<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Kanth, Rajani</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rkanth@fas.harvard.edu">rkanth@fas.harvard.edu</a>></span><br>Date: Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 7:50 AM<br>Subject: The Critique of EuroModernism: a question of standpoints<br>To: "<a href="mailto:michelsub2004@gmail.com">michelsub2004@gmail.com</a>" <<a href="mailto:michelsub2004@gmail.com">michelsub2004@gmail.com</a>><br><br><br>
<br>
best ,<br>
r<br>
***<br>
Understanding EuroModernism<br>
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In this short piece, I clarify the standpoint of my Critique of EuroModernism ( in the latter section of this Note; I have carefully defined this epochal template in previous posts, some of which are available on my blog-site: <a href="http://theinvolutegandhian.weebly.com/" target="_blank">http://theinvolutegandhian.weebly.com/</a> ).<br>
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I have tried to argue, in various previous posts, that EuroModernism is the demoralizing , totalizing, spectre that haunts the globe today - albeit now in its very last tremors (though its ghoulish tail lasheth at us all, willy nilly).<br>
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Its expungement will be , I have written, a great boon to humanity, globally, not least to European societies themselves - that were its very first victims.<br>
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I have not claimed this as a moral imperative, though it certainly is so.<br>
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Nor have I forwarded it as an apriori political judgment, though the Argument might not be diminished by such a stance.<br>
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Instead, I have merely posited the requisites of real, anthropic societies: and suggested that all of Modernist presumptions run plainly contrary to their basic presumptions.<br>
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In effect, Modernist ontology and epistemology are inherently anti-anthropic in their thrust: and will, if allowed full rein, destroy our anthropic existence entirely - thereby fully arresting human evolution.<br>
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The prospect of a Transhuman future , which is not far off - if unchecked - is quite ineradicably written into Modernist dogmas.<br>
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To the ‘progressivist’ Modernist such a critique will appear un‘dialectical’, equivalent to ‘throwing the baby out, alongside the bathwater’.<br>
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Stated differently , the Loyal Critics of His Modernist Majesty have it that it is kosher to criticize Modernist realities, but not Modernist ideals (that they, apparently, share) - omitting to remember the critical, umbilical, cord connecting the one to the other.<br>
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Indeed, Modernism ‘creates’ a wholly mutant social form , alien to the anthropic essence, and antithetical to its hospitable survival in a relatively equable natural world.<br>
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It replaces the vital nexus of kinship with contractual relations, to the point of viewing society itself as a ‘contract’ rather than an affective compact.<br>
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It postulates, and idealises, an asocial ‘individual’ who is prompted with self-seeking conduct as the ontological ‘building block ‘ of this ‘civil’ society.<br>
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It also vests this luckless creature - doomed henceforth to live out the dual , if still monotonic, destinies of a producer/consumer - with illimitable material drives that keep it at the wheel ,like hamsters , for the duration of its days.<br>
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After performing this radical caesarean , it compensates this disabled, rootless entity with the promise of a slew of meretricious ‘rights’: equality, liberty, <a href="http://et.al" target="_blank">et.al</a>.<br>
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Where/when these dubious benefices are found insufficient in themselves (as ever!) there is that standby, gaudy, glut of commodities that might help while away the idle, empty hour , where such time is available at all : away , that is, from the daily, lifelong, grind of laboring - usually for the profit of others, which is the abject lot of the vast majority.<br>
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Even were these ‘rights’ to be ‘real’ (i.e. realizable) they would only help solidify the alienated individual forlornly within his/her personalized domain of cold, ‘rational’ anomie, floundering without the crucial rudders of care and consideration , manifestly essential to anthropic well-being.<br>
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But they are tendentious promises only , run through , and razed, by the designs of the rich and the powerful who manage the ‘system’, one way or other, for their own ends.<br>
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To live and die within the solitary confinement of such a lightless, privatized , existence, formally ‘equal’ to others suffering similarly under the same common fate, does not , somehow, appear to represent a cornucopia of psychic riches to be envied, or marveled, at: let alone being the apex of human attainment, as EuroModernism views itself.<br>
