First devastating societal blow in Late-Modernity (11)

5.   A gradual shift from a Western to an Eastern model of society

5.2.4. the irresistibility of Regional Economic Blocks (REBs)

The first series of articles in this trilogy was titled “A growing disconnect between East and West” and it was published in book form in October 2018. I sketched our present moment, in it, as follows :

“ Pessimism is the new normal in the West where thoughts concentrate on a societal reality that is slipping very rapidly downwards past the peak of an exponential curve that in better days visualized the abstract idea of progress and the production of economic abundance.

The contrast with the air of the times in China could not be starker. China is still at the beginning of its upward move on the exponential curve that visualizes the abstract idea of progress which is the statistical confirmation of a booming societal reality. The air of the times in China today corresponds to the air of the times that prevailed in the West in the Nineteen-Sixties when any thought of a future fall was simply inconceivable. In other words the present, old age, societal pessimism of the West contrasts radically with the societal optimism of an adolescent grand-mother China that has barely set foot in Modernity. “  (1)

Two years after having written these words the corona-virus is accelerating the movement of history. And here is how the South China Morning post describes Beijing views' about this acceleration of history :

“ Xie Maosong, a professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said a situation such as a pandemic could accelerate either the rise or fall of great powers.

It can be the final blow to the failing state, or it may stimulate a rising country to renew and repair itself, he said.

In the case of China, the epidemic pushed the leadership and government agencies to swiftly get people organised and mobilise resources. It helps to expose problems in China’s rise and accelerate efforts to fix them. Overall, it will emerge stronger with better social cohesion.”  (2)

Amidst the mood of this very particular societal context the USA, in a trump tantrum, is breaking down the Western World order built at the onset of the 2nd World War. This is assuredly not going to ‘Make America Great Again’ but it surely puts the rest of the wold on edge.


The problems, faced by humanity in Late-Modernity, are experienced all over the world.  These problems are indeed global in their nature and so they necessitate global solutions. But due to humanity’s national organizational mode the implementation of global solutions is necessarily realized by each nation locally. At that point a question arises :  how do all nations voluntarily apply a common set of responses ? This question implies responses that are unanimously agreed upon globally while being binding locally.


If the climate change negotiations, over the last decades, have shown us anything it is that, for one, agreeing on a common set of responses is extremely difficult and secondly having all nations on earth implementing these responses is even more difficult. But now that the US ‘Trump Tantrum’ has irremediably destroyed the necessary trust, between the national actors, nations have passed the point to agreeing on anything. The mood in the US has turned against its elites and also against the rest of the world.


History teaches us that coming out of such a cycle of national retrenchment can take many years. But humanity does not have the luxury to wait. The convergence of the multiple side-effects of Modernity is upon us and waiting to adapt is a recipe for the imminent collapse of national state actors (3). Now nature has no pity for failed state losers and in that sense nature teaches us that national decisions can have mortal consequences. In light of this knowledge those nations, whose culture and systems of governance have still not been contaminated by the virus of postmodernism and neoliberalism, have an obligation to their citizens to act now.


But as I mentioned here above the predicament of humanity in this Late-Modernity is that the problems are global while the implementation of eventual responses can only happen at the local level of nation-states. In light of the US ‘Trump Tantrum’ that irremediably destroyed the Western world order the last institutional settings available to sane nations are the Regional Economic Blocks (REBs). Finding responses between neighbors, to urgent life and deaths problems, is assuredly a lot easier than in a world assembly of 200 state members. The global nature of these problems will then automatically drive the REBs to collaborate between each other.


There are many signs already of a strengthening of the REBs as laid out in 5.2.1, 5.2.2, and 5.2.3. This indicates that the world has already started its restructuring along the lines of its regional specificities. The present reset, of the economy-world, shifts its center of gravity to East-Asia with Beijing at the core of its civilizational space. But the relations between its national components point to the destabilizing effect of a now antiquated institutional setup that saw the US Dollar reigning as the reserve currency during the era that followed World War 2.


To ensure that the hegemonic center of gravity of the economy world, during the 2nd part of the 20th century and until today, was firmly kept within its control the US at all time maintained deeply interwoven relations with its ideologically aligned regional allies which often resulted in conflicts and destabilization in the different regions of the world. The US economic strength allowed its nation to be interwoven with its allies and to benefit, as Valery Giscard D'Estaing once said said, from the ‘exorbitant privilege’ procured by the status of world reserve currency of its national fiat currency.


