The  Human Condition and Spontaneous Order

                                                  Continuing Arguments Against EuroModernism

                                                                     

 

For  some three decades, now,  I have written/spoken against the ruling ethos  of the  EM – EuroModernist - Paradigm ( I have detailed this phenomenon in several Works, the most recent of which is my Farewell to Modernism, 2017. Suffice it to say here that ‘EM’ is the  highly specific  form of Modernism that Europe first invented, imposed on itself,  and then ‘gifted’ it, under duress, to the  rest of  the world) that dominates the Modernist spectrum,  Left or Right, East or West, today.

Other than Immanuel Wallerstein – from whom nothing is hid !– I doubt any of my readers have really understood its  meaning or import.

That is just one measure of the insularity of academe,  which is a  self-serving enterprise well-funded by the powers that shouldn’t be,  and charged with ‘managing’  acceptable discourse.

Whilst this malaise is near universal in the modern world , the US academy possibly takes the cake, in this regard, since it operates also within a  broader societal  milieu of near-barbarism in intellectual matters ( a critical  intelligentsia, other than academe-based ,being virtually non-existent).

One might say, where there is opulence there is its inevitable concomitant - corruption.

I am not the only one who has noticed this:  a long time ago, Oscar Wilde noted it with the comment that the US had gone straight from barbarism to decadence,  bypassing the stage of civilization.

He was not joking.

A century later,  Henry Miller devoted passionate pages to  the exposition of what he called ‘the air-conditioned nightmare’ (also the title of the book).

 

*

 

The underlying motif  of EM is the notion of societal engineering.

Via its prophets and seers,  it virtually rewrote the human condition – to suit its corrupt ends.

The ‘Hobbesian world’,  which Hobbes understood to be exemplifying the state of nature, it visualised as the normal social condition.

It projected society as atomized, individualized, fragmented, and driven by distrust, competition, and one-upmanship: and most of all by greed unbound.

Not merely ‘projected’, ideologically, but institutionalized, concretely.

As the centuries unfolded ,  from the  marker of the so-called ‘enlightenment’ , it turned into a composite, inchoate, mix of  often contradictory ideas: from  a relatively benign laissez-faire  stance (Smith) to  virulent Social Darwinism (Malthus, Spencer).

Gone was the  antic, mutualist,  social compact: in its stead,  it posited a bare, cold, social ‘contract’,  with all institutions taking on an acquisitive,  calculating,  bargaining modus as with today’s Neo-Cons, Neo-Libs, and the Nash genre of Game Theorists (tending , eventually, toward  the Transhumanist , misanthropic terminus that looms ahead, in these  misguided visions).

Modern ‘Economics’, the crown jewel of this mutant ideology,  carries/exhibits  all  of its scars -  to a t.

In sum,  it produced a mind-set well captured in J.P. Sartre’s  ‘Hell is other people’  epigram.

 Under its auspices, we are required to envision and enter a ‘society’ that is a minefield of misanthropy , in dubious struggle against each other : for the reward of  a mess of pottage for some, and  for  virtually nothing at all for the many.

This view of human nature, as I have written elsewhere,  is little short of a  noxious libel upon the human race.

 

*

This was no ‘enlightenment’.

It was a descent into  a hellish abyss of  a fondly carved dystopia -  of which western society , especially its Anglo-Norman hegemons, is  now , fatefully, emblematic.

Little wonder the UK has , apparently,  just created a Minister for ‘loneliness’, echoing both Orwell and Huxley in that one  tragic trope

Life is short - and EM votaries have rendered  the life of the planet  itself even shorter: serious scientists,  like, Guy McPherson ,  now give us but ten years to the beginning of human extinction.

So, I will spare us the details, and get to the nub – before doom do us part.

 

*

Contra the concoctions of EM pronouncements,  we  humans of the  primate family ( I will drop the self-glorifying ‘homo sapiens’ apothegm) have some rather  striking features.

We are primarily convivial, co-operative, and communal creatures bound to each other  by what I have termed a ‘balance of affections’ (not the  negatively charged, jaded,   ‘balance of interests’ idea  of the Contract Theorists).

In that  one line, above,   we bury all the axioms of  the putative discipline of ‘economics’, as it arose , historically, within the ‘brutish isles’  (no exaggeration to this designation:  since  the history of the elite policy makers, not the people, of that society lives up to that characterization amply).

However, the above  sketch  is complicated by our instinctual endowments.

Put succinctly: Men are endowed with the instinct of violence,  Women with the instinct of nurturance.

