The Crux

The crux of my critique is simplicity itself.

The ontological/epistemic basis of ALL EM theorising is patently false.

As such, ALL of EM social theory is wrong.

They read nature, mostly (subject to correction by latter-day quantum ideas) right, but ‘human nature’ (noting the oxymoron) wrong.

Why?

Because they ‘deduced’ so called ‘human nature’ by simply examining themselves (and extrapolating) , in context, of the adversarial, avaricious, dog-eat-dog, world they lived in (similar to Hobbes assuming a ‘state of nature’ that actually reflected English societal life, and Smith , looking into his heart, and seeing a Glasgovian ‘propensity to truck and barter’ sealed within it: ditto with Freud taking the traits of his effete, Viennese, clientele , to be universal, etc.).

Their economics, politics, and social theory was, thereby, at once, particularistic and perverse; not even vaguely general, and far, far , from being universal.

In just the same way that an adequate physics is a sine qua non of getting chemistry and biology right, a true anthropology is needed to theorise economy and society, accurately

Whence the Himalayan blunders of EM ‘economics’, Freudian ‘psychology’, and so forth.

*

So what is the truth?

We are , instinctually, affective, heat-seeking, convivial, communal, co-operative, mammals, content with home , hearth , family, and kinship , before rogue ‘animal spirits’ of men – yes, men– extend and expend themselves in corralling power and wealth, leading to the subversion of our primal, tribal, gemeinschaft, social forms into the familiar class-ridden, exploitative, gesellschaft formations of empire-state-and nation (or, ESN, roughly in that historical order).

The simple, tribal form is eminently the domain where the ‘paradigm of femininity’ POF (nurturance) thrives, whereas ESN formations are where the ‘paradigm of masculinity’, or POM (domination, exploitation, expropriation) reigns.

Slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, in European history, are all in the latter mold: in the non-European world they had mirror counterparts in various tributary, imperial, formations.

So EM , or European Modernism, within which the non-tribal world lives today , is in the latter POM cast, ever restless, ever chafing, ever crusading for more, recklessly expansionist, and predatory; and , ultimately, destructive of ALL forms of life.

Those of us trapped within its nihilist ideology suffer the EM languishments of angst, anomie, and alienation, doomed to struggle, suffer, and perish , unrequited.

What a waste of (the abundant potential of )human life!

*

If you think I exaggerate, consider who, or rather what, gave us WW1 and WW2 , and now are, in giddy madness, rushing us all into WW3.

Neither Non-European (non EM) societies, nor their ideologies, are capable of even thinking in such exterminist terms.

The (so-called) barbarians, of yore, Mongols, Huns, et al. were structurally incapable of such dire, rank , overweening , misanthropy.

For all their stupendous ravages, they still left the world – ecological and societal – mostly intact.

That is more than the EM Hegemons of today would care to guarantee, in lapidary insouciance, even to their very own posterity.

Evil Incarnate, and yet for being Amoral, unaware/uncaring of it all.

*

If such are the fruits of ‘enlightenment’, perhaps the world might have been safer if Europe had remained unenlightened, rapt in ignorant slumbers?

If this is what, in the net, ‘progress’ produces, one can hardly abstain from relentless interrogation of the meretricious idyll.

So called ‘growth’ and ‘development’, the key watchwords of this litany, are but the cover for a simpler, more primal, EM urge: imperial expansion.

In sum, I am far from unaware of the benefits of EM, such as they are: I just happen to think that they are simply not , in human and evolutionary terms, anywhere near being even remotely cost -effective.

Human life and human needs are altogether simple, even banal: it is EM ideologues who, steeped in masochistic discontent, and cumulationist drives, concocted its entirely suppositional, vainglorious, overbearing, ‘complexity’ and pseudo-sophistication.

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

The Post Human Society

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110455311/html

The Work ( Writ in 1992/Published in 2015, by De Gruyter ), in belles-lettristic form, constitutes the set of my initial, affective , preliminary, reactions to the cultural logos of the Lead Hegemon of EuroModernism.

