A Farewell
It is time to prepare to bid farewell to the long reigning supremacy of EuroModernism.
This may appear absurd, given its wilful hegemony across the universe, today.
But it is time, nonetheless.
The global struggles today , howsoever cloaked by our own misconceived vocabularies/viewpoints, are , in essence, a clash between modernist and non-modernist ways of life, ideas, and practices: indeed, the oft-reviled Huntington was not far wrong in his depiction of this as a ‘clash of civilisations’.
He was off-base, however, in equating EuroModernism with a form of civilization - instead , of being its very antithesis.
So, more aptly, is it a struggle between barbarism and civility, between materialism and morality, between the calculus of accumulation and the mores of empathy (or , perhaps more succinctly, in my own usage: between mammals and reptiles).
It is (Euro)Modernism that first erected an Unbreachable Wall - between our anthropic natures and our societal being.
The Modernist Revolutions, ideational and material, from the Late Sixteenth century on, which now stereotypically define the ‘west’ – in their own eyes - saw to that.
Briefly , it did so by the adoption of a vision of society as a ‘contract’ (i.e., a ‘balance of interests’), rather than the ancient compact of a ‘balance of affections’.
Secondly, it , perforce,‘individuated’ humans, i.e., cleft them from their societal bonds, those tensile hoops of affective steel!, so they could , then, in all sordid, self-destructive, alienation, see ‘society’ as but a means to deliver personal, individual , ends.
The West did not invent individuals – they are universal to all anthropic societies – but rather ‘individualism’: of an asocial nature.
In a stroke , the moral basis for societal conduct was expunged - paving the way for a still devolving ‘amoral’ being , increasingly obsessed with advancing a purely private interest, knowingly, against the pre-conditions of societal, and ecological, well-being.
Gemeinschaft village communities, under the impetus of greed and trade , were breaking up, and being swallowed by the new Gessellschaft formations belonging to the genre of empires - ending in the now familiar modernist ‘nation-state’ (that emerged in the 13th century, maturing with the Treaty of Westphalia).
Modernism is the most far-reaching empire ever constructed by the (evil) genius of Men (gender intended) , providing, for four centuries now , the stark mismeasure of human inclinations, aptitudes, and dispensations.
In that same vapid devolution , speaking in metaphor, mammals began to morph into reptiles, conviviality yielding to calculation.
These two mutations were situated within a new outlook that adopted an aggressive materialism both as a general philosophy, and as a measure and standard , of both personal and societal welfare.
The sciences of the time , positivist in the main, handily assisted this make-over , objectifying ‘nature’ (which in Christian usage did NOT include ‘god’s children’ – unless you happened to be Women, or ‘Other’ cultures! ), and creating a cheerless universe of things: both social and natural.
Its impact on the so-called social sciences – which were no more than blunt devices of social control designed to contain the revolutionary stirrings of the times (Comte’s vast repertoire of works are a good example)- was immediate: with someone like Durkheim, e.g., asking us to ‘consider social facts as things’.
As Sartre commented, this could only be possible where ‘things’ had already become the dominant social facts.
The Age of Quantity was beginning its long, triumphant, destructive, march.
Any and all forms of idealism (especially moral idealism) were consigned to the pound of a now devalued religion, whose tenets ran seriously afoul of the drives of the commercial classes.
Protestantism eventually first debunked, then displaced, the increasingly anachronistic strictures of the Church of Rome , and forged an individuated, and ‘reformed’, Christianity, that , possibly not by coincidence!, better fitted the needs, nay the demands !, of commerce and industry.
Simultaneously, morality was banished , and assimilated to the boondocks of religion, with utilitarian and pragmatist social policies being their new-fangled, stolid , surrogates (via the likes of Bentham, et. al.).
Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind quite epitomizes that banal outlook.
Social Engineering, on behalf of the dominant , acquisitive classes, , the Great (if as yet unfinished) Modernist Project, had begun.
My very first scholarly work describes how so-called ‘laissez-faire’ (Kanth, 1986) simply disallowed only anti-establishment interventions, not pro-system subventions.
The new ‘Social Science’ was undermined inevitably by its ‘law-and-order’ biases, much as philosophy was hopelessly overdetermined by church vs secularism issues: each ,thereby, inhabiting a self-imposed prison which offered little scope for either objectivity or insight.
On the other hand, Modernist philosophy , to take up the other major link in the ideological chain, was always a morass of partial speculations.
Indeed, European philosophy, where uninspired by Greek ideas, simply could not exist as a viable entity.
At any rate , in the Seventeenth century, the former project took unsteady hold, with Descartes sounding the pioneering bugle.
If compared to the originality of the Greeks, or India, it was , and still is, wholly unremarkable – indeed, to this day.
The reason is simple.
The Greeks were not self-limited by the parameters of Judeo-Christian norms :nor should their contributions be assimilated to ‘European’ philosophy gratuitously, as the North Atlantics have done: they were part of a great Pan-Mediterranean civilization whose ideas were part of a vast, melting pot, affected , in particular, by the seminal influences of Asia and Africa.
To give but a trivial , if telling, example, Aesop’s Fables – attributed to Greece, much like the ‘Theorem of Pythagoras’ – have their origins in antic Indian Panchatantra tales , themselves deriving from an oral tradition of a dateless antiquity.
