A World on the Wane: the Wherefore and the Why
It may be moot to dwell, even muse, at the extraordinary state of things today.
I mean, behind the veil , the mask - indeed, the reverie, of everyday ‘normalcy’ with which we are all smitten.
An irredeemably wrong turn taken by Europe 4 centuries ago, pursued to egregious lengths by its Anglo-Am Avatars, has the institutional world now teetering on the brink of rank disorder and dissolution.
The infelicities run in crushing overload.
Species disappear by the day.
Great chunks of the living planet have been despoiled, in some instances irrevocably.
Empire-madness has led to large-scale regions (like West Asia) , with long histories , plunged into churning cauldrons of political chaos - unworthy of their culture and civilisation.
Entire economies have been shaken-down, ruined, run right through, by a triumphalist financial gangsterdom that is the new ruling demi-urge.
Ecologies are being ravaged with multiples of the force and fury invested, say, in large-scale fracking, the seas are choking with the daily swill from the ever cataracting corporate blunders: oil spills , untreated waste-disposals , nuclear dumpings.
Clocks , other than the Doomsday One, have been rudely turned back, mocking the myths of ‘progress’ dear to the Modernists, even as we revert to a breathtaking neo-feudalism in regards to the all–out exercise of near-despotic power.
Rule of Law, justice, sovereignty, and other such sacred terms of Modernist parlance, have all washed up on shore as no more than empty, dead , archival slogans of the past, with little content remaining.
Ditto with the liturgy of full-employment, peace, and societal amelioration.
Never, in the history of the species, has gross cynicism toward all charity, benevolence, and inter-societal empathy been so abundantly in public display.
Antic hostility to the Other, and a righteousness wholly at odds with its actual conduct – (mis)guided by greed and a ‘Viking’ spirit of domination – propels NATO to the very Gates of Asia ,whilst still lisping the old gibber of human rights and democracy.
Civic decencies, co-respecting behaviors, approaches of care and consideration – leave aside compassion - are becoming as obsolete , in particular in the Anglo-Am world, as the old soup-and-fish.
In contempt of the facile fables of Smith and Mandeville, private vices now redound , in hypertrophic size and scale, as ‘ginormous ‘public vices.
An Empire of Unregenerate Lies – in lineal descent from the old standards of ‘perfidious Albion’ - is fast dissipating the very last provinces of an almost moribund, dying , morality.
As the swelling ranks of the super-rich gloat and strut, the impuissant – nations, peoples, tribes, strata, persons – are hunkering down to hold on to the little they have left in a now hopelessly insecure world.
Those who pushed that atomic button once before stand ready to do so again, for yet another mess of pottage - and few would care to doubt their earnestness.
Pandora’s box is wide open, and empty; evil genies are out of their smoking lanterns, and evil geniuses plot daily to ransack the planet to its very last iota of expendability.
For all but the .01% , the Great Depression of the 21st Century is well under way.
No one has a Solution: no one has a Clue.
The effete still prattle on, feebly, about corporate responsibility, societal welfare, and ‘human rights’ :but these are no more than ghosts of political formulas past.
The pundits cannot see the forest for the trees.
It has not occurred to them – indeed, it couldn’t - that this is a Civilisational climacteric, not an ‘economic crisis’.
It is no less than the last, unholy, huzzah of the West.
In fact, the species is being forced to morph, from the North Atlantic hegemons down.
Robotics are the incoming Way: from drones that kill, computers that play in high frequency trades, and machines that draft the myriad messages that flood the media ,hour to hour, minute by minute.
A bionic world is fast being ushered in: transgenics have already swept the plant world, and they are now gaining ground in the animal world, inclusive of our own species.
The recklessness in this area virtually guarantees a generation of transgenetically modified humans , within decades.
Given corporate blueprints, the new anthropic template will , likely, be a species that will adapt to the key requirements: to obey, consume, and be silent - the three imperatives of our epoch.
