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The making of a Late-Modern Testament. |
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Dear Pilgrim, thank you for your attention and interest. You are likely here because you can feel a cold wind and brewing storm blowing your way; that it is time to get your existential affairs in order and contemplate the meaning of salvation; i.e., justifying yourself and the legacy that you are going to leave behind when you die. You have come to the right place, at least in principle. The table of contents, introduction and executive summary give you the chance to make up your mind whether these writings have anything much to say to you that might justify reading further. The first 16 chapters are designed to be read as a whole and to that end are on the whole shorter than those from 17 to 27. They provide the intellectual wheels for the rest of the work. From chapter 17 on, the next tranche of chapter entries put the ideological rubber on the road. They are fully fledged free standing essays that take the foundation analyses and lay them out in detail as they pertain to particular aspects of life, from the way we socialize children, to sex, race, civilizational narrative and the coming ideological fundamentalism that may well drive it into the future. The short snapshot 'Visions' laid out in chapters 28-35 are not attempts at prediction. Bits of them may or may not appear as our future becomes history. Historical actors may be driven by such visions, but like all great entrepreneurial gambles, what comes out is a relationship between luck and using its opportunities to win and sometimes lose struggles that take on a life of their own, well beyond the original imaginings of their authors and the contesting powers and influences that ultimately sit behind them. That does not mean however that analyses of the past and visions of the future are unimportant, or that they do not provide a powerful suite of compass and grounding to those who build and then perhaps lead the walk on the road towards our common and individual fates. Good luck dear Pilgrim. May a fair wind be at your back for as long as maybe. And in the meantime, you can acquire the necessary resilience to endure when it isn't, for if I am right that we are heading into a postmodern devolution, you will need it. That was a fair speculation when I started writing this at the beginning of this century, and it is one that has improved with age. I can think of no better training exercise, as it was for me, than what I have laid out for you here. THE SECULAR FUNDAMENTALIST The making of a Post-Modern Testament. For the indulgently rotund Moral tales are like bathroom scales Unforgiving, maladjusted and shunned. Great journeys must be imagined first and so trenchant in their intent to slake the deepest kind of thirst, they grasp imaginers by the throat and tell them bluntly only through travail and trial, by purging fire and hammer blows be smote can their spirit be reforged and history's child be sired. This ordeal can either temper or destroy according to its whim, or perhaps the pilgrims’ strength within. Courage can surmount faint hearts, but how can faith presume that having gambled all, there is a way to save us in the end? There are no roads upon the other side, except the ones we make, every step perhaps at stake our lives, every view through soldiers’ eyes. And so we wile away our days beside brooding familiarities that will not speak to us for fear that it is not the sun that brightens all that we hold dear, but the bonfire of our vanities; that the deepening darkening shade it castes is not shadow, but decaying sanity. We look for hopeful signs, but at midnight, the clock rings its hands and says in anguished tones, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time.” CONTENTS: Faceplate Statement: (Picture of Martin Luther circa 1525) Introduction and Executive Summary PERSPECTIVE AND HISTORY 1. Modernism: Satan’s bargain This uses a modernized and secularized version of Faust’s deal with the devil as a motif for what an entire society has done to itself. 2. Plunder: species war against the planet A profoundly dominant species faces its apotheosis in the destruction of the life support system. 3. The Blind Eye: the accounts Accounting is a much as anything else a propaganda and screening device that conceals damage, loss and later disaster, cannot distinguish between economic obesity bloating, cancerous over-replication and healthy output, distorts and mythologizes economic effort, prevents realistic planning for the future and will likely preside over a disgraceful rationalizing of economic and ecological collapse. 4. Modernity and Postmodernity: some further explanation The mythologization of modernity into irrational collective thinking that bunkers down rather than rationally responding to profound challenges, feeds into a scenario of disruptive historical dislocation that will propel us into a quite different and devolved order, forcing us into an uncertain and difficult journey into the future. 