<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, May 18, 2015 at 12:18 PM<br>Subject: From r<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>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black"> <b>The Threat
<i>Du Jour</i></b></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">It is, regrettably, a veritable
<i>Age of Extremes</i>.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">By now, we all likely know the banal fact that the ‘highest stage’ of Socialism may very well be
<i>Neo-Liberalism.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">But what we may not have known is that the ultimate stage of<i> Capitalism</i> may actually be an unabashed <i>Neo-Feudalism.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">In fact, why would it stop there?</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">I have always maintained that the Modernist sloganeering of ‘rights’ , the Enlightenment onwards, was specious, in the extreme, <i>vis a vis</i> the disempowered strata (inclusive of women).</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Way things are going, there may be even ‘higher’ stages to come, like the reinvention of
<i>Slavery.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Indeed, ex-colonial world sweatshops that produce for European elite consumption today are but a fig leaf removed from conditions approximating slavery.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Leave it to our able US/UK Modernists to rush us back into Antiquity , on rocket-propelled roller skates.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">I said <i>Antiquity</i>: but let us recall that the US brazenly practiced that venerable institution in the<i> modern
</i>era, not in some antic past, and ‘gave it up’ only by the slimmest of margins.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">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.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">So, as with<i> Capitalism</i> (of the dominant , Anglo-Am kind) the inspiration for such innovating novelties remains the
</span><strong><i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:#404040;background:white;font-weight:normal">fons</span></i></strong><b><i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:#404040;background:white"> </span></i></b><strong><i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:#404040;background:white;font-weight:normal">et</span></i></strong><b><i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:#404040;background:white"> </span></i></b><strong><i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:#404040;background:white;font-weight:normal">origo</span></i></strong><b><i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">
</span></i></b><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">: the <i>
Brutish I</i>sles, and their far-flung Atlantic/Pacific Progeny.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">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. </span></i><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">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.</span></i><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">And yet these imperial polities set themselves up, even in these latter days, as paragons of
<i>human rights.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">The <i>Other</i> Europeans, today, are largely reduced to being no more than docile or disgruntled camp-followers, having long given up any hope for any real
<i>autonomy</i> ( with the exception of France, perhaps).</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">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<i>: human extinction</i>.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">No, this is not hyperbole.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Let me explain.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">I have done a book called the
<i>Post-Human Society</i>: it waited 20 years to find a publisher. </span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">No Anglo-Am publisher would touch it. It now has, at long last, a German imprint.
</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">You get it, I’m sure: <i>
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)</i>.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">At any rate , I argue there that the US is the bellwether of the
<i>Global <a href="tel:1984" value="+661984" target="_blank">1984</a></i> to come, constituting an<i> Amoral</i> <i>Society,</i> across the board: a ‘society’ where the antic distinction between the moral and the immoral is losing both meaning and significance.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">It is another way of saying that anthropic society- which is based firmly on<i> morality</i> – is all set to give up the ghost amongst the Late European formations.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black"> It is another heroic Anglo-Am ‘first’ in history, like the Atom Bomb - amongst a few other such deeply merit-laden accomplishments.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">As always, the <i>in-house</i> critics , being no more than a mere <i>loyal Opposition</i>, have it all wrong: it is not the fact that the world is being polarized between 0.001 % and All the Rest,
in <i>wealth</i>, that is at all remarkable.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">That sells Monsieur Piketty, all over the map, of course: but no more.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Rule by the few</span></i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black"> , based on the expropriation of social wealth, is the norm in all predatory societies, the consecrated myths
of ‘democracy’ notwithstanding.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">What is really remarkable is that anthropic society is being , in evolutionary terms,
<i>arrested.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">An <i>amoral society</i> is not an anthropic society at all, <i>but a contractual, Eurocentric, rational-legal , entity</i>, the fitting complement to the<i> beggar-thy-neighbor</i> economy.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">It will harbinger a dire estrangement, and occlusion, of