In some regards , EuroModernism was no more than a rabid intercalation of Materialism, Mechanisation , and Violence: the terms understood in their most completely encompassing sense.
The materialism destroys anthropic morality, the mechanization militates against the vital essences of organic society, and the violence makes the world an angry, sullen, inhospitable ,moonscape of dug-outs and trenches, with a caricature Hobbesian world of each –against- all.
True, some Non-European formations were also ‘materialist’ , but with TWO highly significant differences:
a) They didn’t push materialism to radical, sub-human , Modernist extremes (save under the brief spell of ‘communism’, as , e.g., in China)
b) More importantly, this materialism was never sharply double-dosed with a regressive paradigm of aggressive self-interest: it is this latter (the vaunted ‘individualism”) that violently militates against any and all notion of a larger, ‘public’ or ‘societal’ interest, as in Anglo-Am societies, which puts them beyond the ramp of redemption.
The nouvelle 3-D printer that , today, prints out guns, on command, will , in the near future, ‘print out’ even more apocalyptic, Doomsday ,notices for us all.
Indeed, the very fact of such a printer is such notice in, and of , itself.
(ii)
How did we get here?
Or rather, how did ‘they’ get us here?
Here is one ‘movement’ in this , still unfolding, tragic opera.
One small part of the world, one subset of tribes, a minor part of the larger human family, donned giant, half-league boots four centuries ago, animated by Modernist ideas and practices.
Suddenly, enough was not enough.
The passion for accumulation was inexhaustible, as currently , also, exhibited by Wall Street and its twin: the City of London.
A mere nation was not sufficient, a continent wasn’t room enough: the whole world had to be conquered.
Most of the European Titans went for it, lock, stock, and barrel.
First, they spent centuries in attempting to destroy each other.
Then they went on an international rampage and , in due time, subdued the globe.
The only non-European tribe – nation - that came close to emulation of this ‘feat’, in Modern times, was Japan: but it is arguably accurate to say that their depredations were largely defensive: - they were ‘stepping out’ to put up a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around their little island, having seen most of Asia gobbled up by Europeans and Americans.
Even if that were not entirely true, Japan would still be the exception that proves the rule of the European monopoly in Modernist global colonization.
(iii)
So, Modern Europe – and its North Atlantic partners - went straight-arrow ,from Barbarism to Decadence.
In fact, that may be something of an overstatement.
For its barbarism is still very much intact, and on display.
Its ‘forte’ has remained unchanged for four hundred years: the organised , cold-blooded murder of non-Europeans, seizure of their assets, and occupation of their lands, on one pretext or another.
If one spotlights their North Atlantic Hegemon, and Tribal Chief, the barbarism is entirely self-evident: even ignoring their global depredations, they who cannot get past skin-color , nor give up stocking wholly gratuitous arsenals in favor of maintaining even the most ordinary civic peace, are no more evolved than the ritually vilified ‘Mongol Hordes’- except that the latter were never craven enough to claim the cresting mantle of ‘human rights’’ for themselves , whilst on their marauding rampages.
(iv)
So: what really happened?
Now, for the rest of the story.
It is our innate, anthropic, anthropology that, always, provides All answers.
Once society was conceived , not as an anthropic End but as a Means ( and that too, to a privately , even personally, conceived self-interest), as with Euromodernist thinkers (of the ‘social contract’ variety) and policy makers, the inexorable, final doom of the social was already underwritten.
Human morality is wrapped up in the societal-cultural moment, and stems from it: once that integument is rent, it goes to pieces.
The thoughtless destruction of familial, kinship, structures along with their associated ‘cultural’ matrix of care and provisioning (the struggle over the Speenhamland Amendment to the Poor Laws is emblematic of this, in the case of England) en route to the new-fangled means/mores of material aggrandisement, was no small event in human history.
