The Modern Era 2
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 01.2
The hyperbolic hype
Overcoming the present impotent resignation to statistical data analysis requires above all an epistemological reset, specifically, a refocusing of our own perceptive apparatus that is, at present, unable to set up a constructive connection with the living forces currently driving the change.
The evolutionary clock ticks the time for our species to readapt to the environment, an effort that is not in contradiction with the technological advances but must transcend that ‘homo technologicus’ ideological-complex that we developed during our big leap forward, and that now menaces to destroy our individual and collective identities altogether.
Right at the beginnings of the scientific revolution came the querelle des anciens et des modernes, a dispute settled by the verdict of Fontenelle that become, with the Illuminati and the Hegelian historians, an undisputable cultural axiom: modern man, being on the shoulders of the ancients, sees farther then they. Heir of its time, the ‘modern truth’ claimed to contain in itself all the other truths of the past, that had no relevance whatsoever if not under the ‘modernity’ perspective lens, where they appear as meaningless , distant crossroads on a historical path that left them behind long ago and recalls them only distractedly to explain what matters: where it got to.
This absolutization of the present hides, under the guise of disinterested rationality, a hidden intent of legitimizing the existing socio-political and ethnical hierarchies. Together with the ancients, we classed as irrelevant all those ethnic groups foreign and marginal to European civilization, the only one to have supposedly stolen the fire from the gods, and the only one set to dominate the earth.
Built upon a methodical refutation of the different, our modern conscience rests on the obscure depths of its psycho-analytical repressions: its crisis erupts when the suppressed parts pressure the enclosed ego until they break in, putting an end to ‘good conscience’.
Modern man deceived himself, thinking he could implant his model of humanity to every tribe on earth, and to break the illusion and excite his subconscious abyss, is the sudden realization of the unsustainable imbalances now threatening the biosphere — and his own inevitable involvement in the announced catastrophe.
Having become accustomed in assuming his own cultural identity as the only possible human identity — the human species coincidentally being the Chosen One by God— modern man would attempt to solve the world problems by looking in the mirror. This was noticed, back in 1760, by J.J. Rousseau: “The mistake of Hobbes and the other philosophers is to confuse natural man with the men they see around them… They know very well what is citizen in London or Paris, yet they’ll never know what a man really is.”
I recall the words of Malinowski on Freud in the 1920s: the ‘Oedipus complex’ scheme proposed by Freud can work for the patriarchal European family, but not for the social organization of the Trobriand Islands, where the repressed desires are to “marry one’s sister and kill the uncle on the mother’s side”. Same being said for the subconscious myth of the primordial horde, again a mere projection of the European submerged collective memory.
This is valid throughout our official culture: whenever we attribute something to ourselves we subconsciously attribute it to the whole world, since ‘ourselves’ is really all we perceive of the world.
It is while conceiving this hyperbolic subjectivity that modernity hoped to untie the knot that held man bound to his past: in his own mind — proudly claiming of reaching adulthood by liberating rationality from the chains of pre-scientific thought, it believed to possess the ultimate tools to measure what in man is according to nature and what’s not. In reality, it was constantly confronted by many different kind human and natural phenomena that couldn’t be reduced to its measure units. To hide this contradiction, official culture would boldly proclaim that only modern humans had full self-awareness, and all the other specimen were residual examples of earlier evolutionary stages. They were indeed men, but inferior.
The current crisis of our civilization is in fact the crumbling of that self-narrative aimed at legitimizing the totalitarian pretensions of the western world, and exporting its ideologies and institutions as if they were the logical outcome for every rational being.
Only today, at the end of this process, we can look back and honestly admit and condemn the phase of colonial conquest during which Europe tried to subdue all the peoples of the world under its domination. The proponents of this view supported their belief with a blind faith in the supremacy of reason, a faith that proclaimed herself scientific, but was really still deeply contaminated with theocratic dogmas and Eurocentric biases.
Even Marx’s revolutionary project would fail to evade this paradigm of modernity, still subconsciously accepting it the implied necessary stage in the evolution of humanity.
