[P2P-F] the end of euro-centrism, by rajani kanth

[Michel Bauwens]

 *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.

-- 
Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at:
http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan

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