A SUMMING UP
In a series of posts , commencing early in 2014, I have been detailing the modalities of the current global crisis :from causes to consequences - and even salves.
These sketches are to be brought out in a volume provisionally entitled ‘Against Modernism: Essays in Indictment’’.
It represents, perhaps, the first comprehensive, Non-Eurocentric/Non-EuroModernist , accounting , and outline sketch, of global societal phenomena in their evolution under the heel of European Hegemony.
Here, I present, in the usual, truncated form, ever in acute brevity!, their essential import.
So , some repetition is not only to be expected , but required.
A necessary caveat, or two: adding to the Poet’s admonition, a little knowledge is not merely a dangerous thing, but also, in some regards, merely embroiders extant ignorance .
That is to say, my rendition hangs together- i.e. , stands or falls - only as a whole.
So, a little patience will ‘pay’.
It is also, unmistakably, antipodally antithetical to received information on the subject(s) stemming from vainglorious Modernist accounts, within which we have all been tutored , for generations - be they liberal, conservative, or otherwise.
As such, it were helpful if judgment on parts were suspended, until the entirety of the presentment is both read, and understood.
Now , I am not seeking accord; far less, acquiescence (from anyone).
Quite the contrary: It has been said that ‘history is a fable, agreed upon’ - far more utilitarian, perhaps, if it were viewed, instead, as a parable, disagreed upon.
Finally, I scribe , not fuelled by customary drives of ‘ambition, or bread’ , but moved by pain - from the piercing pangs of keen ‘awareness’ of our rather desperate constitution on planet earth, especially in these latter days of mayhem and turmoil.
To explain.
Exploitation and oppression are very different things.
The former is oft not known, nor even ‘felt’ when known.
But oppression is , always, both known and felt.
Modernism oppresses, like no other, even if it exploits no more than any other form of patriarchy –which is the inexpungable bane of our species.
I write to dismiss, and so help diminish, the oppressive weight of its shibboleths, which are a further , gratuitous, tax upon an already foredoomed species - within an inexorably dying universe.
Unlike many fellow critics , I would settle, readily, for but a ‘cruelty free’ social universe, though that simple pleading may go wildly beyond what any and all utopias can even promise - let alone deliver.
Indeed, as I will suggest, all (Modernist) utopias are sadly, if necessarily, ‘anthropology-free’ (to their eternal detriment).
And our anthropology ‘locates’ us, in our ‘being’, much as the planet does so, spatially.
So, I am sort of saying : know your anthropology, and go and sin no more.
(ii)
The world is upside-down today owing to the cumulating consequences of the Modernist Revolutions that rent the societal fabric of Europe , Sixteenth Century on.
As such, unequivocally, European governors bear full responsibility for the inglorious disarray of our times.
It is almost truistic to note that we have all been brought, today, to the very brink of the extinction of both the planet’s material hospitalities and human society’s own, antic, civic decencies.
And the ‘agency’ that ensured this obnoxious outcome was the wholesale embrace of materialism as the ruling ‘geist’ in all matters: in the sciences, arts, and societal modes of living.
As I have written, materialism is sham science, shoddy philosophy , and shabby ethics.
The endemic crisis in sustainability and human well-being is , thereby, the infelicitous ‘gift’ of EuroModernism, a gift that was, perforce, pushed down the throats of all Other societies by the simple fact of European domination of All societal spaces, globally: economic, political, cultural, etc.
Modernism is an ideational construct built upon: a) a self-serving view of progress’ b) a materialist scaling of the latter’s desiderata c) a chronic attachment to ‘scientism’ d) and a readiness to use (illimitable) force to achieve ‘ putatively ‘progressivist’ ends.
As such, it covers both (European) capitalism and socialism (the difference lies in the fact that the former relies on an ‘individualist’ ontology, and the latter on a ‘collectivist’ one).
Whilst ‘Europe’ is its inescapably generic , matrix source, it is also clear that it is the Anglo-American formations that have ‘powered’ the appalling declension in world affairs (in consequence of Modernist theory and practices) with all their might - a process not at all abated even today (not all societies, nominally ‘European’ , had either the head or the heart for this sustained crusade.The Celts, as just one example, were subdued early on, and brought into the fold by force, but remain, to this day, with some reservations, ‘a breed apart’. Ditto , with many regions of Eastern Europe never wholly won over by the Modernist Revolutions).
(iii)
For those who might object that some major ‘Non-European’ societies were also ‘materialist’ in philosophy, as, say, China (which is why Buddhism – itself imbued with a pragmatic materialism that challenged Vedic idealism - did as well as it did there: unlike, say , in India) the answer is that no society other than the European ever acceded to an ‘individuated self-interest’ modus; for it is this latter predilection that virtually guarantees the repudiation of ANY notion of a public, or general , interest, that can - be it abstractly or concretely, - be expected to supercede the sovereignty of individual (self) interest.
Once that genie is out of the lamp, there is no turning back.
Stated differently, China was indeed materialist , but retained serious societal responsibility and accountability as governing norms of public policy (and that to this day, despite being inundated by Western accoutrements).
So, it is the invidious combination of materialism with an asocial individuation that explains the distinctive structure and trajectory of European formations , after the Sixteenth Century.
It also explains their palpably common Modernist ‘signature’ conditions of angst, despair, loneliness, and restlessness .
Which is why the ‘lights can never go out, the music must always play’, wherever EuroModernism strikes unwholesome, noxious, root.
A soul, ill at ease, can seek only, for ever more!, crass , and unrequitng, satisfactions.