Enshrined first amongst the ruling orders , it ‘permeated’ down: with subject orders, inevitably, also pressured , under heavy duress of factory and farm disciplines, to follow that primrose path to perdition.
With societal morality disintegrating, the species suffered severe alienation from its own species-being: the EuroModernist is most lost, nay marooned, exactly when (s)he is celebrating his/her individuated liberty from any and all cultural restraints.
The Asocial catch-as-catch-can ‘freedom’ is but the waste residue , the drab refuse, that is left after the willful demolition of the essential Wholeness of both person and society.
Thencefoth, angst and existential despair – in one word a coruscating loneliness - overtook the individuated European, far ahead of any other human species on the planet, enveloping him/her still in a shroud of restless , unrequiting , inconsolable, anomie.
The ‘god’ of Kierkegaard, despite its ‘Christian’ spin, is none other than the familial collectivity , now lost forever.
So, howsoever deludedly, as Durkheim fully understood, the very ‘god’ we worship is our own Collective Being – for Religion is merely the hypostatized variant of societal Morality, expressing its essences in ritualized cadences of form.
Grandiose delusions of global mastery, the ‘reaching for the stars’ predispositions, the ‘illimitable growth’ hallucinations, the ‘anything goes’ societal ideologies, are all species of a unique pathology stemming from the ensuing dislocation and disorientation, unprecedented in human history.
With morality extinct, the Amoral moment begins: and, thereafter , EuroModernism sinned against its own species with a casual insouciance that is all but short of rabid insanity.
Other than European formations, no Other human tribe has , as yet, collectively passed on to this stage - and hence still retain the vestige of being ‘human’.
It is this critical difference I try to capture with my metaphor of the struggle between mammals vs. reptiles.
I can put it even more starkly, for resonance: a Kennedy would have pushed that button, during those dog-days of the famous Crisis, a Kruschev simply could not.
Yes, it’s the mammal that ‘blinked’.
The infamous ‘drop’ on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and the, similar, utterly insensate, destruction of Dresden) , similarly, could only be accomplished by ‘reptilian’ beings , wholly devoid of common, anthropic, humanity.
(v)
I return us , ever, to our anthropology.
For we are instinctual beings, regrettably now laboring under the Modernist delusion that we can be anything we wish to be.
Yet our anthropic nature is far from being no more than but a sullen prison.
Thousands of tribal societies have managed to live in equable states of being , content with themselves, and in ‘balance’ with nature .
Men and women, though distinct sub-species endowed with differing instincts , have , over long evolution, found formulas for a relatively benign, co-operative co-existence, situating themselves within ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’, quite often free of gratuitous ‘Protestant ‘ burdenings: of stifling notions of labor, struggle, and redemption.
Yes, valuing , enjoying, shared societal affections , with time to spare, might well be an instinctive clause of human conviviality.
When, and where, successful , this ‘paradigm of femininity’ has trumped the ‘paradigm of masculinity’ , to the advantage of the community.
True, the second set of named proclivities frequently breaks this ‘social compact’ , and leads off into states of war and empire – but that much is just anthropic reality: for yes, we are not discussing idylls.
That the contrary has existed - and still exists - is reassuring, and indefeasible , proof of the possibility of contented states of social existence sans the indelibly Modernist hamster-at-the-wheel parameters of accumulation, growth, work, and do-or-die competition.
So how might we return to Eden?
For now, the Juggernaut appears unstoppable.
Indeed, the only force opposing it, with any degree of seriousness, today , is religion (qua morality, and/or vice versa).
Admittedly, there’s fine irony to it: market fundamentalism being challenged by religious fundamentalism.
But a new set of Crusades will not pause the runaway rollercoaster: indeed, might even fuel its further acceleration.
So, is there no hope? In point of fact, as it happens, there is.
And , again, there is irony,
The only force strong enough to stop it is: Itself.
As I have written, in previous posts , Late Modernism is now cannibalizing itself - at a ruinous rate.
