“…the collapse of the Afghan government showed that
the U.S. had fundamentally misunderstood the people of Afghanistan and had
tried to impose a military system that simply made no sense for a society based
in patronage networks and family relationships.“ - Heather Cox Richardson, August18, 2021*
What is the world going through?
Neoliberalism, Modernity, Political
Science vs. History and Cultural Anthropology?
or
Western Modernity and Progress vs. The
Rest?
or
Modernity Blinders to Premodernity and
Postmodernity vs. Cultural Human Nature 101?
We in the US and most of the rest of the
world that is separately following our way regarding faux liberal democracy or
autocracy, Enlightenment ideals hypocrisy or rejection, and über-nationalist capitalism are leading humankind over
the precipice of economic, social, and ecological collapse. Modernity is on its
way into the dustbin of history.
I thought I would never have such a
thought entering and having any chance of sticking in my mind. But global events
and the social and cultural degeneration of my country, the US, have forced it upon me: Maybe
the postmodernists have it right. There is no objective truth. Only opinion and
language games are important in modernity. Knowledge claims and value
systems are ‘contingent or socially-conditioned. They are products of
political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies’ (Wikipedia).
No, postmodernism did not cause the current state of world affairs. It brought it to our attention led by certain French philosophers**. When PM was pulled from the arts, architecture, and literature beginning in the 1970s and found its way embedded as a minority in the faculties of the social sciences and a growing part of the public's awareness in the 1990s, postmodernism had established itself and remains as one of the first and persistent expressions of the chaotic existential dead-end that modernity has become.
Almost everyone since postmodernism began, including the majority in academia, the barons of industry and their mouthpieces in politics, and the mainstream public rejected it out of hand. They could not fathom liberal democracy, founded in the West on Enlightenment individual and societal ideals, science and technology, and the notion of individual progress and redemption that Christianity bequeathed the world, could fail. But modernity is failing. From the inside out.
Unfortunately for humankind, the PMs, early on and now, cannot express themselves in less esoteric, cryptic, convoluted language, academically and publicly, or in a usable and effective activist manner within mainstream politics. Humankind, and particularly those of us in the US, might have woken up decades ago from our thoroughly modern sleepwalk toward collapse. And begun blazing a new cultural evolutionary trail leading humankind toward better political, ecological, and international outcomes. Instead, after World War II, we double-downed on modernity via neoconservatism and an inept, often compliant, opposition within the Left. Wealth, gadgets, status, comfort, convenience, power are equal opportunity addictions.
Personal and spiritual needs, the PMs
say, are best fulfilled by homegrown improvements in social conditions, not
pursuing capitalism and nation-building led by foreign politicians (Left and
Right) and their soldiers. The grand narratives and ideologies of modernity and
Enlightenment rationality that focus on the role of ideology for maintaining
political or economic power are wrong and doomed to fail.
Modernity’s universalist notions of
objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, science, language,
and social progress deserve our strongest criticism and incessant skepticism.
Conversely, claim the PMs, self-consciousness, self-reference, relativism,
pluralism, communalism/collectivism, and irreverence are most fundamental to
being human.
No wonder postmodernism is so strongly
attacked by most in modernity’s mainstream public and private sectors, from both sides
of the aisle - liberals and conservatives. It aims a deadly blow at the heart
of the way of life we have chosen since we entered the gates of Sumer and put
on the harnesses and shackles of civilization. A way of living that eventually
led to human- and Earth-destructive modernity.
Under modernity political and cultural
discourses seeking and maintaining power and hierarchies are pursued through
language and culture manipulation within and between nations. Only the wealthy
and powerful benefit from this. In the short and medium terms, the vast
majority of humankind does not.
But ultimately the masses win because
power will pass to them when the wealthy and powerful, and their institutions and monuments to themselves, inevitably self-destruct. When their
efforts leading to economic, social, and ecological collapse are complete.
The sooner a critical mass of humankind
begins to emphasize self-consciousness (conscientization or critical consciousness, Paulo Freire***),
self-reference, relativism, pluralism, and irreverence, and returns to
focusing on ‘how we treat each other’ as our highest priority contra the
pursuit of wealth and power, the better prepared humankind will be to reconstitute
being human in a better way after modernity's collapse.
How? No-one knows. What control we ever
had, if any at all, over the course of humankind’s cultural evolution and the
wealthy and powerful who have controlled it for 12-15 millennia, is minimal to
none today. The wealthy and powerful control all that matters, and they will
not stop their self-serving pursuits willingly. Revolutions and reforms have
failed to deter or stop them.
Our only option is to engage in noble,
humane acts within our individual control and socially, with as much hope as
each of us can muster, and wait.
_________________________
* Richardson, Heather Cox, 2021, “August 18, 2021.” Letters from an
American: A Newsletter About the History Behind Today’s Politics. A Substack
Newsletter.
** Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard.
*** Freire, Paulo, 1970, Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum. 1975, Conscientization, Geneva: World Council of Churches.