China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South-Korea, Japan, and Vietnam share a civilizational space that goes back thousands of years. They certainly had their family feuds but their present relations are fraught with the memory of the past 70 years when they were aligned along the lines of different ideological agendas. This naturally results in recurring bouts of suspicion and distrust between these regional national players and restraints the development of their common regional natural potential. It will take time, and the acceptance of their momentary differences, for them to fully reach the promise that is contained in their common regional natural potential. But they’ll eventually reach that point and this is when the East-Asian REB will gain the maturity of a highly cohesive regional block that will then impulse the march of humanity toward a shared destiny of living sustainably.


In the meantime the destabilization of the economy-world is going to ignite ever louder calls for new institutional arrangements. The maturation of the East-Asian REB flows in parallel with the destabilization of the economy-world and the calls for new institutional arrangements. Some day these parallel paths will fuse and the new historical era  following Modernity will reshape the relations between nations and their actions in building a sustainable ecological future for all.


Contrarily to what the West fears the context in which this new era is forming is not conducive to a new hegemony. For one China has no hegemonic ambitions. It simply wants to restore the confidence of its nation and of its citizens in their traditional system of governance. This is why the search for their nations’ roots is seen as such a determinant factor to successfully restore the worldview shared by the Chinese citizens.


China rejects the idea that nations have to adopt any foreign model of governance. What the country wants is to reconnect with its past in order to re-establish the continuity of its nation. It has no other ambition and it has certainly no ambition to impose its own model of governance on others. A good understanding of the limits of China’s ambition, and its legitimate aspiration as a nation, would decidedly gain foreign nations the respect of the Chinese. But this implies learning a bit of China’s history.


The knowledge gained at the contact of China’s history would shed some light in Western minds on the fact that hegemony is excluded from China’s model of relations between nations. And this would then shed light on the fact that hegemony has typically been a European model of relations between nations over the last 500 years. In view of this knowledge the image, forming in people’s minds about the future, would surely come to see the existence of the institutional arrangements within Regional Economic Blocks (REGs), while embryonic,  as being a real opportunity to address the predicament of humanity in Late-Modernity.

The Regional actors as of 2020.

Here under follows an imaging of the present state of affairs of existing REGs followed by a sketchy presentation of the Regional actors in presence :

Source : World Bank. Modified by laodan, 2020-06

• The European Union :   Deep flaws, in its present institutional arrangement, augur the necessity of deep reforms. Such deep reforms could then act as a catalyst of a new approach to international relations that would solidify the EU relations with :  ‒ Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union,  ‒ China and East-Asia,   ‒ the Tri-Continental-Area,  ‒ Africa,  ‒ North-America,  ‒South-America,  ‒ Australia and New Zealand. But the EU has missed the opportunity to reform while the economic climate was still conducive to a favorable popular sentiment for the EU institutions. Since then the economic conditions have gone from bad to worse and the popular sentiment for the EU institutions has gone negative making the adoption of reforms that push unification forward a pipe-dream.  

• Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union :  With a population of 183 million, a GDP of some US$ 5 trillion, and 70% of its trade being paid for in Rubles and local currencies the Eurasian Economic Union has succeeded to deflect the Western weaponization of the dollar and US technology. Its fusion with the developmental strategy of the New Silk Roads automatically grants it :  ‒ large volumes of exports to China, large infrastructure investments financed with Chinese loans, the access to cheap Chinese technology, and so on. But more than anything else this Chinese developmental strategy procures a peaceful environment to the Eurasian Economic Union that it can leverage to push its own internal economic development.
  
  This internal economic development of the Union, + the pull of China’s gigantic market, is what will finally pull Europe decidedly East. 
  
  The ultimate target, in the minds of European leaders today, is that Europe’s foray East will allow it to divide the Eurasian Union and China… But the assumption by today’s EU leaders, in such a fast evolving global economic context, could well change the calculus of those who will follow them at the helm of the EU...

• the 'Tri-Continental-Area' :   For a start this new appellation puts to rest the old Euro-centrist vision of the Middle-East while it also better renders the true transit nature of that geographical area where the exchanges between 3 continental masses materialize into trade and cultural exchanges.
  
  The Old Silk Roads landed Chinese products in the Tri-Continental-Area and its transit nature expanded the reach of Chinese goods further to Africa and Europe. The same is going to happen with the New Silk Roads and China is furthermore counting on this effect to suck out of that area the belligerence that Euro-centrism has inflicted on it for so long. Investments in fast train lines, freeways, and high speed telecommunications are going to dry up that swamp of belligerence. And Palestinians, Muslims, Jews, Christians and others are going to be swamped in trade and cultural exchanges between the 3 continental masses that their territory intersects.