(iv)
Of course, this ‘fateful embrace’ went directly against the very grain of our anthropic being.
And it is this materialism that has always stood , defiantly, as the impenetrable obstacle to the prospect of a European Civilisation (understood as a pacification of the conditions – natural/societal - of human existence).
Once society was seen as a ‘social contract of interests’, rather than a compact of affections, and, further, only a means to individual ends - the fall from grace was both certain, and precipitate.
Every vanity, especially greed, was given full, nay utmost, rein: and the societal tie , in dire, straight -line acceleration, wilted and withered.
In the singing words of Goldsmith, ‘Ill fares the land , to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay’.
Indeed.
And the fetid decay is spread all around us, like a virus.
Morality, which is but the collective cement of a human community, now dies a morbid death, gradually asphyxiated by the extinction of culture, civility, and goodwill.
In its place arise the dry dessications of Modernist ‘rules, laws, and constitutions’: in short, ‘legality ‘ takes the place of moral norms, and, of course, gives us the cheerless, fateful, ‘Amoral’ society whose paramount example is latter-day America, the derelict wasteland , where the only, last, threadbare, restraint on anti-social behaviors left, if at all, is Fear - of the Law.
The radical transition should be noted: Modernism destroys the convivial, affective , basis of morality , and replaces it with a tawdry, fear-based system : of punitive legalisms.
It explains why police shoot to kill in America even for minor , inconsequential, civil offenses - and not even a few demur(indeed, they kill even when no infractions are at issue).
It is as one alien does - to another (for they are all, ‘alien-ated’).
Not so in Denmark, or Iceland, which, despite their Modernism garb, yet retain the tribal, communal , tie,
Gemeinschaft is ,thereby , replaced with Gesellschaft.
Civilisation , with the laws of the jungle.
Mammalian traits, with Reptilian ones.
The paradigm of femininity (caring, consideration), with the paradigm of masculinity (aggression, greed).
Yet ‘Man’ does not , cannot, live by dread alone - without embracing dire anomie , and its indefeasible consequent : gathering insanity, as enshrouds the budding psychopath and the sociopath.
(v)
I write often of morality - a topic conspicuous by its striking absence from the daily vocabulary of EuroModernism.
No wonder: having destroyed its affective basis viz., family and community, it can scarce comprehend its relevance, let alone its meaning.
In fact, for most purposes it is , in layperson’ s terms today , equated with ethics, and hence left up to individual taste, and choice.
This is little short of an unspeakable travesty.
Morality is the interlarding fabric of anthropic society, and stems from its very primal building block – the mother-infant relation : the inexpugnably vital basis of anthropic evolution.
As such, it originates , primarily, with women .
The vulnerable human infant requires time to mature to adulthood: whence the entire safety-security set of relations /conditions that constitute the cultural ‘cordon sanitaire’ of ‘pre-requisites’ (of what we might understand as ‘civilisation’ ) assuring that this may be accomplished, time and again: i.e, , the pacification of the extant conditions (natural, social) of human existence .
Given that the greatest threat to this nurturing process is always the on-and-off nature of male depredations, it is women ,again, who are the primary trustees of civilization (whence , also, of civility).
So, both morality and civilization are serious , structural, societal ‘needs’ , not arbitrary , personal, ‘choices’, mediated, in the first instance, by women.
The fact that EuroModerist society finds both to be no more than dispensable artefacts only illustrates the real basis of its continuing, steady-state , observable , dissolution - as an anthropic society,
I have also argued that men and women are, two distinct sub-species, divided by differentiated instincts, something known to all but the Modernists who sweep radical distinctions under the dissembling rug of a presumed , ideological, ‘equality’ of the two: au contraire, women are ‘arguably’ superior to men, using the realist , and non-arbitrary, standard of bearing propensities that ensure the possibility of the survival of the species.
Stated succinctly, women (across millennia) quietly build the templates of reciprocal convivialities, even as men , somewhat less modestly, raze them.
As an important aside, the relationship of Men to power and domination is , at root, instinctive: it is the genius of matrilineal tribal formations to, more or less, enchain this ‘drive’ within the bonds/bounds of the affective ties of kinship: thereby placing it, howsoever ephemerally, ‘under restraint’.
Where such restraint is absent, or weak, empires result, of one kind or other, within the firm grip of a burgeoning ‘iron law’ of oligarchy.
It is this latter propensity that obdurately undermines and vitiates all Modernist projects that aim to thwart power and curb domination, even when nobly inspired.
At any rate, ‘Equality’ is but one, powerful, if largely exploded, myth: there are many other notions that are shot through with a slew of epistemic and ontic disclaimers , non-starters, and sheer bad faith.
Which brings me, now, to my Major Thesis: that ALL varieties of Modernist philosophy ,and social ‘science’ , fail, utterly, for NOT being located in real(ist) , human , anthropology.
Regrettably, Modernist anthropology was hopelessly vitiated , ab initio, by its a priori , all but unconscious, ‘assumptions’, drawn, loosely, from a secular version of Christian theology which ascribes a teleology (of ‘progress’) to the human species , alone amongst all others.
Now, am I suggesting , perchance, that ‘anthropology is destiny’?.
Not necessarily, though even a casual perusal of history will confirm the trivial truth of my propositions about men and women.
Instead , let me say that we must , in all caution, resist the temptation to be delusional , in the grandiose , Modernist , manner of pontifical , even ‘universal ‘, declarations that suggest that we can be ‘anything we choose’ , as a species.
In fact the only ‘universals’ are our instinctive, anthropic drives, though mediated by culture.
And culture is ‘difference’ , writ large.