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Indeed, it is a condition that , perhaps somewhat more obviously, moves sentient, feeling , creatures to the very margins of debauchery and destruction (of the Self, or Others) - as befitting a state of rudderless anomie.<br>
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Paradoxically, the more normless and amoral the real societal state of being, on average, the more glaring the Modernist flaunt of Constitutions, Codes, and Rulebooks (yes, it is an Empire , any time of day, blest with a commanding largesse of Laws).<br>
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In fact, even a casual glance at the civil/social statistics of EuroModernist societies would help confirm the very palpable psychic suffering, alienation, if you will, that accompanies a life spent - not lived! – in such an arid terrain of perpetual, pitiless competition, one-upmanship, and despoiling, extirpative conflict.<br>
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It becomes, inescapably, a nasty, boorish , Hobbesian world where, as has justly been remarked, ‘hell is other people’.<br>
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The urban jungles of the lead Modernist entity, the US, illustrate this ineffable quality of hellishness , almost in caricature.<br>
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Small wonder that desperation, existential angst, and coruscating, irrequitable , loneliness is the lot of so many of the true believers who still worship at the Modernist Altar(even whilst being sacrificed on it).<br>
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Indeed, the frantically utopian yearnings of the sensitized , within them, are a reflex only of<br>
the unbearable , destituting, burdens of that prostrating geist.<br>
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The conclusion may well be indefeasible: that EuroModernism is little other than sheer fraud, a scurrilous Libel upon the - admittedly slender reeds of beneficence of - the Human Race.<br>
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For desocialisation is , for us humans, dehumanization.<br>
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Stated differently , the eclipse of gemeinschaft communities by the hypertrophic gesellschaft formations so favored by Modernist Corporatism – for it is their choice creation !- presages only the slow , suffocating, extinction of the civilities, nay decencies, of anthropic life.<br>
With the latter, dies morality - a societal norm deriving from the domestic sphere of child-rearing (the domain, in extremis, of societal care and consideration).<br>
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Whence arises the amoral ‘human’ ( a real oxymoron) , now rendered fair game for manipulation , robotisation , and exploitation - by the powers that be.<br>
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I have tried to point out that deep underneath the unprecedentedly egregious Crises of our times is a real, titanic struggle between the ‘mammals’ (warm blooded/heat-seeking) and the ‘reptiles” (cold blooded/calculating).<br>
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I have no doubt that given time, our species-being will , eventually, assert itself: but it could be this very vital resource that may be insufficient to ensure such an outcome - given the overflowing Tribe of Dr Strangeloves (and worse) that today populates , in increasing overswell, the extant halls of Power and Governance.<br>
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EuroModernism is, in short, misanthropy, writ large.<br>
***<br>
Standpoints , in such analyses of the here , and the hereafter, are clearly important.<br>
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Any philosophy or ‘social science’ that elides a sound knowledge of a realist anthropology of the species is, thereby, simply gratuitous.<br>
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Regrettably, almost all of European speculative philosophy , since the so-called ‘enlightenment’ – including its ‘social sciences’ - has had nothing but thin air as its presumptive, ontic foundation(whether pronounced piously or pompously).<br>
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Marx’s Tenth Thesis on Feuerbach says: The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.<br>
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It can now be seen that both the ‘standpoints’ referred to, above, are flawed.<br>
‘Civil Society’ is the quintessential artefact of EuroModernism that negates every axiom of anthropic society, in its constitution, being the playground (or is it the battleground?) of ‘universal egoism’ - where each sees the other, and society itself, as a means to his/her personal ends.<br>
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But the novel ‘standpoint’ he proffers, in its stead, is also pure fiction: indeed, what realist basis exists for such a fantasy?<br>
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Now, to the extent that his ‘human society’ is none other than tribal formations - first overrun by European conquistadores and then eulogized as ‘primitive communism’ – there would be , thence, a solid base for a very real, already achieved, ‘Utopia’.<br>
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But it is not at all clear that that is what is being referred to: ‘primitive communism’ was , undeniably, an original point of departure for Marx, and others - but his later ideas left that inspiration behind as he went on to embrace a radical, ‘left-wing’ version of Liberal EuroModernist ideas ( I am aware that, in his very last years, Marx changed his mind about many such issues, but his legacy and legators did not scale that into their plans).<br>