• Africa :   With a population reaching over 1.3 billion in 2020 Africa is the last frontier awaiting the developmental boost of Modernity. China is already actively engaged with its developmental strategy in Africa. It started way back with the export of natural resources back home and it is now branching out in industrial investments to supply cheaper locally produced goods to the African citizens.
  
  China seems to be on the right track to finally eliminate the scourge of colonialism that kept Africa low for so many centuries. This should be celebrated were it not for Western spite. Notwithstanding Western tantrums Africa’s newly found dynamism is on its way at last to deliver a better future to its citizens.
  
  But Western aggression is never far away. It cut short Qaddafi’s ambition of monetary unification of the African Union and when Libya was down an opportunist US shipped home the Libyan gold that would have guaranteed the new African currency.
  
  The African Union (AU) is a continental union consisting of 55 member states. The African head of states called for its creation in 1999.
  

  “ The AU was announced in the Sirte Declaration in Sirte, Libya, on 9 September 1999, calling for the establishment of the African Union. The bloc was founded on 26 May 2001 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and launched on 9 July 2002 in Durban, South Africa" (4)

  The Agenda 2063 centers on the realization of 15 flagship projects that could advance the development of the entire African continent :
  

  " AGENDA 2063 is Africa’s blueprint and master plan for transforming Africa into the global powerhouse of the future. It is the continent’s strategic framework that aims to deliver on its goal for inclusive and sustainable development and is a concrete manifestation of the pan-African drive for unity, self-determination, freedom, progress and collective prosperity pursued under Pan-Africanism and African Renaissance. “ (5)

• South-America :  
  

  “There is a dream that moves the neighbors of our region, and that is the dream of Latin American integration,” says Sherban Leonardo Cretoiu, a professor at the Fundação Dom Cabral, a prestigious business school in Brazil.”  (6)

  But this dream has failed to materialize until now. It is not for failing to try. Political differences, but mostly intrusive US interference, make it difficult to actually accomplish anything so countries prefers to rely on bilateral agreements.
  

• North-America :   In 1994 Canada, Mexico and the US signed “The North American Free Trade Agreement” (NAFTA) that made North America a trade block. Donald Trump negotiated a new agreement the “United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement” (USMCA), that took effect in March of 2020. This was basically a renaming, of its NAFTA predecessor, that enlarges the North-American economic space and separates it from Latin America.
  
  The move was without any doubt astute. The US gets indeed an exclusive access to Mexico’s third world production conditions that will help it benefit from low costs productions at its doorstep until Mexican wages eventually increase delivering then an extended market for US produced goods  …

• Australia and New Zealand :  These 2 countries are bordering Asia and have bilateral free trade agreements with Asian countries.
  
  A new and larger free trade agreement “the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership” (RCEP) is in the final stage of negotiation  and could be ratified within the next months by the ten member states of ASEAN and five of ASEAN's FTA partners — Australia, — China, — Japan, — New Zealand, — and South Korea. RCEP would create a free trade area spanning East-Asia, Asean, and Australia New Zealand and could act as the vehicle of a deeper integration in the East-Asian Economic space.
  
  But this is still a work in progress and, if successful, the delivery of the goods will be in the future.
  
  I added Afghanistan in the pink category of those nations that aspire integrating the East-Asian economic space but are still not in a position to benefit from it.

• East-Asia :   I concentrated nearly exclusively on this Region in the preceding pages so I will add nothing more here.

• India :  Under Modi and the BJP India is being courted by the US and its allies to play as a competitor, and potential future enemy of China, to execute the dirty business of the West which is to challenge China’s ascendancy.
  
  But encouraged by Russia India became also a full member of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) in June 2017. As stated in Wikipedia the SCO is :
  

  “the largest regional organisation in the world in terms of geographical coverage and population, covering three-fifths of the Eurasian continent and nearly half of the human population“. (6)

  Apparently India wants to occupy a special space trying to gain advantages from all sides. But this pragmatic positioning is nevertheless short-circuited by its momentary rejection of the RCEP free trade agreement.
  
  To avoid falling out of history, in the making, India will soon have to chose if it is on the side of East-Asia and if it participates in the New Silk Roads. These are indeed the engines that power the present and will be determinant in shaping the future world economy.

The economic collapse of the West is near

The USA and the EU both, in their own manner, have lived in the illusion that time was standing still and that the privileges they had gained from having been the first to industrialize would be preserved eternally. The debates, that were raging in the seventies among a small coterie of academics specialized in political sciences, about the wisdom to de-localize Western industries to third world countries, were turned short. Big capital and its servants muzzled the opponents to the idea and they were shunned by the national establishments, the national institutions, the think-thanks and the media.


