<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: Tue, May 24, 2016 at 6:37 AM<br>Subject: The Three Extinctions<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>
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Human Survival: and The Three Extinctions<br>
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Given the deep obfuscations of Modernist ideology, which overwhelmingly dominate both its ‘left’ and ‘right’ variants, globally, we oft elide many fundamentals that should , rightly, concern us: and just one of them is the fragile nature of our precarious State of Being in these perilous times.<br>
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Let me , therefore, point to Three imminent/immanent Threats humankind faces today: I treat them all , seriously, as entirely possible ‘extinctions’.<br>
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They need to be viewed as such, and prepared for , with countervailing planning, rather than the slew of sub-issues that tend to detain public opinion/discourse within the carefully controlled mass-media.<br>
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The 3 (uniquely Modernist) Extinctions are:<br>
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Firstly, a Nuclear debacle: be it by intent, or by accident.<br>
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IF we somehow get past that, then Second: surviving the extant rush to morph us all , perforce, into a Trans-Humankind, via what I term ‘robotisation’ and ‘synthesisation’.<br>
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We are well en route to such a dystopia, originally commenced, a century ago, with the wholesale ‘mechanization/robotisation’ of production/management processes of production and delivery, of consumer/producer goods/services, across all sectors. Now, with the advent of bio-genetics , bio-electronics is intruding menacingly into bodily structures and functions, via advancing nanotechnologies.<br>
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This is paralleled by the grim determination of Corporates to find profitable, synthetic substitutes for all organic, natural, products and processes – let’s simply call this ominous trend the galloping ‘synthesisation’ of life.<br>
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If we , somehow, manage to avoid Strikes One and Two – fortuitously - there is yet the Third hazard , no less calamitous than the previous two : Cultural Survival.<br>
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The Late Modernist ‘ Neo-Vandalist’ Agenda involves the utter, ruthless, deracination of all non-Modernist, autonomous, cultures and civilizations, globally.<br>
This has, to some degree, already been achieved.<br>
A standardized, homogenized, and ‘flat’, cultural (and eco-political) landscape makes marketing, control and domination, so much easier.<br>
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The Modernist, ‘culture-free’, wasteland is steadily expanding by the day, engulfing more and more of physical, social , and cultural space.<br>
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Notice the nature of the above 3 Threats: they each spell near-extinction of the anthropic species - physically, biologically, and morally, respectively.<br>
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Notice, also, I have not mentioned the more usual, endemic genre of oppressions that engage public attentions, in more ‘normal’ times, i.e., racism, sexism, jingoism, and empire :- all pushed into the periphery, now - much like chronic, systemic disorders , at another remove, of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, ecocide, etc, that occupy the airwaves ( indeed, where/when in Modernist history have such issues not existed?: there is NO Modernist ‘golden-age’, contrary to the lapidary delusions of the varied apologists and shills).<br>
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Notice, finally, that I do not include climate change in the list of possible ‘extinctions’: because we can and will cope with it, with the usual lags – even more so because many mega Corps now clearly smell vast potential for profits in it.<br>
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Besides, anthropic extinction is not an imminent climate change consequence, implying at present, merely even more straitened living conditions.<br>
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Thus do catastrophic evils trump merely calamitous ones.<br>
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Unsure of the difference between calamity and catastrophe?<br>
Let me explain, by modifying an old witticism.<br>
It were a calamity, I would admit, if a luxury-liner carrying the entire set of the nouvelle billionaire rulers of the globe were to capsize, mid-voyage, mid-ocean.<br>
But It were a real catastrophe, perhaps, if someone were to fish them out.<br>
The humor is harsh, I know (for they be all honorable men…) : but the extinctions I speak of - the gratuitous gifts of this same genre of gentry – are no less benumbing.<br>