It is , thereby, entirely, self-subverting.
A global financial crisis, even short of a collapse, or some other equivalent catastrophe (war, natural disaster) will , systemically, induce serious economic and political disaffections.
At that point – and we might be there right now - our anthropic nature will , of necessity, revive new forms of communal relations, quite spontaneously.
And rebuild, from scratch, that nexus of reciprocities that we should understand now as our very real , tribal being,
Indeed, it is already happening ,in microcosm, all over the world, even if the corporate media are loth to report it.
Let me draw down , then, with Michael Polanyi’s lines: (that, despite it all) “We believe more than we can prove. We know more than we can say”.
And close, by adding my own perception: that we are (despite imperial design), as ordinary people - whether ‘mammalian ‘ or ‘reptilian’ - a lot nicer, better, than the system ‘requires’, or we let on.
We are being corralled into the realm of the Post-Human, only as a short stop en route to an even more invidious Trans-Humanism: but ,as for now, we are not yet wholly stripped of our minimal humanoid traits.
Possibly, then, it’s a fair presumption that the Great Breach of our anthropic essence bequeathed by Modernism will get , if slowly, and over time, mended.
We can only hope it won’t be a case of too little, too late.
***
Note: I confess to a minor contretemps: located in the European cosmos, as I am, my readership is , almost entirely, of that lineage. I wish I could , to allay discomfort/disquiet, depart from facts to mitigate chagrin: but there’s the self-evident, rub. All I can say is, therefore: the world has been Their very own personal oyster for centuries - for better or for worse. Perhaps that signal achievement might serve as its own form of psychic compensation, for the unavoidable , ensuing pain of this inevitable, entirely consequent, and contingent, critique.
REFERENCES
R.Kanth Breaking With the Enlightenment, 1997
---------- Against Economics, 1997
______ Against Eurocentrism, 2005
______ The Challenge of Eurocentrism, 2009
______ The Post-Human Society, 2013
[© R.Kanth 2014, Harvard University]
It may be moot to dwell, even muse, at the extraordinary state of things today.
I mean, behind the veil , the mask - indeed, the reverie, of everyday ‘normalcy’ with which we are all smitten.
An irredeemably wrong turn taken by Europe 4 centuries ago, pursued to egregious lengths by its Anglo-Am Avatars, has the institutional world now teetering on the brink of rank disorder and dissolution.
The infelicities run in crushing overload.
Species disappear by the day.
Great chunks of the living planet have been despoiled, in some instances irrevocably.
Empire-madness has led to large-scale regions (like West Asia) , with long histories , plunged into churning cauldrons of political chaos - unworthy of their culture and civilisation.
Entire economies have been shaken-down, ruined, run right through, by a triumphalist financial gangsterdom that is the new ruling demi-urge.
Ecologies are being ravaged with multiples of the force and fury invested, say, in large-scale fracking, the seas are choking with the daily swill from the ever cataracting corporate blunders: oil spills , untreated waste-disposals , nuclear dumpings.
Clocks , other than the Doomsday One, have been rudely turned back, mocking the myths of ‘progress’ dear to the Modernists, even as we revert to a breathtaking neo-feudalism in regards to the all–out exercise of near-despotic power.
Rule of Law, justice, sovereignty, and other such sacred terms of Modernist parlance, have all washed up on shore as no more than empty, dead , archival slogans of the past, with little content remaining.
Ditto with the liturgy of full-employment, peace, and societal amelioration.
Never, in the history of the species, has gross cynicism toward all charity, benevolence, and inter-societal empathy been so abundantly in public display.
Antic hostility to the Other, and a righteousness wholly at odds with its actual conduct – (mis)guided by greed and a ‘Viking’ spirit of domination – propels NATO to the very Gates of Asia ,whilst still lisping the old gibber of human rights and democracy.