“Thanks to the rapid technological progress of the means of production — we read in the Manifesto — and to enhanced communication networks, the bourgeoisie brings civilization even to the most savage countries”. What more, it’s the same bourgeoisie that offers to the proletarian a chance of raising himself to become a self-determined historical subject, by giving him a role in the new play, since it needs an interlocutor, and “finds itself compelled to reach for the proletariat and ask for its support, hence dragging him in the political arena. It’s the bourgeoisie therefore to provide the proletariat with the tools for emancipation, and with the weapons to eventually overthrow herself.” Thus the working class accepts, by representing the antithesis on the stage of history, a part in the modern dialectic and becomes a responsible and concerned actor of its evolutionary journey. Marx would explain the alienating dynamic imposed by Capital on the labour class by referring to Hegel’s master-slave argument. In spite of his powerful analysis of the capitalist’s production system as a game in which the single entrepreneur plays the role of the clueless officer, he wasn’t able to predict the final outcome that game would lead to: both capitalists and proletarians become slaves of a ‘master’ that is production itself. Marx is limited by the conceptual bias of western anthropology, and subconsciously still believes the myth of god electing mankind to rule over the natural kingdom.
“Freedom is conceived by Marxism as another form of domination, only upside down” — the victims in place of the executioners — “but always implying that mankind would realize itself through the technical manipulation of reality, as if technology were morally neutral, and could progress indefinitely with no restrictions or setbacks. Dominance ended up becoming, aided by technology, the real motive of history, finding its fulfillment in the post-atomic cold war power lobby. For this reasons, any experience not revolving around the logic of production and any portion of humanity not yet transformed by the industrial revolution have gradually lost, even to the Marxists’ eyes, every significance.”
Europe, homeland of the modern revolutions and exporter of its fruits to the world, had the historical merit of unifying it. But this globalization process was imposed and not spontaneous, led by an aggressive ideology of exclusiveness masquerading under the mask of progress. Closed the colonial era, it’s easy to realize today how modernity couldn’t really penetrate the root identities of the cultures it was trying to absorb, but only enclose them in its far-reaching tentacles, sometimes crushing them, some others provoking a resentful retreat in themselves.
The historical impasse
The modern era awaits its singular destiny with the presentment of having to deal with something different from the traditional kind of social and cultural upheavals on-record, such as those remembered by the West after the fall of the Greco-Roman world or after the Middle Ages. In both cases the decline of the status quo was accompanied by signs of renovation or renaissance, in other words by innovations that were rooted in what was dying. The Middle Ages lived in the firm belief of accomplishing the mission of the Roman Empire. The Renaissance built itself on the shoulders of the Ancients. The novelty would thus maintain continuity with its past and draw from there the inspiration to project its future.
The absence of a future, today, isn’t due to our lack of imagination but rather reveals the need for a transition with different degrees of magnitude.
Who abandons himself, on the traces of a Toynbee or a Spengler, or even of a Vico or a Kaldoun, to the suggestive voice of the historicist mermaid that sings about the birth, growth, and death of civilization while dreaming of another one to take its place, has lost, to my eyes, the last spark of reason. And yet that spark is alive, and is capable of giving a meaning to our existences even as we approach the end of an epoch.
It is a blind turn that won’t take us to a no man’s land inhabited only by gods, but instead to a tour inside ourselves, to the contradictions within that hide the key to realize this transition.
The dialectic of the Greeks already recognized the logical stage of aporía, the blind end, the situation with no apparent way out, stalled between two incompatible and yet equally grounded conclusions. To escape, the only option is to reassess the initial premises and spot the incongruity that led to the logical breakdown.
Today we have reached an aporetic point whose symptom is the scientifically proven impossibility of extending to every human being the lifestyle enjoyed by the developed countries. This is the antinomic formula of the dead end: modern culture is universal since step by step it developed involving every man and women on earth / modern culture isn’t universal since its diffusion was only due to the violent repression of the every other living human culture and identity.
To overcome this contradiction we must agree on one fundamental premise:
what has been propagated by ‘modernity’ was only one version the many possible realities.
Not everybody agrees to trace back, trying to explain the current collapse of our civilization, to this original sin: the Human Will to dominate the world. It’s true indeed that what we call modernity is a complex phenomenon in which we can distinguish many overlapping trends, each deploying with a different plot. For example, Stephen Toumlin dates the start of ‘modernity’ as the rationalistic season that runs between Decartes and Hobbes, whose main heritage is the overcoming of religious fears and dogmas for a new scientific approach based on methodical geometry. The modern era begins, in his analysis, in the second half of the 17th century, while the great thinkers of the 16th, in particular Montaigne, where exponents of a more flexible sort of humanism, accompanied by a healthy touch of skepticism, and open to ethnological variations of sorts.
