<div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal"> <b><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The Final Hour</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The <i>modus</i> 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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The extraordinary
thing is that, to this day, these worthies remain all but unaware of their incredibly apocalyptic , historical ‘mission’.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">This might
appear surprising - until one fathoms the underlying mystery.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Unlike, say,
their Eastern counterparts the genius of the European has always lain in precision-mapping of all things: <i>especially in their micro-domains</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Here , I must
interject a <i>caveat:</i> this
prepossession, whilst a generic trait, is far more pronounced amongst the <i>Anglo-American</i>
<i>genre</i> than , say, in their German or Latin cousinages.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">So, the ‘<i>Big Picture’</i> 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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">This has
many obvious benefits, which we
associate, in sum, with the Hesperian “Way of Life’ that dominates the globe today.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">But it comes at quite a prohibitive cost.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Put metaphorically, they crave Knowledge,
as it gives them Power: but not the Wisdom
that might confer Felicity</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">In antipodal
contrast , is the Vedic tradition of Ancient India - which
imbues all knowledge , <i>ab initio
and post-factum</i> - with the pervasive
spirit of a perennial <i>wisdom.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">You both begin and end with the ‘<i>big picture’</i> in the<i> latter</i>:
not so, in the <i>former</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The latter
project , in other words, is , ever, a <i>moral
</i>undertaking: the former, only a <i>material</i> one.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Thereby the former are unable, in effect, to arrive at an intrinsic, ‘implicate’, comprehension of the Whole.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Indeed, <i>morality</i> (being always <i>societal)</i> is constituted at the level of
the whole, not its parts: so our Micro-modelling geniuses cannot put it
all together<i>, speaking
metaphorically, </i>any more than they
could patch-up Humpty Dumpty<i>, post factum, </i>, at time deferred.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Stated
differently, the Cartesian ‘mechanical ‘ metaphor simply fails with organic entities.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The (Modernist)
Enlightenment researcher, in his/her
‘value-free’ <i>cum</i> materialist garb, was appropriately ‘color-blind’ with
respect to perceiving the <i>moral cement</i> binding societal entities .This might help
explain why Adam Smith <i>, e.g.,</i> is
lauded very widely for his <i>Wealth
of Nations</i> tome , but few even
recall his <i>Moral Sentiments </i>work.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'"> (ii)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">EuroModernism effectively begins with the adoption of <i>materialism</i> as its guiding metaphysics : wherein its
supernal success – and abject failure.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Since this stance is openly flaunted as a <i>virtue,</i> not least by ‘progressive’
trends within it (<i>e.g.,</i> Marxism), I
will not expend time in establishing the fact.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">More interesting
,perhaps, might be to indicate why this happened.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The
‘Reformation’ paved the way for <i>Modernist
Greed</i>: this could only be done by
wholly demolishing the Late Christian ideology of the <i>ancien regime.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">So classical
Christianity (Canon Law, <i>e.g.)</i> , of a
monist-idealist bent, was swiftly subverted , and stood on its head,
with a banal ,materialist calculus
replacing it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">But it is even more profound than that.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">When <i>gemeinschaft </i>was dismantled, with it
fell the<i> moral </i>economy upon which it
rested: the new ‘<i>social contract’</i> notions of society (<i>i.e.</i> the <i>gesellschaft</i> form) could only conceive of society as a ‘<i>balance of interests’</i>, rather than a ‘<i>balance of affections’ (i.e.</i>, care, consideration, <i>etc</i>.) - it is in this pivotal moment that the <i>‘material’ economy</i> replaced the more ancient, and <i>anthropic
</i>, mode of social<i> being</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Given that
Europe became <i>Modernist</i>, in this sense,
far ahead of others, it embarked upon
the road to ruin well before the rest.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Morality is not an arbitrary episteme, a ‘choice’ as Modernism views it: it emanates ,
in fact, from our anthropic being, , as an ontic necessity.</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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’</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Given that women
are the first providers of infant needs, universally, it falls to them to be
the <i>prime custodians of morality (i.e</i>.