Civic decencies, co-respecting behaviors, approaches of care and consideration – leave aside compassion - are becoming as obsolete , in particular in the Anglo-Am world, as the old soup-and-fish.
In contempt of the facile fables of Smith and Mandeville, private vices now redound , in hypertrophic size and scale, as ‘ginormous ‘public vices.
An Empire of Unregenerate Lies – in lineal descent from the old standards of ‘perfidious Albion’ - is fast dissipating the very last provinces of an almost moribund, dying , morality.
As the swelling ranks of the super-rich gloat and strut, the impuissant – nations, peoples, tribes, strata, persons – are hunkering down to hold on to the little they have left in a now hopelessly insecure world.
Those who pushed that atomic button once before stand ready to do so again, for yet another mess of pottage - and few would care to doubt their earnestness.
Pandora’s box is wide open, and empty; evil genies are out of their smoking lanterns, and evil geniuses plot daily to ransack the planet to its very last iota of expendability.
For all but the .01% , the Great Depression of the 21st Century is well under way.
No one has a Solution: no one has a Clue.
The effete still prattle on, feebly, about corporate responsibility, societal welfare, and ‘human rights’ :but these are no more than ghosts of political formulas past.
The pundits cannot see the forest for the trees.
It has not occurred to them – indeed, it couldn’t - that this is a Civilisational climacteric, not an ‘economic crisis’.
It is no less than the last, unholy, huzzah of the West.
In fact, the species is being forced to morph, from the North Atlantic hegemons down.
Robotics are the incoming Way: from drones that kill, computers that play in high frequency trades, and machines that draft the myriad messages that flood the media ,hour to hour, minute by minute.
A bionic world is fast being ushered in: transgenics have already swept the plant world, and they are now gaining ground in the animal world, inclusive of our own species.
The recklessness in this area virtually guarantees a generation of transgenetically modified humans , within decades.
Given corporate blueprints, the new anthropic template will , likely, be a species that will adapt to the key requirements: to obey, consume, and be silent - the three imperatives of our epoch.
In some regards , EuroModernism was no more than a rabid intercalation of Materialism, Mechanisation , and Violence: the terms understood in their most completely encompassing sense.
The materialism destroys anthropic morality, the mechanization militates against the vital essences of organic society, and the violence makes the world an angry, sullen, inhospitable ,moonscape of dug-outs and trenches, with a caricature Hobbesian world of each –against- all.
True, some Non-European formations were also ‘materialist’ , but with TWO highly significant differences:
a) They didn’t push materialism to radical, sub-human , Modernist extremes (save under the brief spell of ‘communism’, as , e.g., in China)
b) More importantly, this materialism was never sharply double-dosed with a regressive paradigm of aggressive self-interest: it is this latter (the vaunted ‘individualism”) that violently militates against any and all notion of a larger, ‘public’ or ‘societal’ interest, as in Anglo-Am societies, which puts them beyond the ramp of redemption.
The nouvelle 3-D printer that , today, prints out guns, on command, will , in the near future, ‘print out’ even more apocalyptic, Doomsday ,notices for us all.
Indeed, the very fact of such a printer is such notice in, and of , itself.
(ii)
How did we get here?
Or rather, how did ‘they’ get us here?
Here is one ‘movement’ in this , still unfolding, tragic opera.
One small part of the world, one subset of tribes, a minor part of the larger human family, donned giant, half-league boots four centuries ago, animated by Modernist ideas and practices.
Suddenly, enough was not enough.
The passion for accumulation was inexhaustible, as currently , also, exhibited by Wall Street and its twin: the City of London.
A mere nation was not sufficient, a continent wasn’t room enough: the whole world had to be conquered.
Most of the European Titans went for it, lock, stock, and barrel.
First, they spent centuries in attempting to destroy each other.
Then they went on an international rampage and , in due time, subdued the globe.
