The Final Hour
The Doomsday Clock, for all species that inhabit this earth, was set into motion only with the arrival of the European as a Force in World History.
The planet had mustered an ill manner of maladroit equipoise - despite the tyrants , East and West, that come and go with such monotonous, and ill-fated, regularity in the iniquitous annals of the universal Archetype of Patriarchy.
However, all of them, even taken together, could not have hoped, in their wildest orgies of despoliation, to even dream of approximating the realities of the all-Extirpating scourge that Europe , in its Modernist Avatar, in its unseemly haste to streak straight from barbarism to decadence, unleashed upon this world.
The modus of ‘Modernism’ it invented and embraced – and which rules us all today, East or West - robbed the Species of little choice other than to go further and further along that path of collective self-immolation.
To iterate the obvious, when I make reference to the ‘European’ , I am always denoting their governing orders - not the hoi polloi, who , like all subalterns, scramble but for the crumbs , material and ideological, that fall off the regal table.
The extraordinary thing is that, to this day, these worthies remain all but unaware of their incredibly apocalyptic , historical ‘mission’.
This might appear surprising - until one fathoms the underlying mystery.
Unlike, say, their Eastern counterparts the genius of the European has always lain in precision-mapping of all things: especially in their micro-domains.
Here , I must interject a caveat: this prepossession, whilst a generic trait, is far more pronounced amongst the Anglo-American genre than , say, in their German or Latin cousinages.
So, the ‘Big Picture’ is not, in the first instance, their real concern: Anglo-Saxon , empiricist, pragmatism has a taste, nay a fascination, for ‘facts’ , rather than grand theory: so they dig deep, and like moles, stay stupefyingly immersed, up to their gills, in the dirt of the datum.
This has many obvious benefits, which we associate, in sum, with the Hesperian “Way of Life’ that dominates the globe today.
But it comes at quite a prohibitive cost.
Put metaphorically, they crave Knowledge, as it gives them Power: but not the Wisdom that might confer Felicity.
In antipodal contrast , is the Vedic tradition of Ancient India - which imbues all knowledge , ab initio and post-factum - with the pervasive spirit of a perennial wisdom.
You both begin and end with the ‘big picture’ in the latter: not so, in the former.
The latter project , in other words, is , ever, a moral undertaking: the former, only a material one.
Thereby the former are unable, in effect, to arrive at an intrinsic, ‘implicate’, comprehension of the Whole.
Indeed, morality (being always societal) is constituted at the level of the whole, not its parts: so our Micro-modelling geniuses cannot put it all together, speaking metaphorically, any more than they could patch-up Humpty Dumpty, post factum, , at time deferred.
Stated differently, the Cartesian ‘mechanical ‘ metaphor simply fails with organic entities.
The (Modernist) Enlightenment researcher, in his/her ‘value-free’ cum materialist garb, was appropriately ‘color-blind’ with respect to perceiving the moral cement binding societal entities .This might help explain why Adam Smith , e.g., is lauded very widely for his Wealth of Nations tome , but few even recall his Moral Sentiments work.
To underline the critical import of this ‘difference’: the nuclear bomb cannot be built, or even thought of, in the one world: but it comes about all too easily in the other.
(ii)
EuroModernism effectively begins with the adoption of materialism as its guiding metaphysics : wherein its supernal success – and abject failure.
Since this stance is openly flaunted as a virtue, not least by ‘progressive’ trends within it (e.g., Marxism), I will not expend time in establishing the fact.
More interesting ,perhaps, might be to indicate why this happened.
The ‘Reformation’ paved the way for Modernist Greed: this could only be done by wholly demolishing the Late Christian ideology of the ancien regime.
So classical Christianity (Canon Law, e.g.) , of a monist-idealist bent, was swiftly subverted , and stood on its head, with a banal ,materialist calculus replacing it.
But it is even more profound than that.
When gemeinschaft was dismantled, with it fell the moral economy upon which it rested: the new ‘social contract’ notions of society (i.e. the gesellschaft form) could only conceive of society as a ‘balance of interests’, rather than a ‘balance of affections’ (i.e., care, consideration, etc.) - it is in this pivotal moment that the ‘material’ economy replaced the more ancient, and anthropic , mode of social being.
Given that Europe became Modernist, in this sense, far ahead of others, it embarked upon the road to ruin well before the rest.
