---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kanth, Rajani <rkanth@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Fri, Jun 9, 2017 at 12:19 AM
Subject: Summations
To: "michelsub2004@gmail.com" <michelsub2004@gmail.com>



                                     Summations
                                  [For Paul Feyerabend]

I have now explained the Paradigm that rules us all, east, west, north,  south.
EuroModernism (EM).
It is the genre of Modernism that first arose in Europe, and was then 'extended' ,largely involuntarily ,  to the world as whole.
[In a nutshell: it involved a materialist world-view ,  a material , self-serving definition of'progress', an asocial acquisitive individualism,  reliance on a select, favored  version of science that advanced  its  interest, and  the use  of  illimitable  force as legitimate means to impose its fiats upon disbelievers/skeptics ].
That term covers it all , A to Z.
The older terminology of “Capitalism”, ‘Modernism’,  etc., is inadequate to describe the whole.
In effect, my term sublates all of  that.

But,  it is even  more.
It points directly to our  real anthropology as so-called   'homo sapiens', seriously misread by EM fantasies.
It also suggests that in anthropic societies, culture and philosophy are  vital causal agents, with politics and economics derivative.
It questions, therefore,  the ruinous reign of Classical Scientific Materialism – itself based on  received Newtonian ideas (which Quantum Physics now places in serious question) – in the realm of  (European) ideas.
*

I also point out that the real revolution of EM  was in raising  (individual) self-interest above the societal interest, something never before achieved in human society, anywhere.
Whilst all of Europe gave in to this ethos, it is the Anglo-Norman formations that pushed it to the ad absurdum non-limits transparently obvious today.
Amorality is its culmination: with anomie, angst, and despair its  neon-lit route markers.
Travel from the US to Iceland, e.g., and one can  ‘taste’ the difference: you move from an Unsociety - where but the law , armed with lethal force, keeps some modicum of peace -  to  where a shared , tribal morality sustains basic decencies.

Defining civilization as the pacification of social and natural threats to survival, EM societies are a linear descent into abject barbarism (so, sorry, the Lincoln Centre and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre will NOT serve as the
irrefutable markers of civilisation).
Oscar Wilde joked that America went straight from barbarism to decadence bypassing the stage of  civilization: of course , he was Wrong (in his categories as well).
It never abandoned barbarism.
Worse, the barbarism is, today,  globally self-limiting in the negative sense of leading us all into Annihilation.

*
I have also suggested that men and women, universally , constitute  two sub-species with distinct instinctual traits that can be worked against  but not erased.
I have called  these the  ‘paradigm of masculinity’  and the ‘paradigm of femininity’ , understood as a cluster of traits.
In radical brevity, men possess the instinct to kill, women , the instinct to nurture (culture can either reinforce , or antidote - the antidotes can only be weak -  these impulses).
This is both universal and timeless.
This goes against the grain of the specious  EM rhetoric of ‘equality’,  and its dismissal of instincts as explanatory variables in human affairs under the jibe of ‘essentialism’.

I explained that this presumption  (against instincts) stemmed from the Judeo-Christian view (though it may not be unique to that faith)  that we are created in the image of ‘god’ and so cannot have ‘animal’ traits ( a pre-Darwinian idea, in origins).
Now this is not to say that EM practices actually prescribe an  equality of genders.
Au contraire, feminists had to struggle for generations, and have still not achieved parity.
The real intent was to protect humans (in particular, males, of European origin) from the influence of  ‘base’ instincts: indeed the ‘natuurvolk’  (native peoples, women)  on the other hand, were seen as wholly ‘animalistic’ in their ways w/out any dissonance.
Consider Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew to understand this succinctly: wild horses, natives,   and women had to be ‘tamed’.
It also meant that  women were gratuitously included in the oxymoronic phrase ‘human nature’, inclusive of  the violent proclivities of males, and their violent 'contribution' to  his-story.
*

I have argued that EM claims ‘progressiveness’  for itself - and  appears persuasive -  given its provenance in the  obvious iniquities of Feudal Europe ( a quite false basis of comparison  - yes, bad is better than worse! : I use the template of simple tribal societies, our natural  heritage, instead,  to show up the  glaring lesions of EM society ,  unerringly).
But, what really transpired was that the prior  dictatorship of the church and state  was replaced by that of the new rulers of commercial society, no less implacable.