I have since refined these first impressions, developing a Transcendent Critique of Eurocentrism, but this work was an important first step.

It is free to download, for the interested, as per the link provided, above.

Ps readers can judge for themselves how much of what I say there remains applicable to this day.

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

Dolor of Gaia

Oft did I travel in the haunts of old

memories warm lienholders though cold

by Stygian charnels b’neath leafy groves

beside seething beaches sultry coves

reminisced deep recalling such forms

shadows departed dead antic norms

pleated of travesty latticed of spite

impassable glooms split by tendrils of light

O the dim worlds entered all unprepared

guilty innocent where no one is spared

beseeched high heavens found heavens all bare

as dystopic disorder reigned everywhere

What penances expiate our sordid sins

what love absolves afore prayer begins?

what fair deeds of charity still remain

to repeal forever our birthmarks of Cain?

upon the planet’s long wrenched breast

there be no redemption nor any sweet rest

she ready casts off our worn mortal coils

curtailing our trespass moribunding our toils

touch her once more prostrate at her feet

in Homeric despair are we made obsolete

Forfeit all mercy she doles us our due

O in Homeric dolor she bids us adieu

in fealty to Others as Mother to All

She lets go the Lapsarian Children of Baal

[©R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

On Hypocracy

In 1789 , in Philadelphia, the aged icon, Ben Franklin , made an ominous prediction.

It’s not quoted too often, understandably.

He said that the – newly drafted – Constitution would assure a modicum of good government , until such time that the corruption of the people brought about its end, producing the only government really suiting it: despotism.

My thought(s): are we there yet?

*

In 1986, I published a book (Political Economy and Laissez-Faire) in which I showed that the key idylls of western capitalism – laissez-faire, free trade, etc., – were no more than topically relevant ploys to secure the contextual interests of the emergent (wannabe) rulers.

In fact, political economists played a key role in assuring the victory of the manufacturing middle classes, the emergent rulers of the new world: a role they still play, in our time, in dead earnest.

Since then, in later works (such as Breaking With the Enlightenment) I showed that the high-toned sloganeering of the Modernist Revolutions (French, and American : with the litany of liberte, egalite, et. al) was also deceptive , serving only to endow the industrial-commercial elites, with the power that lay, at the time, with the landed aristocracy: against whom they were pitted, in keen struggle.

The liberte idyll was deployed to break the ideological fetters of the ancien regime (such as Canon Law: the Just Price, the Laws against Usury, etc.) that inhibited untrammeled (i.e. , ruthless ) capital accumulation.

The egalite idea was used to establish/justify their own claims to power alongside/against the ruling nobility.

But both notions also served a dual purpose, being double-edged instruments.

These ideas were offered, disingenuously, to the laboring classes and the peasantry: enticing them to believe that they too were to be beneficiaries of such ‘freedoms’ – so they could serve, willingly, as cannon-fodder in the ensuing political struggles.

As they did, unfortunately.

*

Of course, it was all pure eyewash.

As it was with the US Constitution , preaching that ‘all men are created equal’, which really meant white men (and only men ).

The (Con)founding Fathers might well turn in their graves to see how a later epoch would try to extend this to Other men, and women ( no part of their plan).

And today, where rights – when available at all – are become privileges, we see how easily all such liberties can be suspended , willy-nilly , as/when it suits the same orders.

No mystery, that: unless you live in Shangri-La – that much is simply the nature of the propaganda of power.

To untangle fact from fantasy requires insight into the mechanics of societal domination.

Official ‘social science’ is not designed to teach that.

*

All this leads to an obvious conclusion, and one that I have made repeatedly, in all my Works.

That all the grandiloquent ‘declarations’ of these revolutions, were tendentious – being context-driven dissimulations only.

One believes it at one’s peril.

And there is real pathos in this.

The oppressed fell for the bait – and labored prodigiously, like the English working class, to invest the manufacturing ‘middle classes’ with political power in the 1820s and 1830’s ; only to have the latter , cannily, deny them the very franchise they had fought for in, 1832, with the Reform Act.