Modernism standardizes and homogenizes any and all cultural/institutional ‘differences’ so as to better co-opt, control, and dominate the world.
The entire set of Modernist declamations, upon which its applecart rides most insecurely, is specious cant: alternately, false, misleading, tendentious, empty, shallow, anti-social, and misanthropic.
Take , e.g., the vaunted, abstract, ‘freedom’ that is the primus deus of Modernist ideology: indeed, it is but little hyperbole to claim that all variants of the spectrum swear by it.
Careful scrutiny will , however, reveal more holes than may be found in the common run of swiss cheese.
For starters: freedom from what, for what?
Next, what the (actual, potential) limits of this ‘freedom’?
Then, perhaps the key lacuna: it is ever an individuated concept of freedom, which underlines its asocial, and even anti-social, credentials.
Now, to its realist, ontic , correlates.
For the luckless consumer, it’s the meaning-laden ‘choice’ between Coke and Pepsi.
For the citizen, the solemn election between Two Parties divided only by One , common, idolatry(Republican, Democrat).
Any other freedoms?
Yes, largely to live and die alone – in ‘solitary’, as in prison parlance! – formally ‘equal’ to millions of others similarly marooned, drowned, and foundered: in an irredemptive swamp of loneliness , disaffection, and despair.
So much ‘Free Will’, one might say, so little self-contentment.
Ah , but it does have a ‘real’ side to it, wherein the real clue to its ideology comes revealed: the Corporate Governors are ‘free’ to do what they wish, as they wish, when they wish, upon whom they wish.
And now, thanks to an insensible Supreme Court, they too are ‘individuated’ by fiat: yes, they are ‘individuals’, nay, ‘persons’ with rights (if not responsibilities).
For them, rises the Statue of Liberty, but with no parallel Statue, not even a tiny hand-puppet!, of Responsibility, or Accountability to offset it.
Let the meaning be clear: ‘freedom’ is a Modernist, corporatist slogan that arose in European history when upstart commercial classes wished to rid themselves of the nuisance-laden restrictions of the Ancien Regime, Canon Law, Laws against Usury, and such, that frustrated their insidious advance to absolute power.
It served to dupe and mobilize the masses, who fought and died for it, only to be tragically robbed again of the societal protections that once immunized them , howsoever minimally, against want and privation.
More profoundly, individuated modernist ‘freedom’ goes against our given anthropic grain: the modicum of contentment that is possible for us is found only in close-knit, emotive, tribal reciprocities that are emphatically NOT based on any such abstract ‘freedoms’.
The human family illustrates my meaning , irrefutably: it is not equal, not democratic, not free - yet gives to all, high and low, east and west, Modernist and Non-Modernist , that miniscule dole of warmth without which life would be unbearable, unthinkable, and unlivable.
Not for nothing did Alexander Selkirk name his very own private island the ‘Island of Despair’.
Once again, we need to know our own anthropology to resist the genre of false, and dangerously misleading, temptations.
Real ‘Freedom’ may well be, as has been held, if within limits, the recognition of necessity.
(vi)
Instincts impose many caveats upon ‘human’ (i.e. , male/female) behavior that would be , and have proved, quite foolhardy to ignore.
One telling, and related, example of radical misreading of human behaviors, is how the pseudo-science of Modernist economics is all agog , bursting at the seams with ‘wants’, but (tendentiously) ‘forgets ‘needs ‘ altogether, to its utter, disadvantage (yes, and workers , e.g., are but ‘hands’ only, ‘freed’ of the inconvenient, fulsome, burdens of bellies and mouths).
And Economics draws from Modernism, the motherlode from whence it springs – which conceives us all as mechanical , rationalist, automatons, not organic, biological, beings, having epistemically ‘freed’ us, from our very placement in Nature itself (whilst yet leaving, leastways in its early idylls, , women and ‘primitives’ to stew in that latter, primal , slime: yes, both the ‘Shrew’ and the ‘Aboriginal’ required much’ taming’ and ‘uplifting’ to meet Modernist standards : Shakespeare, attending to the first, and Kipling, to the latter, at least allegorically).
The madness runs several shades deeper: one Nobel Laureate, in Economics, whom I will not name out of embarrassment for his sake, in full flush of Modernist triumphalism, argued that ‘we can do without nature’ (what a pellucid manifest of Self-alienation!, quite aside from the fact that, regrettably, the truth is, exactly, vice-versa).
We are, in all its drab pathos , but animals (if shaped in ‘god’s image’, this god could only be a great , even glossy, Ape) who, lofted by sheer imagination, and equal measure of egotism, soar higher than nature allows: but , just as gravity brings us ‘down to earth’ if we are not properly equipped, so do our instinctual natures drag our (utopian) projects down , when we strike out for the empyrean - unequipped with due understanding of our obvious flesh-and-blood limitations.
Regrettably, All Modernist paths are the same: they lead nowhere.
Flights of fancy , be they of ‘Left’ or ‘Right’, are destined only to crash land - worse, in a place not of their choosing.
Durkheim understood the ‘socialism’ of his time, shrewdly, as a tragic cri de couer at a paradise lost irretrievably: and Marx’s ‘communism’ of the future was but a Modernist make-over of so-called ‘primitive communism’ - which is no more than the tribal reality I have been drawing attention to in these essays.
So, our tribal essence asserts itself, even in Modernist pipedreams.
(vii)
How is all this to be reversed?
I have argued that there is no earthly , temporal, force that is , today, stronger than EuroModernism.
Thereby, it is perhaps quite fitting that it will, in all probability, and all by itself, undermine itself.
