5. After-Modernity and the prospects of an artistic awakening
Over the last 50 years a great convergence has slowly been taking place, between – the crisis of the governance-world – and the multitude side-effects of Modernity, that is evolving into a drastically new living environment.
This convergence will result in a radical drop of the world population and life will be forced to re-organize locally in small groups surviving under the reign of necessity. Their most vital priority will be the reproduction of their societies over the long haul and to ensure this the minds will be glued by new foundational narratives grounded in myths fixing the memory of what caused the fall of Modernity.
Modern knowledge will rapidly be forgotten and visual signs will thus become the vehicle of choice to share knowledge with all. That’s how the historical nature of art returns with a vengeance …
This convergence will result in a radical drop of the world population and life will be forced to re-organize locally in small groups surviving under the reign of necessity. Their most vital priority will be the reproduction of their societies over the long haul and to ensure this the minds will be glued by new foundational narratives grounded in myths fixing the memory of what caused the fall of Modernity.
Modern knowledge will rapidly be forgotten and visual signs will thus become the vehicle of choice to share knowledge with all. That’s how the historical nature of art returns with a vengeance …
5.1. the crisis of the governance-world and the fading of Late-Modernity
As we have seen in the precedent posts, over the last 50 years, the level playing field of the Western market for ideas has been cleansed of foundational narratives. Western societies thus naturally atomized and the neoliberal experiment went unopposed. This explains how Warren Buffet could declare1 that his class of big capital holders had won the class struggle.
But in the process Western economies were completely hollowed out and the social fabric was reduced to the antagonistic dualism of the 1% versus the 99%. I call this the fabrication of Western nothingness that ends with the collapse of Western societies and Western Christian civilization.
While its profits are falling in Western nations big capital is now also confronted to an awakened ‘rest of the world’ that refuses to be cleansed of its traditional worldviews and rejects neoliberalism … A conflict is brewing and its outcome will draw the map of what comes after Modernity.
Western nothingness means that Western societies are now moving forward only powered by their residual force of inertia. The majority of people are being fooled by propaganda and lies about an economy that is doing great but their miserable daily lives inform them that something is really amiss.
Look no further than the US as in this apt description given by Oriental Voice: “… the US is best advised to pull its head out of the sand and assess the present global reality objectively. You ain't numero Uno no mo'! You don't manufacture efficiently, your workers are too fat to put in a day's hard work, your lawyers' and Propaganda pros' rantings don't result in money in people's pocket to put food on tables, your national leaders have no idea nor vision as to how to shape up or where you should be headed. These are some of the realities. Now if you can change all that over night, by all means decouple from them chinamen and land on your soft behind. But if you can't do it over night, perhaps you'd better bite your tongue, roll up your sleeves, and work slowly to build up strength before cutting the umbilical? ”2
The economic story of the West makes no longer any sense. But that does not distract financial engineers to dream up ever more dystopian policies. At the last count global bonds totaling some of $17 trillion now generate negative yields … Is this not proof that financial expectations have been turned on their head? Yes. But… not really. It is more like the Western societal machinery is so overwhelmed by its debts that it needs a reprieve to be able to repay its old loans with new ones that call for lower charges. Unfortunately for the West this artifice of negative yields is destroying its process of capital formation. What is at stake here is that financial speculation is rarefying investments in productive activities and countries enter a process of pauperization.
In other words the reason, that is at work within capital, has been hijacked over the last 40 years by financial engineering of everything. This filled the pockets of managers and speculators but societies ended up drowning in debts while the incomes of the 99% have at best been stagnating.
The resulting inequality is the source of the Western social malaise that threatens the powers that be. And they responded by prioritizing their neoliberal institutions of power as a last ditch totalitarian rescue of their privileges. But this is only a momentary reprieve before the collapse of state institutions.
The context, of this over-indebtedness and its resulting social inequality, is furthermore complicated by the rise of China that is expanding silk-road communication and economic development networks to the whole of Eurasia, Africa, and South America. For the first time in its history Western big capital is confronted with a successful development narrative that contradicts its own failing ‘Washington Consensus’ narrative.
How is Western big capital going to handle this infernal trio ?
