[P2P-F] Fwd: From r

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kanth, Rajani <rkanth at fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Mon, May 18, 2015 at 12:18 PM
Subject: From r
To: "michelsub2004 at gmail.com" <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


                                                *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 I*sles,  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 <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]*



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