Its parasitism has now turned into an even more deadly ‘self-cannibalism’ (I call this the phase of Late Modernism).
For four hundred years, Modernist Europe ( via its savvy governors) swindled the Other (both external and internal to it), to attain its vast bounty of resources.
We all know – or should know - the means deployed: slavery, genocide, expropriation, occupation, war , conquest , pre-emptive trade &commerce, colonisation, and empire.
In effect, workers, peasants, farmers, women, serfs, slaves, chattel ,the indigent and the impuissant ,the world over (again, both internal and external to Europe) labored - so European elites (and their usually dependent cronies/allies elsewhere) could live in the glitz and glitter that attends them still.
And today’s ‘globalisation’ has replicated that so very remarkable process of a wholesale transfer of resources/values - even more smoothly.
Then, in the closing decades of the Twentieth century, with apparently little left to dominate (other than the Moon and Mars) , and brimming over with bravado at its ‘victory’ over the oppositional, if hapless, ‘socialist’ comity of nations - it turned on itself.
With Productions virtually ceded to the ‘New Emergent Periphery’, and its own traditional working-class(es) similarly abandoned, the Anglo-Ams (in a separate piece I have detailed the historical uniqueness of the Anglo-Saxon as a force in world history) are now spearheaded by the perhaps the purest form of egregious parasitism conceivable within the modernist economic paradigm: finance.
Banking capital now superordinates , and controls, all other capitals, owing to a gargantuan size and scale made possible, ironically, by its very fictitious nature.
The unproductive rule the productive, the drones command the bees.
It has given but behind-the scenes , credit-wielding, speculative , cyberfunctionaries , life-and-death power over agriculture, industry, etc. , and, as such, over real livelihoods, and economies, globally.
Small wonder, possibly, that many of their technocratic philosophies, in shallow echoes, see little difference between the real and the virtual , in grim forewarning of an encroaching Transhuman future.
It is , emblematically, the very height of (Euro)Modernist tragic absurdity that scraps of paper (oft-times, even less: but mere computer entries!) ,no more than IOUs , can yet purchase outright , vast , incalculable, swaths of real resources, both societal and natural - with malefic intent , and deadly effect.
Thus, the ‘Great Reversal’ of this self-immolating agenda is written into the script, from the start: already , derivative gambles exceed the value of world GDP by a colossal factor - i.e., a sudden, and cataclysmic collapse of finance is only a little short of inevitable.
And with it, howsoever buffered by public budgets, will go much of the flimflam and fluff of Western Economies - and the hegemony of the North Atlantic Powers.
Of course the Costs of its Fall , economic, political, etc., similar to its initial , cataclysmic , Rise, will be borne by those (Other cultures, Other species, and the teeming strata of the underprivileged , under-represented, and the resource-starved) who can least afford it.
When a Gulliver falls, a lot of Lilliputs can only find themselves placed in radical jeopardy.
(viii)
The world will not, of course, be taken by surprise.
Our intrepid governors know full well what they are , and have been, doing.
It has ,rightly, been termed ‘failure, by design’.
And many , if not all, amongst the Other: Russia, China, India, e.g., are also catching on, howsoever slowly.
Indeed, the BRICS have already taken the first , hesitant, baby-steps to climb out of the deepening morass.
And many, many, others, will follow their example, perhaps even take lead.
So, yes , this 2.0 version of the Titanic will - finally! - be abandoned, if , unhappily, as with the original, too late for the many.
The real economy will revive, all over the globe , and an antic sanity will , yet again, get restored.
That much is also written, nay coded , into our species-being.
And it can only be beneficent – to all.
Once again , it will be a poly-centric world, free of hegemons: a motley crew of nations/societies ,living/experimenting - according to their own cultural lights.
We can only hope that the incumbent pioneers can generate the needed ‘escape velocity’ to leave Modernist ideologies behind, permanently.
And they will need to dig deep within : to recover buried realms of past heritage, from whence they can yet again derive norms, values, even small felicities!, of real anthropic import and meaning lost, for so long, in the turgid melee of modern-day consumerism.
It will, doubtless, also, take some time to retire all the false , meretricious gods to their sordid lairs in misanthropy.
This is quite comparable to the state of the world prior to the onset of the great saga of European Adventurism, so it is neither fantasy nor utopia.
Of course, the enforced let-down from their dizzy heights will be hard to swallow for the Older Hegemons.
But they, too, will need to adapt - and learn to live more peaceably with a world that they have thus far, and for so very long, owned and operated , willy-nilly, as their very own fief.
Better humble pie , one might say, than no pie at all?
So, as the good bard has it: the best, just possibly, is yet to be!
Although, given what we know of the crumbling present, even a return , simply , to the status quo ante might serve just as well.
REFERENCES
R. KANTH, BREAKING WITH THE ENLUGHTENMENT, 1997
________, AGAINST ECONOMICS, 1997
________,, AGAINST EUROCENTRISM, 2005
---------,, THE POST-HUMAN SOCIETY, 2013
---------, TWO LECTURES ON EUROCENTRISM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwQrpfom9M<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DZDwQrpfom9M&k=AjZjj3dyY74kKL92lieHqQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Ul8alR2l08keT7LU6kfGk%2FLPjA2GeWA1tJYXAdjLdto%3D%0A&m=l80kmrQP5oD9Yn9GW3wVClP85XRBN%2FmCVzJs2Jxsw8M%3D%0A&s=86a419fc904ebbfcaf93be689bd47970ffd28239a7951a7b16c96396fd034db4
[© R.Kanth 2014, Harvard University]
In a series of posts , commencing early in 2014, I have been detailing the modalities of the current global crisis :from causes to consequences - and even salves.