Current mythology has it that it is western capitalism that ‘gave us’ democracy, as a free gift out of its political largesse.

Bilge.

It was the noble English working-class – the Chartist movement – that put universal democracy on the agenda: the US ‘democracy’ – Republic, rather – of 1789, was a sham one, intended only for propertied white, Christian, men.

Toward the last decades of the 19th century, and later, when the new century opened, it was the socialist movement , and the Russian Revolution, that forced hasty concessions from western elites in that direction (by dint of their example: and in fear of similar political movements sprouting at home).

Strikingly, and by way of illustration, women got the vote in the US (1920) , only after Soviet Russia had granted it first, in 1918.

And now, with the collapse of socialism and the USSR, things are reverting back to original form, with white supremacy and rank misogyny right back on the cards.

How the Wheel turns!

*

In fact, it is the sudden collapse of the USSR that helped the West return, in indecent haste, to its erstwhile roots.

Far from shutting down NATO, e.g., they expanded it : to serve as the master tool of western power, with the clear objective of creating and policing client-state regimes all over the world.

Not to mention grabbing any and all resources they can (Libya, Iraq, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, et.al) get away with.

And they’ve gotten away with it, and much else, for centuries.

In a way , they are, easily, without any risk of hyperbole, and verifiably, the most daringly successful pirates in human history (geniuses, also, at instituting , and glorifying, the canons of ‘international law’ : for Others).

Full spectrum domination, that’s the Anglo-Norman norm today: as it was, a century ago.

That is what we are living through now, with all dissenting nations on their hit-list.

Where do memes like liberte, egalite , and democracy , fit in that Great Game?

Nowhere.

Those terms are but tools of legitimation only.

One needs to beware of such limpid chicanery.

As has been well said, if appearance and reality coincided, there’d be no need for science.

The regime we really live under , in these times, is what I have , elsewhere, designated (semi-seriously) as Hypocracy.

*

It is obvious that, left to its own devices, (the governors of ) ‘western civ.’ will, with absolute certainty, destroy us all.

First, it created the very operational system of economy that has brought the ecological world to near-collapse.

Then – just to ensure the job is well done – it ushered in the nuclear age.

And now – in case we survive the first two depredations – it is also busy trying its best to turn us all into Transhuman zombies.

Think of it all as highly methodical madness: an insanity that is the direct consequence of having lost, over generations, our real anthropic moorings within the stabilising loci of community, kindred, and the co-operative, convivial, ties that bind.

Those who , within the frame of an antiquated materialist philosophy, blame it all on ‘Capitalism’ , have missed the operative causal agency, here , altogether.

It is really Asocial Individualism (AI) – which founds the Amoral Society – that produces the wild , runaway, recklessness we see abounding today.

Iceland is Capitalist, but lacks the distortions of AI, and remains – if, within capitalist bounds – ‘responsible’, and accountable, to community norms: not so, the UK and the US.

It’s a vital difference.

In that sense, the more important precipitants of societal conduct are cultural factors, rather than economic ones.

The latter is, itself, ‘embedded’ in culture.

It is in that singular trait (i.e., AI) that Western Civ is utterly unique: this tenet has not really taken real root anyplace else, despite the fact that adoption of western socio-economic norms moves us all , inevitably, toward that fateful template – which , then, is prelude to catastrophe.

*

At any rate, we live now in the mature version of this long gestating , institutional, modus.

I call it Hypocracy ( i.e. a system that preaches one philosophy, and practices another).

Rule by a canny combination of cannon, and chicanery , alone (with no regard to traditional means of ‘legitimation’)

Yes.

Perhaps, Political science just gained a new designation?

If nothing else, possibly Ben Franklin would have felt vindicated.

*

So , that’s how we arrived at this terrible pass in history.

If we are to find an exit from this highway to hell, it is not by following existing European paradigms, but by breaking with them.

Nature (as far as we can gather from the apparent means of social contentment) did not design us to be insatiable producers and consumers of things.