5. A Personal Late Modern Experience A short personal history and explanation of why I believe what I do. 6. Early Twentieth Century Perspectives: modernism triumphant. This is the story of the accumulating threat of blithe optimism in the face of overwhelming historical success and chronic under-estimation of the possibility that it might turn. 7. Towards the Middle Twentieth Century: The totalitarian template While early versions of bluntly autocratic totalitarianism had ‘issues’, they did address the overwhelming pressures and traumas of industrialism, even if at a very high price. Ironing out those kinks has led to much more sophisticated and ‘democratic’ solutions. THE MECHANISMS OF LATE MODERN TIMES 8. Total War and Peacetime Mobilization Commercial totalitarianism has been reconfigured out of the all-out mass mobilization for total war production to ‘peacetime’ total production war, turning soldiers into 24/7 production warriors and shop troops, reconstructing socialization in favor of adolescence, conflating critical language into doublethink and building libertarianism into the language of orthodoxy and administration. 9. Masters and Slaves: the rule of the Idearchs The locus of slavery has moved from physical domination to the domination of thought and its entrenchment into the collective imagination, to the point that independent contractors will deprive themselves more and beat themselves harder and more often, than the slave drivers of old. . 10. The New Totalitarians: the industrial drivers – hubris The wages of corporate megalomania are a society that has been turned into an asylum, where fantasizing and rationality are no longer distinguishable. 11. Restructuring: shifting the parameters of social control. The development of a new kind of corporate totalitarianism that colonizes civil society through the root and branch commercialization of liberty, where the instruments of enforcement and subjugation are depoliticized into products and services, the building of public pressure around them, the protracted institutionalization of mass seduction and the editing out and/or domestication of dissonances. MODERN REGIME PSYCHOLOGY 12. The Dictatorship of the Toys: the hegemony of games The engine room of production warfare is the conversion of objects into icons, relationships into games and reality into fantasies, desires and fulfilling them. 13. ‘The Edge’: the psychology of totalitarian mobilization The extremism of production warfare forces everyone to the edges of their character and the possible in ways that energize and reward the enterprisingly nimble, over-tax the hard working, marginalize and strip the vulnerable and turn all human intercourse into a fall prone exercise in slippery cliff hanging and scrambling, that all too often ends in the valley of the shadow of marginalization. 14. The Western Existential Hinterland: once you saw it, now you don’t The journey into the modern world of instrumentalized and specialized thinking has eroded the parts of us that religious life and institutions looked after, to the point the we are so stripped of an existential heartland that faith and reason no longer meaningfully correspond, such that reason degenerates in rationalization and faith becomes blind. THE CRUMBLING EDIFICE 15. Hypatia’s Ghost: the decline of modernism The secular critique of religion, as exemplified by the work of Richard Dawkins, not only underestimates the rise of religious fundamentalism, but entirely misses what is giving it its traction; serious flaws in the secular world itself that require a complete existential, social and economic rethink of the absolute basics; what the purposes of life and wealth are. Failure to do this has given old time religionists (and new time neo clerical Woke fundamentalists) a free get-out-of-the-garbage-heap-of-history card, enabling them to re-stake their claim on the territory and preparing the way for a reformational shift, which only a determined secular counter-reformation will stop 16. Adaption Success and Failure: The early modernizing and late modern experiences The challenges raised and responses to them during the transition into modernity are analogous to the challenges we face today, as the modern project begins to confront its own mortality, just as its predecessors did, when they had to decide what could be ported from their past into a new world order, and what had to be left behind. CASE STUDY IN EMERGENCE, TRANSITION AND DECAY 17. Romeo and Juliet Revisited: ‘childthink’ Shakespeare introduces us to a very ‘early model’ version of the autonomous child in the face of traditionalist expectations and political realities; traditionalists who are made to take the modern blame for the adverse outcomes arising from the children’s willful and inconsequential egoism and their adult collaborators’ irresponsible and indulgent behavior. 