Being instincts,  they may not be wholly  erased, but culture can either accentuate them or abate them,  in its dictates,  to an extent (nurture can and does ‘control’ behavior, if  within limits: as learnt by Skinner and Pavlov).

I term the first  'cluster of traits' the POM : paradigm of masculinity.

The second set,  I call the POF: paradigm of femininity.

In the first instance, therefore, civilization is no more than a ‘taming’ of the predatory urges of men.

If Civilisation is understood as the pacification of  human existence , both social and natural,  then we can understand where/how  that first step fits in.

In effect, women are the very first peacemakers: since they need to build and secure  a  functioning  ‘cordon sanitaire’, in order to  raise the infant child, safe from the unpredictable  predations of men.

Mother and child , together, constitute the very first social unit: and their relationship, is also the structural provenance of human morality.

Thus, humans have  always had two permanent  sources of dread: the violence of nature and the violence of men (both,  of course , belonging to ‘nature’).

It is to antic tribal society’s credit that it shackled the second  threat, localizing it,  and limiting it,  within the tribal family, by means of the binding restraints of ties of kinship (‘affections’).

 This is still the only workable model we know.

EM society was far better at taming external nature: but found male violence  highly serviceable to its predatory ends, using it to suppress revolt, keeping  the classes divided, and keeping workers and women under effective domination.

One could call this strategy  ‘management by fear’: who says  (wo)man does not live by dread alone?

Contemporary US,  the most violent society in earth, may well be  the text-book model of this EM  configuration..

 

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EM organised  us to accept  a state of permanent war, economic and political, as the rulers accumulated wealth ,  by dint of various extortions : ( leastways, today) one billionaire at a time.

Most of us take  this imposed reality as ‘life’: and  concoct  rationalising philosophies to endure  it,  as  may be inevitable.

Is there no way out of this matrix?

Yes, there is: and has always been.

This is where this idea of ‘spontaneous order’ fits in.

We are communal beings, led in the first instance, to create sustainable kindred with one other.

Far from being  ‘light seeking’,  we are, as mammals, ‘heat seeking’: and our greatest ‘need’ is simply : to huddle.

This is how original human societies were formed, universally.

Instinctually.

That is how they can be re-formed,  again, any time, any where.

So,  we needn’t agonise over the ‘how’ of it, via  pedantic  debate and discussion: it takes care of itself.

Norms arise spontaneously in the crucible of shared human affections, and then ‘evolve’.

This ‘evolution’ is nothing other than an extension of the kinship paradigm,  but within Gemeinschaft limits.

Gemeinschaft societies are the original,  ‘natural’ societies.

Gessellschaft  entities, most common in – but not unique to - EM formations,  are  , always, contrived, artificial, imposed entities,  wherein our  real, anthropic endowments are permanently  crippled and thwarted.

‘Paradise Lost’ (with a degree of obvious  hyperbole)  is where the former give way to the latter, generally under the impulse of  the drives inherent in the POM (paradigm of masculinity), no longer containable within the ‘balance of affections’ of domesticity.

It is how tribal societies, often, break up into empires.

So, it is as simple as that.

There is no way of ‘reforming’ the  adversarial society as invented by EM: it is, inherently,  irreconcilable.

Which is why all well-meaning efforts to manufacture  a ‘socialist’ society  ( as invented in radical EM theorising) fail -  and will fail.

In fact, such   structures  can only be built on affections: not charters, rules, and regulations.

Goodwill, charity, care, and compassion may not be legislated, to form the bonding cement of society,  in some ‘rational-legal’ sense.

 It would be akin to King Canute ordering the ocean waves to halt.

Instead, It is love that binds: not self-interest , nor even a disinterested  fealty to an  abstract altruism.

The human family , embodying the values I am referencing, is both a natural and social entity simultaneously: and stands in all societies and cultures, and at all times, ,  a reminder of our  real, instinctual roots (which, owing to operative EM norms we have all but forgotten: in fact,  instincts,  were not permitted to rule ‘humans’, under the strictures of Judeo-Christian ideas, where humans were presumed  carved in the ‘image of god’. So, despite Darwin, we   deploy  instincts in  the study of animal behavior,  but not in analysing human , social , behavior. Even more importantly, nurture had to be assumed  as trumping nature:  since the  entire  thrust of  the EM Project is societal engineering,  which would be   quite impossible otherwise).

Impressively, and instructively, it obeys not one single EM Diktat from the Holy Catechism that we have all internalised: equality, democracy, individualism, ‘freedom’, et. al.

