This article is a sketch of the
general context of the present moment we find ourselves in the world. It
comes as a conclusion of my short series “the disconnection in
perceptions between East and West”. I'll follow this sketch with 2 more
posts addressing – the realities on the ground in China and the West, –
their future prospects in view of their present realities.
I started this series with the observation that today in Late-Modernity Asian and Western minds seem to be completely disconnected. And in "Our present mood shapes our reading of the future" I wondered 'Does it matter if Chinese and Western perceptions about societal reality are growing further apart?" I believe that those whose minds are still open and curious about the fate of humanity should be watching carefully. The Geo-political order that resulted from the adoption of Western Modernity by the whole world has indeed reached the end of its road but what comes next is anyone's guess. In such a context there is no doubt that the disconnect between Chinese and Western perceptions matters greatly.
The reality is slowly starting to sink in Western minds that to be able to compete globally they will have to consent to be remunerated at levels comparable to Asian and African wages. The internet is indeed flattening the playing field of humanity. As should be expected this provokes radically different generational reactions. Having witnessed the gradual changes taking place in the economic and social order over the last decades the older generations have been numbed into in-actionable anger. At best they could throw a Trump cocktail Molotov at the establishment or a Brexit grenade in the halls of finance in London but more generally fatalism has won over the minds of older Western generations and this instilled in them the preparedness to the idea that they eventually will be losing their jobs, healthcare, and pensions, etc. But such views are unacceptable to the millennial generation. In the eyes of its members America and Europe are eating their young and when such an image reaches their brain it fosters disgust for the society of their parents’ generation. No surprise then that millennials declare preferring socialism over what they perceive as being the economic and social inhumanity of capitalism. Meanwhile Asians, and more particularly the Chinese, experience rising wages and have the feeling that their countries invest in their, and their children’s, well-being: new housing stock, new transportation infrastructure, new health care systems, pensions, and security systems and ...consumerism of all these goodies that Western movies have been projecting in their faces over the last decades.
It should thus not come as a surprise that the mental disconnection I refer to has been shifting the mood of Westerners and Chinese in opposite directions. Their present material and psychological conditions instill pessimism in Western minds while Chinese have no doubt that their future will be nothing short of glorious. Such differentiated individual moods can't but taint the attitudes of their nations in their dealing with the rest of the world. As a result the world is now faced with 2 radically different models of inter-state relations. One is a Chinese "win-win" economic cooperation model that is gaining traction with ever more countries and the other is a US gangster like imposition of its exceptionalism that is seriously starting to piss off the rest of the world.
What is going on here? The world seems to have reached a dualist (di-)vision moment. All signs indicate that a dying Modernity is starting to be contradicted by an emerging After-Modernity.
The center of gravity of the economy-world is moving.
From the perspective of the long haul history what we are witnessing is a re-balancing of the economy-world a “global economic reset” in IMF speak. The present era of Western centric Modernity took roots in the Italian city-states in the 13-15th centuries. From there the center of gravity of the Western economy-world successively move to Flanders in the 15-16th centuries, to Holland in the 17th century, to the United-Kingdom in the 18th-19th and the first part of the 20th century, and finally to the United-States starting just after the 2nd World War when its economy represented over 50% of the world’s GDP. Butt since then the US share of the world’s GDP has been shrinking. Measured per ‘exchange rate method’ the US economy today represents 23.3% of the world’s GDP (China's 16.1%) but when more usefully measuring differences in living standards (PPP method) the US share of world GDP is only 15.1% compared to China's 18.7% (1). Whatever method of reference is selected the conclusion is firm and unmistakable. The Western centric era of hegemony is rapidly dwindling and the seeds of a new era are starting to sprout.
What these figures show is that we are assisting at a re-balancing between nations of the factors of power: demography, economy, finance and technology with hard changes to follow soon in culture and the arts. The differential in the potential future growth between the West and China is such that there is no longer any doubt that the realities on the ground are pushing the center of gravity of the economy-world away from the United-States in the direction of Asia and more particularly towards China. All signs are indeed pointing to a coming era of Chinese centric After-Modernity.
China is not only accumulating a set of factors of power that will soon be vastly superior to that of the US but also, and perhaps even more importantly, in term of societal cohesiveness the US is simply no match to China. The atomization of Western societies has weakened their cohesion to such a point that they are now simply unable to absorb any shock that would inflict any significant pain to their citizens. In stark contrast to Western citizens’ pessimism and the atomization of their societies we observe that – the Chinese are extremely optimistic about their future – and they share a common worldview which solidly glues their minds and makes their nation a highly cohesive and resilient civilization-society.