- internal over-indebtedness
- resulting social inequality
- confrontation of its failing ‘Washington Consensus’ development narrative with a successful Silk-Road development narrative
Here are the theoretical possibilities that will lead to an outcome :
- over-indebtedness could theoretically be solved by cleaning up or extinguishing debts. But this would result in a reset of the real economic might of Western nations at a far lower level which would be putting Western big capital holders in a precarious position in their competition with Chinese state capital. I doubt they ever would be willing to contemplate such a scenario,
- kicking the can down the road is what Western big capital holders and their servants have been doing since the great crisis of 2008. This could still go on a little further. Unfortunately the tricks of the central banks are no longer working their magic and so Western countries are now on the cusps of financial and monetary collapse,
- Western big capital holders and their state servants will be tempted to avoid, or to hide financial and monetary collapse, by launching a military conflict that will be presented as the conflict of good (West) against evil (China, Russia, Iran, and the rest).
It looks like reality is shortening the theoretical possibilities to one outcome only. In all probability the coming conflict will be extremely short and extremely brutal. After observing the damages of the first round of shooting the conflicting parties will want to rest …
5.2. the transition to After Modernity
If the crisis of the Western governance-world shows us anything it is that there will be no serious political answers coming out of Western countries to counter the side-effects of Modernity. In other words there will be a lot of bla bla but no real action. This means that the physical context, in which life unfolds, is going to be engaged always further in a process of dramatic changes that, at best, will make life very difficult for humanity in the near future.
Looking at the reactions of the world to the very bleak future prospects of the human species we observe that two radically different societal approaches are starting to take shape:
- on one side the gradual collapse of the Western governance-world leaves the individuals more and more on their own to care for their survival. In such a scenario of societal atomization one imagines that the chances of the individuals to survive, the destabilizing factors that are emerging in front of our noses, will be meager indeed.
- on the other side, I observe that, the Chinese governance-world is quietly building neighborhood public networks of survival: – food and first household necessities, – health-care, – old age-care, … In such a scenario one imagines that the chances of the individuals to survive the destabilizing factors that are emerging in front of our noses will be a lot higher than if no preparations had been engaged at all as is the case in the west… In Chinese political parlance these ‘neighborhood public networks of survival’ are one component of a larger societal system that they qualify as being an ecological-civilization.
In my mind such diverging societal approaches are directly related to our differing civilizational origins. What I mean to say by this is that the axioms of civilization of the West and of China are opposites as I illustrated in the 4th post in the present series3. The axioms of civilization are forcing peoples’ behaviors and this takes place largely outside of their awareness. And this naturally includes peoples’ behaviors towards change. Let’s see how this works out in real life :
- Western axiom: change is being handled as a rupture with the past.
This started, in the Middle-East, with the civilizations that followed the stabilization of imperial institutions. These civilizations started as a rupture with animism and the creation of worldviews, or foundational stories, inspired from events that occurred in the immediate past. The same rupture is observed in the Western practice of knowledge formation. A new concept or a new idea is always a rupture with a past concept or idea. Modern science inherited this very model of knowledge formation. - Chinese axiom: change is being handled as a continuity with the past.
The stabilization of Chinese institutions of power took place while animism was the worldview of their men of knowledge and their men of power and so their civilization was necessarily based on the continuity of the animist worldview. Their animist worldview then adapted, to the evolution of their society, by superposing add-ons to its existing knowledge base.
The presently initiated Western collapse of societal institutions engages an uncontrolled transition process that will necessarily unfold as a rupture with Modernity. In contrast, by preparing institutions that are adapted to the coming changes, the Chinese ensure that their future will unfold as a continuity of their present and past. In other words, seen from a long haul perspective, China will largely eschew Modernity. Its worldview (Chinese Traditional Culture) will assimilate, from Modernity, what is deemed compatible and also appears to be useful for the production of peoples’ daily lives (pragmatic sponge). So it is already evident today that the transit of China through Modernity will be no more than a short blip in its history. And its emerging ‘After-Modernity’ will in reality be more like a continuity of its past in term of its axioms of civilization and its traditional worldview.
