euro)Modernity.
Europe suffered its Modernist Revolutions , long prior to the Antic Civilisations of Asia, who , with the possible exception of Japan, received ‘Modernity’ only via the rigors of Colonial Conquest.
The latter: India, China (and its early periphery of Japan, Korea and Vietnam) , Persia, the Mediterranean , and much of West Asia (in the Tigris-Euphrates area) – I omit Egypt form the Mediterranean clutch since it did not endure into Modern times – were , unmistakably, highly evolved societies in relation to Northern Europe.
Northern Europe, largely unaccomplished in the Material and Civil Arts (save Warfare) conquered the Mediterranean first (The ‘Crusades’) , and assimilated its Original cultures into itself, even claiming putative descent from it (the so-called ‘Renaissance’).
Next , it subdued the native peoples of North and South America.
Then, it turned to Asia, Australia, and Africa: and ransacked as much of those spaces as it could.
Its own brand of Modernism was then imposed, as if its various extractions were not enough : on culture after culture.
Regrettably, there is a Gresham’s Law of Civilisations(given that Gresham has a Law of his own, let me dub it Kanth's Law): the less evolved (in terms of values) tend to overrun the more evolved - the ‘Barbarians at the Gate ‘, of the Other, were Europeans.
How were they able to do so, even granting ‘advantages’ of cannon and chicanery (of course one can hardly belittle these devices: EuroModern despotism was built upon outrageous fraud – indeed, EuroModernists , are arguably, the Greatest Deceivers of All Time -of which the latter-day WMD ploy is only a trivially abject example. Of course, their hegemony was always buttressed by the – now openly confessed- doctrine of Outright , and permanent, Military Supremacy)?
Civilisation, or the lack of it, provides the clue.
Why is it that India and China lay next to each other, more or less peaceably , for centuries whereas Europeans past (and present) could not go through even a century without warfare?
The ravening European hungered, and thirsted, far more than his ‘Eastern’ cousins: was ready to leave ‘home’ and spend lifetimes – nay, generations - in distal, inhospitable foreign shores , seeking the humdrum manna, the drabbest mess of pottage, of the mundane earth: because His own Locus, His Native Lands , were so very devoid of such fare.
So, the very mastery of the civilized arts, in India and China, limited their appetites for, and any tendency to, sustained, long term ‘adventurism’.
I am reminded, to digress but a little, of the Last Mogul, the indolent Bahadur Shah, who continued to scribe his beloved love poems, despite being aware that the Brits were on the march.
Silly, isn’t it? Or, is it?
Similarly, the many, Indian tribal chiefs that stoutly resisted the British , when not militarily vanquished, threw in the towel all too prematurely , anxious to return to convivial enjoyments: only the hapless, stolid, steadfast, British trooper, joyless, visionless, far from home and hearth, with only duty and booty (i.e. cupidity merged with stupidity) in mind - in other words, already a zombie – stood ever-ready in the mid-day sun, to die , in any dirty ditch, for the Crown , as required by Orders from above: and so , eventually, prevailed.
European barbarism , relatively speaking, provoked their fitful Exodus: Asiatic civilization, au contraire, restrained it.
But this, though true, is question-begging.
Did the ‘wanderlust’ of the European really arise solely from the putative ‘paucity ‘of their resources?
Not entirely; for then, mutatis mutandis, one might think, all the Aboriginals would have , similarly, rushed out to conquer us all.
So , it was a species of critical metaphysical change(s) that produced this miasma of ‘discontent’ (that has not left them yet!).
Modernism (as I define it) is the encompassing term I designate that covers that novel, and fateful ,orientation and outlook.
I have defined , analytically, the concomitants of this process elsewhere ( in Works cited in the References below) so I won’t repeat it here.
Suffice it to say , that this was the First Break of Humankind from its own long-standing ‘species-being’.
All the ‘normal’ polarities of anthropic society were soon overturned, or reversed.
Individuated, and Anti-social , Greed , perforce, led the way into an everlasting, seething Ocean of Discontent (like Midas, they didn’t anticipate the inevitable).
There was so much to be pirated and purloined, they discovered – during their contact with the more opulent world during the Crusades - if only they didn’t have their own Selves as obstacles!
Thus did the nouvelle European ‘states’ ( a state being simply a permanent camp of armed men who claim monopoly over a stretch of land, and its unfortunate populace): Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, France, and England, amongst others, battle each other for supremacy.
The Wolves were extirpating each other - for the right to be sole Ruler of the Lambs that lay Without.
Many ‘sciences’ , and ‘technologies’ , were fine-tuned by this deathly serious competition.
Ideologies that held them back, like the Traditionalist notions of the Catholic Church –the Laws against Usury, or the notion of justum pretium - were gruffly set aside (the ‘Reformation’).
Societal obligations that limited the rights of these new ‘merchant-prince-pirate- plunderers’ were swiftly snuffed out (the Enclosure Movement, the Poor Laws, , the various Statutes that manacled the laborers).
Of course, every such capitulation to the calculus of greed was preceded by a noble , if dissembling, declaration (Malthus , e.g., argued against welfare subsidies saying they were too ‘patronising’, and ‘paternalist’, an affront to the dignity of the laborer!) of high principle.
Thus was Asia\Africa conquered , if one is to believe this bilge, as a form of ‘upliftment’ for their own benefit: such was the touted ‘civilisation-mongering’ norm within the casuistry of the ideology of the ‘White Man’s Burden’.
Similarly, Chinese coastal cities were shelled into submission only so they could be welcomed into the civilizing world of ‘free trade’ – in Opium, no less.
Today , the rickety old ‘Human Rights’ claptrap is deployed in much the same way, and spurred on by the same nefarious intent.
The domestic societal cost, within Europe, was horrific, the flip-side of the casual genocide inflicted on much of the Non-European world.
Family ties, tribal ties, community ties, were all rudely sundered (to the everlasting distress of the subaltern orders).
Desolation, alienation, and anomie , rose as defining attributes of the ‘West’(and remain so to this day).
Oliver Goldsmith’s wrenchingly plaintive ‘The Deserted ViIlage’ poem touches upon it all, in inimitable cadences.