Having said that we have to keep in mind that the passage from Modernity to After-Modernity will be such a radically world-changing event in the history of humanity that its unfolding necessarily will stretch over many decades. Many things could thus possibly derail the process – internal mechanisms relating to the re-balancing of the factors of power between nations like wars, revolutions,... – external mechanisms relating to the actions of non-societal factors like epidemics, the natural environment, the climate, aliens, or whatever else...
Western societies are atomized / Asian societies are highly cohesive
The transition from Modernity to After-Modernity is something a lot bigger than the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world from one nation to another. Modernity is indeed larger than national factors of power. It is first and foremost a worldview or a shared understanding, by all the citizens of a nation, of what reality is all about. A worldview acts like cement that glues particles (the individual citizens) into a cohesive whole (society). Without such a glue societies fragment and eventually atomize. Societal atomization is reached when the individuals believe that they know better than anyone else including those who master the knowledge that founded their society. Societal atomization is the stage of societal death.
Societal cohesion acts like the energy that powers the engine of a car. When the fuel tank is empty the engine stops but the car nevertheless continues to roll till the force of inertia is completely exhausted. The same goes for societies. When a society has exhausted its cohesion it has no energy left to power its survival. Only remain the habits of its citizens that act like the force of inertia that allows a dead society to roll somewhat further. Societal death or collapse is baked in the atomization of a society and inertia is merely the push of a zombie society a little further down the road until the habits of the individual citizens have been forgotten either through their physical death or through their escape and integration in a new or another existing societal group. For more on this see book 2, theoretical considerations, and more particularly in volume 3, Culture, worldviews, civilizations”, and volume 4,“Governance and societal evolution”
In the climate of hyper-individualism that has absorbed the minds of most individuals in the West the need for societal cohesion and the diagnostic of societal atomization have little chance to find much of an audience. But that does not bother me. I don’t write to convert people. As I stated many times I write to clarify my own thinking. The only ambition I still have is indeed to reconcile the visions I glean from the recesses of my subconscious and my conscious certainties. “Over the years painting and thinking have naturally driven my mind on a path of confrontation. As we all know conscious certainties and subconscious visions do not naturally tend to agree with each other. But after making a real effort at understanding both at a deeper level you always find a way to reconcile them at a level of understanding that is far superior than the addition of meaning that is contained in each taken separately” (2).
Modernity is the worldview that procured its hegemony to the West
More generally worldviews can take the form of religions or of pragmatism (a set of principals helping people to navigate their daily life). Both Western centric Modernity and China reject the need for a religion and adhere to pragmatism. But their pragmatism could not be more different.
At the founding of its empire, some 4 to 5000 years ago, China inherited the body of knowledge of animism and its system of pragmatic principles. Its worldview is thus grounded in the knowledge accumulated by the animist men of knowledge from their observations of the sky and their local environment. That animist knowledge was accumulated over the span of tens of thousands of years and over the following 4-5000 years China continued to expand that knowledge-base by means of add-ons. And so the animist body of knowledge was kept intact while the pragmatic principals to navigate daily life were adapted to the knowledge gathered from changing times.
This compares with Western Europe where Christianity violently destroyed all signs of animism. By the time of the crusades Europe was still an economically and culturally backward place that was divided into a zillion medieval domains governed by knights, or other nobility, who were constantly fighting each other and were administered under the lord-serf relationship. Christianity was the worldview that kept the whole thing together and the written language was still the privilege of the priests and monks who were in charge of spreading the creed. It is in such a primitive context that the long distance trade, for Middle-Eastern luxury goods at the attention of the nobility and the new rich, impulsed or imposed the reason at work within capital to the minds of the long distance merchants. Their complete devotion to the reason at work within capital not only gained the long distance merchants richness it also spread envy of this newly gained richness in the minds of all citizens. So it should not come as a surprise that, after some 5 centuries of devotion and spreading envy, the minds in academia would also be converted to the abstraction of that reason... Eventually Descartes and his ilks expanded the abstraction of the reason at work within capital to a general philosophical principle that was tasked to model the entire behavior of humanity. Since then rationalism and materialism have conquered the whole world. Globalization is merely the last iteration on the theme of exponential growth that was initiated by the reason at work within capital and later expanded into rationalism-materialism.