These sketches are to be brought out in a volume provisionally entitled ‘Against Modernism: Essays in Indictment’’.
It represents, perhaps, the first comprehensive, Non-Eurocentric/Non-EuroModernist , accounting , and outline sketch, of global societal phenomena in their evolution under the heel of European Hegemony.
Here, I present, in the usual, truncated form, ever in acute brevity!, their essential import.
So , some repetition is not only to be expected , but required.
A necessary caveat, or two: adding to the Poet’s admonition, a little knowledge is not merely a dangerous thing, but also, in some regards, merely embroiders extant ignorance .
That is to say, my rendition hangs together- i.e. , stands or falls - only as a whole.
So, a little patience will ‘pay’.
It is also, unmistakably, antipodally antithetical to received information on the subject(s) stemming from vainglorious Modernist accounts, within which we have all been tutored , for generations - be they liberal, conservative, or otherwise.
As such, it were helpful if judgment on parts were suspended, until the entirety of the presentment is both read, and understood.
Now , I am not seeking accord; far less, acquiescence (from anyone).
Quite the contrary: It has been said that ‘history is a fable, agreed upon’ - far more utilitarian, perhaps, if it were viewed, instead, as a parable, disagreed upon.
Finally, I scribe , not fuelled by customary drives of ‘ambition, or bread’ , but moved by pain - from the piercing pangs of keen ‘awareness’ of our rather desperate constitution on planet earth, especially in these latter days of mayhem and turmoil.
To explain.
Exploitation and oppression are very different things.
The former is oft not known, nor even ‘felt’ when known.
But oppression is , always, both known and felt.
Modernism oppresses, like no other, even if it exploits no more than any other form of patriarchy –which is the inexpungable bane of our species.
I write to dismiss, and so help diminish, the oppressive weight of its shibboleths, which are a further , gratuitous, tax upon an already foredoomed species - within an inexorably dying universe.
Unlike many fellow critics , I would settle, readily, for but a ‘cruelty free’ social universe, though that simple pleading may go wildly beyond what any and all utopias can even promise - let alone deliver.
Indeed, as I will suggest, all (Modernist) utopias are sadly, if necessarily, ‘anthropology-free’ (to their eternal detriment).
And our anthropology ‘locates’ us, in our ‘being’, much as the planet does so, spatially.
So, I am sort of saying : know your anthropology, and go and sin no more.
(ii)
The world is upside-down today owing to the cumulating consequences of the Modernist Revolutions that rent the societal fabric of Europe , Sixteenth Century on.
As such, unequivocally, European governors bear full responsibility for the inglorious disarray of our times.
It is almost truistic to note that we have all been brought, today, to the very brink of the extinction of both the planet’s material hospitalities and human society’s own, antic, civic decencies.
And the ‘agency’ that ensured this obnoxious outcome was the wholesale embrace of materialism as the ruling ‘geist’ in all matters: in the sciences, arts, and societal modes of living.
As I have written, materialism is sham science, shoddy philosophy , and shabby ethics.
The endemic crisis in sustainability and human well-being is , thereby, the infelicitous ‘gift’ of EuroModernism, a gift that was, perforce, pushed down the throats of all Other societies by the simple fact of European domination of All societal spaces, globally: economic, political, cultural, etc.
Modernism is an ideational construct built upon: a) a self-serving view of progress’ b) a materialist scaling of the latter’s desiderata c) a chronic attachment to ‘scientism’ d) and a readiness to use (illimitable) force to achieve ‘ putatively ‘progressivist’ ends.
As such, it covers both (European) capitalism and socialism (the difference lies in the fact that the former relies on an ‘individualist’ ontology, and the latter on a ‘collectivist’ one).
Whilst ‘Europe’ is its inescapably generic , matrix source, it is also clear that it is the Anglo-American formations that have ‘powered’ the appalling declension in world affairs (in consequence of Modernist theory and practices) with all their might - a process not at all abated even today (not all societies, nominally ‘European’ , had either the head or the heart for this sustained crusade.The Celts, as just one example, were subdued early on, and brought into the fold by force, but remain, to this day, with some reservations, ‘a breed apart’. Ditto , with many regions of Eastern Europe never wholly won over by the Modernist Revolutions).
(iii)
For those who might object that some major ‘Non-European’ societies were also ‘materialist’ in philosophy, as, say, China (which is why Buddhism – itself imbued with a pragmatic materialism that challenged Vedic idealism - did as well as it did there: unlike, say , in India) the answer is that no society other than the European ever acceded to an ‘individuated self-interest’ modus; for it is this latter predilection that virtually guarantees the repudiation of ANY notion of a public, or general , interest, that can - be it abstractly or concretely, - be expected to supercede the sovereignty of individual (self) interest.
Once that genie is out of the lamp, there is no turning back.
Stated differently, China was indeed materialist , but retained serious societal responsibility and accountability as governing norms of public policy (and that to this day, despite being inundated by Western accoutrements).
So, it is the invidious combination of materialism with an asocial individuation that explains the distinctive structure and trajectory of European formations , after the Sixteenth Century.
It also explains their palpably common Modernist ‘signature’ conditions of angst, despair, loneliness, and restlessness .
Which is why the ‘lights can never go out, the music must always play’, wherever EuroModernism strikes unwholesome, noxious, root.
A soul, ill at ease, can seek only, for ever more!, crass , and unrequitng, satisfactions.