Descartes, Kant, even Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer) , quite consciously, were all dealing, for better or for worse, with various tenets of Christian theosophy.
The German philosophers , in particular, were also specially tutored in newly translated Sanskrit texts.
Descartes was explicitly religious: Kant, somewhat more implicitly (it is said that Kant found it only societally utilitarian to believe in god as a means to succor morality , not because it was ‘true’: at any rate , he helped divorce faith from reason , permanently, in EuroModernism, to the lasting satisfaction of the emergent overseers of both church and state) , with ‘freedom’ (read Christian’ free will’) being a notion that still had to be retained , as a necessary a priori.
In fact, sans Christian ‘free will’, Kant’s project vanishes almost entirely: a clue, possibly, to its putative ‘greatness’.
As was , apparently remarked about Andre Gretry’s harmonies, ‘between his high notes and his low, you could drive a chariot’: a critique that , usefully, applies to all of Post-Renaissance , Non-Greek, European philosophy.
Even the ‘rejectionist’ Marx was , no less, moved, undeniably, by the gospel(s) of Christian humanism (the adjective being as important as the noun, whence his ready contempt , vide his writings on India, for the beliefs of Other cultures: a stance that is extant to this day amongst his epigones).
In fact, as often as not , Marxism itself is a species of a loyal ‘opposition’ to Modernist agendas,
To state the point brusquely, Christian myths are, en generale, believed, privately, even by the intelligentsia, as loosely historical - with all Others being treated, privately again, as suppositional.
Anglo-Am media (is there another kind?), a cut below academic scholarship, e.g., to this day carry narratives of Jesus , e.g., without qualification : whereas any references to Krishna are explicitly couched in condescending terms suggestive of myth, lore, and legend.
In effect, the EuroModernist ‘progressivist’ could have his/her religious/cultural cake and eat it too: whereas all Others had to surrender, and sacrifice, their traditional belief systems to climb up to the Modernist altar.
European ‘secularism’ is, thereby, not very much more than, nor ever very far from, Protestant theosophy,
In other words, even ‘progressivist’ Modernist agendas –such as ‘ communism’- were but extensions of essentially, deeply inscribed, pan-Christian ideals.
Indeed, take away the King James’ Bible and there are but few themes/tropes remaining in the Anglo-Am lexicon of the higher imagination (Shakespeare’s writings might follow as a distal second, in impact, but are , also, similarly, drenched in biblical imagery).
So, this was not philosophy that was wholly ‘open-ended’, like that of the Greeks, or the Indians, : it was, of necessity, constrained, to its serious detriment.
Its greatest exemplar is , of course, existentialism: a striking example of Christian passions battling Modernist debasements, howsoever fruitlessly.
As such, its fruits were/are quite bare.
Virtually all of it is a cri de couer, a grieving, for the moral/ affective ties lost, or scuttled, by the societal artefacts of Modernist ‘progress’ , with no faith left to offer solace.
Indeed, speaking only of philosophy, if the entire tradition from Descartes to Quine and Putnam, in our own time, were to vanish, not much would be lost that could not easily, and far more suitably, be re-acquired, say, by a quick delve into the antic Vedic treasure trove (much of it still in need of translation).
This should not be surprising since Christianity itself is no more, philosophically, than a trite variant of Buddhism - as the latter was but a deviant (naastika) strain of mainstream (aastika)Vedic thought.
This should surprise no one, since Buddhist influence flowed far, in both east and west, from India ,until the later rise of Islam checked its advance, terminally, westwards.
It is only with Wittgenstein, and much later, with Chomsky, that European philosophy takes up original subject-matter that was not inherently part of, or influenced by, the old, hackneyed, struggle between church and state, or religion vs secularism (as , say, moved Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche) via the novel study of language : but ,in so doing, Chomsky only revives pioneering Indian ideas of thousands of years ago (originating with Panini, to name but one ).
Of course, Linguistics is not, prima facie, part of philosophy at all, but is rather a sub-set of a possible science : of anthropology.
In fact, there is only One social science that is feasible, and includes all else: a realist anthropology of our species, yet , it has never been achieved, within EuroModernism, owing to, a) its imperial origins, and , b) its contamination, ab initio, with Christian, and Modernist, ideals (such as ‘equality’ , to name but one: I have tried to sketch the initial prodromes of such an anthropology in lecture format – it is cited , at the end of this essay.).
European anthropology is better termed a ‘misanthropology’: to which the only fitting correction is what I have christened ‘reverse anthropology’ – a field that has only just begun to be assayed.
Wittgenstein’s initial notion that words are pictures of reality and, later, that meanings are socially constructed , would not have fazed Indian linguists of antiquity in the slightest.
Indeed, the West oft claims too much for its philosophers; Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ has been compared, for instance, with the biblical ‘Golden Rule’ as amongst the noblest canons of human invention.
Firstly, it’s a moral canon, and not a necessary derivative of his philosophy: secondly, in all irony, it offers the engaging mantra, no less, to a society, an emergent civil society, which, ex definitione, is driven precisely by the severely anti-social frame of a ‘universal egoism’: where each uses the other as a means to his/her own advancement.