With the benefit of hindsight today in Late-Modernity humanity starts to discover that this theme of exponential growth bequeathed to us what appears every passing day as being an unsolvable predicament. Exponential economic growth facilitated exponential population growth and the combination of both resulted in an exponential destruction of the habitat of all living species on earth including the habitat of humanity.
The consciousness of the immensity of our stupidity obliges us to reflect on the causes of this calamity. These are the most salient lessons:
1. Modernity is grounded in a trio of causalities:
- the reason at work within capital initiated capitalism that was the most revolutionary economic force of all times. It was so successful that it overwhelmed our minds and we lost sight of what was going on.
- rationalism and materialism exponentially expanded our efficiency at applying the reason at work within capital to ever more domains of life (science, tech, management, marketing,...)
- globalization and financialization further exponentially expanded the reach of the reason at work within capital geographically to the whole world (transition from nation state capital holders to a transnational elite controlling the biggest chunk of the world's capital base. See note 3.)
3. and these consequences are among the most important external mechanisms (externalities) that could possibly derail the present re-balancing of the national factors of power and the movement of the center of gravity of the economy-world to Asia (epidemics, the climate, the collapse of humanity's habitat, an alien invasion, or whatever else...).
Western big capital self-inflicted the demise of its hegemony
Nearly 50 years ago Western big capital holders started to manipulate the people of the world into believing that globalization, or the free movement of capital around the world, was the way to further expand economic growth. What they did not tell was that they did not give a damn for their nation-states of origin nor for their fellow citizens. What they really were after was exclusively an increase of their profits by expanding the theater of their activities to the whole world. And by becoming global Western big capital holders also cornered an organized working class to be utterly powerless within the confines of their countries of origin (3).
By the end of the sixties profit generation within the Western nation-state had reached a plateau and to further expand their profits big capital holders thought they had to expand the territory of their activities to the whole world. I always found amazing, and enervating at the same time, that nearly all economists followed suit and in the span of a few short years globalization had indeed become the ideology of the establishment in all countries of the world. To convince the masses into accepting the de-localization of the factories where they worked they propagandized the idea that de-localized jobs would soon be replaced by higher paid jobs. Their scheme was to make believe that the West would remain in charge of the production of technology and know-how while third-world countries would only supply cheap labor and an environment free of rules protecting the workers, the environment and so on.
De-localization was sold in the West as an opportunity for Western labor to climb the ladder of better paid knowledge jobs. With hindsight this was a fat lie. In the South globalization was sold as an opportunity of economic development. But what the sales pitch omitted was that cheap labor and the elimination of all externalities was the real goal. Some countries benefited from globalization. China is the best example that comes to mind. But we should not forget the high price that was imposed on China by externalities like pollution of the air the land and the water as well as the severe physical and mental injuries to its workers. In the meantime multinational corporations multiplied their profits and many of them grew bigger than their nation-states of origin. In the meantime cheap wages and the elimination of externalities procured a feast of consumerism at bargain prices to Western citizens...
I was intrigued at the time by the fact that nearly all economists and bureaucrats really believed the propaganda big capital holders were peddling. Nearly no one ever questioned their scheme nor the idea that Westerners would be able to monopolize the production of knowledge and know-how. But what is even more amazing is that bureaucrats and academics seem to continue to believe in this non-sense to this very day. How to explain otherwise their belief that China's technological breakthroughs could only have been realized by stealing Western technology. To me this smells like racism.
These bureaucrats and academics never bother to look at the realities on the ground. Here are the hard facts. "China had 4.7 million STEM graduates in 2016. India, another academic powerhouse, had 2.6 million new STEM graduates while the U.S. had 568,000" (4). In view of these figures this anti-China propaganda appears nothing more than a gross manipulation of public opinion to justify aggression against China by Western powers.
But the fact of the matter is that with 8 times more STEM graduates than the us it is only natural that China will soon surpass the West in scientific and technological prowess...
Source. See note 3
Notes.
1. International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook (April – 2018)
2. From Modernity to After-Modernity (50)
3. Giants: The Global Power Elite Paperback. By Peter Phillips. 2018
Global world wealth in 2017: approximately 255 Trillion and 66% of this is owned by EU & US capital holders. Seventeen global money management firms collectively control & manage more than $41.1 trillion of that global wealth (not including the value of the capital stock these conglomerates hold in all branches of the global corporate structure).
4. The Countries With The Most STEM Graduates. Niall McCarthy. Forbes. 2017-02-02.
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