18. The entrenchment of Adolescence: the modern Romeo and Juliet Our system of one to one familial social governance has been systematically unpicked and replaced by market forces and methodology to the point that parenting without a sales and marketing division is out of the question. We are not helpless before this, but not only is the challenge daunting, the road back is strewn with mines and obstacles that every parent must understand and negotiate. 19. Abusing Children In Detention The system of social administration has become as savvy as the Stalinist regime of the 1930s at obfuscating and diverting attention and blame for its policies from itself, and shifting it to obedient apparatchiks whose behavior is declared after the fact to be a deviant/adventurist/revanchist excess, mismanagement and perverse betrayal of of 'the people'. In the case of abuse of children in detention centers, the game is to blame the guards for responding vigorously to protect themselves and their institution from the violently pathogenic chaos and disorder that is being imported into the detention system from a society that has been almost completely stripped of its governance by the dominant libertarian paradigm of administration. Low level apparatchiks become the regime fall guys. THE 4 UGLY SIBLINGS: sexism, homo/transphobia, racism and religious fundamentalism 20. Sexuality, Feminism & the Coming Crunch Sexual 'liberation' has become a regime keystone that has been used to destroy 'repressive governance' that might inhibit the consumption of fantasy based behavior, turns women into marketing tools and available-on-demand commodities, dissolves the meaning of older political terminology in order to obfuscate the underlying operations of an indulgence driven economy and culture, and thus renders notions of 'progress' and 'conservatism', right and left wing almost non sensical. Women find themselves in the middle of this, as feminism itself divides along regime and anti regime lines, with the regime deregulators and privatizers representing female 'liberation' as sexual disinhibition-without-boundaries and its gender critical opponents, as a disciplined gender sexual politic that is only tangentially about sex and sexuality, and everything to do with social power. 21. The case of abortion on demand The ease with which this practice was legitimized had very little to do with the extremely dubious anti-sexist arguments for it, and everything to do with the internal politics of production warfare and the reconstruction of sex and female ‘liberation’ as consumer constructs. 22. The case of the homosexual lobby While women have been ‘had’ by the sexual revolution, homosexuals have been able to leverage, crib and fudge the gender critique of feminism with the rise of ‘sexistentialist’ consumer ideology, which became the perfect matrix for homosexual claims to sexual 'equality' and the right to invade an increasingly chaotic and defenseless reproductive commons. 23. Transgender Inc - Kafka's Children The capacity of activists to manipulate a microscopic gender identity disturbed population with a view to colonize, redefine and re-engineer the wider system of social reproduction, by linguistically manipulating sexual categorization, becomes the apotheosis of a long history of pseudoscientific public relations and marketing reconstruction of reality and consciousness itself....and takes it to whole new level. The essay analyses the economic and cultural context, and the 'persuasantific' methodology of consciousness manipulation being used in detail. 24. Aboriginals: racism, imperialism and ‘sorryspeak’ A narrative about ‘time travel’, adaption and governance, and what happens to not just an indigenous population, but anyone who fails to manage the major and difficult historical shifts brought about by modernization. Those who support, excuse and institutionally reinforce such failure to underpin their own ideological position through a culture of aggressive condemnation and shoddy excuse making, not only further disable their ‘clients’, but set themselves up for the same fate, as their own world and worldview starts to unwind. 25. Racial Hystericism Rewritten A civilizational war on the past has been declared as a stepping stone to war in the present, as the awokened humanist ascendancy moves against the religiously traditionalist Trump led rust belt hinterland white working class rebellion against its industrial and cultural displacement, all supposedly on behalf of black 'prolwelfariat' communities that have been displaced and impoverished not by racism, but exactly the same industrial forces that have marginalized their white class opposite numbers, and which have also systematically destroyed their social infrastructure in the name of liberty without moral or social agency; a problem and regime responsibility that the race narrative neatly glosses over. 26. Drugs, executions & moral fundamentalism This is a narrative about the internal collapse of governance and moral discourse in affluent late modern societies, as it pertains to an international dispute over executing young Australian drug smugglers. It speaks to the potential for a dynamic alteration of that narrative through the intervention of a local and international religious tradition, or some secular version of it, to rebuild the architecture of our moral infrastructure. 