Thirdly, its enduring novelty is a function ,merely, of its denial, or absence, within Modernist society, and its ‘universality’ is quite untenable since it requires an atypical, abnormal, focus, like all Modernist Projects, on the premise of a sovereign individual in ‘free’ association - which is not sustainable (even unthinkable) for the vast majority of anthropic societies , past and present, untouched by Modernist corruption(s).
It is akin to applying gessellschaft criteria to gemeinschaft entities.
Finally, if you are seriously seeking moral canons of genuine ‘universality’, Jainism and Buddhism is where you would, more profitably, commence the search.
The more contemporaneous John Rawls’s acclaimed contribution is, similarly, interlaced with strands of Modernist pedantry.
Justice is not reducible to ‘fairness’; fairness is simply , to use a vernacular idiom, the prima facie ‘cover charge’ to be paid to any petition for ‘justice’, ab initio.
‘Fairness’, or impartiality rather, is therefore more of a rule of legality, or procedure , than justice, in the first instance.
Like all Modernist systems, Rawlsian criteria are formalistic ‘universals’ only, and evade substance (ideas such as ”equal rights’ , and ‘egalitarian economic systems’ that lace his arguments, are abstract . Modernist, notions that perhaps dodge, if not actually fudge, and divert attention away from, the more vital , historical issue of ‘initial conditions’: so ‘distributive justice’ even a la Rawlsian criteria cannot undo a default in an initial dispossession , say, via theft, fraud, or conquest, an issue that he was , of course, fully aware of).
Rawlsian ideas , are , thereby, a celebration (in the customary vein of triumphalism) only of the possibility of Modernism crafting ‘the ‘Good Society’ as a project of social engineering (if permitted by the ruling interests!) - another ‘ideal’ that one must, perforce, set in stark contrast to prevalent, ontic reality.
More fundamentally, any notion of ‘justice’ (and there are several: restitutive, retributive, et. al.,) is relative always to prevailing norms , so it is a societally specific notion: it cannot be elevated to a ‘universal’ discourse.
Rawls does just that: and ,as such , Rawlsian criteria are specific only to Modernist ideology, and are not relevant to non-Modern formations.
Anthropic Society is not a voluntarist engineering project that one ‘designs’ - like a gulag, or even a gated-community with member-prompted ‘ rules’ (which is how both capitalist and socialist planners, i.e. , the two dominant strains of EuroModernism have viewed matters): it is an organic entity that evolves, naturally and spontaneously, building consensus , over millennia.
Of Late Modernist will o’ the wisp billows such as Structuralism, Deconstruction, PostModernism , et. al., the less said, perhaps, the better: they never ascend to the scale of serious philosophical systems, and are no more than passing fads, the ‘ bas morceaux’, of very minimal lasting value (despite assisting, inevitably, a host of avant-garde careers: for academe is also a rich backwater of minor spoils).
In the choice of depth, seriousness, and nature of subject-matter , Anglo-American philosophy of today scarcely touches the hems of the ancients.
As in so many regards, Modernism as an intellectual force, remains , to employ terms I have applied , hitherto, to its economics only : a self-referential language game (in the case of economics, with zero representational efficacy).
Of course, it is , and can be, ‘interesting’ - as a TS Eliot character has it, in one of his plays, in context of someone finding another’s poetry interesting : but only if you are , a priori, interested in it.
Modernism, in all its stances, to underline my meaning, is inescapably misanthropic , tending to a dour anthropic entropy, in its very constitution.
It leaves us all , if swallowed whole, fit only for ‘treasons, stratagems, and spoils’.
Which, if thoughtfully considered, is no more than the grisly record of the European Drama - at least, since Columbus.
Let me relate but one minor moment in the latter’s register of infamy , in a poignant tale.
One of his victims, a native aboriginal about to be burnt alive was approached by the stand-by Catholic priest who asked if wished to be baptized (as prelude to the broil).
He asked why – and was regaled with vistas of the joys of heaven.
At this, he asked only if his tormentors were also headed there: and ,receiving the obvious answer, said :–“ No, I don’t wish to meet your kind again, anywhere”.
I dare say he spoke a mouthful there - for millions more to follow.
(ii)
I have taken my stance, in many of these posts, on the premise of the possibility a real anthropology of our species, so my ‘ critique’ is - leastways in that sense - non-arbitrary.
What do I mean by it?
That we are ‘programmed’ as a species, much as our other animal cousinages are, and the one obvious way of just beginning to read the modus of this conditioning is the obvious one of looking to instincts : which hold vital clues not merely to ‘human behavior’, but more accurately , and importantly, to the differential behaviors of men and women: who, whilst sharing some instincts in common, also have distinctly differing instincts.
Modernist ideology tendentiously subsumes men and women under the solvent rubric of ‘equality” (thereby joining women, to men , gratuitously, in the ghastly epics of male depredations).
This is a vicious canard: men and women have played very different anthropic roles in human evolution.
I have argued that both morality and civilization , understood as the pacification of the conditions of human existence , derive from the structural roles/responsibilities of women, not unrelated to their instinctual endowments and biological capabilities.
Patriarchical ideology – men being the ruling sex universally- could not admit disclosure of the fact that male societal violence stands in outright contrast to the female record in this area, cross-culturally: whence the feint of speaking , in terms of a ‘human’ propensity for aggression, etc., cannily evading appropriate gender responsibility.
