The Threat Du Jour
It is, regrettably, a veritable Age of Extremes.
By now, we all likely know the banal fact that the ‘highest stage’ of Socialism may very well be Neo-Liberalism.
But what we may not have known is that the ultimate stage of Capitalism may actually be an unabashed Neo-Feudalism.
In fact, why would it stop there?
I have always maintained that the Modernist sloganeering of ‘rights’ , the Enlightenment onwards, was specious, in the extreme, vis a vis the disempowered strata (inclusive of women).
Way things are going, there may be even ‘higher’ stages to come, like the reinvention of Slavery.
Indeed, ex-colonial world sweatshops that produce for European elite consumption today are but a fig leaf removed from conditions approximating slavery.
Leave it to our able US/UK Modernists to rush us back into Antiquity , on rocket-propelled roller skates.
I said Antiquity: but let us recall that the US brazenly practiced that venerable institution in the modern era, not in some antic past, and ‘gave it up’ only by the slimmest of margins.
Even today, not all political forces in the US , as is obvious, have ‘given it up’, leastways in their minds. A Nation-wide poll on the issue might well confirm this hunch.
So, as with Capitalism (of the dominant , Anglo-Am kind) the inspiration for such innovating novelties remains the fons et origo : the Brutish Isles, and their far-flung Atlantic/Pacific Progeny.
Yes, as an Indian I call that wretched polity – its ruling elites being the target - the Brutish Isles: what they did to that unfortunate sub-continent, over two centuries, is , in sheer scale, so outrageous that no reparations are ever possible.
It is not in the ‘playing fields of Eton’, as is fancied, but in the killing fields of Ireland, India, and North America – to say nothing of innumerable other regions across this globe - that the Brits cut their martial teeth.
And yet these imperial polities set themselves up, even in these latter days, as paragons of human rights.
The Other Europeans, today, are largely reduced to being no more than docile or disgruntled camp-followers, having long given up any hope for any real autonomy ( with the exception of France, perhaps).
So, the wonderful folk who gave us all the cumulative glories of Colonialism, Imperialism, Capitalism, and Neoliberalism, are now about to give us all a taste for something new: human extinction.
No, this is not hyperbole.
Let me explain.
I have done a book called the Post-Human Society: it waited 20 years to find a publisher.
No Anglo-Am publisher would touch it. It now has, at long last, a German imprint.
You get it, I’m sure: anyone who challenges hegemony is a ( branded) pariah(which, incidentally, is fine by me: as a self-sufficing Brahmin, I hardly need, let alone crave, such indifferent company. Borrowing from Kipling: I have a ‘neater, sweeter,’ set of communal norms and ideals, drawn from a ‘cleaner, greener’ civilizational source. The soul, as Emily Dickinson wrote, selects her own society).
At any rate , I argue there that the US is the bellwether of the Global 1984 to come, constituting an Amoral Society, across the board: a ‘society’ where the antic distinction between the moral and the immoral is losing both meaning and significance.
It is another way of saying that anthropic society- which is based firmly on morality – is all set to give up the ghost amongst the Late European formations.
It is another heroic Anglo-Am ‘first’ in history, like the Atom Bomb - amongst a few other such deeply merit-laden accomplishments.
As always, the in-house critics , being no more than a mere loyal Opposition, have it all wrong: it is not the fact that the world is being polarized between 0.001 % and All the Rest, in wealth, that is at all remarkable.
That sells Monsieur Piketty, all over the map, of course: but no more.
Rule by the few , based on the expropriation of social wealth, is the norm in all predatory societies, the consecrated myths of ‘democracy’ notwithstanding.
What is really remarkable is that anthropic society is being , in evolutionary terms, arrested.
An amoral society is not an anthropic society at all, but a contractual, Eurocentric, rational-legal , entity, the fitting complement to the beggar-thy-neighbor economy.
It will harbinger a dire estrangement, and occlusion, of affective ties and ethical norms globally, such that a homogenized, standardized, deculturalised, dehumanized, barbarism can flourish unchecked by received human propensities.
It is also remarkable that Europeans have thought themselves to be possessed of the very acme of civilization, at the very instance of adopting the very Tools of Barbarism that are now part of the EuroModernist Legacy forced on all, everywhere.
I have done a couple of books on that subject (listed below), so I will not trouble to detail it here.
No, double-entry bookkeeping, and the compounding of interest, are not the momenta of civilization, but simply the unmistakable markers of being, inexorably, on the loping , low road to Nihilism.
Materialism (in its wild, rampant, Anglo-Am vein) is the very antithesis of the Convivial Moment that marks the possibility of civilization amongst us hominids.
The Convivial promise is innate in the province of maternity and child-rearing, making for a hallowed social space, howsoever brief and circumscribed, free from male violence and aggression.
Indeed, that domain is the real provenance of virtually all of anthropic morality.
Admittedly, that promise, slight as it was, was always severely constrained by the predations of masculinist violence and aggression that homo heirarchicus – a more accurate term than the abjectly self-serving ‘homo sapiens’ - shares, liberally, with Chimpanzees.
It is unfortunate that, as a species, we did not take after our worthy Bonobo cousins, instead, who might have served as a far worthier template.
For that reason, our few success stories, simple tribal societies with a matrilineal bent, soon gave way to dissolution via the familiar exit of empire.
The Patriarchical male is an Oligarch, and lives (and dies) by an Iron Law of Oligarchy.
It is this ineluctable fact that, at base, vitiates the various feeble attempts at democracy (and pacifism) –when serious at all in intent - that have been tried.
It is also that trait that unites US militarism to Afghan tribalism, in the attitude and ideology of primal machismo.
The tribal Afghan, of course, like his American counterpart , needs no instruction in violence: but has not yet learnt to embrace the doctrines of unmitigated greed - and will doubtless be taught that elevating social grace at the coming rash of American Universities that will flourish there, soon, if it all unfolds as per plan.
But the Post-Human society – meaning the Amoral Society – is not a terminus, by any means: it is but the stepping stone to another , far more egregious climacteric- the TransHuman Society, that will not merely arrest evolution but annihilate it altogether.
So, mere barbarism is not to be a secure resting place: it will be, in the not-so-distal future, a universe of androids.
Ask yourself: who today, are the supreme world leaders in arms, in wars, in cloning, in transgenetics, in greed, in desensitisation, in militarism, in nuclear testing, in reckless global destabilization: and the answer is patently unequivocal.
The fetishism of technology, in context of a system run wholly on behalf of privateers and profiteers, leaves no other option: beginning with embedded chips , it will enlarge to all manner of vital displacements - of the human by the machine.
It might also be instructive, here, en passant, to inquire as to just how many years the US and the UK have refrained from active warfare – including the planning/preparation of it - in the past two centuries? Not Pax Britannica or Pax Americana , therefore, but Bellum Britannica, etc., may be the more appropriate term.
No surprise, really: science, technology, intelligence , are all a colossal waste , indeed become a gathering threat to their own societies, if not accompanied by the positive checks of anthropic ethics, morality, kinship and community.
Given the triumphalist destruction of the latter, under the various diktats of EuroModernism – celebrated fatuously as the paraphernalia of ‘freedom’ - all that is left us is domination by a small coterie, a rabid collation of sociopaths and psychopaths who will ‘lead’ us all, assuredly, into a certain, even predictable, damnation.
If we let them.
Absit Omen.
REFERENCES
R.Kanth, Breaking With the Enlightenment, Humanities, 1997
_______, Against Eurocentrism, Macmillan, 2005
________ The Post-Human Society,( Forthcoming), De Gruyter, 2015
[©RKanth,2015]