Our collective salvation lies in rediscovery of our real anthropic essence: which is embedded in the quiescent , co-operative, communal, affective, relationships of care and consideration, not in idylls and practices that glorify the solitary, gratuitously heroic, individual (or ‘national’) ego, engaged in the futile ‘devil take the hindmost’ one-upmanship of a winner-take all race.

That latter is not a human race, at all : but a race to the bottom – of human extinction.

By that latter phrase, I mean something other than is ordinarily understood: that we are destroying, in this dubious struggle, not our species, nor even the planet: but the precious life-blood of our humanity.

Even Hobbes might have been appalled to see his putative ‘state of nature’ – i.e. , the laws of the jungle -reproduced : in society.

So, ask yourself: do you really want your life, and that of your kin and progeny, to be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (and devoid of empathy, sympathy , and conviviality)?

What will it take to grasp this: yet another mass shooting?

We’ve had 146 already this year: and it’s only April.

Can there a more telling index of the utter failure of our – gratuitously vaunted – ‘ way of life’?

Or is it , actually, rather, an unmistakable ‘way of death’?

Worth mulling?

[© R.Kanth 2023]

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

L’esprit

(for Asha & Michael)

The heart can speak

yet it sings

a bird can walk

but it wings

Lightness soars but

everywhere

even in this woestruck

world of care

The Modern World

wreaks gravitas

more than

spirit can bear

Let the lilting heart

yearn it to sing

let the chirruping bird

learn it to wing

Whilst we on the shore

worry work and weep

look in the seas

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

In Essence

We live in a self-aware, and spontaneous, universe, both social and natural.

The Great Error of Modernist Europe (I term it Eurocentric Modernism, or EM ) was to believe that somehow we can engineer ourselves into this or that ideal, be it left-wing or right wing in inspiration.

So, they compelled the rest of the world, and they still do it to this day: to follow this or that plan.

Of course , naturally, they preferred a plan that suited their own interests, of the time, as might be expected.

*

But the real problem is much deeper.

Like all living beings , we are instinctual in nature.

So we simply cannot be ‘programmed’ to achieve some, or other ideal: except very briefly , either by sheer force, or by dint of propaganda.

Men are far easier to program, mainly because they are the programmers, – they follow leaders, owing to a varying mix of male bonding and totemic fealty – but women simply cannot be easily, or effectively, programmed.

Because their instinctual awareness is much deeper, and they bear heavy responsibility for new life , which is a far more vital concern than the more trivial issue of subscribing to this or that form of idealism , that comes and goes like fashions in couture.

*

A human society is always built instinctually , and spontaneously, on family, kinship, and community (all tribal formations arise in this fashion) , NOT on democracy, equality, and/or liberty which are but concocted political ideals.

I do not take up the issue here of whether they are good or bad, right or wrong: though I could, and in much detail.

That really does not matter; they are, stated simply idylls.

Once this point is grasped, the sources of the crisis of the EM world become transparently obvious.

Of course, one has to step well outside the EM matrix to glean this, which may be difficult, if not impossible, for many ( I can sympathise with that: for few of us could be expected to endure the exile that would ensue).

*

As I have said before, one needs an adequate physics to understand Nature, and , similarly, an accurate anthropology to understand society.

Unfortunately, EM constructed its social (including economics, politics, philosophy, et. al.) theory out of thin air.

As if all one has to so is to manufacture a fanciful manifesto, plim with meretricious ideals :and, presto!, it can be realized (if at frightful cost, one might add) , just like that!

Stated simply , it has no idea of who we are as human beings, and therefore, what real human needs are.
*

Time to rectify that error?

I actually believe it’s past time.

All we need to do is to step out of the iron cage of EM to see what human life is all about: in its brevity, fragility, and ineffable hopelessness.

All hid in plain sight by the conquistadorian bravado of the EM call to perpetual, adversarial, arms, ever tilting at false goals, false hopes, and false notions of the summum bonum..