I have already pointed out , in the earlier section, why EuroModernists chose NOT to take the requisite empirical route of real anthropological analysis.
Instead, the ‘rationalist’ modus was adopted, by and large (a tendency that peaks with Levi-Strauss and French anthropology of that genre), in keeping , partly, with Modernist ‘ideals’ of progressive humanism.
Christian myths of human genesis, in turn, also played a role in the refusal to classify Europeans alongside animals as animals, despite the genius of Darwin - although cheerfully applying such derogation, as/when needed, to Women and non-Europeans.
.Besides, the needs of imperium dictated that Other Cultures should be studied only to measure their ‘distance’ from the European master-model (Said’s Orientalism was amongst the early works to define this tendency, though Fanon, and others, had gotten there long before academic scholarship), alongside the perhaps more pressing need to ‘crack their codes’ - for colonial and military objectives.
Also, Modernist ‘requirements’ , as in Economics, did away with the embarrassing aspects of human biology such as ‘needs’ - in favor of duly manipulable, and indefinitely expandable , ‘wants’.
So, all of the above made a hash of anthropology as a science: instead, it became , like economics, yet another unsound pillar of Modernist, ideological propagation.
In sum, we know not who/what we are, as a species, let alone why we are here.
The First task, left to ‘science’ never really got off the mark, as just discussed; the Second, left to religion (and philosophy) meant that only generous fantasy prevailed.
Yet it behooves us to ask these questions, again, and start over: and in so doing, we shall be returned , perhaps, to the procreant musings of the ancients which still proffer a trove of insights that we can pursue further - subject to our own genius.
A realist anthropology, unlike the misanthropology bequeathed us by Modernism, could offer invaluable insight and guidance as to the real parameters of the ‘human dilemma’
‘Until then, regrettably, we will only be (mis)led by the canny subterfuges that undergird the sordid plans of the Modernist Project.
(iii)
How can one be reasonably sure that this , dreary ‘saga of our times’ is all set to expire?
Well, again, the facts lie stark, nay blatant , before us.
I call the phase after the Reagan-Thatcher coup, the Era of Late Modernism, where it begins, finally, to self-cannibalise: and that is likely the certain Prelude to Unravelment.
Marx once wrote that the Middle Ages could not live on religion (even if it swore by it) : and neither can Late Modernism live on Finance and Munitions (these latter are bad enough simply in their own terms, but, in combination , they are a fiendish mix).
Finance cannot feed, Munitions cannot minister.
Empires , like ambition, need to be forged of sterner stuff.
Au contraire, we have all seen its delegitimisation proceed precipitately, in these latter days, as the many , increasingly, see through the spin.
Our doughty Anglo-Am governors apparently forgot the old dictum of Napoleon: that you can do anything with bayonets - save sit on them.
One cannot simply bomb one’s way to enduring legitimacy, in this age and time.
And Global hegemony is not built by explosives, though the latter was undeniably the simpliste European basis for domination - which is a far lesser-order phenomenon.
Consequently, sans the necessary fig-leaf, the world can see , all too clearly today, only their ineffable brutishness.
When/Where a basic licitness is lost, little endures.
The tribes that looted much of the world pell-mell (American drives derive, innately, from their English roots: accordingly, that generative island-cluster I christen the ‘Brutish Isles’ for their regressive impact on the globe) , in a historically unrivalled orgy of extirpation cum extraction, are now in sullen state of an unaccustomed abatement - with confusion rife in their ranks and banners.
One might think of it, perhaps, as a species of suprahistorical Karma?
Of course, EuroModernism will not simply ‘cease to be’: it will only begin to (con)cede hegemony.
To be even more specific: its dominant, if aberrant , Anglo-Am , form will now draw down, forever (unlike ,say, its Icelandic cousinages, which, reined by abiding, antic ,communal-tribal norms, will yet hold their own).
Whence I conclude this piece with a mini semi-dirge - as a sort of a prevenient requiem.
A Farewell
We will Heed no more the Call of the Wild
to fulsome seductions in Whimsy’s wan pall
few Artless amongst us yet Lost in the Woods,
in goblin ensnarings, rapt by Sirens in Thrall -
We stride swiftly by Quicksands, past Pythons of Blight,
abeying the Tempters in Revels of Night:
The Long Dance quite ended, the Tables full Bare,
The Candles still flicker, but the Music is spare –
Carriage wheels clatter, gates creak to let go,
Wry catcalls ricocheting, Wraiths take to the Tow:
lolled in their penumbra, we grew sere in its glow,
but the Dread Lot is past, new Salves are aflow:
Time pratfalls in Trespass, life still is Unclear,
But the Vigil is demitting, neap Redemptions appear:
We fain sense the sunrise, we feel it loom nigh:
Burnishing the damson of a still smould’ring sky:
The Masque is untwining, the Ghouls are in flight,
Vampire and Werewolf, all glid into Night:
We who Adored them now resolve to Revile -
For We shall Yield no more to the Call of the Wild
[©R. Kanth, 2007]
REFERENCES
R. KANTH, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND LAISSEZ-FAIRE, 1986
---------, 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
[© R.Kanth 2014, Harvard University]
It is time to prepare to bid farewell to the long reigning supremacy of EuroModernism.