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As I have written elsewhere, the underlying vision of Marx, like so many of his ‘progressive’ contemporaries, is not too far apart - with some hyperbole - from a secular version of the Judeo-Christian ‘kingdom of heaven’.<br>
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The irony of otherwise materialist philosophers, plim with fanciful ideals is far from a trifling one.<br>
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Most European ‘enlightenment’ philosophers , in this genre, theorized even more ‘speculatively’, much like the US ‘declaration of independence’ positing boldly, , one presumes with a divinely granted perspicacity, various human attributes given us by an invisible ‘Creator’.<br>
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I do not, given such discouraging precedents, advocate, in turn, yet another ‘pie-in-the-sky’ Program leading to a Promised Land: instead, I point to ‘actually achieved utopia’, i.e., the innocuous, self-sustaining, anthropic communities that lived contentedly (if within unbreachable anthropic limits) on the basis of affective, kindred based, convivial relations - almost ‘dialectically’ antipodal to any and all versions of EuroModernist societies.<br>
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As I have written, we can’t simply ‘imagine’ ourselves into a ‘new world’ (despite the fact that there is, as has been noted, ‘a hidden value to day-dreaming’) , on the basis of a grand, even noble, ‘camaraderie of ideals’, which is largely the way EuroModernists went about their plans – to unscalable human misery such as has chararacterised social engineering, Capitalist and Socialist, in the Twentieth Century.<br>
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Anthropic society is real: it is not difficult to fathom - if studied seriously, without the aids of colored or discolored lenses.<br>
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It is neither good nor bad: it is what it is.<br>
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I argue that the essence of our species-being lies in kinship : and , accordingly, I suggest that societies that are based on that live possibly more satisfying lives, in consequence.<br>
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I point to the universality of the family as the ultimate warren of nurturance , care, and warmth for the human animal as providing powerful testimony in support of that supposition.<br>
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This is not utopian banner-waving, nor does it constitute unduly wishful thinking: au contraire, it is a serious argument that is as yet , providentially ?, verifiable empirically : given that a few such societies still exist where, by sheer inadvertence, the Modernists, be they European or Otherwise, have not annihilated them completely.<br>
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As such , the Argument is in point of fact, for better or for worse, realist in the extreme.<br>
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One Final matter: Modernism is the motherlode from which both Capitalism and Socialism derive.<br>
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Putting aside Socialism , that derived from an appreciation of the more egregious defaults of EuroCapitalism (obvious to both Dickens and Engels, for example, in England), the issue might be posed: which came first, Modernism or Capitalism?<br>
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Unlike the chicken-or-the-egg conundrum (‘solved’, apparently, to their own satisfaction by Brit researchers sometime ago), this one is rather easy.<br>
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It is Modernism that first validates individualized,(i.e. anti-social) , unilateral, self-interest, unmindful of the community interest, as socially appropriate: it is this glaring watershed that separates not only Europe from its own history, but also from the history of ALL existing societies , globally.<br>
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That idea found its resonance in the subsequent approval of the ill-fated Profit-motive ( that so disfigures all scapes of Europe, forever after) which is the mantra, and mainstay, of Modernist Capitalism.<br>
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So, yes, EuroModernism was the foster-nurse and midwife of EuroCapitalism.<br>
REFERENCES<br>
R. KANTH, BREAKING WITH THE ENLIGHTENMENT, 1997<br>
______, AGAINST EUROCENTRISM, 2005<br>
______, THE CHALLENGE OF EUROCENTRISM, 2009<br>
______, THE POST-HUMAN SOCIETY, 2013<br>
---------, TWO LECTURES ON EUROCENTRISM <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwQrpfom9M" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDwQrpfom9M</a><<a href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DZDwQrpfom9M&k=AjZjj3dyY74kKL92lieHqQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Ul8alR2l08keT7LU6kfGk%2FLPjA2GeWA1tJYXAdjLdto%3D%0A&m=l80kmrQP5oD9Yn9GW3wVClP85XRBN%2FmCVzJs2Jxsw8M%3D%0A&s=86a419fc904ebbfcaf93be689bd47970ffd28239a7951a7b16c96396fd034db4" target="_blank">https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v1/url?u=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DZDwQrpfom9M&k=AjZjj3dyY74kKL92lieHqQ%3D%3D%0A&r=Ul8alR2l08keT7LU6kfGk%2FLPjA2GeWA1tJYXAdjLdto%3D%0A&m=l80kmrQP5oD9Yn9GW3wVClP85XRBN%2FmCVzJs2Jxsw8M%3D%0A&s=86a419fc904ebbfcaf93be689bd47970ffd28239a7951a7b16c96396fd034db4</a><br>
[© R.Kanth 2014]<br>
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