(iv)
Of course, this ‘fateful embrace’ went directly against the very grain of our anthropic being.
And it is this materialism that has always stood , defiantly, as the impenetrable obstacle to the prospect of a European Civilisation (understood as a pacification of the conditions – natural/societal - of human existence).
Once society was seen as a ‘social contract of interests’, rather than a compact of affections, and, further, only a means to individual ends - the fall from grace was both certain, and precipitate.
Every vanity, especially greed, was given full, nay utmost, rein: and the societal tie , in dire, straight -line acceleration, wilted and withered.
In the singing words of Goldsmith, ‘Ill fares the land , to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay’.
Indeed.
And the fetid decay is spread all around us, like a virus.
Morality, which is but the collective cement of a human community, now dies a morbid death, gradually asphyxiated by the extinction of culture, civility, and goodwill.
In its place arise the dry dessications of Modernist ‘rules, laws, and constitutions’: in short, ‘legality ‘ takes the place of moral norms, and, of course, gives us the cheerless, fateful, ‘Amoral’ society whose paramount example is latter-day America, the derelict wasteland , where the only, last, threadbare, restraint on anti-social behaviors left, if at all, is Fear - of the Law.
The radical transition should be noted: Modernism destroys the convivial, affective , basis of morality , and replaces it with a tawdry, fear-based system : of punitive legalisms.
It explains why police shoot to kill in America even for minor , inconsequential, civil offenses - and not even a few demur(indeed, they kill even when no infractions are at issue).
It is as one alien does - to another (for they are all, ‘alien-ated’).
Not so in Denmark, or Iceland, which, despite their Modernism garb, yet retain the tribal, communal , tie,
Gemeinschaft is ,thereby , replaced with Gesellschaft.
Civilisation , with the laws of the jungle.
Mammalian traits, with Reptilian ones.
The paradigm of femininity (caring, consideration), with the paradigm of masculinity (aggression, greed).
Yet ‘Man’ does not , cannot, live by dread alone - without embracing dire anomie , and its indefeasible consequent : gathering insanity, as enshrouds the budding psychopath and the sociopath.
(v)
I write often of morality - a topic conspicuous by its striking absence from the daily vocabulary of EuroModernism.
No wonder: having destroyed its affective basis viz., family and community, it can scarce comprehend its relevance, let alone its meaning.
In fact, for most purposes it is , in layperson’ s terms today , equated with ethics, and hence left up to individual taste, and choice.
This is little short of an unspeakable travesty.
Morality is the interlarding fabric of anthropic society, and stems from its very primal building block – the mother-infant relation : the inexpugnably vital basis of anthropic evolution.
As such, it originates , primarily, with women .
The vulnerable human infant requires time to mature to adulthood: whence the entire safety-security set of relations /conditions that constitute the cultural ‘cordon sanitaire’ of ‘pre-requisites’ (of what we might understand as ‘civilisation’ ) assuring that this may be accomplished, time and again: i.e, , the pacification of the extant conditions (natural, social) of human existence .
Given that the greatest threat to this nurturing process is always the on-and-off nature of male depredations, it is women ,again, who are the primary trustees of civilization (whence , also, of civility).
So, both morality and civilization are serious , structural, societal ‘needs’ , not arbitrary , personal, ‘choices’, mediated, in the first instance, by women.
The fact that EuroModerist society finds both to be no more than dispensable artefacts only illustrates the real basis of its continuing, steady-state , observable , dissolution - as an anthropic society,
I have also argued that men and women are, two distinct sub-species, divided by differentiated instincts, something known to all but the Modernists who sweep radical distinctions under the dissembling rug of a presumed , ideological, ‘equality’ of the two: au contraire, women are ‘arguably’ superior to men, using the realist , and non-arbitrary, standard of bearing propensities that ensure the possibility of the survival of the species.
Stated succinctly, women (across millennia) quietly build the templates of reciprocal convivialities, even as men , somewhat less modestly, raze them.
As an important aside, the relationship of Men to power and domination is , at root, instinctive: it is the genius of matrilineal tribal formations to, more or less, enchain this ‘drive’ within the bonds/bounds of the affective ties of kinship: thereby placing it, howsoever ephemerally, ‘under restraint’.
Where such restraint is absent, or weak, empires result, of one kind or other, within the firm grip of a burgeoning ‘iron law’ of oligarchy.
It is this latter propensity that obdurately undermines and vitiates all Modernist projects that aim to thwart power and curb domination, even when nobly inspired.
At any rate, ‘Equality’ is but one, powerful, if largely exploded, myth: there are many other notions that are shot through with a slew of epistemic and ontic disclaimers , non-starters, and sheer bad faith.
Which brings me, now, to my Major Thesis: that ALL varieties of Modernist philosophy ,and social ‘science’ , fail, utterly, for NOT being located in real(ist) , human , anthropology.
Regrettably, Modernist anthropology was hopelessly vitiated , ab initio, by its a priori , all but unconscious, ‘assumptions’, drawn, loosely, from a secular version of Christian theology which ascribes a teleology (of ‘progress’) to the human species , alone amongst all others.
Now, am I suggesting , perchance, that ‘anthropology is destiny’?.
Not necessarily, though even a casual perusal of history will confirm the trivial truth of my propositions about men and women.
Instead , let me say that we must , in all caution, resist the temptation to be delusional , in the grandiose , Modernist , manner of pontifical , even ‘universal ‘, declarations that suggest that we can be ‘anything we choose’ , as a species.
In fact the only ‘universals’ are our instinctive, anthropic drives, though mediated by culture.
And culture is ‘difference’ , writ large.