This may appear absurd, given its wilful hegemony across the universe, today.
But it is time, nonetheless.
The global struggles today , howsoever cloaked by our own misconceived vocabularies/viewpoints, are , in essence, a clash between modernist and non-modernist ways of life, ideas, and practices: indeed, the oft-reviled Huntington was not far wrong in his depiction of this as a ‘clash of civilisations’.
He was off-base, however, in equating EuroModernism with a form of civilization - instead , of being its very antithesis.
So, more aptly, is it a struggle between barbarism and civility, between materialism and morality, between the calculus of accumulation and the mores of empathy (or , perhaps more succinctly, in my own usage: between mammals and reptiles).
It is (Euro)Modernism that first erected an Unbreachable Wall - between our anthropic natures and our societal being.
The Modernist Revolutions, ideational and material, from the Late Sixteenth century on, which now stereotypically define the ‘west’ – in their own eyes - saw to that.
Briefly , it did so by the adoption of a vision of society as a ‘contract’ (i.e., a ‘balance of interests’), rather than the ancient compact of a ‘balance of affections’.
Secondly, it , perforce,‘individuated’ humans, i.e., cleft them from their societal bonds, those tensile hoops of affective steel!, so they could , then, in all sordid, self-destructive, alienation, see ‘society’ as but a means to deliver personal, individual , ends.
The West did not invent individuals – they are universal to all anthropic societies – but rather ‘individualism’: of an asocial nature.
In a stroke , the moral basis for societal conduct was expunged - paving the way for a still devolving ‘amoral’ being , increasingly obsessed with advancing a purely private interest, knowingly, against the pre-conditions of societal, and ecological, well-being.
Gemeinschaft village communities, under the impetus of greed and trade , were breaking up, and being swallowed by the new Gessellschaft formations belonging to the genre of empires - ending in the now familiar modernist ‘nation-state’ (that emerged in the 13th century, maturing with the Treaty of Westphalia).
Modernism is the most far-reaching empire ever constructed by the (evil) genius of Men (gender intended) , providing, for four centuries now , the stark mismeasure of human inclinations, aptitudes, and dispensations.
In that same vapid devolution , speaking in metaphor, mammals began to morph into reptiles, conviviality yielding to calculation.
These two mutations were situated within a new outlook that adopted an aggressive materialism both as a general philosophy, and as a measure and standard , of both personal and societal welfare.
The sciences of the time , positivist in the main, handily assisted this make-over , objectifying ‘nature’ (which in Christian usage did NOT include ‘god’s children’ – unless you happened to be Women, or ‘Other’ cultures! ), and creating a cheerless universe of things: both social and natural.
Its impact on the so-called social sciences – which were no more than blunt devices of social control designed to contain the revolutionary stirrings of the times (Comte’s vast repertoire of works are a good example)- was immediate: with someone like Durkheim, e.g., asking us to ‘consider social facts as things’.
As Sartre commented, this could only be possible where ‘things’ had already become the dominant social facts.
The Age of Quantity was beginning its long, triumphant, destructive, march.
Any and all forms of idealism (especially moral idealism) were consigned to the pound of a now devalued religion, whose tenets ran seriously afoul of the drives of the commercial classes.
Protestantism eventually first debunked, then displaced, the increasingly anachronistic strictures of the Church of Rome , and forged an individuated, and ‘reformed’, Christianity, that , possibly not by coincidence!, better fitted the needs, nay the demands !, of commerce and industry.
Simultaneously, morality was banished , and assimilated to the boondocks of religion, with utilitarian and pragmatist social policies being their new-fangled, stolid , surrogates (via the likes of Bentham, et. al.).
Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind quite epitomizes that banal outlook.
Social Engineering, on behalf of the dominant , acquisitive classes, , the Great (if as yet unfinished) Modernist Project, had begun.
My very first scholarly work describes how so-called ‘laissez-faire’ (Kanth, 1986) simply disallowed only anti-establishment interventions, not pro-system subventions.
The new ‘Social Science’ was undermined inevitably by its ‘law-and-order’ biases, much as philosophy was hopelessly overdetermined by church vs secularism issues: each ,thereby, inhabiting a self-imposed prison which offered little scope for either objectivity or insight.
On the other hand, Modernist philosophy , to take up the other major link in the ideological chain, was always a morass of partial speculations.
Indeed, European philosophy, where uninspired by Greek ideas, simply could not exist as a viable entity.
At any rate , in the Seventeenth century, the former project took unsteady hold, with Descartes sounding the pioneering bugle.
If compared to the originality of the Greeks, or India, it was , and still is, wholly unremarkable – indeed, to this day.
The reason is simple.
The Greeks were not self-limited by the parameters of Judeo-Christian norms :nor should their contributions be assimilated to ‘European’ philosophy gratuitously, as the North Atlantics have done: they were part of a great Pan-Mediterranean civilization whose ideas were part of a vast, melting pot, affected , in particular, by the seminal influences of Asia and Africa.
To give but a trivial , if telling, example, Aesop’s Fables – attributed to Greece, much like the ‘Theorem of Pythagoras’ – have their origins in antic Indian Panchatantra tales , themselves deriving from an oral tradition of a dateless antiquity.