The European , severed from the healing hospitalities of anthropic life – family, community, tribe – , became, in large numbers, and for the most part, a rather wretched creature: cheerless, restless, and rootless.
Minus the pumps of sugar, caffeine, and alcohol – or worse – he remains that still, mired in various modalities of existential angst.
Now Greed, and its Object - an equally Asocial , Profit-led- Productivism-and-Consumerism - took over Life itself : not as Means to an End, but as Ends-in-Themselves.
The filigreed , multi-faceted, richness of Societal Life was thus reduced to the dull abasement of producing and consuming , at the cost , to all, of the simple felicities of Being, and Living - in a degrading Libel on the Human Race!
‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay’: so intoned the moving dirge of Goldsmith.
Drugs, drug-wars, senseless mass-shootings, species destruction, , ecological degradation, nuclear contagion, toxification of nature’s troves, pesticide contamination, food crop spoliation – the monotonic cadences run on.
Yes.
For they all add up to that humming , hi-octane, world of ever-augmenting GDP the North Atlantics are so inveterately proud of.
3
This Unwholesome European Way was adopted wholesale by its rebel progeny: North America - which was to lead the world to a new , even higher (or is it lower?) Climacteric in these regards.
I have said that Modernism , as I define it, was history’s First Break with the norms of Anthropic Society.
But North America concluded a Second Break , which was even more final - in its Breach of Human Civilities.
Up until recent times, and for millennia, we ‘ homo sapiens’ have known but two dominant societal norms(or just One, perhaps, with its implied antithesis) : Morality and Immorality.
Anthropic societies are , primarily - like the human family - Moral Entities.
But America led us into Late Modernism, the Second Break, by initiating, virtually singly, a new nadir of devolution: the oxymoronic, Amoral Society .
EuroModernism triumphed by deracinating Communal obligations, and a host of interdependencies that marked the ‘social compact’ of pre-Modern Europe, across the board.
Late Modernism , in full motion since about the period of Reagan-Thatcher, for its part, turns and twists the knife, this time, upon its own corpus: cannibalizing itself, by undermining its own ontic bases (economic and societal infrastructures): - and , as such, is little other than an inglorious suicide mission.
Now , the Moral and the Immoral presume each other, limit each other.
But the ‘Amoral ‘ is a brand new Vista of Utter Normlessness.
The Only Limit to any societal disorder within the Amoral Regime - cupidity, violence, chicanery- is the Law Alone (rather than moral regard or ethical norms).
Small wonder that 94% of the world’s lawsuits are filed in America.
And the Peace is kept , and broken, by naked armed force: more guns, and more gun deaths , than any society on earth.
And more people, per cent, incarcerated ( a fact lately turned even more hypertrophic - to feed the profits of a privatized prison-commercial complex).
Is this , at all, an Anthropic, i.e. , a human, society , held in check, as it is, only by Mutual Terror?
Traditional Societies are based, like the anthropic family, on a ‘Balance of Affections’ (take any Native American tribe, e.g.).
Euro-Modernist ‘societies’ , in Emergent Modernism, were/are held together by a ‘Balance of Interests’ (the so-called ‘Civil Society’ of ‘universal egoism’ where each sees the other as a means only to some private advantage, and where, famously, ‘Hell is Other People’.).
But Late Modernist ‘societies’ are ‘held’, if at all!, only by mutual intimidation, or a ‘Balance of Terror’.
The Emergent , permanent, Security State (droning, surveillance, profiling, etc) being exported globally today, is chillingly emblematic of that new, apocalyptic genre.
4
So now we know why Europe ‘pulled ahead’(though any merit to such species of ‘gain’ is, clearly, to be questioned).
It stood ready to do ANYthing for material gain (Slavery, Fracking, et. al).
It was ready, also, to inflict ANY quantum of violence to achieve its Ends of Mastery(Hiroshima, Nagasaki).
I will give but one antic , counter-example, to illustrate by contrast.
Anyone familiar with ancient Vedic Classics, in everything from Science to Metaphysics , cannot help being struck by the fact that the Knowledge Quantum existed thousands of years ago, in the Indus Valley region, to spur an inexorable drive to amassing vast material wealth.
But they did NOT take that route: it was a sort of societal , metaphysical , ‘choice’.
They were ‘rich enough’ ( and a lot richer , by far, than Pre-Modern Europe): and that was enough.
That mode of 'gold-rush' Materialism, that was to overwhelm Europe, was NOT found to be in favor.
Sanatana Dharma (or Vedic theosophy) assigns the commercial sphere exclusively to one Caste , so as to limit, and localize , one might speculate, its corrosive impact.
China, on the autre hand, pursued technology far more vigorously than India (whence their ancient ‘lead’ in technologies over other societies) – Confucianism was far more pragmatic than Brahmin Idealism- but they ,too, did not encourage, rampant, runaway, wealth-seeking.
Yet, today, the entire gamut of North Atlantic societies (yes: the precocious American Child has assiduously ‘fathered’ the European Man) are ready to colonise the Moon, and Mars, if need be, to fill the deepening voids of its own tragic emptiness.
I have used simple metaphors - and they are no more than metaphors! - to capture this vital ‘difference’.
Since the Sixteenth Century, Modernist Europe gave up its natural ‘Mammalian’ heritage to adopt increasingly ‘Reptilian’ traits.
So, the current, global, ‘war’ is between the Mammals and the Reptiles(no offense to either species): between the grimly cold calculators of material advantage, and the more warm-blooded , emotive , custodians of their, much simpler, domestic weal.
Take the BRICS, e.g., and compare them to the G7.
How do they differ?
Very, very , importantly.
The BRICS are uninterested in Hegemony (or ‘full spectrum dominance’.).
They are not ready to risk genocide, or mass annihilation of our species, to achieve their socio-economic ends.
But can we not object , e.g., and say that , surely, India, China, Russia et. al., are all now en route to the same Valhalla of reckless Marketisation , and Globalization, as in the West?
Fair question, but one that begs the prior Query: for which, or who, were the Comity of Nations that conspired , for decades, to drag them , kicking and screaming, into that Unfamiliar Compass, using every means, fair and foul?