It is a moral, not a political, nor economic, entity.

Bears thinking.

 

*

 

Order is spontaneous, both in nature  and  society.

Why we don’t see  evidence of that in EM societies – and  more so in  this Late Modernist  stage of human devolution - is because these are profoundly unnatural entities, from their very inception.

They are a house of cards, in one sense: castles in the air in another, held together by force and fraud in the main.

Even more than both of the above ,  are they existential traps in which the human spirit chokes and suffocates.

In fact, the West, to the extent it ‘lives’ by  such pernicious EM norms, is no more than a dying  cantonment  of a  decaying citizenry : of masses of  robotized, idiotised,   individuals  poised on the brink of  a post-human, transhuman disfigurement.

Indeed, the lead Anglo-Norman formation has  already crossed a red line: they are the world’s first Amoral Society (an obvious oxymoron), with  -  the usual exceptions apart- a populace desensitized to the point of accepting war, violence , struggle,  and conflict, as routine , incorrigible ,  aspects of social existence.

The  astonishing passivity in the face of  the continuing  spate of mass shootings domestically, and mass murders abroad, are a telling index of this remarkable  Devolution.

But none of this is inevitable, nor necessary.

A human society can be re-created, via detachment, delinking,  opting-out , from the  dominant EM Project.

No charter is needed, nor manifestos, nor constitutions; no ’pre-requisites’, no ‘resources’.

Any set of humans can  found it, any where, anytime ,  in near-endless replication.

It is limited only by our inventiveness, the cultural genius inherent in our species-given creativity.

Its  permanent locus will always be the  family unit - real or ersatz- based on caring, love, warmth,  and affection:  transcendent  human values virtually  debased, distorted , and /or destroyed, by EM  postures and stances.

 In its essence,  it embodies , within itself, that  very  overarching transvaluation of values that stands as eloquent , if humble,  critique and  rebuke to the  pernicious, toxic,  nostrums of EuroModernism.

So what is/was the secret of tribal empathy?

The rearing of children in common.

In essence, the tribe is merely an extended family, and the ‘familial’ principle relates all  adults to all children , really or  virtually, as potential or actual care-givers.

This unyielding bond of kinship is stronger than galvanized steel: enabling tribal formation, like Australian Aboriginals to exist and thrive  for millenia,  undaunted by altering environs.

Can we recreate that bonding?

I think so.

By focusing, ever,   on  the domain of affective ties and relationships, and minimizing contact with,  and participation in,  the alien,  ‘public’, Gessellschaft  world ,  organised from above, for their own purposes,  by the ruling/governing elites.

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Ideals, idylls, and utopias have nothing to do with  such a reconstitution of life: indeed,  constructs, of that nature,  are  no more than  specious  EM snares, enticing us into a permanent hallucinatory state that , like much of religion, promise  a  shining tomorrow  (that never comes) as  canny bait to accept present-day  oppressions  with a degree of equanimity.

Life is not a matter of realization of ideals: it is about living  within the bounteous  promise of our species-being.

As animals, we have all manner of traits that are far from  congenial and  foolhardy  to ignore: yet , even within our mammalian cast, lie  hidden salves that can  yet make life on earth  more bearable.

EM ideology, on the other hand, is  unmistakably reptilian in its geist,  and leads  inexorably only to  irreparable angst and inconsolable  despair.

It can offer, in this late era of impending doom,   only sordid  ‘Ministeries of Loneliness’ to repair the mortal blow it has delivered to  the very possibility of human  existence.

And this is, perforce,  the Age of Reparation.

The invading EM adventurers,  e.g., on the North American  continent, annihilated without the slightest compunction, thousands of  native tribes: it were  only fitting if, in late expiation,    thousands of novel  ‘tribal'  entities could be commenced, to re-seed/re-generate  that ill-fated  land, much as the world at large,   and restore antic  balances  rudely ruptured by the   accumulationist ravages of these  ‘tribes’ of reckless ‘civilisation-mongers’ that have brought the entire planet crumbling, today,   to the  very brink of  a wholly gratuitous , and entirely avoidable, extinction.

We have strayed far from our roots, whose redemptive rediscovery is on the cards, now,  in these tumultous times.

It is no more than our birthright.

 

                                                    R  E  F  E  R  E  N  C  E  S

 

Kanth, R.  Breaking with the Enlightenment, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997

_______   Farewell to Modernism, NY: Peter Lang, 2017

 

[©R.Kanth 2018]