The application of Neoliberal policies over a period of 40/50 years resulted in the great recession of 2008 and its further deepening in mid-September 2019 when the repo-markets’ rejected state bonds offered as collateral for overnight loans (7). This initiated what would be seen later as the FED’s intervention craze that culminated during the corona-virus outbreak with the injection of fiat created money that was used to shuffle liquidity in the hands of big corporations, financial actors, and to buy back failing corporate bonds. And the possibility of stock purchases was furthermore floating in the air of the times. Within a few weeks the FED had gone fully Japanese.


Covid-19 will inevitably be seen in the coming decades as the reagent that set in motion the financial reaction which unleashed the fall of the dollar as the world reserve currency. The injection by the FED, within the span of solely a few weeks, of trillions of dollars of new fiat money in the economic system contrasted with the attitude of the Chinese Central Bank that basically froze money creation. The media remained silent but the market did not miss the contrast and, for the first time in dollar monetary history, it immediately punished the federal reserve by letting the dollar go south :

“  It's been an historic week for the U.S. with president Donald Trump signing a record $2.2 trillion coronavirus-induced emergency stimulus package.

The massive cross-party rescue deal is designed to help Americans and businesses cope with the economic shutdown caused by the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. dollar has taken a beating, however, dropping almost 4% against a basket of currencies this week—its biggest weekly loss since the height of the global financial crisis over 10 years ago.” (8)

This moment will be remembered in economic history as the slipping of the US in the great unraveling that frees the way to China’s rise to world preeminence.

But how on earth have we slipped to this place without even noticing ?


Coming out of the great recession of 2008 the US appeared to be immobilized and companies in the rest of the world began creating alternatives to once unrivaled American monopolies. Huawei is a perfect example of this, in the field of communication, but there are many other examples. Alibaba dominates B2B online commerce and its online payment system is the most advanced on earth rivaled only by Tencent. Both Alibaba and Tencent are Chinese companies. But even in less advanced nations, like India or African countries, the creation of alternatives to US monopolized sectors is taking hold and this empowers these nations to keep the flows of money locally.


Forty, fifty years ago, America started to abandon the building and making of stuff. Europe, at the exception of Germany, followed the movement. They never looked back and have focused on protecting their knowledge, controlling the investments in the rest of the world, and managing the flows of money. By the end of this process Western economies had morphed, from being industrialized, into a general state of financialization that services the money flows to investments, trade, consumption and the ownership of assets. In this process the production of goods used in Western economies was largely de-localized to countries disposing of cheaper production factors.


The immateriality of financialization and services detached Western citizen’s attention from the hard daily realities. Debt started to fill the place of ‒ income in financing consumerism, ‒ savings in financing corporate investments, ‒ taxation in financing public investments and gradually also operating expanses.


In this detachment from the hard daily realities theoretical studies found a space to carve an intellectual justification for liberal concepts like the ‘state gulag’ and ‘hyper-individualism’ that became the cornerstone of a deepening of liberalism into the ideology of neoliberalism. These concepts were applied externally to fight against State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and state planning but then they also started to be applied internally to dismantle all state protection institutions.


These Neoliberal concepts were introduced in a particularly propitious context that resulted from the radical transformation of the artistic and intellectual scenes that had occurred along the preceding decades :

1.   by the end of the 2nd World War Modernism, an artistic  reaction to the Renaissance and its further developments, was in crisis. This was an opening that was opportunistically sized upon by the following actors to defeat the opponents of liberalism and advance the US hegemonic agenda (9):

•  ideologues at the state department and the CIA used Modernism as an instrument of ideological manipulation to break the sympathies of Western artists and intellectuals for socialist ideals. The target was to gain their eventual adhesion to liberalism.

• European art merchants were called upon to organize exhibitions, of the works of the New York Art School,  as support of this ideological operation and in return were offered a share in the nascent New York Art market that, starting during the 2nd WW, US institutions had been nurturing to become the Art center of the world.

• As an extension to the just mentioned ideological operation and nurturing of the New-York art market the CIA adroitly used European intellectuals, and their schools of thought, to push the neoliberal agenda exposed here above. Postmodernism was at the core of this effort. The most famous French intellectuals were invited to teach in the US and their publications were advertised to US intellectuals as being the pinnacle of intellectual thought.

The central thesis of Postmodernism was that the post-war cultural context had radically changed. A triumphing economic liberalism had elevated science on the pedestal of truth and, as a consequence all grand narratives, or foundational stories, had suddenly lost their ancestral reason for being.