Let’s now come back to the components of the Chinese ecological-civilizational system. These are the determinant factors that are building continuity in the Chinese emerging future. These components include the following elements:
- neighborhood public networks of survival: – food and household first necessities, – health-care, – old age-care, …
- maintenance of the physical context: – forest planting, – desert greening, – large scale adoption of clean and sustainable energy sources that allow to fight against air pollution and to localize the energy supply, – sustainable supply of clean drinking water, …
- a complementary economic approach: – private initiative develops offers at the local and regional level, – the state keeps a national monopoly over what are deemed to be strategic sectors and these sectors are then handled by public enterprises that will gradually operate along the lines of a workers’ owned management scheme. This is how the old and ossified state-owned economic entities inherited from the past will finally transform into dynamic national champions …
The Chinese worldview is non dogmatic. It is the pole opposite of dogmatic. It is pragmatic, flexible, and tolerant of the ways of others and so it acts like a sponge that absorbs everything that is deemed useful for its society and for the production of its citizens’ daily lives. The Chinese model of change, through continuity, is based on add-ons of compatible changes that are stacked on top of their worldview’s knowledge base. This means that its ecological-civilizational system inherits from the past a bamboo like model of institutional construction that has the flexibility to absorb the pounding of outside forces like the hurricane winds of trade wars and other exceptional events.
In other words the Chinese adapt to contextual changes in the environment, in the climate, in geo-politics, and so on. This adaptation to contextual changes is not something new. It has always been the primary unifying principle of their nation. The biggest part of China’s territory has indeed been assembled not through outside conquests like in other parts of the world but through internal occupation by outside invaders who then sinicized. They sinicized because to govern an empire the size of China they had no other recourse but to rely on the advice of Chinese scholars. That’s how Mongols and Manchu who vanquished the Chinese armies and occupied China sinicizing while adding the territories of Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia and the 3 provinces of Dongbei (Manchuria) to China’s original territory4. There can thus be no question that all along its history China demonstrated the hugely pragmatic and flexible nature of its worldview. But what about the impact on China of the great convergence between the crisis of the governance-world and the multitude of Modernity’s side-effects ?
The fact of the matter is that the side-effects of Modernity are numerous and interacting among themselves in ways that are non predictable. We know that these side-effects are derived from human activities. So one would imagine that the wisest action would be to reduce our activities or better to reduce the ‘human footprint’5 on the natural systems of our planet. We know indeed for a fact that if our species continues, to behave as usual, the end game is unmistakably human extinction and the extinction of most other species. In that sense Modernity has to be viewed as a life threatening worldview !
If human life eventually succeeds to reproduce, through Late-Modernity and into After-Modernity, it will be because humanity abandons Modernity and devises another way of living based on a worldview that is rooted in interconnectedness and societal sustainability. Society is the living arrangement of a large or small group of individuals and that living arrangement includes:
- axioms of civilizations
- societal worldviews
- a daily culture (all ideas and behaviors of the individuals at a given moment called present in a given society)
We have always to remain conscious about the fact that there is no certainty that humanity will succeed to make it into After-Modernity. A growing number of climate biology and ecology scientists, as well as artists, are indeed convinced that we already have passed the threshold that leads us to the extinction of our species. For my part I think that the truth about reality is outside of the human domain of expertise. And what I also know for a sure fact is that a life lived in despair is a wasted life. So I think that problems should not scare us. They should motivate us to find outside of the box solutions. But all this is only feasible within the framework of a society. Left on our own we individuals would indeed rapidly be wiped out … That’s the problem that awaits the individuals in atomized Western societies.
The fact of the matter is that our present societies, at least in their Western forms, are not going to help us reach After-Modernity. As I already stated the Chinese experiment is encouraging. Its model of society is not static. It is permanently evolving and adapting to new emergencies. As such China does not have an ideologically perfect model of society. But it surely has a functionally working model that has proven to have the flexibility and the adaptability to render the country sustainable even through very chaotic times. Living in China and observing these unique Chinese characteristics I have the confidence that there is eventually a way leading to After-Modernity. But I can understand that for those living in Western countries things look rather different. It is difficult there to think about a way that would permit us of reaching After-Modernity … and so the mood is understandably gloomy.
Having said that, even if in all rationally I can’t be absolutely sure that there is a way to After-Modernity, my personal way is to live fully in the present by immersing myself in what I like. I’m living on the margins. I have no longer any ambition nor do I have any desires. I simply surf on the flow of time and spend my time dreaming, thinking, painting and writing about the human adventure as it evolved from the past, to the present, to the future. And yes as an observer on the margins of Chinese society I see a future … but it is a future rather different from the present.
Perhaps the most notable fact is that the world population will inevitably unravel during the transition from Late-Modernity to After-Modernity. Societal collapse is indeed always accompanied by a falling population. But the worse declines will eventually take place as a result of heat indexes reaching such high levels that human life becomes physically impossible over vast stretches of the earth. And this is without taking into account the very real possibility of large wipe-outs due to highly probable wars and epidemics.