Descartes, Kant, even Nietzsche (and Schopenhauer) , quite consciously, were all dealing, for better or for worse, with various tenets of Christian theosophy.
The German philosophers , in particular, were also specially tutored in newly translated Sanskrit texts.
Descartes was explicitly religious: Kant, somewhat more implicitly (it is said that Kant found it only societally utilitarian to believe in god as a means to succor morality , not because it was ‘true’: at any rate , he helped divorce faith from reason , permanently, in EuroModernism, to the lasting satisfaction of the emergent overseers of both church and state) , with ‘freedom’ (read Christian’ free will’) being a notion that still had to be retained , as a necessary a priori.
In fact, sans Christian ‘free will’, Kant’s project vanishes almost entirely: a clue, possibly, to its putative ‘greatness’.
As was , apparently remarked about Andre Gretry’s harmonies, ‘between his high notes and his low, you could drive a chariot’: a critique that , usefully, applies to all of Post-Renaissance , Non-Greek, European philosophy.
Even the ‘rejectionist’ Marx was , no less, moved, undeniably, by the gospel(s) of Christian humanism (the adjective being as important as the noun, whence his ready contempt , vide his writings on India, for the beliefs of Other cultures: a stance that is extant to this day amongst his epigones).
In fact, as often as not , Marxism itself is a species of a loyal ‘opposition’ to Modernist agendas,
To state the point brusquely, Christian myths are, en generale, believed, privately, even by the intelligentsia, as loosely historical - with all Others being treated, privately again, as suppositional.
Anglo-Am media (is there another kind?), a cut below academic scholarship, e.g., to this day carry narratives of Jesus , e.g., without qualification : whereas any references to Krishna are explicitly couched in condescending terms suggestive of myth, lore, and legend.
In effect, the EuroModernist ‘progressivist’ could have his/her religious/cultural cake and eat it too: whereas all Others had to surrender, and sacrifice, their traditional belief systems to climb up to the Modernist altar.
European ‘secularism’ is, thereby, not very much more than, nor ever very far from, Protestant theosophy,
In other words, even ‘progressivist’ Modernist agendas –such as ‘ communism’- were but extensions of essentially, deeply inscribed, pan-Christian ideals.
Indeed, take away the King James’ Bible and there are but few themes/tropes remaining in the Anglo-Am lexicon of the higher imagination (Shakespeare’s writings might follow as a distal second, in impact, but are , also, similarly, drenched in biblical imagery).
So, this was not philosophy that was wholly ‘open-ended’, like that of the Greeks, or the Indians, : it was, of necessity, constrained, to its serious detriment.
Its greatest exemplar is , of course, existentialism: a striking example of Christian passions battling Modernist debasements, howsoever fruitlessly.
As such, its fruits were/are quite bare.
Virtually all of it is a cri de couer, a grieving, for the moral/ affective ties lost, or scuttled, by the societal artefacts of Modernist ‘progress’ , with no faith left to offer solace.
Indeed, speaking only of philosophy, if the entire tradition from Descartes to Quine and Putnam, in our own time, were to vanish, not much would be lost that could not easily, and far more suitably, be re-acquired, say, by a quick delve into the antic Vedic treasure trove (much of it still in need of translation).
This should not be surprising since Christianity itself is no more, philosophically, than a trite variant of Buddhism - as the latter was but a deviant (naastika) strain of mainstream (aastika)Vedic thought.
This should surprise no one, since Buddhist influence flowed far, in both east and west, from India ,until the later rise of Islam checked its advance, terminally, westwards.
It is only with Wittgenstein, and much later, with Chomsky, that European philosophy takes up original subject-matter that was not inherently part of, or influenced by, the old, hackneyed, struggle between church and state, or religion vs secularism (as , say, moved Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche) via the novel study of language : but ,in so doing, Chomsky only revives pioneering Indian ideas of thousands of years ago (originating with Panini, to name but one ).
Of course, Linguistics is not, prima facie, part of philosophy at all, but is rather a sub-set of a possible science : of anthropology.
In fact, there is only One social science that is feasible, and includes all else: a realist anthropology of our species, yet , it has never been achieved, within EuroModernism, owing to, a) its imperial origins, and , b) its contamination, ab initio, with Christian, and Modernist, ideals (such as ‘equality’ , to name but one: I have tried to sketch the initial prodromes of such an anthropology in lecture format – it is cited , at the end of this essay.).
European anthropology is better termed a ‘misanthropology’: to which the only fitting correction is what I have christened ‘reverse anthropology’ – a field that has only just begun to be assayed.
Wittgenstein’s initial notion that words are pictures of reality and, later, that meanings are socially constructed , would not have fazed Indian linguists of antiquity in the slightest.
Indeed, the West oft claims too much for its philosophers; Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ has been compared, for instance, with the biblical ‘Golden Rule’ as amongst the noblest canons of human invention.
Firstly, it’s a moral canon, and not a necessary derivative of his philosophy: secondly, in all irony, it offers the engaging mantra, no less, to a society, an emergent civil society, which, ex definitione, is driven precisely by the severely anti-social frame of a ‘universal egoism’: where each uses the other as a means to his/her own advancement.