Modernism standardizes and homogenizes any and all cultural/institutional ‘differences’ so as to better co-opt, control, and dominate the world.
The entire set of Modernist declamations, upon which its applecart rides most insecurely, is specious cant: alternately, false, misleading, tendentious, empty, shallow, anti-social, and misanthropic.
Take , e.g., the vaunted, abstract, ‘freedom’ that is the primus deus of Modernist ideology: indeed, it is but little hyperbole to claim that all variants of the spectrum swear by it.
Careful scrutiny will , however, reveal more holes than may be found in the common run of swiss cheese.
For starters: freedom from what, for what?
Next, what the (actual, potential) limits of this ‘freedom’?
Then, perhaps the key lacuna: it is ever an individuated concept of freedom, which underlines its asocial, and even anti-social, credentials.
Now, to its realist, ontic , correlates.
For the luckless consumer, it’s the meaning-laden ‘choice’ between Coke and Pepsi.
For the citizen, the solemn election between Two Parties divided only by One , common, idolatry(Republican, Democrat).
Any other freedoms?
Yes, largely to live and die alone – in ‘solitary’, as in prison parlance! – formally ‘equal’ to millions of others similarly marooned, drowned, and foundered: in an irredemptive swamp of loneliness , disaffection, and despair.
So much ‘Free Will’, one might say, so little self-contentment.
Ah , but it does have a ‘real’ side to it, wherein the real clue to its ideology comes revealed: the Corporate Governors are ‘free’ to do what they wish, as they wish, when they wish, upon whom they wish.
And now, thanks to an insensible Supreme Court, they too are ‘individuated’ by fiat: yes, they are ‘individuals’, nay, ‘persons’ with rights (if not responsibilities).
For them, rises the Statue of Liberty, but with no parallel Statue, not even a tiny hand-puppet!, of Responsibility, or Accountability to offset it.
Let the meaning be clear: ‘freedom’ is a Modernist, corporatist slogan that arose in European history when upstart commercial classes wished to rid themselves of the nuisance-laden restrictions of the Ancien Regime, Canon Law, Laws against Usury, and such, that frustrated their insidious advance to absolute power.
It served to dupe and mobilize the masses, who fought and died for it, only to be tragically robbed again of the societal protections that once immunized them , howsoever minimally, against want and privation.
More profoundly, individuated modernist ‘freedom’ goes against our given anthropic grain: the modicum of contentment that is possible for us is found only in close-knit, emotive, tribal reciprocities that are emphatically NOT based on any such abstract ‘freedoms’.
The human family illustrates my meaning , irrefutably: it is not equal, not democratic, not free - yet gives to all, high and low, east and west, Modernist and Non-Modernist , that miniscule dole of warmth without which life would be unbearable, unthinkable, and unlivable.
Not for nothing did Alexander Selkirk name his very own private island the ‘Island of Despair’.
Once again, we need to know our own anthropology to resist the genre of false, and dangerously misleading, temptations.
Real ‘Freedom’ may well be, as has been held, if within limits, the recognition of necessity.
(vi)
Instincts impose many caveats upon ‘human’ (i.e. , male/female) behavior that would be , and have proved, quite foolhardy to ignore.
One telling, and related, example of radical misreading of human behaviors, is how the pseudo-science of Modernist economics is all agog , bursting at the seams with ‘wants’, but (tendentiously) ‘forgets ‘needs ‘ altogether, to its utter, disadvantage (yes, and workers , e.g., are but ‘hands’ only, ‘freed’ of the inconvenient, fulsome, burdens of bellies and mouths).
And Economics draws from Modernism, the motherlode from whence it springs – which conceives us all as mechanical , rationalist, automatons, not organic, biological, beings, having epistemically ‘freed’ us, from our very placement in Nature itself (whilst yet leaving, leastways in its early idylls, , women and ‘primitives’ to stew in that latter, primal , slime: yes, both the ‘Shrew’ and the ‘Aboriginal’ required much’ taming’ and ‘uplifting’ to meet Modernist standards : Shakespeare, attending to the first, and Kipling, to the latter, at least allegorically).
The madness runs several shades deeper: one Nobel Laureate, in Economics, whom I will not name out of embarrassment for his sake, in full flush of Modernist triumphalism, argued that ‘we can do without nature’ (what a pellucid manifest of Self-alienation!, quite aside from the fact that, regrettably, the truth is, exactly, vice-versa).
We are, in all its drab pathos , but animals (if shaped in ‘god’s image’, this god could only be a great , even glossy, Ape) who, lofted by sheer imagination, and equal measure of egotism, soar higher than nature allows: but , just as gravity brings us ‘down to earth’ if we are not properly equipped, so do our instinctual natures drag our (utopian) projects down , when we strike out for the empyrean - unequipped with due understanding of our obvious flesh-and-blood limitations.
Regrettably, All Modernist paths are the same: they lead nowhere.
Flights of fancy , be they of ‘Left’ or ‘Right’, are destined only to crash land - worse, in a place not of their choosing.
Durkheim understood the ‘socialism’ of his time, shrewdly, as a tragic cri de couer at a paradise lost irretrievably: and Marx’s ‘communism’ of the future was but a Modernist make-over of so-called ‘primitive communism’ - which is no more than the tribal reality I have been drawing attention to in these essays.
So, our tribal essence asserts itself, even in Modernist pipedreams.
(vii)
How is all this to be reversed?
I have argued that there is no earthly , temporal, force that is , today, stronger than EuroModernism.
Thereby, it is perhaps quite fitting that it will, in all probability, and all by itself, undermine itself.