Toumlin’s insights are useful to trace back the different plot lines that constitute modernity and are now converging in this critical stage of systemic reset. But I remain convinced the original foundation of this last period is that ideology based on a systematic denial of the ‘other’ for the sake of an identity that claims to be absolute. This is the anthropological root culminating, since the 1600’s, in the extraordinary journey of civilized man.
The false premise we have to reassess to move on from the present dead end is the formerly indisputable axiom by which civilized man had to be in charge, the only one competent enough to manage the future of the species and of the whole planet. It’s about time we critically overturn that axiom, in order to rediscover, in the depths of homo sapiens, the available resources to create a less unilateral and pretentious human subject than the one acclaimed during this last technological breaktrough. As explained by Hans Jonas, before the industrial revolution technology was seen as a tool to help dealing with the necessities of everyday life, not as the progressive path towards the grand vision of a illimitate progress, as if the destiny of man was the complete control on matter and on himself. “Likewise, concludes Jonas, the triumph of civilized man on the external reality meant at the same time it’s trumph on the internal constitution of humanity, of which before it merely constituted a part”.
For some sort of feed-back, the accumulation of incredible achievements realized my modern man in the domain of manipulating objective reality retroacted on his subjectivity, in his perception of both knowledge and ethics, discarding or repressing any element not functional to the success of his enterprise. A semplification forseen by Decartes when, after reducing the material world and even the human body to mere res extensa, he placed in front of it a subject whose perceptive apparatus couldn’t be anything else but a perfect geometrical model.
The power of this reduction that feeds modernity from its beginnings is under our own eyes. Inside a universe designed to match his appearance, mankind appears to be moving without surprises if not momentarily, all measuring and all dominating, even to the cost of repressing every other impluse that doesn’t comply with that order, every language that won’t accept the discipline of rational discourse based on the principle of identity and on a rigorous deductive method. Anything else, anything different, ambivalent, inexpressable was to be denied and confined to the subconscious, as mankind held firmly anchored to the golden rule of scientific truth as the only clear and distinct object of the mind, forgetting how the mind doesn’t necessarily follow the pure abstraction of truth as its ultimate goal, and instead is mostly driven by the will to power, that makes knowledge its own function. Indeed, throughout its percourse modernity was accompanied by a strong suspicion on itself (and here we find its nobility) and by the concern of setting, in the name of reason, the limits of reason itself. But even if balanced by those suspicions, the main impulse of modernity led humanity to a reckless rationalization of the cosmos and of history, losing touch with the natural and historical reality, up to the point where the all-encompassing circle of reason snapped and broke down.
Now we know it:
“a point of the circumference, mistaking itself as the centre, evoked the shadows of the great cycles in which everything flows as an accident, and no scientist is able to fix it”.
Modernity became aware of being nothing more than an ‘accident’ happening within a larger reality that follows its own cycles, and that now stormed back in charge, marginalizing who foolishly believed to be at the centre, and declassing our universal history to an ‘island of history’, to use an expression by Marshall Sahlins.
And there are as many islands as there are cultures. History is only the attribution of a shared meaning, to certain events that taken by themselves are just empirical accidents, according to a set order of values. Something that happens turns into an event when it enters a relationship with a given symbolic system, and that means after it’s been interpreted. That’s why each culture has its own way of conceiving history, and why neither of them can reasonably proclaim itself as the universal, as the ‘centre of the circumference’.
The suspect that the centre was elsewhere, and that the same concept of centre was only an ideological abuse, was first expressed by Edmund Husserl in the 30’s, just before the nazi racial insanity woud take over. He would ask himself if “ that aspiration culled by european humanity ever since the birth of greek philosophy…is only a casual achievement formulated by a casual humanity between many others, each with their own historical sense, or else it revealed itself as the universal trait proper of humanity as whole?”. Only by answering this question, goes on Husserl, “would be possible to understand if western civilization brings in herself an absolute idea or is rather a mere anthropological expression as are ‘China’ or ‘India’; and furthermore: if the present occurrence of ‘europeanization of all humanity’ reveals the manifestation of an absolute design in accordance to the sense of the world, or it’s rather an historical non-sense”.
To me, writing more than half a century later, the answer is clear:
what made sense in history doesn’t make sense anymore.
The suspect, that for Husserl would arise in the shadow of a biased rationality still in the process of discovering its own limitations; for us it is the mature conclusion coming from the direct experience of the current world crisis.