Morality is not an arbitrary episteme, a ‘choice’ as Modernism views it: it emanates , in fact, from our anthropic being, , as an ontic necessity.
Its eternal provenance is the need for secure child-rearing (at once, both a natural and social necessity) in the warring warren of what I have elsewhere termed the ‘paradigm of masculinity’.
Given that women are the first providers of infant needs, universally, it falls to them to be the prime custodians of morality (i.e. , the guarantors of the security of the newborn).
Indeed, the first moral (at once natural and social) relationship is the mother-and-child one.
So , the ‘material economy’ inhabits the arena of masculine drives (greed, power) , whereas the ‘moral economy’ lies in the hinterland of feminine hospitalities (nurturance, care-giving).
The broad distinction between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains corresponds to this divide.
So, Morality is the gift of Women, much as Politics is the bane of Men.
Prior to the advent , and domination, of EuroModernism , even the material economy was , if only partially, offset by the persistent demands of the moral one.
But with its outright triumph, it erodes, in straight line depreciation, to the point where , now, in the US, it has virtually negated any signs of the moral economy - outside of the vanishing residual of the nuclear family.
As I have stated in earlier posts, the US is, in most regards, now an amoral, Post-Human Society: which is the ‘face of the future’ of all Modernist formations of today.
Now, as for materialism itself , in this age of Quantum Physics, there is no necessity for proffer of argument (I have detailed its lacunae in previous posts) : it is, very simply stated, bad physics, faulty philosophy, and shabby morality.
Poignantly, in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer "...materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take account of himself”.
And, as I have written in previous posts, it is in the degree and intensity of this paradigm of materialism that Europe, since the inception of Modernism, differs, portentously and prophetically, from All species of the Other.
(iii)
The nascent EuroModern economy leeched off all domains that it could annex: women’s labor at home, serf , slave, and wage-labor, abroad.
It is this primal annexationism, beginning in the Sixteenth century, that explains its hypertrophic growth to giantism in the Twentieth Century.
The gap between Europe and Non-European societies was not the painfully negative one it was to become - at the start of this process.
One has only to gauge the pathetic riches of, say, England, in the 16th Century, in relation to that of the Indian Sub-Continent, to understand this in all its dark poignancy.
It was Expropriation of all Other worlds that ‘created’ the First World, in its mature form in the Twentieth Century, despite the tendentious posture of benign concern for the former affected today by the North Atlantic powers(even whilst bombing, occupying, and looting them, wily-nilly!).
And what a saturnalia of accumulation that was!
That lurid history covers the holocaust of genocide, colonial looting , slavery, and confiscation , where Europe ran riot throughout the world in an orgy of pillage, piracy , and plunder never before seen on the globe.
Messrs . Attila and Genghis appear but mere village pick-pockets, and small-time hoods, in comparison.
That same process gave the European that very current elan of being the Law-giving , ultimate “Masters of the Universe’ imprint that is such a hallmark of that ilk - as they still go about dismantling regimes, destroying nations, and debilitating cultures , globally.
(iv)
Strike One of EuroModernism was, as described in the foregoing section, the debauchery of Other domains of economy and society, both domestically and abroad (England, e.g., colonized its hapless Celtic neighbors even whilst subduing foreign lands) .
Strike Two, is the very Late Modernist one, inaugurated by the Reagan-Thatcher Anglo-Am set of Policy Initiatives that , essentially, in self-cannibalising fashion , undermines , today, the very basis of Modernism - via its ‘revised’ manifest of illimitable greed at any cost.
Partly, this is to point to the quick transition from rampant immorality to the chilling amorality as was achieved , say, in the Post-WWII period. As anthropic beings , we are either moral or immoral: but amorality is a Euromutation of apocalyptic significance that surfaces first in the Anglo-Am formations.
Not only is the self-cannibalising extant within the social economy, in Late Modernism , it is paralleled also in the systematic ‘deconstruction’, i.e. annulment, of anthropic traits that the ‘civilising’ process (where it exists) effects over time.
It means we are engineering, stolidly, a new generation of robotized, crypto-humanoids that will, fittingly, inhabit the urban wastelands that Late Modernism is ‘creating’, with such breathtaking neglect, in its own decrepit backyards.