Thirdly, its enduring novelty is a function ,merely, of its denial, or absence, within Modernist society, and its ‘universality’ is quite untenable since it requires an atypical, abnormal, focus, like all Modernist Projects, on the premise of a sovereign individual in ‘free’ association - which is not sustainable (even unthinkable) for the vast majority of anthropic societies , past and present, untouched by Modernist corruption(s).
It is akin to applying gessellschaft criteria to gemeinschaft entities.
Finally, if you are seriously seeking moral canons of genuine ‘universality’, Jainism and Buddhism is where you would, more profitably, commence the search.
The more contemporaneous John Rawls’s acclaimed contribution is, similarly, interlaced with strands of Modernist pedantry.
Justice is not reducible to ‘fairness’; fairness is simply , to use a vernacular idiom, the prima facie ‘cover charge’ to be paid to any petition for ‘justice’, ab initio.
‘Fairness’, or impartiality rather, is therefore more of a rule of legality, or procedure , than justice, in the first instance.
Like all Modernist systems, Rawlsian criteria are formalistic ‘universals’ only, and evade substance (ideas such as ”equal rights’ , and ‘egalitarian economic systems’ that lace his arguments, are abstract . Modernist, notions that perhaps dodge, if not actually fudge, and divert attention away from, the more vital , historical issue of ‘initial conditions’: so ‘distributive justice’ even a la Rawlsian criteria cannot undo a default in an initial dispossession , say, via theft, fraud, or conquest, an issue that he was , of course, fully aware of).
Rawlsian ideas , are , thereby, a celebration (in the customary vein of triumphalism) only of the possibility of Modernism crafting ‘the ‘Good Society’ as a project of social engineering (if permitted by the ruling interests!) - another ‘ideal’ that one must, perforce, set in stark contrast to prevalent, ontic reality.
More fundamentally, any notion of ‘justice’ (and there are several: restitutive, retributive, et. al.,) is relative always to prevailing norms , so it is a societally specific notion: it cannot be elevated to a ‘universal’ discourse.
Rawls does just that: and ,as such , Rawlsian criteria are specific only to Modernist ideology, and are not relevant to non-Modern formations.
Anthropic Society is not a voluntarist engineering project that one ‘designs’ - like a gulag, or even a gated-community with member-prompted ‘ rules’ (which is how both capitalist and socialist planners, i.e. , the two dominant strains of EuroModernism have viewed matters): it is an organic entity that evolves, naturally and spontaneously, building consensus , over millennia.
Of Late Modernist will o’ the wisp billows such as Structuralism, Deconstruction, PostModernism , et. al., the less said, perhaps, the better: they never ascend to the scale of serious philosophical systems, and are no more than passing fads, the ‘ bas morceaux’, of very minimal lasting value (despite assisting, inevitably, a host of avant-garde careers: for academe is also a rich backwater of minor spoils).
In the choice of depth, seriousness, and nature of subject-matter , Anglo-American philosophy of today scarcely touches the hems of the ancients.
As in so many regards, Modernism as an intellectual force, remains , to employ terms I have applied , hitherto, to its economics only : a self-referential language game (in the case of economics, with zero representational efficacy).
Of course, it is , and can be, ‘interesting’ - as a TS Eliot character has it, in one of his plays, in context of someone finding another’s poetry interesting : but only if you are , a priori, interested in it.
Modernism, in all its stances, to underline my meaning, is inescapably misanthropic , tending to a dour anthropic entropy, in its very constitution.
It leaves us all , if swallowed whole, fit only for ‘treasons, stratagems, and spoils’.
Which, if thoughtfully considered, is no more than the grisly record of the European Drama - at least, since Columbus.
Let me relate but one minor moment in the latter’s register of infamy , in a poignant tale.
One of his victims, a native aboriginal about to be burnt alive was approached by the stand-by Catholic priest who asked if wished to be baptized (as prelude to the broil).
He asked why – and was regaled with vistas of the joys of heaven.
At this, he asked only if his tormentors were also headed there: and ,receiving the obvious answer, said :–“ No, I don’t wish to meet your kind again, anywhere”.
I dare say he spoke a mouthful there - for millions more to follow.
(ii)
I have taken my stance, in many of these posts, on the premise of the possibility a real anthropology of our species, so my ‘ critique’ is - leastways in that sense - non-arbitrary.
What do I mean by it?
That we are ‘programmed’ as a species, much as our other animal cousinages are, and the one obvious way of just beginning to read the modus of this conditioning is the obvious one of looking to instincts : which hold vital clues not merely to ‘human behavior’, but more accurately , and importantly, to the differential behaviors of men and women: who, whilst sharing some instincts in common, also have distinctly differing instincts.
Modernist ideology tendentiously subsumes men and women under the solvent rubric of ‘equality” (thereby joining women, to men , gratuitously, in the ghastly epics of male depredations).
This is a vicious canard: men and women have played very different anthropic roles in human evolution.
I have argued that both morality and civilization , understood as the pacification of the conditions of human existence , derive from the structural roles/responsibilities of women, not unrelated to their instinctual endowments and biological capabilities.
Patriarchical ideology – men being the ruling sex universally- could not admit disclosure of the fact that male societal violence stands in outright contrast to the female record in this area, cross-culturally: whence the feint of speaking , in terms of a ‘human’ propensity for aggression, etc., cannily evading appropriate gender responsibility.