27. Shylock and His Bastard Children As Islam (and to some extent almost all other religions) start to convulse into a Reformationary spasm of puritanical rage, at the bottom of this highly volatile and explosive cocktail we are just bound to find an absolutely fascinating and extraordinary little tribe; the Jews. If you do not believe in divine providence and end-of-the-world eschatology, explaining how the modern era has become hostage to the fate of this tiny ethnic group is a tough ask, but I do my best…..for to not understand it is to not understand the rise of fundamentalist religion. VISIONS: 28. MacSocialization The civil libertarian side of capitalism has reached its use-by date and the market now needs to take over the space left by a laissez-faire implosion of governance. Social reproduction is just another services product and can be delivered in exactly the same way, by applying the same totalitarian principles of production warfare and consciousness control as one might use to promote bottled water. 29. Denazification as a Model of Change The process of denazification was a unique experiment in changing consciousness at a mass national level, by combining the consequences of failure with collective shame and rehabilitation, in ways that modeled new values and behavior. The 2008 GFC offered an opportunity to repeat it in the context of prospective economic catastrophe, to break some very unpleasant habits and rebuild productive and prudent financial behavior throughout society, from top to bottom. 30. Sistermentor The deconstruction of manhood into permanent adolescence eventually caused such grievously dysfunctional reproductive outcomes, that parents who could afford it, or families that had exceptionally understanding distant female relatives/friends, started to build a sexual right-of-passage mentoring process for adolescent boys into the practical business of becoming considerate, thoughtful, stable and emotionally mature adults, who could engage their future female partners in ways that would secure them and their future family throughout an entire reproductive cycle. 31. Aspirants, Redemptories and Practical Salvation Salvation is the business of constructing the attitudinal software, social practice and institutional setting to enable communities to high function collectively and bring out the best in the individuals who compose them, in ways that enrich future generations, no matter how trying and dangerous their material circumstances. 32. A Post Modern Death Death becomes our summary and the legacy that it leaves behind is not merely a dead hand, but a living artifact that buries itself into our successors, just as much as if we were to individually live on as immortal spirits. It is to be embraced, where possible, as an exalted moment rather than one denied and unnecessarily put off out of fear or egoism, so that our successors can take over our space in the generational social matrix at the height of their powers, and that the dying person does not overly consume scarce medical resources through unnecessary elongation of the process. 33. The Softwell Man No institutional structure, no matter how high its ideals, is immune from the ordinary effects of political struggle, mistakes or the ineluctable transition processes that all living organisms must endure. Movement founders are often not the same sort of people as those who build them into great institutions. And if they are compressed into the same time and space, conflict is likely and the apparatchiks usually win. As a founding father dies, we see the dynamic of that kind of defeat and how movements change gear. 34. Post-Modern Heroes: Michael and Giordanda This is a visionary ‘history’ of a post-modern commune and a family within it, making their way in an extremely hazardous, violent and deprived world, where the rules of conduct and social engagement form an integral part of its armory and wealth capital. The strength and discipline of their commons and the solidarity that it produces is the key to their survival, and everything they do and the entire process of reproductive effort, is geared to that end. 35. Satan’s Bargain: the ‘FutureSafe Guarantee’ ® Satcor CEO, B. L. Zeebub, offers the company’s human elite genetically and memory engineered immortality, as part of their remuneration packages, in return for collaborating in the final solution to the biology question; death. CONCLUSION: 36. War, Peace and the Ongoing Struggle We are in a society that is living wildly beyond its means and putting crushing pressure on everything it touches. We must now prepare ourselves for a most difficult journey into the future in which there are no rescue services except our own, face the prospect of a multi-millennial time line to struggle against extinction and build an opportunity to port something of a legacy that includes virtue as a civilizational goal for our descendants. Introduction and Executive Summary In 1517, an obscure academic monk called Martin Luther (See faceplate) did what