<i>affective ties and ethical norms</i> globally, such that a homogenized, standardized, deculturalised, dehumanized, <i>barbarism</i> can flourish unchecked by received human propensities.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">It is also remarkable that Europeans have thought themselves to be possessed of the very acme of<i> civilization,
</i> at the very instance of adopting the very <i>Tools of Barbarism</i> that are now part of the EuroModernist Legacy forced on all, everywhere.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">I have done a couple of books on that subject (listed below), so I will not trouble to detail it here.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">No, double-entry bookkeeping, and the compounding of interest, are
<i>not</i> the momenta of civilization, but simply the unmistakable markers of being, inexorably, on the loping , low road to
<i>Nihilism.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Materialism </span></i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">(in its wild, rampant, Anglo-Am vein) is the very antithesis of the
<i>Convivial Moment </i> that marks the <i>possibility</i> of civilization amongst us hominids.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">The <i>Convivial promise</i> is innate in the province of
<i>maternity and child-rearing</i>, making for a hallowed social space, howsoever brief and circumscribed, free from male violence and aggression.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Indeed, that domain is the real provenance of virtually all of anthropic morality.</span></i><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Admittedly, that promise, slight as it was, was always severely constrained by the predations of masculinist violence and aggression that
<i>homo heirarchicus </i>– a more accurate term than the abjectly self-serving ‘<i>homo sapiens’</i> - shares, liberally, with Chimpanzees.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">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.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">For that reason, our few success stories,
<i>simple tribal societies with a matrilineal bent</i>, soon gave way to dissolution
<i>via</i> the familiar exit of <i>empire.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">The Patriarchical male is an Oligarch, and lives (and dies) by an Iron Law of Oligarchy.</span></i><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">It is this ineluctable fact that, at base, vitiates the various feeble attempts at <i>democracy</i> (and
<i>pacifism)</i> –when serious at all in <i>intent</i> - that have been tried.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">It is also that trait that unites US militarism to Afghan tribalism, in the attitude and ideology of primal
<i>machismo</i>.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">The tribal Afghan, of course, like his American counterpart , needs no instruction in
<i>violence:</i> but has not yet learnt to embrace the doctrines of unmitigated <i>greed</i> - 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.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">But the <i>Post-Human society</i> – meaning the
<i>Amoral Society</i> – is not a <i>terminus,</i> by any means: it is but the stepping stone to another , far more egregious climacteric- the
<i>TransHuman Society</i>, that will not merely arrest evolution but annihilate it altogether.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">So, mere barbarism is not to be a secure resting place: it will be, in the not-so-distal future, a
<i>universe of androids.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">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 <i>unequivocal.</i></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">The fetishism of technology, in context of a system run wholly on behalf of privateers and profiteers, leaves no other option</span></i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">:
beginning with embedded chips , it will enlarge to all manner of vital displacements -
<i>of the human by the machine</i>.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">It might also be instructive, here,
<i>en passant</i>, to inquire as to just how many years the US and the UK have refrained from active
<i>warfare </i>– including the planning/preparation of it - in the past two centuries? Not
<i>Pax </i>Britannica or <i>Pax </i>Americana , therefore, but<i> Bellum</i> Britannica,
<i>etc.</i>, may be the more appropriate term.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">No surprise, really: science, technology, intelligence , are all a colossal waste , indeed become a gathering
<i>threat to their own societies</i>, if not accompanied by the <i>positive checks</i> of anthropic ethics, morality, kinship and community.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Given the triumphalist destruction of the latter, under the various
<i>diktats </i>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.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">If we let them.</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<i><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">Absit Omen.</span></i><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black"> </span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">REFERENCES</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">R.Kanth, <i>Breaking With the Enlightenment,
</i>Humanities, <a href="tel:1997" value="+661997" target="_blank">1997</a></span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">_______, <i>Against Eurocentrism</i>, Macmillan, 2005</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">________ <i>The Post-Human Society,( Forthcoming)</i>, De Gruyter, 2015</span><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:200%">
<b><span style="font-family:"Garamond","serif";color:black">[©RKanth,2015]</span></b><span style="color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
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</div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: <a href="http://commonstransition.org" target="_blank">http://commonstransition.org</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></div></div>
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