Yet , despite all that, they are still NOT akin to the West - as yet !- on the Two Vital Parameters noted above.
They are still ‘Satisficers’ in the Profiteering Game, not insensate Maximisers.
And they still cling to the quaint old nostrums of Morality and Immorality.
In other words they are still , despite their enforced marketisation, anthropic societies.
Civilisation , like modesty, forbids.
Russia recently passed a Law that prohibits swear-words in the Public Media.
You can guess where the loud howls of protest came from: yes, it was from the G-7.
After all, Milan Kundera fled (‘defected’) to the West, and was duly received as a Culture Hero, to gain the inalienable right – yes - to pen porn.
It’s the one , obviously vital!, higher-order, ‘ freedom’ that even western security states do not care to tamper with.
5
It is time now to sum up, in précis form, the difference, between ‘east’ and ‘west’, or rather between the Late Modernists and the Late Traditionalist , but now Ambivalent Modernists.
The European, bereft of even the bare material artefacts of comfort and convenience (i.e. ‘civilisation’) , beginning in the Sixteenth Century, swept across the globe like a holocaust, plundering, pillaging , and expropriating.
This catapulted that Sub-Continent (no, as every schoolgirl is aware, Europe is NOT a continent :that being a usage inspired only by their smug ‘apartheid’, but a rather small part of the Landmass of Eurasia) , materially, above a world much of which, like India and China, was far and away ahead of them in virtually all regards.
In this process , the European shed vital anthropic traits, one by one, dissipating the precious , rarefied qualities of societal life, in favor of cumulatively possessive quantitative cravings.
Family and Community – and its binding forces, such as kinship and kindred - fell prey early on: so HE (I use the Masculine Voice, since Women remain the ‘Other’ in ALL such matters of Empire and Power) increasingly subsisted in a sordid moral vacuum, isolated, forlorn, and ‘alienated’.
When aware of such deprivations at all, He sought to , desperately, recreate these Lost Affinities, in hapless ‘modernist’ fashion, via wan Utopian Cravings – such as ‘Communism’ – as mark the cri de couer works from More to Marx, including the short-lived vintage of the ‘Noble Savage’ idiom.
Speaking metaphorically, having ‘ left home’ – i..e , the matrix of kin and kindred, the only sanctuary of bliss that anthropic life affords us all , high or low- he looked everywhere ( and still does) , in all the wrong places, and in vain, for the ‘paradise lost’.
Nietzche , Kierkegaard, Goethe, and German Romanticism, like Russian Romanticism (Pushkin, Tolstoy, et. al.), both nations being late comers to Marketisation, bemoaned the Great Bereavement , as philosophers can and do , in powerful works , that are still resonant.
Carlyle and Ruskin, Blake, and Southey, did much the same in England, if in the form of ‘voices in the wilderness’.
But ,for the most part – and this is important - He embraced his own wretched anomie, wore it proudly like an ornament and a badge of a higher attainment, and projected his ‘loss’ and ‘discontent’ externally in malevolence, misanthropy , and misogyny : content only when razing culture and civilisation wherever he encountered it - ‘levelling’ the world, in grim satisfaction, in his own , unhappy, morose, image (and serving as a living testament , en passant, to the Marxian idea that the ‘bourgeois’ have no values - save that of deriding all values).
At any rate, the Non-European world was uprooted : and turned into that pathetic morass of wretchedness that is contemptuously titled the ‘third world’, by the very grandees that willfully and ruthlessly manufactured, in cold blood, and by brute force, that staple, and appalling, Brand of Societal Tragedy.
Europe created , via Classical Colonialism, not ‘poverty ‘–which is a relative term – but acute , and real, deprivation , globally: its own enrichment being directly proportionate to the havoc wreaked on the ‘Other’.
The grim visage of wretchedness that still litters much of Africa , at its base, is of European origin, much as the demoralization of ‘Native Americans’, a continent away: they forcibly disrupted the natural rhythms of tribal life , and tribal ecology, to feed their extortions.
Slavery, genocide, and civilisational destruction: these are the momenta of Modern Europe’s Great Ascent.
India, arguably the wealthiest civilization on the globe in the Sixteenth century, using Europe’s own misguided yardsticks (though far richer than even that , within its own civilisational scales) , was calmly and rationally looted and shattered, reduced to being , within two centuries of British – or shall I say ‘Brutish’? – barbarism, for a while, the 'world’s most successful beggar' (and one might, equivalently, guess who the world’s most successful thief is - or was).
Sixty years after a nominal independence, today, it is finding its own footholds again as a solid, senior, member of the BRICS configuration, albeit still working within the maladroit Rules of the Game of its former Oppressors.
So what, or where,is the Critical Divide?
It lies in the Blanket Philosophy of Materialism that Europe adopted , covering ALL social spaces: science, philosophy, religion, morality, and culture.
(Euro)Modernism is built upon Materialism: it deploys a materialist science to advance an economy and society driven/riven by materialist values, using illimitable material force ,as needed , to further its insatiable materialist ambitions.
Sadly, EuroModernism is Wrong on ALL epistemic Scores:categorically misleading in its Science (latter-day Physics defies much of Classical Physics), False in its Metaphysics (Newtonian Materialism is unsustainable by today’s scientific discoveries, its ‘Determinist’ world now replaced by a ‘Probabilistic ‘world) , and ever so hopelessly barren, and denuded of amity , convenance, and grace, in its Amorality.
And all of Traditional – tribal – society stands , as it has always stood, in Grand Negation of virtually every Canon of that tawdry Enterprise.
In consequence, the Late Traditionalists ( largely Non-Europeans), deep within their psyches , remain closer to their anthropic geist: and thereby are, relatively speaking, more stable, more centred, more concrete, less abstract, less alienated, less anomic, more affective, more emotive, more contextual, more whole - than their average EuroModernist counterparts.
These key differences of ‘temperament’ - not all of which necessarily produce virtuous outcomes - are NOT inconsequential, but have a decisive impact on epistemic orientations and ontic practices..
Stated starkly: the world is safely left in the hands of a Masai - not so in the hands of a NATO General, a Corporate CEO, or a D.C.Beltway Politician.