Every freedom such folk gave their underlings was either  tokenism compared  to what they allowed themselves (to trade, invest, loot, and plunder), or quite chimerical.
Plus some  putative freedoms were entirely negative: such as ‘freeing’ the peasant, involuntarily,  from  vital access to commons, pastures, fields and meadows (Enclosures) , and/or  from state subsidies (welfare provisions, such as Speenhamland).
I can throw a house dog on to the streets and give it its ‘freedom’: and am relieved, thereby, of its maintenance expenses.
Of course,  the ‘dog’, in this case, was never consulted.
*

Worse, EM substituted a  crass, pseudo-anthropology of our kind.
It subverted all our original, antic , anthropic impulses of kinship and domesticity: i.e. care, consideration, and hospitality,  and taught us, instead,  that we are , all,  necessarily, selfish , individualistic,  and  acquisitive – which I deem  a sordid  EM libel upon the human race.
This is the crux of it.
As a particular breed of hominids, we are communal, tribal , creatures , finding the ‘meaning of life’ in kinship, family, and  emotive association(s).
EM brutishly razed that idea (and its ontic basis) and ‘freed’ us, to leave it all and go ‘venturing’ ( the ‘climb every mountain’, tripe) into permanent Discontent.

In other words the Captains Commercial extended their native, vicious, greed and lust, gratuitously, to the entire human species as an ‘ideal’ – and as such drove most of us to the nether  limits of sanity.
Outside of the tribal/familial matrix we are fit only for ‘treasons, stratagems, and spoils’: which is the blithe  EM exhortation!
Worse, we lose, like giddy flies,  balance and perspective , our deeply ingrained societal sense of sanity.
And so real ‘human nature’ was subverted/suborned, and we were  foredoomed, lost as castaways, far from our  native shores of weal and hospitality.
Little wonder that early EM ‘pioneers’ were no more than pirates, brigands, and looters: Drake, Pizarro, and Columbus.
And are their epigones ,today,  any different?
No: but a whole  lot crazier.

Society – an end in itself  - was seen as no more than a means  - of personal advancement , thereby standing our anthropic natures on is head.
As Hegel saw it, correctly, ‘civil society’ is the arena  only of a ruinous  ‘universal egoism’.
This, ab initio, eliminated (as much as it could) the moral-social impulse, that stems entirely from our communal being, substituting arid , paper-deep, disingenuous legality in its stead.
The Amoral society is not an anthropic society at all, and the current planetary crisis is the direct result of such EM revaluations (or, devaluation)  of values.
What EM wilfully destroyed , as if it were  an execrable anathema, our original benefice of The Convivial Society.
*

In sum, EM dismantled, by virtue of its  regressive, predatory orientations, the very basis of our social and natural worlds.
All the vainglory of' liberte, egalite, and fraternite ' is no more than idle gibber if there is not even a bare physical existence  to look forward to, for the planet, and its varied species.
It is EM that gave us WW 1 and 2, or, rather, European Wars 1 and 2 .
Yes, the 'world' was dragged into the carnage:by EM forces.
Japan is the exception that proves the rule, but only did so, it must be noted,  after first adopting EM  orientations.
EMs , across history, torched all societies they encountered, either to annex/loot ,  or  organise a fire-sale of their vital resources right on-site.
The Bible, the Navy, and Compound Interest  were the original Troika that led the First Waves of Colonisation: the  sophisticated EMs that succeeded them let only  the first  of that Trinity go.


Today, China, and most nations have been, perforce (it must be noted) ,  inducted into the EM game (EM , for four centuries,  was never prone to  let sleeping dogs lie: that,  quite contrary to its evangelical expansionism) : yet, in mordant irony, these nouvelle Non-European EMs  may well beat the original EMs at their own game.
And now the same 'globalised'  madness is, inexorably,  precipitating  the  onset of EW3.

What grandiloquent, yet tragic, irony that the ruling  'civilisation-mongers' of yesteryear - the 'advanced', 'developed', 'First" Worlders - are, in high tones,  preparing us All, unknowingly, for an Endgame that  could put paid  to all pretensions, peoples, species -  nay,  the planet itself!
Is that the zenith of 'progress'?
No , this is not hyperbole: have a glance at the Doomsday Clock.
And let us give credit where it is due: it was NOT set (at where it is)  by Women, Native peoples, or Other Non-Traditional societies.


                                         R E F E R E N C E S

Kanth, R.            Farewell to Modernism: On Human Devolution in the Twenty-First Century. NY : Peter Lang,
                         2017

_______             The Post-Human Society, Warsaw: De Gruyter, 2015




 [© R.Kanth 2017]