seemed impossible. He unwittingly started a massive two hundred-year political-religious upheaval whose echoes can still be felt today. The trigger for this maelstrom was his objection to the sale of ‘Indulgences’. These religious instruments enabled sinners to buy their way out of the consequences of their negative behavior in this life, in the next. The Church Establishment of his day profited immensely from this sales practice. However, he felt it defeated the quest for salvation. For him, this institutionalized attempt to buy off God meant that the redemptive value of all well intended Good Works and Worthy Behavior had been hopelessly compromised. Only blind faith in His mercy, grace and forgiveness gave any hope for the deeply faulted character that is inherent in every one of us. In its day this message had enormous resonance. Today, Indulgence has become embedded into the deregulated and privatized foundations of our economy and culture in ways that Luther could have hardly imagined. As much as it did in Luther’s time, self indulgence and the indulgence of others equally subverts and damages us. We no longer try to buy off God. Instead, we try it on ourselves, family and friends, and the wider community. We try to buy salvation through goods and services satisfactions, but the more we fail, the harder we try to make them give what they cannot deliver. Indulgence cuts at the very basis of rules based governance by not enforcing its edicts consistently and tolerating poor and self defeating behavior that delude the indulged into believing that that is their right; i.e., that responsible agency, disciplines, boundaries and restraints are there to be broken in favor of entitled narcissism and adolescent solipsism. Self-deception, lies and false expectations however are only the beginning. The indulged are taught to give in to every desire and whim gives rise to an economic system that ravishes everything it touches in its efforts to feed a bottomless pool of demand and entitlement. We no longer end up in an afterlife purgatory. We have a self-designing and dynamically evolving form of hell that colonizes us in the here and now. It is a Golden Gulag (a reference to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's stories about the Soviet prison camp system). It is so overwhelming it absorbs everything, including our best intentions and Good Works. Salvation and redemption can therefore still only be achieved by blind faith that one can do what seems to be impossible, which is to somehow escape the Gulag's power and recover our own, as it becomes obvious that marketed consciousness management and perception manipulation isn't just a colonization tool, but now the main product of the system, whereby goods and services are reduced to mere icons. The Golden Gulag is a concentration camp for the prisoners of desire that evolved as an economy and culture of needs and wants was subsumed by fantasies and intolerable pressure for their immediate satisfaction. Unlike its cruder earlier industrial predecessors, the facilities are very comfortable and copiously supplied, but its processes are exactly the same. It is a feedlot that takes many multiples of the value extracted from the victims of older forms of totalitarian governance. Its victims are destroyed by their labor and starved of existential nourishment until all that is left are ghosts. The enslavement is absolute Despite the pretty facades of the buildings, the well kept roads and gardens, the orderly administration and quality entertainments, it is a charnel house. It feasts on the living world for its fuel, debouches an acrid odor of burning flesh and leaves behind mountains of the charred remains of our needs and wants. Inside the Gulag, people enslave themselves and each other to intensely engineered passions, unbridled egoism and pathological levels of overproductivity and consumption. They are persuaded to abandon the domesticity and community sociability that not only existentially secures them and their intimates, but also constructs them as adult characters. Adolescence breaks out of its age niche to become a toxic mainstream force that paralyzes adult consciousness and critical thinking. Within the Gulag, freedom, human rights and indulgence seamlessly merge to benignly disempower the inmates in ways repression never could, thus binding them all the more tightly to their voluntary destruction. 