Having a view, or a vision, of the future helps to detect trends inside the present that foreshadow what is coming our way. And the core trend that I see, in the present, presaging the future of humanity is the rise of the idea of organic life. The organic is definitely in the air of our time.
5.3. After-Modernity
We are slowly transitioning from the worldview of Modernity to a new worldview that I call After-Modernity. That new worldview will eventually emerge out of the particular context resulting from the fall of Modernity. While this process has already been set in motion it will largely unfold in the near future. What is already a certainty is that the world population will drop radically. Life will re-organize locally in small groups surviving under the reign of necessity and their most vital priority will be the reproduction of their societies over the long haul. To ensure this the minds will be glued by new foundational narratives grounded in myths fixing the memory of what caused the fall of Modernity. Such an outcome is the results of ‘the great convergence between :
- the crisis driven governance-world that is characterized by the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world from the West/Washington to East-Asia/Beijing
- and the convergence of the multitude of side-effects from Modernity that is gradually making our planet earth inauspicious for more and more living species which has engaged what biologists call the 6th mass-extinction. Here follows a list of the most dominant among these side-effects: – societal atomization, – peak resources, – chemical pollution of air water and land, – climate change, – acidification of the oceans, etc …
Those of us who have succeeded to free ourselves from the ideological traps of Modernity6 are well aware that the technologies we take for granted today will rapidly be forgotten in the wake of collapsing of societies. The fight for survival will be the new name of the game of life and it will impose the organic way as the only way forward. Anything else is bound to be crushed under the imperative of the necessity to survive. These inexorable trends set the general framework that will impose the outlook on reality of our descendants’ in the coming era of After-Modernity. But what does this entail for daily-life ?
For a starter population levels are bound to fall dramatically. We should expect, in the most optimistic outlook, that the world population could fall as low as 1 to 5 percent of the present levels that will be dispersed all over the world. In consequence the survivors will have to assemble in small groups by sheer necessity of survival. Our descendants will thus have to experiment to find new models of societal grouping that best suit their new context.
But will they, as our tribal ancestors, discover the usefulness of the Dunbar number7? The fact of the matter is that :
- the evolution from small bands to tribal societies expanded to the whole world and all tribes eventually stabilized their populations along the lines of the Dunbar number,
- the spontaneous grouping, in the setting of our present professional diversity, along the lines of the Dunbar number gives us also food for thought8.
Small survival economies will focus primarily on the production of goods necessary to satisfy human objective needs such as food, shelter, clothes,… It is to be expected that the knowledge accumulated by humanity by the end of Late-Modernity will have been forgotten after a few generations. The experimentation to satisfy human objective needs will thus inevitably result in archaic and low tech productions techniques.
To survive and reproduce over the generations small groups living under the reign of necessity will learn that it is imperative to crush any remnants of individualism while prioritizing the cooperation of all in the group. And so the societal polarity will necessarily be re-established as the dominant polarity of the human species just as it was the case under the first societies which were the original tribes. Individualism having been taken out of the picture technological change will be rather slow to say the least. The most vital priority of the day, under After-Modernity, will be the conservation and reproduction of societies over the generations.
As I mentioned here above After-Modernity is a worldview. This means that all citizens in any societal group will be sharing a common foundational narrative that answers all questions humans may have about the working of reality in their particular context. In what comes after Modernity such a narrative will unmistakably be grounded in myths perpetuating the memory of what caused the fall of Modernity. And these myths will justify the adoption of prohibitions (individualism, … ) as well as required behaviors (precautionary principle, … ).
In such a context happiness will relate to the satisfaction of the group’s needs and, instead of searching to acquire stuff for oneself, the individual will find happiness is the act of giving. The economy resulting from such a kind of behavior is called a “gift economy”. It is not difficult to imagine that in a society practicing such an economic model the trust between the individuals will be boosted to the top which in turn will boost societal cohesion to its maximum. Societies like that reproduce over the very long haul.
As we have seen here above societal collapse, and drastically falling population levels, lead to survival economies. But in what kind of a timespan will such a process take place? The great convergence, between the crisis of the Late-Modern governance-world and the side-effects of Modernity, will evolve into a drastically changed contextual landscape in a very short timespan or in a blip on the scale of the long haul history. Hey; climate change alone has the potential to collapse all societies within a short few decades. So I can’t imagine that the convergence of a multitude such crises would not conclude in an even shorter timespan.