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By informal reckoning, I surmise that no more than about a <a href="tel:1000" value="+661000">1000</a> individuals, mostly of European origin, now hold the keys to the destiny of 7.5 billion of us (indeed, how did we let us ourselves get to such a pass?).In the last analysis, we are oppressed by this genre of real, live, rulers of the realm, not simply by the sway of abstract ‘paradigms’.<br>
And that’s every bit as scary as the extinctions themselves.<br>
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And the probability of our surviving these 3 extinctions?<br>
The First (nuclear) threat is the most critical, since we cannot rule out/control accidental discharge(s) of weaponry: and nuclear waste is already, for some time, seeping , like some gothic horror, into land and sea.<br>
We need a CERN-scale project to attend to this: but with a view to terminating nuclear processes - not extending/refining them.<br>
You can bet your local reactor that when billions are spent on a science project it is NOT to advance human welfare, in the first instance.<br>
Yes, our scientific elites are all, save the usual honorable exceptions, a co-opted, bought-out, and loyalist cadre.<br>
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The Second, and Third threats, are, leastways in principle, highly avoidable, since public policy can, in theory, be brought to bear on stemming it.<br>
But our record of preventing disaster(s) is anything but reassuring, as we look back at the last few centuries of outright genocide, mass-murder, war, and exterminism.<br>
This is even more true in these last decades of what I term “Late Modernism’.<br>
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They that ‘permit’ us their version of ‘democracy’ weren’t exactly planning on committing suicide in so doing: ‘we, the people’ were never part of that game, save as gulls.<br>
There is not one ‘right’ we possess in modern times that may not be wholly retracted, as it suits the Masters of the Universe, the shrill propaganda of the system notwithstanding.<br>
Think I exaggerate? Have a look at the newly arrogated prerogatives of governments (read Corporations) in any ‘advanced’ Modernist formation<br>
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The Third extinction is fatal to the species in its most poignant sense: there is an operative Gresham’s Law of Cultures - base cultures drive high cultures clear out of circulation.<br>
Competition and ‘devil-take-the hindmost’ ideas of abject self-advancement dull the edge of antic anthropic cultures, which are universally, in the ‘infancy of humankind’ , affective, convivial , and familial, in essence: co-operative norms enhance it.<br>
It takes millennia to build the latter, yet it can all be erased in but two, or less, generations.<br>
Which is what happened to the colonized peoples by dint of the impact of our ‘civilisation mongers’.<br>
And who can, after the fact, scale that loss?<br>
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Certainly not the tribe of materialists who constituted Modernism to begin with: a mere mess of pottage suffices for this lot.<br>
Cram their itching palms with lucre, and they’re in veritable seventh heaven: after all, they who first ordained ‘per capita income’ as a vital metric for ‘progress’ ,‘development’, and what have you.<br>
Culture? Civilisation?<br>
No more than will-o'-the-wisp, ignis fatuus, parlor room twaddle: save all that for a rainy day.<br>
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Used to be the case , in classic Colonialism of yore, of a stance of ‘give us your resources, keep your culture”: now it’s more a call for ‘surrender your resources, abort your culture, and sacrifice sovereignty’.<br>
Such the criteria, to be a true vassal of the global empire - in these times.<br>
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As I have remarked before, Europe and its offshoots – whose elites govern the world today - bear the lion’s share of responsibility for the current state of affairs.<br>
They dragged us to this climacteric, willy-nilly: but we may all have to co-operate, now, deploying all means at our disposal - to get us out of it.<br>
Yes, our ragged-trousered philanthropy is to be the salve: fitting, is it not?<br>
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And if/when we do, let us hope we will all be possessed of the essential wisdom to jettison forever the modernist chimera of ‘progress’ - which has enslaved us all in technological, militaristic, and financial chains more asphyxiating and inescapable than the ones that bound us in the pre-modern era.<br>
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We need to find our way back to a historically extant Eden (no, not Utopia, by any stretch; but far more modest microcosmic , anthropic, communities within which co-respecting accountability , and conviviality, are more possible and likely) via the anthropic societal model of a ‘moral economy of affections’, bypassing the modernist, contractual, ‘material economy of interests’ which is the ontic/epistemic quagmire we are sinking in today, to an immiserating, inexorable, and irredeemable, doom.<br>
R E F E R E N C E S<br>
Kanth, R. The Post-Human Society, Munich: De Gruyter, 2015<br>
_______ Farewell to Modernism: On Human Devolution in the 21st Century, forthcoming, NY: Peter Lang, 2016/7.<br>
[© R. Kanth 2016]<br>
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