The disembodied , cool, calculating ‘rationality’ of the EuroModernist has , and has had, its uses in various contexts: but, in Late Modernism , its utility is wholly eclipsed by its strident penchant for stark robotisation of human traits , turning flesh-and-blood humans into mechanized automatons, ‘living by the book’ , knowing little other than ‘the book’, and bereft of any and all creative imaginations that transcend the ‘for-profit-market-nexus’.
At any rate, returning to metaphysics, Human Subjectivity , far from being an odd, even anomalous , reflex of barren matter, as in Classical Physics, stands instead , now, owing to Quantum science, at the very Epicenter of our otherwise inscrutable Cosmic Reality.
As Goswami puts it, we live, ineluctably, in a ‘Self-Aware” Universe: to which I add - and a ‘Self-Fulfilling’ one, as well.
It may be recalled that European Social Science, at its early inception, was wholly dominated by ‘Physics-envy’, (i.e. of the Classical Newtonian Paradigm) and needs, now, to be suitably expurgated.
And the Non-European World, though increasingly cast (not by any accident, but by the fact that the world is dominated by the West) in that same recreant, EuroModernist , image, is still not entirely ‘emancipated’ from its own ‘traditionalist’ value structures: and this applies, even now, in the 21st Century, to virtually all of Africa, Asia , and South America.
Thus are the Mammals yet set apart from the Reptiles.
And thus is Late Modernist Barbarism ,entirely European in provenance, yet checked by the admittedly fading premises of a Traditionalist civilisational genius still residing in the Other: that, for all its own undeniable, internal , petty, brutalities, cruelties, and infelicities , which I do not mitigate, has never threatened with extinction, willfully nor inadvertently – indeed, not even in its wildest dreams - the essential , and enduring, hospitalities (such as they are) of our transient , Planetary Home - their ambitions and joys being, ever, wholly local , and insular, in origin and impact.
All other despotisms – and Masculinity ensures , universally, a none-too-benign outcome whenever, and wherever, it runs amok – left both Society and Nature Untouched: it was the North Atlantic’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ to disrupt (let us hope not irreversibly) the normal functioning of both - and in record time.
Those who wish to , and stand ever ready to, press that nuclear button, past and present, are firmly, and irrefragably, of the Amoral, Late Modernist , ilk.
The sad truth is that anthropic existence is , even at best, tenuous and transitory, leaving very little to be cheerily glorified: and yet, a small part of the human populace has put even that minimal boon, of the baseline survival of All species , at risk - via its demonic zeal for unceasing surplus extraction from both society and nature.
It is EuroModernist values, or , perhaps ,its striking dearth of anthropic values !, that benumbs us today - like a miasma hanging over all - with a universally felt apocalyptic fear : of encroaching, impending , Doom.
Tragedy is that there is no external force powerful enough to halt its runaway chariot: yet ,ironically, its tumultuous reign may yet expire , and in the none too distal future, owing to the giddy overreach of its own titanic, if truantly ill-conceived, eco-political ambitions.
It is, in other words, as already hinted, providentially, Self-subverting.
Sic transit infamia mundi.
REFERENCES
Kanth, R Breaking With the Enlightenment, 1997
______ Against Eurocentrism, 2005
______ The Challenge of Eurocentrism, 2009
______ 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>
[©2014, R.Kanth, Harvard University]
Aeons ago, when I commenced my academic avocation, as an Asst .Professor at the then newly opened , and highly innovative, Jawaharlal Nehru University, in India, at the ripe, green, age of 21, I had , sub rosa, but one real ‘quest’.
To discover the ‘essential’ (I use the word advisedly) difference between the classically stereotyped ‘east’ and ‘west’ (for those innocent of such genre of old hat, I commend Kipling’s ringing, heroic, ballad, ‘the Ballad of East and West’ that immortalizes that ‘divide’).
Only very recently, about 2007 , did I finally put it all together.
Yes, it is true: I , now, have – if only to my own satisfaction! - the Unholy Grail.
If there were false starts, and mis-steps , along the way I am unaware of them, since I feel I had my eye on the ‘ prize’ from the start.
But, there was a certain streak of Brahmin perfectionism (much is made of the Protestant Ethic: but it pales, like a lover’s face in moonlight, before its sovereign Brahmin predecessor) that wanted every Argument to be in place before I announced it to the world.
This I did, on January 04, 2007, at my Festschrift, at the Chicago Meetings of the American Economic Association.
My Book Against Eurocentrism (Macmillan, 2005) , but ,more so, my other Book , The Challenge of Eurocentrism (Macmillan, 2009) spells out the Thesis in much detail.
I had doled out bits and pieces of the Argument , at various invited gatherings , but given that most at such events were Economists , the ideas, likely, went past all but a handful.
At more mixed public gatherings , there was enthusiasm, but I was not always sure of genuine comprehension.
My very early correspondent friends (and I have been really blessed with the best) – the late Robert Heilbroner and Paul Sweezy; Noam Chomsky, and Roger Owen – probably got what I was driving at: but maintained a certain – necessary?- discretion vis a vis my ideas.
Immanuel Wallerstein also read bits of my work ( commending it publicly, if cautiously).
I had met Roy Bhaskar early on (Oxford, 1987) and liked him and his work; but it was apparent (at least to moi) that my own ideas were heading in quite another direction(though his more recent work it is said, may run at least tangentially close).
However , the one I met very late – in his short life – the inimitable Paul Feyerabend, was hewed of another clay.
If the above were all canonical saints, he towered over them like a god.
In him, and his work (for the twain were the same), I found Total Empathy.
I still treasure his beautifully handwritten epistle, but a few months before his tragic passing, bemoaning the fact that only a few really understood where this chaotic Age of ours was headed.
I must not omit Vandana Shiva who helped, like Feyerabend, to foster a critical attitude toward scientism. Shiva and Maria Mies (like their own predecessor, De Beauvoir) also emboldened my latent Feminism - and , importantly, brought its intimate connection with Nature into play.
I must mention Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak , also: though with them it was ever a feeling of travelling along parallel tracks, if not within the same Arena.
David Bohm and Krishnamurti also helped in strengthening my convictions, though I found the former by far the more insightful one, with his brilliantly discursive style of open discussion.