In most places on earth the survivors will be left to themselves which means that they will be very few and in consequence survival necessity will impose on them to conclude their grouping experiments within one or two generations at the most. In places where preparations have been undertaken to adapt to the outcome of ‘the great convergence’ things will unfold at the same speed. But their preparations will procure a model of organization, and save critical knowledge, that will eventually result in more survivors. Yes I’m talking here about a radical differentiation, in the outcome of ‘the great convergence’, between China, and the West plus the rest.
The timespan thus framed it makes no doubt that knowledge and technology will be rapidly forgotten. China’s present adaptation will procure an advantage to the survivors within its territory but the rapidity of the sequence of changes will be such that this could be no more than a relative advantage. Such a relative advantage could nevertheless prove to be all the difference between life and death.
Once knowledge and technology are gone it is highly likely that visual signs will acquire a new importance everywhere around the world. They will become the primary vehicle to share knowledge in a new cycle of knowledge formation…
In “1. The nature and function of art over the last tens of thousands of years” I laid out how visual signs were the art of the first societies or tribes. And we saw how tribes shaped the historical nature of art which is to give visual signs of the worldview of the men of knowledge to share with all tribesmen or all citizens of society in order to foster trust among themselves and boost societal cohesion which in finale is what ensures, not only the reproduction of societies but more importantly, the reproduction of the principle of life. This historical nature of art is bound to make a comeback in After-Modernity and my crystal ball tells me that it will return with a vengeance.
It is necessity that will trick humanity back to the arts.
When all the knowledge and technologies assembled in Modernity are gone the survivors will suffer greatly and with time they’ll eventually re-discover that knowings help to squelch suffering. And so a new cycle of knowledge formation will be put in motion. As I already mentioned multiple times the most imperative need of a society is to have a worldview; not to share the truth about reality but to share a story that all citizens can easily share in the context of their time. Such a story is what glues the minds of all around a common understanding of how reality operates and this common understanding generates trust among all which boosts the societal cohesion that is absolutely necessary to ensure the reproduction of societies and life itself over the long haul. But how does such a story come about? It is generally a compendium, or a summary, of the knowledge accumulated by the one, or the many, who act as the (wo)men of knowledge in society.
Sharing new knowledge, in a context of lost knowledge, will call for simple tools that are accessible to everybody. Visual signs, images, will make the trick as it did in the first societies. This is how art will rediscover and reacquire its historical nature in After-Modernity.
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NOTES
1 “Yes, there is class warfare, all right,” declared Warren Buffett. “But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. Yes, the Rich Class is at war with you, with the 99%, a war against America. This class war actually started a generation ago, in 1981 when Ronald Reagan became president. Since then, the Rich Class has been winners. Big-time. And the 99% are the losers. Real big-time. “ “Rich Class fighting 99%, winning big-time” in MarketWatch by Paul Farrell. 2011-11-01
2 “U.S. Decoupling From China Forces Others To Decouple From U.S.” See comment n#18 by Oriental Voice. In Moon of Alabama by b, 2019-08-24
3 See “The 6th mass-extinction and the futility of hegemony” in “3. In the 20th century the 3rd world was forced to adopt Modernity in order to survive ”
4 China’s territory spans some 9.6 million km2.
Xinjiang spans some 1.6 million km2, Tibet 2.5 million km2, Mongolia 1,6 million km2, and Manchuria 0.5 million km2. Total added territory = 6.2 million km2 or some 65% of the entirety of China were added through occupation by invaders …
5 “Global terrestrial Human Footprint maps for 1993 and 2009” in Nature, by Oscar Venter and other. 2016-08-23
“Mapping the terrestrial human footprint ” in Nature, by Philip J. K. McGowan 2016-09-08
6 ideological traps of Modernity: infinite economic growth, unstoppable progress, science has the answers to any problems that our species might encounter,…
7 See Dunbar number in “But what is this golden rule of population size ? “: “The ‘Dunbar number’ gives a measure of the highest number of people who can intermingle while trusting each other. That number is a mean of 150 individuals representing stable cohesive groups ranging between extremes of 100 and 200 individuals. Groups, that are under intense environmental economic or defense pressure, have a strong incentive to stabilize around a mean size of 150 because it is the size that ensures them a maximum of cohesion which in finale ensures them the best outcome in fulfilling their task. This has been observed in numerous fields along history and in contemporary settings ”
8 See “what is a tribe” in “1. The nature and function of art over the last tens of thousands of years ”.
See also “Are Humans Hard Wired For A Limited Social Circle? " by Mark Sisson
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