, the guarantors of the security of the
newborn).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Indeed, the first moral (at once natural and social) relationship is
the mother-and-child one.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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).</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The broad
distinction between the ‘public’ and ‘private’ domains corresponds to this
divide.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">So, Morality is the gift of Women, much
as Politics is the bane of Men.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">As I have stated
in earlier posts, the US is, in most
regards, now an <i>amoral,</i> <i>Post-Human</i> Society: which is the ‘face of the future’ of all Modernist formations of today.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Now, as for <i>materialism</i>
itself , in this age of Quantum Physics,
there is no necessity for proffer of argument (I have detailed its <i>lacunae</i> in previous posts) : <i>it is, very simply stated, bad physics, faulty philosophy, and shabby morality</i>. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Poignantly, in
the words of Arthur Schopenhauer "...materialism is the philosophy of the
subject who forgets to take account of himself”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">And, as I have
written in previous posts, it is in the <i>degree and intensity</i> of this paradigm of
materialism that Europe, since the inception of Modernism, differs, portentously and prophetically,
from <i>All
</i>species of the <i>Other.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">
(iii)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The nascent
EuroModern economy leeched off all domains that it could annex: women’s labor at home, serf , slave, and
wage-labor, abroad.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">It is this <i> primal annexationism, </i>beginning in the
Sixteenth century, that explains its
hypertrophic growth to <i>giantism</i>
in the Twentieth Century.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The gap between
Europe and <i>Non</i>-European societies was
not the painfully negative one it was to become - at
the <i>start </i>of this process. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">One has only to
gauge the pathetic riches of, say, England, in the 16<sup>th</sup> Century, in
relation to that of the Indian Sub-Continent, to understand this in all its
dark poignancy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">It was Expropriation of all <i>Other </i>worlds that ‘created’ the <i>First World,</i> 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!).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">And what a
saturnalia of accumulation that was!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Messrs . Attila
and Genghis appear but mere village pick-pockets, and small-time
hoods, in comparison.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">That same process gave the European that very current <i>elan </i>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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">
(iv)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Strike One</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">
of EuroModernism was, as described in
the foregoing section, the debauchery
of <i>Other
</i>domains of economy and society, both
domestically and abroad (England<i>, e.g.,</i> colonized its hapless Celtic neighbors even whilst subduing foreign lands) .</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Strike Two,</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'"> is the very <i>Late Modernist</i> one,
inaugurated by the Reagan-Thatcher Anglo-Am
set of Policy Initiatives that ,
essentially, in <i>self-cannibalising</i> fashion , undermines , today, the very basis of Modernism - <i>via </i>its ‘revised’ manifest of illimitable greed <i>at any cost</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Partly</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">, this is to point
to the quick transition from rampant <i>immorality</i>
to the chilling <i>amorality</i> as was achieved , say,
in the Post-WWII period. As anthropic beings , we are either moral or immoral: but <i>amorality</i> is a Euromutation of
apocalyptic significance that surfaces first in the Anglo-Am formations.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Not only is the <i>self-cannibalising</i> extant within the social economy, in Late
Modernism , it is paralleled also in the systematic ‘deconstruction’, <i>i.e.</i> annulment, of anthropic traits that
the ‘civilising’ process (where it exists) effects over time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">But, mostly, I
am referring to the entire set of <i>Neo-Liberal Strategies</i> that ended up empowering the most <i>parasitic</i> forms of capitals – such as<i> finance</i>
– over the traditionally more societally
useful, and productive, ones :to the point where the domestic economy is longer a primary base for sustainable <i>productions.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Rentier</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'"> Capitalism, or the <i>regime of coupon clippers,</i> can only
survive, bubble to bubble, tenuously , on Financial scams and Ponzi schemes,
crisis to crisis.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The system survives, precariously, today,
on the continuous circulation and
re-circulation of ever-escalating debt: </span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.<i></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">As it is , we
are now teetering on the brink of a
collapse, or series of collapses, of the various mini asset-bubble economies.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">So the EuroModernist
world has, by now, and in these very times, reached the
tail end of its overly long tether.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Indeed, few
systems have tried harder to win the
game of <i>self-subversion.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">
(v)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The choice
before the world is , thereby, stark,
and grim.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">If the Late
Modernist rollercoaster is not halted, and <i>reversed
,</i> in form and content, soon, we all go over the abyss into a zombie
world already at the draft and design stage.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Is there a fate
worse than extinction?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Yes, there is.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">The implacable misanthropes who pushed the nuclear
button , back in the mid-twentieth
century, can quite easily do so again.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">And that would,
of course, end it all - for much that inhabits our little
corner in space.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">But if they didn’t</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'"> - and actually succeeded in getting the
world to bail them out with yet more
blood and sacrifice, <i>then what lies ahead
is little short of a dire dystopia that
decisively punctuates, maybe even terminates,
our long history of Anthropic Evolution.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">I am referring
to the nouvelle, sci-fi, <i>TransHuman</i>
world that latter-day Dr Frankensteins and Dr Strangeloves are busy concocting, in their hidden laboratories, albeit far from public
scrutiny.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Late Modernism
achieved the <i>Post-Human</i> Society as its choice
contribution to anthropic <i>devolution.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Strike Three of Modernism will be the
TransHuman Society that will halt about 200, 000 years of our anthropic
existence.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">This <i>emergent
techno-industrial complex</i> 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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">It will , very likely, transfer the Transgenic processes applied thus far to plants and animals
to humans,: </span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">and internalize , quite literally, the new <i>genre</i>
of bio-tech innovations - to clone
a new class of androids and cyborgs, according to corporate
taste and inclinations.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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</span></i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">, be put
to early, and diabolic, ‘use’.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">So, the bionic species is only , I
suspect, but , a few decades away, if the current genre of Corporatism is
allowed free rein.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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 <i>Final
Hour of the Species.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">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.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">One can only hope there is , out there, some
merciful <i>’god-being’</i>
to stop them, and in time - if we can’t do it for ourselves.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">Indeed, If IT
doesn’t exist, we may well have to
invent it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:'Tempus Sans ITC'">For, they that
set off the Doomsday Clock appear determined to make it , <i>asap,</i> entirely , and
permanently, superfluous.</span></p><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><div>Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: <a href="http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan" target="_blank">http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan</a> </div><div><br></div>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br><br><a href="http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation" target="_blank"></a>Updates: <a href="http://twitter.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://twitter.com/mbauwens</a>; <a href="http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens</a><br><br>#82 on the (En)Rich list: <a href="http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/" target="_blank">http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/</a> <br></div>
</div>