'Liberality' has been elevated into a powerful orthodoxy, but at the price of denuding it of the mature,consequential, responsible and enforceable adult agency that made it work as an independent social ideology. It has been reduced to a cruel parody of itself in return for its role in masking the more negative aspects of the Gulag’s operations. Its control of our social welfare, educational, legal/public service establishments and now social media and tertiary services platforms, has become as corrupted as it is incompetent. Humanities trained Libertarchs (Woke) hang around the social administrative gateways of indulgence capital, delegitimize what is left of a social commons, its discipline and the authority vested in it, and provide unconditional, excuse rich and all inclusive absolution for the lumpen proletariat, the sexual underworlders, the picaresque edge dwellers in the valley of the shadow of marginalisation and those, like the corporate space cadets who have been running our financial systems, still in denial about responsible moral agency. At least in the sixteenth century unreconstructed sinners had to pay up front to avoid damnation. Not anymore, with the special all-you-can-eat-don't-have-to-pay-til-next-year offers you just cannot refuse. All that freebie get-out-of-jail-pass-go inclusivity is now absorbed and co-opted into a giant theatre of fantasies posing as wants, evolving into needs and apotheosing into rights, because the customer is always right, ready for the masters of business administration to orchestrate the real business of uncontrolled spending and inconsequential behavior on the never never....whether international banker or humbleton credit card hound.....indefinitely, as if the future will never come, because we can put it off. This Gulag is not an autocracy. It is self-regulating. There are no guards or fences. The prisoners cannot bring themselves to leave. They have not been arrested or deported there. They have been driven in by proudly sponsored visions of paradise. The Gulag is a revolutionary and totalitarian organism in all the worst and grossest senses of those words. No goal it ever sets itself is ever enough for long. No amount of force or institutionalized violence could possibly accomplish the extent of those goals. However, selling and marketing can. Thus even the most pathologically insane values, aspirations and ideological assertion can be readily turned into middle-of-the-road, state of the art and reasonable. And while the organism assiduously purveys an image of concern for the value of life and property, like all its revolutionary predecessors, it too eats its children, as we have seen all too brutally with the rise of the transgender lobbies and their fellow travelers. The culture of the Gulag is characterized by the language of ‘Doublethink’ (conceptual conflation), ‘Hollowthink’ (vacuous aphorisms, stereotypes and clichés) and ‘Childthink’ (adolescent consciousness), revolutionary enthusiasm, institutionalized veneration of icons, personality cults, privatized, massively budgeted and science driven propaganda instrumentalities, ever intensifying productivity and compliance requirements, systematic white anteing of pre-Revolutionary values and institutions and an agenda of nothing less than the complete reconstruction of the individual and society for the maximizing of production and consumption outcomes. The Gulag controls language in ways that blunt the inmates' ability to critically evaluate and rationally manage conceptual categories, so that they cannot tell the difference between 'discrimination' and discernment, 'humanity' and species narcissism, 'dignity' and caricature, ‘rights’ and consumer entitlement, 'inclusion' and opportunistic colonization, ‘humanistic compassion’ and an indiscriminate soft touch, 'diversity' and defenestrating the center, ‘freedom’ and disinhibited life without boundaries, ‘authoritarianism’ and firmness, ‘justice’ and sectional interest, 'fairness'/'equity', special pleading and excuse making, ‘tolerance’ and indulgence, ‘respect’ and unjustified regard, ‘compromise’ and being compromised, 'flexibility’ and weakness, ‘concern for ‘the value of human life’ and cowardice, ‘dissent’ and treason, ‘repression’ and discipline, ‘assault’ and chastisement, ‘abuse’ and toughness, and 'violence' and the legitimate use of force. Distinguishing ‘disadvantage’ and dysfunctional willfulness, 'personality' and moral character, ‘individualism’ and egoism, ‘helpless disempowerment’ and passive fecklessness, ‘impoverishment’ and a frugal life, 'misfortune' and inconsequential thinking, 'judgmentality' and and the ordinary exercise of judgement became all but impossible. ‘Love’ conflates with lust and eroticism, biological sex with sexual-political gender, ‘sexuality’ with identity (sexistentialism), vilificatory hate/phobia with principled reproductive consciousness, and sexual ‘alternativism’ with sexual error/corruption, parody, infantilism and/or cruelty. ‘Equality’ conflates into creative equivalencing that legitimizes reward for the incompetent, promotion of the unqualified, penalizing the industrious, and in the name of equality, exploiting the unequal (especially the young) by getting them to compete as ‘equals’ out of their league against stronger players who control the rules of the game against them. In the Gulag, failure, poor behavior and dysfunctional values are denied, smoothed away and no one’s fault because better judgement was discombobulated by larger social forces. If it were their fault, they didn’t mean it. If they did, they couldn't help it. If they could, it seemed like a good idea at the time, because everyone else was doing it. Even if it weren't, it was just ill luck that it turned out badly; shit