I have already pointed out , in the earlier section, why EuroModernists chose NOT to take the requisite empirical route of real anthropological analysis.
Instead, the ‘rationalist’ modus was adopted, by and large (a tendency that peaks with Levi-Strauss and French anthropology of that genre), in keeping , partly, with Modernist ‘ideals’ of progressive humanism.
Christian myths of human genesis, in turn, also played a role in the refusal to classify Europeans alongside animals as animals, despite the genius of Darwin - although cheerfully applying such derogation, as/when needed, to Women and non-Europeans.
.Besides, the needs of imperium dictated that Other Cultures should be studied only to measure their ‘distance’ from the European master-model (Said’s Orientalism was amongst the early works to define this tendency, though Fanon, and others, had gotten there long before academic scholarship), alongside the perhaps more pressing need to ‘crack their codes’ - for colonial and military objectives.
Also, Modernist ‘requirements’ , as in Economics, did away with the embarrassing aspects of human biology such as ‘needs’ - in favor of duly manipulable, and indefinitely expandable , ‘wants’.
So, all of the above made a hash of anthropology as a science: instead, it became , like economics, yet another unsound pillar of Modernist, ideological propagation.
In sum, we know not who/what we are, as a species, let alone why we are here.
The First task, left to ‘science’ never really got off the mark, as just discussed; the Second, left to religion (and philosophy) meant that only generous fantasy prevailed.
Yet it behooves us to ask these questions, again, and start over: and in so doing, we shall be returned , perhaps, to the procreant musings of the ancients which still proffer a trove of insights that we can pursue further - subject to our own genius.
A realist anthropology, unlike the misanthropology bequeathed us by Modernism, could offer invaluable insight and guidance as to the real parameters of the ‘human dilemma’
‘Until then, regrettably, we will only be (mis)led by the canny subterfuges that undergird the sordid plans of the Modernist Project.
(iii)
How can one be reasonably sure that this , dreary ‘saga of our times’ is all set to expire?
Well, again, the facts lie stark, nay blatant , before us.
I call the phase after the Reagan-Thatcher coup, the Era of Late Modernism, where it begins, finally, to self-cannibalise: and that is likely the certain Prelude to Unravelment.
Marx once wrote that the Middle Ages could not live on religion (even if it swore by it) : and neither can Late Modernism live on Finance and Munitions (these latter are bad enough simply in their own terms, but, in combination , they are a fiendish mix).
Finance cannot feed, Munitions cannot minister.
Empires , like ambition, need to be forged of sterner stuff.
Au contraire, we have all seen its delegitimisation proceed precipitately, in these latter days, as the many , increasingly, see through the spin.
Our doughty Anglo-Am governors apparently forgot the old dictum of Napoleon: that you can do anything with bayonets - save sit on them.
One cannot simply bomb one’s way to enduring legitimacy, in this age and time.
And Global hegemony is not built by explosives, though the latter was undeniably the simpliste European basis for domination - which is a far lesser-order phenomenon.
Consequently, sans the necessary fig-leaf, the world can see , all too clearly today, only their ineffable brutishness.
When/Where a basic licitness is lost, little endures.
The tribes that looted much of the world pell-mell (American drives derive, innately, from their English roots: accordingly, that generative island-cluster I christen the ‘Brutish Isles’ for their regressive impact on the globe) , in a historically unrivalled orgy of extirpation cum extraction, are now in sullen state of an unaccustomed abatement - with confusion rife in their ranks and banners.
One might think of it, perhaps, as a species of suprahistorical Karma?
Of course, EuroModernism will not simply ‘cease to be’: it will only begin to (con)cede hegemony.
To be even more specific: its dominant, if aberrant , Anglo-Am , form will now draw down, forever (unlike ,say, its Icelandic cousinages, which, reined by abiding, antic ,communal-tribal norms, will yet hold their own).
Whence I conclude this piece with a mini semi-dirge - as a sort of a prevenient requiem.
A Farewell
We will Heed no more the Call of the Wild
to fulsome seductions in Whimsy’s wan pall
few Artless amongst us yet Lost in the Woods,
in goblin ensnarings, rapt by Sirens in Thrall -
We stride swiftly by Quicksands, past Pythons of Blight,
abeying the Tempters in Revels of Night:
The Long Dance quite ended, the Tables full Bare,
The Candles still flicker, but the Music is spare –
Carriage wheels clatter, gates creak to let go,
Wry catcalls ricocheting, Wraiths take to the Tow:
lolled in their penumbra, we grew sere in its glow,
but the Dread Lot is past, new Salves are aflow:
Time pratfalls in Trespass, life still is Unclear,
But the Vigil is demitting, neap Redemptions appear:
We fain sense the sunrise, we feel it loom nigh:
Burnishing the damson of a still smould’ring sky:
The Masque is untwining, the Ghouls are in flight,
Vampire and Werewolf, all glid into Night:
We who Adored them now resolve to Revile -
For We shall Yield no more to the Call of the Wild
[©R. Kanth, 2007]
REFERENCES
R. KANTH, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND LAISSEZ-FAIRE, 1986
---------, 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
[© R.Kanth 2014, Harvard University]