Just when I thought all the ducks were, at last, in a neat row – no, not to be shot at, but to be admired as a formation – I ran into the lone work of Amit Goswami (now a cult hero) that patched the very last pieces on to the evolving tapestry.
He is, I think, amongst the most gifted of contemporary physicists (and , also, happily, likes my work).
Other than Heilbroner and Sweezy (though they were anything but conventional economists), I have not mentioned ‘economists’ in this story, owing to the simple fact that economics is a barren, sterile , and axiomatic, discourse that needs be wholly overhauled , if one is to further an understanding of the human condition.
If Economics is to be vindicated as a discipline that yields any usable fruit, I can only think of Ravi Batra’s brilliant ‘The Myth Of Free Trade’ work , which patiently, and with painstaking gathering of data, indefeasibly disables the very Greatest Myth of Classical Economics. The only other Project I am aware of, that finally, after two centuries of fantasizing, attempts to place the subject , on some kind of an empirical footing, if only in preliminary, introductory text-book form, is the work pioneered under the stewardship of Neva Goodwin at the GDAE (Tufts).
Now, I have saved mention of Classic, Canonical , Scholars, who did not jump on the Modernist bandwagon, to the last.
I will single out but a few: F Nietzsche, S Kierkegaarde, C. Jung, on the Continent and J.Ruskin, W.Carlyle, W.Wordworth, R. Southey, and O.Goldsmith, in England were grappling with issues whose unravelment helps unmask many of the High Pretences of Modernism.
On the India side to this, I must mention the bejewelled tradition of Vedic Ideas(which so influenced Spinoza, Nietzsche, Schopenheur, Emerson, Jung, et. al.) , as distilled by Adi Shankara, and including its Greatest Critic::Siddhartha , the Buddha.
Many were the laden nights that I listened, in awe (in translated audio text) - at their prismatic insights into the Human Dilemma.
Closer to our times, Vivekananda and Gandhi , who straddled the awkward gap between Tradition and Modernity – if, in different ways - helped me think through many issues that are part of the ratiocination of a distinguished , but rather convoluted, Vedic lineage.
Now let me state a very important axiomatic of Eurocentrism (and many named above are wholly within a Eurocentric paradigm, though they are all, a la Shakespeare, honorable men and women): it simply will not allow perspectives outside of its Universe.
In effect, and in all irony, the “Other’ is compelled to borrow , even its very Critique of Eurocentrism , from European thought, if it is to get a hearing!!
Only the ‘loyal opposition’ is granted play: If one dares to ‘break’ with European ideas altogether, one is dismissed as , the ultimate insult!, a ‘Nativist’.
Well, I have ‘broken with the Enlightenment’: and I am wholly at ease with name-calling (believe me , and I know: it doesn’t stop with name-calling…), of any kind.
2
The ‘East-West’ dichotomy, is, in this context, a rather bland misnomer.
The ‘difference’ , today, really , is between Tradition (in this case Late Tradition) and Late (Euro)Modernity.
Europe suffered its Modernist Revolutions , long prior to the Antic Civilisations of Asia, who , with the possible exception of Japan, received ‘Modernity’ only via the rigors of Colonial Conquest.
The latter: India, China (and its early periphery of Japan, Korea and Vietnam) , Persia, the Mediterranean , and much of West Asia (in the Tigris-Euphrates area) – I omit Egypt form the Mediterranean clutch since it did not endure into Modern times – were , unmistakably, highly evolved societies in relation to Northern Europe.
Northern Europe, largely unaccomplished in the Material and Civil Arts (save Warfare) conquered the Mediterranean first (The ‘Crusades’) , and assimilated its Original cultures into itself, even claiming putative descent from it (the so-called ‘Renaissance’).
Next , it subdued the native peoples of North and South America.
Then, it turned to Asia, Australia, and Africa: and ransacked as much of those spaces as it could.
Its own brand of Modernism was then imposed, as if its various extractions were not enough : on culture after culture.
Regrettably, there is a Gresham’s Law of Civilisations(given that Gresham has a Law of his own, let me dub it Kanth's Law): the less evolved (in terms of values) tend to overrun the more evolved - the ‘Barbarians at the Gate ‘, of the Other, were Europeans.
How were they able to do so, even granting ‘advantages’ of cannon and chicanery (of course one can hardly belittle these devices: EuroModern despotism was built upon outrageous fraud – indeed, EuroModernists , are arguably, the Greatest Deceivers of All Time -of which the latter-day WMD ploy is only a trivially abject example. Of course, their hegemony was always buttressed by the – now openly confessed- doctrine of Outright , and permanent, Military Supremacy)?
Civilisation, or the lack of it, provides the clue.
Why is it that India and China lay next to each other, more or less peaceably , for centuries whereas Europeans past (and present) could not go through even a century without warfare?
The ravening European hungered, and thirsted, far more than his ‘Eastern’ cousins: was ready to leave ‘home’ and spend lifetimes – nay, generations - in distal, inhospitable foreign shores , seeking the humdrum manna, the drabbest mess of pottage, of the mundane earth: because His own Locus, His Native Lands , were so very devoid of such fare.
So, the very mastery of the civilized arts, in India and China, limited their appetites for, and any tendency to, sustained, long term ‘adventurism’.
I am reminded, to digress but a little, of the Last Mogul, the indolent Bahadur Shah, who continued to scribe his beloved love poems, despite being aware that the Brits were on the march.
Silly, isn’t it? Or, is it?
Similarly, the many, Indian tribal chiefs that stoutly resisted the British , when not militarily vanquished, threw in the towel all too prematurely , anxious to return to convivial enjoyments: only the hapless, stolid, steadfast, British trooper, joyless, visionless, far from home and hearth, with only duty and booty (i.e. cupidity merged with stupidity) in mind - in other words, already a zombie – stood ever-ready in the mid-day sun, to die , in any dirty ditch, for the Crown , as required by Orders from above: and so , eventually, prevailed.
European barbarism , relatively speaking, provoked their fitful Exodus: Asiatic civilization, au contraire, restrained it.
But this, though true, is question-begging.
Did the ‘wanderlust’ of the European really arise solely from the putative ‘paucity ‘of their resources?