The only non-European tribe – nation - that came close to emulation of this ‘feat’, in Modern times, was Japan: but it is arguably accurate to say that their depredations were largely defensive: - they were ‘stepping out’ to put up a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around their little island, having seen most of Asia gobbled up by Europeans and Americans.
Even if that were not entirely true, Japan would still be the exception that proves the rule of the European monopoly in Modernist global colonization.
(iii)
So, Modern Europe – and its North Atlantic partners - went straight-arrow ,from Barbarism to Decadence.
In fact, that may be something of an overstatement.
For its barbarism is still very much intact, and on display.
Its ‘forte’ has remained unchanged for four hundred years: the organised , cold-blooded murder of non-Europeans, seizure of their assets, and occupation of their lands, on one pretext or another.
If one spotlights their North Atlantic Hegemon, and Tribal Chief, the barbarism is entirely self-evident: even ignoring their global depredations, they who cannot get past skin-color , nor give up stocking wholly gratuitous arsenals in favor of maintaining even the most ordinary civic peace, are no more evolved than the ritually vilified ‘Mongol Hordes’- except that the latter were never craven enough to claim the cresting mantle of ‘human rights’’ for themselves , whilst on their marauding rampages.
(iv)
So: what really happened?
Now, for the rest of the story.
It is our innate, anthropic, anthropology that, always, provides All answers.
Once society was conceived , not as an anthropic End but as a Means ( and that too, to a privately , even personally, conceived self-interest), as with Euromodernist thinkers (of the ‘social contract’ variety) and policy makers, the inexorable, final doom of the social was already underwritten.
Human morality is wrapped up in the societal-cultural moment, and stems from it: once that integument is rent, it goes to pieces.
The thoughtless destruction of familial, kinship, structures along with their associated ‘cultural’ matrix of care and provisioning (the struggle over the Speenhamland Amendment to the Poor Laws is emblematic of this, in the case of England) en route to the new-fangled means/mores of material aggrandisement, was no small event in human history.
Enshrined first amongst the ruling orders , it ‘permeated’ down: with subject orders, inevitably, also pressured , under heavy duress of factory and farm disciplines, to follow that primrose path to perdition.
With societal morality disintegrating, the species suffered severe alienation from its own species-being: the EuroModernist is most lost, nay marooned, exactly when (s)he is celebrating his/her individuated liberty from any and all cultural restraints.
The Asocial catch-as-catch-can ‘freedom’ is but the waste residue , the drab refuse, that is left after the willful demolition of the essential Wholeness of both person and society.
Thencefoth, angst and existential despair – in one word a coruscating loneliness - overtook the individuated European, far ahead of any other human species on the planet, enveloping him/her still in a shroud of restless , unrequiting , inconsolable, anomie.
The ‘god’ of Kierkegaard, despite its ‘Christian’ spin, is none other than the familial collectivity , now lost forever.
So, howsoever deludedly, as Durkheim fully understood, the very ‘god’ we worship is our own Collective Being – for Religion is merely the hypostatized variant of societal Morality, expressing its essences in ritualized cadences of form.
Grandiose delusions of global mastery, the ‘reaching for the stars’ predispositions, the ‘illimitable growth’ hallucinations, the ‘anything goes’ societal ideologies, are all species of a unique pathology stemming from the ensuing dislocation and disorientation, unprecedented in human history.
With morality extinct, the Amoral moment begins: and, thereafter , EuroModernism sinned against its own species with a casual insouciance that is all but short of rabid insanity.
Other than European formations, no Other human tribe has , as yet, collectively passed on to this stage - and hence still retain the vestige of being ‘human’.
It is this critical difference I try to capture with my metaphor of the struggle between mammals vs. reptiles.
I can put it even more starkly, for resonance: a Kennedy would have pushed that button, during those dog-days of the famous Crisis, a Kruschev simply could not.
Yes, it’s the mammal that ‘blinked’.
The infamous ‘drop’ on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and the, similar, utterly insensate, destruction of Dresden) , similarly, could only be accomplished by ‘reptilian’ beings , wholly devoid of common, anthropic, humanity.