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

Grace

Swear no more
of ties that bind
we’re long
succumbed to
blight

Make me no
sundry promises
we are riven
by grudge
and spite

No fealty
or sacrament
we’re shorn
of sacral
truth

Art given
to artifice
we rue
the sparsity
of ruth

Love weaves
no beechen
plot anon
the grape wilts
upon the vine

No ambrosia
that will not
cloy
no veritas
wakes in wine

All’s awry
twixt earth
and sky
forfeit
all benefice
divine

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

Le Cœur

There is no Kingdom
of the Heart
there ’tis the Plebes
who Reign

It has no bound
to largesse
be it of joy
or pain

It dares only to
remember
it cares but not to
forget

What’s too graven
to embrace
it laves
in legerdemain

Never seeking to
calculate
audits both loss
and gain

And never needing
to cogitate
ever showers The Truth
like rain

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

Root Cause?

It is possible to burrow through the multiple, disparate, Crises that afflict the world today, – incl. Covid, Climate Change (and consequent Ecocide) , and the threat of possible Nuclear annihilation – to arrive at the core of what might be envisaged as a compelling ‘root cause’.

I mean that term in a very broad sense, well beyond causal factors, to also include factors that support , augment, and exacerbate the Crises: directly or indirectly, by acts of either commission or omission.

I place it below, in verse form.

It constitutes a small part of my study of EuroModernism – the European Model of Modernism that has dominated the world for well over Two Centuries – and derives from my explorations therein.

It would seem to follow, I might add, that none of the Crises we face can be at all ameliorated until that ‘root cause’ is first firmly extirpated from our modes of thought and practices ; a daunting task, since the powers that be lean so heavily on it to achieve their unseemly ends (despite protestations, to the contrary).

It may appear to be trite, trivial , and truistic , on the face of it: but it is as real as the Crises it has provoked.

It also marks the Great European Innovation – where Europe separated itself from the mains currents of human history – that now threatens to destroy all life on this planet.

***

The Provenance

Private Gain,

OR Common Good?

Answer, was always

Understood –

Till Europe, in

Everlasting Bane

saw the Common Good,

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

The Wertfrei?

First, they derogated (the very idea) of civilisation.
Next, they debunked culture.
Then,they debauched society.
Next, they deracinated science.
They, they deprecated civility.
Then, they destroyed habitats.
Next. they debased morality.
Then. they disparaged ethics.
Next, they discouraged truth.
Then, they disdained values.

*

They told us we are Post Human.
They told us we are Post Truth
They told us we are Post Modern.

*

They also guaranteed us the 3 Inalienable Freedoms of the Neo-Con/Neo-Lib world.

To function: fact-free, value-free, and conscience-free.

Yes, and, finally, they told us, with high aplomb:
Anything Goes!.

*

They were so right!

Not Anything, but rather, Everything Goes:
IF/when one accepts this degenerate , dystopian , Credo(s) of Late Modernism, as listed above.

*

And so, as we watch now, helpless.

Ecology goes. Humanity goes. Social Empathy goes . Any and all norms of mutual civility, and peaceable co-existence go.

And, at the last remove, lo and behold, The Planet Goes!.

Bravo!

*

The Nobel Committee – canny as they always are – should consider a Nobel Memorial Prize for Misanthropy, which they should award themselves first (for giving a Peace Prize to Kissinger: just to balance it out , they should have given a War Prize to Gandhi) , before bestowing it on the likes identified above?

It would be a fair start?

*

As a grand finale, our Masters should press those buttons that they have been itching to press ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so we can watch them play god (or is it that other guy?), one last time.

I have titled their regime one of HYPOCRACY: or, rule by abject , craven, hypocrisy.

No elites in world history have more blood on their hands.

How do they sleep?

Professor Rajani Kanth, is Author of Coda (A Novel), A Day in the Life (Novel), and Expiations (Verse), and Farewell to Modernism (Political Economy Tract).

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The Crux

The Post Human Society

Dolor of Gaia

On Hypocracy

L’esprit

In Essence

Grace

Le Cœur

Root Cause?

The Wertfrei?

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