Not entirely; for then, mutatis mutandis, one might think, all the Aboriginals would have , similarly, rushed out to conquer us all.
So , it was a species of critical metaphysical change(s) that produced this miasma of ‘discontent’ (that has not left them yet!).
Modernism (as I define it) is the encompassing term I designate that covers that novel, and fateful ,orientation and outlook.
I have defined , analytically, the concomitants of this process elsewhere ( in Works cited in the References below) so I won’t repeat it here.
Suffice it to say , that this was the First Break of Humankind from its own long-standing ‘species-being’.
All the ‘normal’ polarities of anthropic society were soon overturned, or reversed.
Individuated, and Anti-social , Greed , perforce, led the way into an everlasting, seething Ocean of Discontent (like Midas, they didn’t anticipate the inevitable).
There was so much to be pirated and purloined, they discovered – during their contact with the more opulent world during the Crusades - if only they didn’t have their own Selves as obstacles!
Thus did the nouvelle European ‘states’ ( a state being simply a permanent camp of armed men who claim monopoly over a stretch of land, and its unfortunate populace): Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, France, and England, amongst others, battle each other for supremacy.
The Wolves were extirpating each other - for the right to be sole Ruler of the Lambs that lay Without.
Many ‘sciences’ , and ‘technologies’ , were fine-tuned by this deathly serious competition.
Ideologies that held them back, like the Traditionalist notions of the Catholic Church –the Laws against Usury, or the notion of justum pretium - were gruffly set aside (the ‘Reformation’).
Societal obligations that limited the rights of these new ‘merchant-prince-pirate- plunderers’ were swiftly snuffed out (the Enclosure Movement, the Poor Laws, , the various Statutes that manacled the laborers).
Of course, every such capitulation to the calculus of greed was preceded by a noble , if dissembling, declaration (Malthus , e.g., argued against welfare subsidies saying they were too ‘patronising’, and ‘paternalist’, an affront to the dignity of the laborer!) of high principle.
Thus was Asia\Africa conquered , if one is to believe this bilge, as a form of ‘upliftment’ for their own benefit: such was the touted ‘civilisation-mongering’ norm within the casuistry of the ideology of the ‘White Man’s Burden’.
Similarly, Chinese coastal cities were shelled into submission only so they could be welcomed into the civilizing world of ‘free trade’ – in Opium, no less.
Today , the rickety old ‘Human Rights’ claptrap is deployed in much the same way, and spurred on by the same nefarious intent.
The domestic societal cost, within Europe, was horrific, the flip-side of the casual genocide inflicted on much of the Non-European world.
Family ties, tribal ties, community ties, were all rudely sundered (to the everlasting distress of the subaltern orders).
Desolation, alienation, and anomie , rose as defining attributes of the ‘West’(and remain so to this day).
Oliver Goldsmith’s wrenchingly plaintive ‘The Deserted ViIlage’ poem touches upon it all, in inimitable cadences.
The European , severed from the healing hospitalities of anthropic life – family, community, tribe – , became, in large numbers, and for the most part, a rather wretched creature: cheerless, restless, and rootless.
Minus the pumps of sugar, caffeine, and alcohol – or worse – he remains that still, mired in various modalities of existential angst.
Now Greed, and its Object - an equally Asocial , Profit-led- Productivism-and-Consumerism - took over Life itself : not as Means to an End, but as Ends-in-Themselves.
The filigreed , multi-faceted, richness of Societal Life was thus reduced to the dull abasement of producing and consuming , at the cost , to all, of the simple felicities of Being, and Living - in a degrading Libel on the Human Race!
‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and men decay’: so intoned the moving dirge of Goldsmith.
Drugs, drug-wars, senseless mass-shootings, species destruction, , ecological degradation, nuclear contagion, toxification of nature’s troves, pesticide contamination, food crop spoliation – the monotonic cadences run on.
Yes.
For they all add up to that humming , hi-octane, world of ever-augmenting GDP the North Atlantics are so inveterately proud of.
3
This Unwholesome European Way was adopted wholesale by its rebel progeny: North America - which was to lead the world to a new , even higher (or is it lower?) Climacteric in these regards.
I have said that Modernism , as I define it, was history’s First Break with the norms of Anthropic Society.
But North America concluded a Second Break , which was even more final - in its Breach of Human Civilities.
Up until recent times, and for millennia, we ‘ homo sapiens’ have known but two dominant societal norms(or just One, perhaps, with its implied antithesis) : Morality and Immorality.
Anthropic societies are , primarily - like the human family - Moral Entities.
But America led us into Late Modernism, the Second Break, by initiating, virtually singly, a new nadir of devolution: the oxymoronic, Amoral Society .
EuroModernism triumphed by deracinating Communal obligations, and a host of interdependencies that marked the ‘social compact’ of pre-Modern Europe, across the board.
Late Modernism , in full motion since about the period of Reagan-Thatcher, for its part, turns and twists the knife, this time, upon its own corpus: cannibalizing itself, by undermining its own ontic bases (economic and societal infrastructures): - and , as such, is little other than an inglorious suicide mission.
Now , the Moral and the Immoral presume each other, limit each other.
But the ‘Amoral ‘ is a brand new Vista of Utter Normlessness.
The Only Limit to any societal disorder within the Amoral Regime - cupidity, violence, chicanery- is the Law Alone (rather than moral regard or ethical norms).
Small wonder that 94% of the world’s lawsuits are filed in America.
And the Peace is kept , and broken, by naked armed force: more guns, and more gun deaths , than any society on earth.
And more people, per cent, incarcerated ( a fact lately turned even more hypertrophic - to feed the profits of a privatized prison-commercial complex).
Is this , at all, an Anthropic, i.e. , a human, society , held in check, as it is, only by Mutual Terror?
Traditional Societies are based, like the anthropic family, on a ‘Balance of Affections’ (take any Native American tribe, e.g.).
Euro-Modernist ‘societies’ , in Emergent Modernism, were/are held together by a ‘Balance of Interests’ (the so-called ‘Civil Society’ of ‘universal egoism’ where each sees the other as a means only to some private advantage, and where, famously, ‘Hell is Other People’.).