happens. And they have to be cut a bit of slack, because hell, they are 'disadvantaged' and/or 'misunderstood' poor things who need uncritical empathy rather than be held to account. The Gulag production system originated from the initially temporary expedients of total war. These have now been adopted and re-engineered by industrial ‘war machines’ for marketing assaults on civil shop troops. They have turned episodic war production into permanently institutionalized ‘production warfare’ by systematically overproducing and then ‘wasting’ goods and services onto market ‘battlefields’. At a profound level, it no longer makes any difference what sort of battlefield is being fought over or whether the munitions are poison gas or air freshener. The damage inflicted by traditional warfare and modern productivity is gradually becoming indistinguishable. The costs of this damage, both tangible and intangible, are externalized out of the accounting system. Even the most merciless and rapacious looting of off balance sheet capital accounts are never disclosed. Thus this system now conceals vast accumulated ‘invisible’ losses that will eventually bankrupt a great part of our institutionally organized, existential, cultural and ecological capital bases. Obesity and cancer are not just medical blights, but metaphors for our age. Damage to healthy tissue through excessive feeding and developmental bloating, over-replication, and aggressive metastasizing are pictured as fabulous success stories, even as they kill their hosts. The Gulag is death, not just for us, but the life force itself. Post-Modernism is an art movement whose aesthetic fractures, deconstructs and dysfunctionalises images. Post-Modernity is a potential historical state of being and living that expresses this prescient art form with all the violence, dislocation and chaos that its definition would imply. The greatest question for the latter days of modern times is how we can limit and manage our exposure to the worst effects of such an age. The defining strategy for managing the answer will be to recast modern technology and ideas to facilitate retreat into sane and defensible existential, cultural, community, corporately institutionalized and ecological boundaries; i.e., to industrially calm and ‘disarm’. Such a process would redefine what it means to be productive, wealthy and fully human. It would make a start down the long road to resuscitate our inner hinterlands, recapture our now thoroughly demolished sense of the sacred and redemptive and rejoin the worlds of faith and reason, so that once more they can make sense of each other. As things presently stand, the only groups currently ready to deal with a post modern period are the militant religious fundamentalists of all persuasions, who have dispensed with reason in order to maintain existential and social capital, which they are increasingly inclined to sustain by blind faith and force. Seculars have barely begun to even contemplate the business of rebuilding this wealth, that has been systematically smashed to be bits by the requirements of a consumer society that needs only production drivers and consumer responders for its veteran third generation contract drones and shop troops. And of all global religious movements, the Abrahamic one, whose power and persuasiveness derives from the greatest totalitarian idea ever created, monotheism, will very likely come to a civilizational flashpoint between its equally absolutist traditions, in the one place that is holy to them all, over which numerous wars have already been fought, and now held hostage to Zionist fundamentalism, in a historical irony too profound and terrible to plumb. And the question has to be asked, how such a tiny ethnic group could possibly be at the centre of what maybe the last modern war, because if it comes, it will very likely be a nuclear one. The timeline for the emergence of post-modern disorders and war has already started and the options for a moderately effective response degrade every day we delay in facing it. Totalitarian megalomania, revolutionary zeal and the awesome momentum of two hundred and thirty years of energy, capital and technology intensive development will likely thwart such a response. Unless we can pull off the impossible, we can look forward with some confidence to a very dark and traumatic period. Seismic shifts in human history bring out the best and worst of our nature. There will be the inevitable violence that characterizes such periods, whereby criminal elements and new contending social forces will move in from the margins to the center stage and challenge the traditional state and confront each other. And there will also be those that arm their communities with the tools to not only overcome adversity, but redefine the human condition, the means by which it assembles itself and their ability to deliver sustainable, stable and empowering solutions to the age old conundrums of what makes human society and its social and existential software, worth living in. |
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