[P2P-F] Fwd: From Rajani: On Alienation: : A Non-Eurocentric View

Wed Jul 11 09:06:44 CEST 2018

Thank you Rajani, for this interesting essay. So much here I would endorse, that we seek the felicity of 'warm kindred relations', and that our separation from nature promotes disease.

One aspect of alienation that you don't name, though it is implicit in this article, is alienation from ourselves. (Did the 'self' exist for Marx outside of its position in the economic and historical structure of society?)

What we are seeing currently is a challenge to conventional gender divisions, based on claims to the 'validity of subjective experience'. LGBTQ plus non binary offer a whole range of alternatives to those who feel constricted by conventional gender assignments. This choice is being given to children as young as 10 years old within the UK education system, and the UK Labour Party has recently agreed to accept applicants for women's positions from those who 'self-identify as women'.

Questioning gender divisions also challenges our whole notion of what we think of as 'masculine' and 'feminine' qualities.  

What Is happening now within EM (to use your terminology) is that there is beginning to be a recognition of the validity of a subjective experience, which is not tied to social norms. This freedom allows us to see that though there may be distinct biological differences, (and even these vary much more than is generally supposed) between masculine and feminine, this does not define qualitative differences between genders. Women are free to be as 'masculine' as they want and vice versa. This is acknowledged within enlightenment philosophies, by proposing that everybody has both masculine and feminine qualities within them, 'the yin yang paradigm'. Although this makes a nonsense of the distinction between masculine and feminine qualities, yet it seems difficult for people to abandon that mindset.

 Perhaps it is time for you to re-assess your thoughts on this as quoted from Wikipaedia: "that men and women are distinct sub-species embodying a "paradigm of masculinity" and a "paradigm of femininity", respectively, correlated to violence and nurturance, that are basically instinctual in nature despite their cultural variation".

Anna

> On 11 Jul 2018, at 03:27, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: r kanth <involutegandhian at gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 3:54 AM
> Subject: Fwd: From Rajani: On Alienation: : A Non-Eurocentric View
> To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> 
> 
> 
> 
>                                                          Further Notes on Euro-Modernism*
> 
>                                                                            On Alienation
> 
>                                                                    
> 
> Alienation is a major theme in European discourse, both theological and philosophical, in its EM  (EuroModernist) phase.
> 
> Marx , one of the great canonicals in that  august lineage, e.g.,  noted several  aspects of alienation:  of workers -  from their product, from the production process(run by owners/agents) , from each other(via ‘competition’) ,   and from their own species essence (Gattungswesen).
> 
> I wish to identify the last as specially important, if in a marginally different sense,  as far as our ‘species-essence’ goes– perhaps – from Marx.
> 
> I also wish to add another species of alienation,   a  little less relevant, perhaps,  to a  child of the enlightenment,  and  an heir to industrial society,  like Marx: i.e. alienation from nature.
> 
> *
> 
> Gattungswesen.
> 
> I have argued that , contra all the norms of EM,  we as a species are affective beings, led to seek the felicity of warm kindred relations, instinctually: familial,  co-operative,  and communal.
> 
> EM,  by setting up its alternate  template of competition, acquisitivenessness, individualist,  self-seeking behavior  (as in the pseudo-science of “Economics”), offers a paradigm strikingly opposed to this human essence.
> 
> This sets up not   so-called ‘cognitive dissonance’ –  a  buzz-word if ever there was one -  but , even deeper, an existential nightmare for humans compelled to act against their very own  natures.
> 
> This is the  ontic basis of angst and despair, noted by existentialist writers,  for generations.
> 
> This is why   the so-called  ‘happiness index’ is so low in all societies most ‘advanced’ in EM norms, such as the US; and why the UK, uabashedly, recently set up , no less, a ministry for ‘loneliness’.
> 
> *
> 
> Nature.
> 
> We are , contra the shibboleths of Biblical ideology, part of nature, i.e ., we are animals
> 
> Even  the radical Marx, echoing his own  Judeo-Christian  heritage,  spoke of “Man’  proudly as the ‘sovereign of creation”.
> 
> He hadn’t  studied  Darwin (Darwin’s classic work  was published, late:  the same year as  one of Marx’s classic works: 1859).
> 
> At any rate, we are part of nature: and when we are kept away from it,  as we are, more or less,  in all EM societies, in arid cityscapes of cement and steel, our ‘spirits sag’  (all but unconsciously) and we experience  an ineffable  distress (poetically depicted  in Keats’ To One Who Has Been Long in City Pent’ verse) .
> 
> Presumably parks exist , here and there, in cities, to alleviate that disorder.
> 
> It is a unique form of alienation – i.e. suffering -  lifted  by that trope of    ‘One Touch of Nature”, as Shakespeare had it,  that “ Makes the Whole World Kin"  .
> 
> It is  a misery quite  akin to that caused by the rupture with Gattungswesen.
> 
> *
> 
> To sum up.
> 
> In my view, we are, as a species,  alienated when separated from family, community,  and nature.
> 
> Marx, subscribing – as did most  all his peers in political economy -  - to EM’s (philosophical) materialism ,  prioritised  human engagement in production as critical (‘work’  is an important concept  in Protestant -Calvinist - theology as well),  whence his ‘alienations’ , leastways,  begin in that domain.
> 
> I theorise, au contraire,  the priority of  family, culture,  and society, within  the geist of our species.
> 
> Native American children, cruelly and brutishly separated  from their families/culture/ and society by their  oppressors, as part of an ‘experiment’ to ‘civilise the savage’ ,   apparently died ‘mysteriously’ in large numbers, or so it is reported.
> 
> No: no mystery.
> 
> It is explained by what I argue, above: no EM philosophy can ‘explain’ it.
> 
> This alienation is critical: at its extreme, we suffer a loss of being, of sanity,  of wholeness, and incur a debilitating  anomie when so separated.
> 
> I will repeat: when separated  from family, community, and nature,  we experience a  critical breach of what we could term the wholeness of being.
> 
> For humans, involuntary  isolation could well be  the ultimate  terror (which is why being put away’ in solitary ‘ is such a barbaric mode of ‘correction’).
> 
> Such  ‘isolation’ is now, sadly,  near-chronic  in EM societies (vide Ministries of Loneliness)
> 
> It may well account for the  unmistakable madness of our (EM) age, in the final stages of what I have termed, in my recent book (2017)  ‘Human  Devolution’.
> 
> I will  conclude by repeating my  principal thesis : in virtually Everything it claims , represents,  or commends, Euromodernism is categorically mistaken :   and , worse,  more often  than not, positively injurious  to human existence.
> 
> The sooner we see through, and reject, its many charades,  the sooner we might have a chance to save what  still remains of our social, natural , and emotive/personal, world.
> 
> *EuroModernism , or EM, for short, is my term for the  specific form of Modernism that Europe first invented, and imposed on itself, and its benighted populace, and then exported  - perforce, to its everlasting detriment -   to the world at large.
> 
>                                      
> 
>                                                           R  E  F  E  R  E  N  C  E  S
> 
>  
> 
> Kanth, R.  Breaking with the Enlightenment, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997
> 
> _______   Farewell to Modernism, NY: Peter Lang, 2017
> 
> [©R.Kanth 2018] 
> 
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