[P2P-F] Fwd: Summations

[Michel Bauwens]

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



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