(v)
I return us , ever, to our anthropology.
For we are instinctual beings, regrettably now laboring under the Modernist delusion that we can be anything we wish to be.
Yet our anthropic nature is far from being no more than but a sullen prison.
Thousands of tribal societies have managed to live in equable states of being , content with themselves, and in ‘balance’ with nature .
Men and women, though distinct sub-species endowed with differing instincts , have , over long evolution, found formulas for a relatively benign, co-operative co-existence, situating themselves within ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’, quite often free of gratuitous ‘Protestant ‘ burdenings: of stifling notions of labor, struggle, and redemption.
Yes, valuing , enjoying, shared societal affections , with time to spare, might well be an instinctive clause of human conviviality.
When, and where, successful , this ‘paradigm of femininity’ has trumped the ‘paradigm of masculinity’ , to the advantage of the community.
True, the second set of named proclivities frequently breaks this ‘social compact’ , and leads off into states of war and empire – but that much is just anthropic reality: for yes, we are not discussing idylls.
That the contrary has existed - and still exists - is reassuring, and indefeasible , proof of the possibility of contented states of social existence sans the indelibly Modernist hamster-at-the-wheel parameters of accumulation, growth, work, and do-or-die competition.
So how might we return to Eden?
For now, the Juggernaut appears unstoppable.
Indeed, the only force opposing it, with any degree of seriousness, today , is religion (qua morality, and/or vice versa).
Admittedly, there’s fine irony to it: market fundamentalism being challenged by religious fundamentalism.
But a new set of Crusades will not pause the runaway rollercoaster: indeed, might even fuel its further acceleration.
So, is there no hope? In point of fact, as it happens, there is.
And , again, there is irony,
The only force strong enough to stop it is: Itself.
As I have written, in previous posts , Late Modernism is now cannibalizing itself - at a ruinous rate.
It is , thereby, entirely, self-subverting.
A global financial crisis, even short of a collapse, or some other equivalent catastrophe (war, natural disaster) will , systemically, induce serious economic and political disaffections.
At that point – and we might be there right now - our anthropic nature will , of necessity, revive new forms of communal relations, quite spontaneously.
And rebuild, from scratch, that nexus of reciprocities that we should understand now as our very real , tribal being,
Indeed, it is already happening ,in microcosm, all over the world, even if the corporate media are loth to report it.
Let me draw down , then, with Michael Polanyi’s lines: (that, despite it all) “We believe more than we can prove. We know more than we can say”.
And close, by adding my own perception: that we are (despite imperial design), as ordinary people - whether ‘mammalian ‘ or ‘reptilian’ - a lot nicer, better, than the system ‘requires’, or we let on.
We are being corralled into the realm of the Post-Human, only as a short stop en route to an even more invidious Trans-Humanism: but ,as for now, we are not yet wholly stripped of our minimal humanoid traits.
Possibly, then, it’s a fair presumption that the Great Breach of our anthropic essence bequeathed by Modernism will get , if slowly, and over time, mended.
We can only hope it won’t be a case of too little, too late.
***
Note: I confess to a minor contretemps: located in the European cosmos, as I am, my readership is , almost entirely, of that lineage. I wish I could , to allay discomfort/disquiet, depart from facts to mitigate chagrin: but there’s the self-evident, rub. All I can say is, therefore: the world has been Their very own personal oyster for centuries - for better or for worse. Perhaps that signal achievement might serve as its own form of psychic compensation, for the unavoidable , ensuing pain of this inevitable, entirely consequent, and contingent, critique.
REFERENCES
R.Kanth Breaking With the Enlightenment, 1997
---------- Against Economics, 1997
______ Against Eurocentrism, 2005
______ The Challenge of Eurocentrism, 2009
______ The Post-Human Society, 2013
[© R.Kanth 2014, Harvard University]