But, mostly, I am referring to the entire set of Neo-Liberal Strategies that ended up empowering the most parasitic forms of capitals – such as finance – over the traditionally more societally useful, and productive, ones :to the point where the domestic economy is longer a primary base for sustainable productions.
The US , with its financially crippled middle-class, its demobilized, and demoralized, quasi-labor force of a part-time, itinerant, and non-benefited ‘under-class’ , and its fast-dwindling, traditional workforce, set against an all-powerful , all-appropriating, corporate, Financial Oligarchy is both a case in point, and a regressive ‘model’ for others.
Rentier Capitalism, or the regime of coupon clippers, can only survive, bubble to bubble, tenuously , on Financial scams and Ponzi schemes, crisis to crisis.
The system survives, precariously, today, on the continuous circulation and re-circulation of ever-escalating debt: with industry shipped off abroad, and jobs with it, with the consumer base thereby radically attenuated, the Anglo-Am economies are held together, increasingly, only by this ever growing mass of indebtedness - public , private, and foreign.
As it is , we are now teetering on the brink of a collapse, or series of collapses, of the various mini asset-bubble economies.
The Fed’s propping of gold, control of interest rates, and pumping of liquidity into banks has mollified a stricken system thus far – if at grievous taxpayer expense.
But the familiar salves of wars, sabre-rattling, and domestic repression cannot stave off the inevitable crash of Late Modernist economies (that are technically bankrupt already).
So the EuroModernist world has, by now, and in these very times, reached the tail end of its overly long tether.
Indeed, few systems have tried harder to win the game of self-subversion.
(v)
The choice before the world is , thereby, stark, and grim.
If the Late Modernist rollercoaster is not halted, and reversed , in form and content, soon, we all go over the abyss into a zombie world already at the draft and design stage.
Is there a fate worse than extinction?
Yes, there is.
The implacable misanthropes who pushed the nuclear button , back in the mid-twentieth century, can quite easily do so again.
And that would, of course, end it all - for much that inhabits our little corner in space.
But if they didn’t - and actually succeeded in getting the world to bail them out with yet more blood and sacrifice, then what lies ahead is little short of a dire dystopia that decisively punctuates, maybe even terminates, our long history of Anthropic Evolution.
I am referring to the nouvelle, sci-fi, TransHuman world that latter-day Dr Frankensteins and Dr Strangeloves are busy concocting, in their hidden laboratories, albeit far from public scrutiny.
Late Modernism achieved the Post-Human Society as its choice contribution to anthropic devolution.
Strike Three of Modernism will be the TransHuman Society that will halt about 200, 000 years of our anthropic existence.
This emergent techno-industrial complex will, predictably, take-off, once every last vestige of real resources has been monopolized, and every nation reduced to vassalage to the North Atlantic Hegemons.
It will , very likely, transfer the Transgenic processes applied thus far to plants and animals to humans,: and internalize , quite literally, the new genre of bio-tech innovations - to clone a new class of androids and cyborgs, according to corporate taste and inclinations.
Projects of molecular nanotechnology all-purpose ‘assemblers’, reanimation of cryogenically suspended patients, uploading of human consciousness to virtual reality: these are all , but a few of the ominous ideas that are being seriously examined and discussed, some even within the nether realms of Academe.
Much the same way that nuclear devices were first conceived of, then produced, and then deployed, so will the new human robotics , now being avidly researched, even at public expense, be put to early, and diabolic, ‘use’.
So, the bionic species is only , I suspect, but , a few decades away, if the current genre of Corporatism is allowed free rein.
Once again, it will be the ever dependable North Atlantic Anglo-Ams that will pioneer and lead this fateful, even fearful, technology: so, with the characteristic twist of a Greek tragedy, they who spearheaded the Modernist cataclysm will now oversee perhaps , what may well be, the Final Hour of the Species.
Of course, it will all be marketed (as was the case with transgenic crops) as but the newest means to eliminate poverty, hunger, sickness - and the rest of the slew of cravenly dissembling shibboleths of public policy parlance.
One can only hope there is , out there, some merciful ’god-being’ to stop them, and in time - if we can’t do it for ourselves.
Indeed, If IT doesn’t exist, we may well have to invent it.
For, they that set off the Doomsday Clock appear determined to make it , asap, entirely , and permanently, superfluous.