Its parasitism has now turned into an even more deadly ‘self-cannibalism’ (I call this the phase of Late Modernism).
For four hundred years, Modernist Europe ( via its savvy governors) swindled the Other (both external and internal to it), to attain its vast bounty of resources.
We all know – or should know - the means deployed: slavery, genocide, expropriation, occupation, war , conquest , pre-emptive trade &commerce, colonisation, and empire.
In effect, workers, peasants, farmers, women, serfs, slaves, chattel ,the indigent and the impuissant ,the world over (again, both internal and external to Europe) labored - so European elites (and their usually dependent cronies/allies elsewhere) could live in the glitz and glitter that attends them still.
And today’s ‘globalisation’ has replicated that so very remarkable process of a wholesale transfer of resources/values - even more smoothly.
Then, in the closing decades of the Twentieth century, with apparently little left to dominate (other than the Moon and Mars) , and brimming over with bravado at its ‘victory’ over the oppositional, if hapless, ‘socialist’ comity of nations - it turned on itself.
With Productions virtually ceded to the ‘New Emergent Periphery’, and its own traditional working-class(es) similarly abandoned, the Anglo-Ams (in a separate piece I have detailed the historical uniqueness of the Anglo-Saxon as a force in world history) are now spearheaded by the perhaps the purest form of egregious parasitism conceivable within the modernist economic paradigm: finance.
Banking capital now superordinates , and controls, all other capitals, owing to a gargantuan size and scale made possible, ironically, by its very fictitious nature.
The unproductive rule the productive, the drones command the bees.
It has given but behind-the scenes , credit-wielding, speculative , cyberfunctionaries , life-and-death power over agriculture, industry, etc. , and, as such, over real livelihoods, and economies, globally.
Small wonder, possibly, that many of their technocratic philosophies, in shallow echoes, see little difference between the real and the virtual , in grim forewarning of an encroaching Transhuman future.
It is , emblematically, the very height of (Euro)Modernist tragic absurdity that scraps of paper (oft-times, even less: but mere computer entries!) ,no more than IOUs , can yet purchase outright , vast , incalculable, swaths of real resources, both societal and natural - with malefic intent , and deadly effect.
Thus, the ‘Great Reversal’ of this self-immolating agenda is written into the script, from the start: already , derivative gambles exceed the value of world GDP by a colossal factor - i.e., a sudden, and cataclysmic collapse of finance is only a little short of inevitable.
And with it, howsoever buffered by public budgets, will go much of the flimflam and fluff of Western Economies - and the hegemony of the North Atlantic Powers.
Of course the Costs of its Fall , economic, political, etc., similar to its initial , cataclysmic , Rise, will be borne by those (Other cultures, Other species, and the teeming strata of the underprivileged , under-represented, and the resource-starved) who can least afford it.
When a Gulliver falls, a lot of Lilliputs can only find themselves placed in radical jeopardy.
(viii)
The world will not, of course, be taken by surprise.
Our intrepid governors know full well what they are , and have been, doing.
It has ,rightly, been termed ‘failure, by design’.
And many , if not all, amongst the Other: Russia, China, India, e.g., are also catching on, howsoever slowly.
Indeed, the BRICS have already taken the first , hesitant, baby-steps to climb out of the deepening morass.
And many, many, others, will follow their example, perhaps even take lead.
So, yes , this 2.0 version of the Titanic will - finally! - be abandoned, if , unhappily, as with the original, too late for the many.
The real economy will revive, all over the globe , and an antic sanity will , yet again, get restored.
That much is also written, nay coded , into our species-being.
And it can only be beneficent – to all.
Once again , it will be a poly-centric world, free of hegemons: a motley crew of nations/societies ,living/experimenting - according to their own cultural lights.
We can only hope that the incumbent pioneers can generate the needed ‘escape velocity’ to leave Modernist ideologies behind, permanently.
And they will need to dig deep within : to recover buried realms of past heritage, from whence they can yet again derive norms, values, even small felicities!, of real anthropic import and meaning lost, for so long, in the turgid melee of modern-day consumerism.
It will, doubtless, also, take some time to retire all the false , meretricious gods to their sordid lairs in misanthropy.
This is quite comparable to the state of the world prior to the onset of the great saga of European Adventurism, so it is neither fantasy nor utopia.
Of course, the enforced let-down from their dizzy heights will be hard to swallow for the Older Hegemons.
But they, too, will need to adapt - and learn to live more peaceably with a world that they have thus far, and for so very long, owned and operated , willy-nilly, as their very own fief.
Better humble pie , one might say, than no pie at all?
So, as the good bard has it: the best, just possibly, is yet to be!
Although, given what we know of the crumbling present, even a return , simply , to the status quo ante might serve just as well.
REFERENCES
R. KANTH, BREAKING WITH THE ENLUGHTENMENT, 1997
________, AGAINST ECONOMICS, 1997
________,, AGAINST EUROCENTRISM, 2005
---------,, THE POST-HUMAN SOCIETY, 2013
---------, TWO LECTURES ON EUROCENTRISM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwQrpfom9M<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DZDwQrpfom9M&k=AjZjj3dyY74kKL92lieHqQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Ul8alR2l08keT7LU6kfGk%2FLPjA2GeWA1tJYXAdjLdto%3D%0A&m=l80kmrQP5oD9Yn9GW3wVClP85XRBN%2FmCVzJs2Jxsw8M%3D%0A&s=86a419fc904ebbfcaf93be689bd47970ffd28239a7951a7b16c96396fd034db4
[© R.Kanth 2014, Harvard University]