But Late Modernist ‘societies’ are ‘held’, if at all!, only by mutual intimidation, or a ‘Balance of Terror’.
The Emergent , permanent, Security State (droning, surveillance, profiling, etc) being exported globally today, is chillingly emblematic of that new, apocalyptic genre.
4
So now we know why Europe ‘pulled ahead’(though any merit to such species of ‘gain’ is, clearly, to be questioned).
It stood ready to do ANYthing for material gain (Slavery, Fracking, et. al).
It was ready, also, to inflict ANY quantum of violence to achieve its Ends of Mastery(Hiroshima, Nagasaki).
I will give but one antic , counter-example, to illustrate by contrast.
Anyone familiar with ancient Vedic Classics, in everything from Science to Metaphysics , cannot help being struck by the fact that the Knowledge Quantum existed thousands of years ago, in the Indus Valley region, to spur an inexorable drive to amassing vast material wealth.
But they did NOT take that route: it was a sort of societal , metaphysical , ‘choice’.
They were ‘rich enough’ ( and a lot richer , by far, than Pre-Modern Europe): and that was enough.
That mode of 'gold-rush' Materialism, that was to overwhelm Europe, was NOT found to be in favor.
Sanatana Dharma (or Vedic theosophy) assigns the commercial sphere exclusively to one Caste , so as to limit, and localize , one might speculate, its corrosive impact.
China, on the autre hand, pursued technology far more vigorously than India (whence their ancient ‘lead’ in technologies over other societies) – Confucianism was far more pragmatic than Brahmin Idealism- but they ,too, did not encourage, rampant, runaway, wealth-seeking.
Yet, today, the entire gamut of North Atlantic societies (yes: the precocious American Child has assiduously ‘fathered’ the European Man) are ready to colonise the Moon, and Mars, if need be, to fill the deepening voids of its own tragic emptiness.
I have used simple metaphors - and they are no more than metaphors! - to capture this vital ‘difference’.
Since the Sixteenth Century, Modernist Europe gave up its natural ‘Mammalian’ heritage to adopt increasingly ‘Reptilian’ traits.
So, the current, global, ‘war’ is between the Mammals and the Reptiles(no offense to either species): between the grimly cold calculators of material advantage, and the more warm-blooded , emotive , custodians of their, much simpler, domestic weal.
Take the BRICS, e.g., and compare them to the G7.
How do they differ?
Very, very , importantly.
The BRICS are uninterested in Hegemony (or ‘full spectrum dominance’.).
They are not ready to risk genocide, or mass annihilation of our species, to achieve their socio-economic ends.
But can we not object , e.g., and say that , surely, India, China, Russia et. al., are all now en route to the same Valhalla of reckless Marketisation , and Globalization, as in the West?
Fair question, but one that begs the prior Query: for which, or who, were the Comity of Nations that conspired , for decades, to drag them , kicking and screaming, into that Unfamiliar Compass, using every means, fair and foul?
Yet , despite all that, they are still NOT akin to the West - as yet !- on the Two Vital Parameters noted above.
They are still ‘Satisficers’ in the Profiteering Game, not insensate Maximisers.
And they still cling to the quaint old nostrums of Morality and Immorality.
In other words they are still , despite their enforced marketisation, anthropic societies.
Civilisation , like modesty, forbids.
Russia recently passed a Law that prohibits swear-words in the Public Media.
You can guess where the loud howls of protest came from: yes, it was from the G-7.
After all, Milan Kundera fled (‘defected’) to the West, and was duly received as a Culture Hero, to gain the inalienable right – yes - to pen porn.
It’s the one , obviously vital!, higher-order, ‘ freedom’ that even western security states do not care to tamper with.
5
It is time now to sum up, in précis form, the difference, between ‘east’ and ‘west’, or rather between the Late Modernists and the Late Traditionalist , but now Ambivalent Modernists.
The European, bereft of even the bare material artefacts of comfort and convenience (i.e. ‘civilisation’) , beginning in the Sixteenth Century, swept across the globe like a holocaust, plundering, pillaging , and expropriating.
This catapulted that Sub-Continent (no, as every schoolgirl is aware, Europe is NOT a continent :that being a usage inspired only by their smug ‘apartheid’, but a rather small part of the Landmass of Eurasia) , materially, above a world much of which, like India and China, was far and away ahead of them in virtually all regards.
In this process , the European shed vital anthropic traits, one by one, dissipating the precious , rarefied qualities of societal life, in favor of cumulatively possessive quantitative cravings.
Family and Community – and its binding forces, such as kinship and kindred - fell prey early on: so HE (I use the Masculine Voice, since Women remain the ‘Other’ in ALL such matters of Empire and Power) increasingly subsisted in a sordid moral vacuum, isolated, forlorn, and ‘alienated’.
When aware of such deprivations at all, He sought to , desperately, recreate these Lost Affinities, in hapless ‘modernist’ fashion, via wan Utopian Cravings – such as ‘Communism’ – as mark the cri de couer works from More to Marx, including the short-lived vintage of the ‘Noble Savage’ idiom.
Speaking metaphorically, having ‘ left home’ – i..e , the matrix of kin and kindred, the only sanctuary of bliss that anthropic life affords us all , high or low- he looked everywhere ( and still does) , in all the wrong places, and in vain, for the ‘paradise lost’.
Nietzche , Kierkegaard, Goethe, and German Romanticism, like Russian Romanticism (Pushkin, Tolstoy, et. al.), both nations being late comers to Marketisation, bemoaned the Great Bereavement , as philosophers can and do , in powerful works , that are still resonant.
Carlyle and Ruskin, Blake, and Southey, did much the same in England, if in the form of ‘voices in the wilderness’.
But ,for the most part – and this is important - He embraced his own wretched anomie, wore it proudly like an ornament and a badge of a higher attainment, and projected his ‘loss’ and ‘discontent’ externally in malevolence, misanthropy , and misogyny : content only when razing culture and civilisation wherever he encountered it - ‘levelling’ the world, in grim satisfaction, in his own , unhappy, morose, image (and serving as a living testament , en passant, to the Marxian idea that the ‘bourgeois’ have no values - save that of deriding all values).
At any rate, the Non-European world was uprooted : and turned into that pathetic morass of wretchedness that is contemptuously titled the ‘third world’, by the very grandees that willfully and ruthlessly manufactured, in cold blood, and by brute force, that staple, and appalling, Brand of Societal Tragedy.
Europe created , via Classical Colonialism, not ‘poverty ‘–which is a relative term – but acute , and real, deprivation , globally: its own enrichment being directly proportionate to the havoc wreaked on the ‘Other’.
The grim visage of wretchedness that still litters much of Africa , at its base, is of European origin, much as the demoralization of ‘Native Americans’, a continent away: they forcibly disrupted the natural rhythms of tribal life , and tribal ecology, to feed their extortions.
Slavery, genocide, and civilisational destruction: these are the momenta of Modern Europe’s Great Ascent.
India, arguably the wealthiest civilization on the globe in the Sixteenth century, using Europe’s own misguided yardsticks (though far richer than even that , within its own civilisational scales) , was calmly and rationally looted and shattered, reduced to being , within two centuries of British – or shall I say ‘Brutish’? – barbarism, for a while, the 'world’s most successful beggar' (and one might, equivalently, guess who the world’s most successful thief is - or was).
Sixty years after a nominal independence, today, it is finding its own footholds again as a solid, senior, member of the BRICS configuration, albeit still working within the maladroit Rules of the Game of its former Oppressors.
So what, or where,is the Critical Divide?
It lies in the Blanket Philosophy of Materialism that Europe adopted , covering ALL social spaces: science, philosophy, religion, morality, and culture.
(Euro)Modernism is built upon Materialism: it deploys a materialist science to advance an economy and society driven/riven by materialist values, using illimitable material force ,as needed , to further its insatiable materialist ambitions.
Sadly, EuroModernism is Wrong on ALL epistemic Scores:categorically misleading in its Science (latter-day Physics defies much of Classical Physics), False in its Metaphysics (Newtonian Materialism is unsustainable by today’s scientific discoveries, its ‘Determinist’ world now replaced by a ‘Probabilistic ‘world) , and ever so hopelessly barren, and denuded of amity , convenance, and grace, in its Amorality.
And all of Traditional – tribal – society stands , as it has always stood, in Grand Negation of virtually every Canon of that tawdry Enterprise.
In consequence, the Late Traditionalists ( largely Non-Europeans), deep within their psyches , remain closer to their anthropic geist: and thereby are, relatively speaking, more stable, more centred, more concrete, less abstract, less alienated, less anomic, more affective, more emotive, more contextual, more whole - than their average EuroModernist counterparts.
These key differences of ‘temperament’ - not all of which necessarily produce virtuous outcomes - are NOT inconsequential, but have a decisive impact on epistemic orientations and ontic practices..
Stated starkly: the world is safely left in the hands of a Masai - not so in the hands of a NATO General, a Corporate CEO, or a D.C.Beltway Politician.
The disembodied , cool, calculating ‘rationality’ of the EuroModernist has , and has had, its uses in various contexts: but, in Late Modernism , its utility is wholly eclipsed by its strident penchant for stark robotisation of human traits , turning flesh-and-blood humans into mechanized automatons, ‘living by the book’ , knowing little other than ‘the book’, and bereft of any and all creative imaginations that transcend the ‘for-profit-market-nexus’.
At any rate, returning to metaphysics, Human Subjectivity , far from being an odd, even anomalous , reflex of barren matter, as in Classical Physics, stands instead , now, owing to Quantum science, at the very Epicenter of our otherwise inscrutable Cosmic Reality.
As Goswami puts it, we live, ineluctably, in a ‘Self-Aware” Universe: to which I add - and a ‘Self-Fulfilling’ one, as well.
It may be recalled that European Social Science, at its early inception, was wholly dominated by ‘Physics-envy’, (i.e. of the Classical Newtonian Paradigm) and needs, now, to be suitably expurgated.
And the Non-European World, though increasingly cast (not by any accident, but by the fact that the world is dominated by the West) in that same recreant, EuroModernist , image, is still not entirely ‘emancipated’ from its own ‘traditionalist’ value structures: and this applies, even now, in the 21st Century, to virtually all of Africa, Asia , and South America.
Thus are the Mammals yet set apart from the Reptiles.
And thus is Late Modernist Barbarism ,entirely European in provenance, yet checked by the admittedly fading premises of a Traditionalist civilisational genius still residing in the Other: that, for all its own undeniable, internal , petty, brutalities, cruelties, and infelicities , which I do not mitigate, has never threatened with extinction, willfully nor inadvertently – indeed, not even in its wildest dreams - the essential , and enduring, hospitalities (such as they are) of our transient , Planetary Home - their ambitions and joys being, ever, wholly local , and insular, in origin and impact.
All other despotisms – and Masculinity ensures , universally, a none-too-benign outcome whenever, and wherever, it runs amok – left both Society and Nature Untouched: it was the North Atlantic’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ to disrupt (let us hope not irreversibly) the normal functioning of both - and in record time.
Those who wish to , and stand ever ready to, press that nuclear button, past and present, are firmly, and irrefragably, of the Amoral, Late Modernist , ilk.
The sad truth is that anthropic existence is , even at best, tenuous and transitory, leaving very little to be cheerily glorified: and yet, a small part of the human populace has put even that minimal boon, of the baseline survival of All species , at risk - via its demonic zeal for unceasing surplus extraction from both society and nature.
It is EuroModernist values, or , perhaps ,its striking dearth of anthropic values !, that benumbs us today - like a miasma hanging over all - with a universally felt apocalyptic fear : of encroaching, impending , Doom.
Tragedy is that there is no external force powerful enough to halt its runaway chariot: yet ,ironically, its tumultuous reign may yet expire , and in the none too distal future, owing to the giddy overreach of its own titanic, if truantly ill-conceived, eco-political ambitions.
It is, in other words, as already hinted, providentially, Self-subverting.
Sic transit infamia mundi.
REFERENCES
Kanth, R Breaking With the Enlightenment, 1997
______ Against Eurocentrism, 2005
______ The Challenge of Eurocentrism, 2009
______ 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>
[©2014, R.Kanth, Harvard University]