The push of this thesis by postmodernism, on the market for ideas, resulted in fixing the urge to reject all ideologies in the collective unconscious. As a result Christianity, Marxism, etc...  rapidly dwindled (10). But this would later be understood as coming at the cost of separating the individuals and gluing them in front of a screen which resulted in a pandemic of loneliness that completely collapsed societal cohesion. The resulting societal atomization is now confronting Western societies with their mortality. The separation of the individuals inevitably results in the death of their society (11). If these societies are still standing today it is for no other reason than their force of inertia which momentarily still powers them forward albeit at a slower pace. But their collapse is not far away.

2.   as a reaction to the ‘cultural revolution of 1968’ big capital holders and their servants imposed a toughened control over culture and science. The role of science was narrowed down to servicing the interests of capital holders. State or corporate scientific institutions were tasked to implement the limitation in scope of the scientific inquiry to such subjects exclusively. This limitation immediately resulted in the scientists’ entanglement in the transformation of science into a functional extension of an economic system that is driven by the reason that is at work within capital.

Neo-liberalism is rooted in the dualist concepts of ‘hyper-individualism/good’ versus ‘state-gulag/evil’. This dualism is an extension of the Christian dualism  “me-we”/good versus “the other”/evil which is still deeply rooted in Western thinking. And so the ideological nature, of the neoliberal concepts, is being subtly amplified in Western minds by subconsciously adding the personal dimension, “me-we”, to the hyper-individualism/good dimension while the state- gulag/evil dimension is subconsciously being associated with “the other”. This subconscious  mechanism radically reinforces the favorability of hyper-individualism in Western minds while the categorization “gulag” forces a disfarorable and untrue evaluation about the state in the perception of the individuals.


Note that in the realm of the Chinese civilization, that extends to Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan and Vietnam, the perception by the individuals of these neoliberal concepts is radically different than in the West.  Dualism is not a part of their axioms of civilization. They understand opposites, not as being dualistic, but as being the extreme poles on the scale of all possible changes within a given entity. These extreme poles are being viewed merely as rare manifestations of changes within a large range of possibilities. In terms of colors, for example, dualism relates to opposites like black/white or red/green or blue/orange.


But the East-Asian vocabulary does not limit opposites to  the extremes in the range. For them black and white opposites can indeed take the form of many shades of grey. And as such the balancing act between polarities, from one moment to the next, settles from one shade of grey to another shade of grey. What this means is that East-Asians are not characterizing opposites as absolutes as Westerners are doing.


Dualism works in the context of Western civilization for the good reason that dualism is its core axiom. But it does not work in the context of other civilizations and more particularly in the context of the Chinese civilization. Opposites are understood by East-Asians as being fluctuating polarities. This differentiation between dualism and polarism is the root of a permanent misunderstanding between the West and East-Asia which gave rise to the conflict between Western absolutism and Eastern relativism. The West is seen as proselytizing, or constantly attempting to convert “the other” to its own set of beliefs, while the east is seen as tolerant of “the other’s” beliefs.


Just watch the bewilderment of the West toward China’s refusal to attach ideological conditions to its relations with other countries. This bewilderment leads to Western suspicions of China’s tolerance. In other words whatever China does is never accepted at face value. The fact of the matter is that we are facing here some form of Western schizophrenia that can only be cured by understanding the axiomatic origin of thinking. Regrettably this is not on the program of Western universities…

Going from scientific knowings to knowledge

The entanglement of scientists, in the process transforming science into a functional extension of an economic system that is driven by the reason that is at work within capital, directly resulted in an increasing specialization which separated the scientists and imprisoned them in silos of specialization. In other words once imprisoned in his silo the scientist has no other recourse than to focus on the small parts related to his field of specialty. And in this process the scientist loses touch with the big picture about the whole that contains the small parts that he studies.


What this basically means is that the scientists have become servants of masters, that they never see, and execute tasks without knowing the finality assigned to them by their masters. The masters want science to be functional and that means that science has to concentrate exclusively on responses that answer the needs of their corporations. The masters of science are opposed to the search for knowledge, about the working of the whole, because such a search distracts from the function that they have assigned to science and in consequence they refuse to invest in holistic projects.


But the fact is that scientific functionalism runs counter to the myth of scientific truth. Responding to a corporate need has no relation what so ever with the truth about what reality is all about. I addressed this question in   “What is going on ? Part 1. Pragmatism versus ideology” :

“  Science generates knowings about bits and pieces of reality while knowledge generates a holistic narrative about the working of reality. Science is being financed by investors, or by institutions acting as their public servants, with the hope to return them profits. This is why science is limited to the acquisition of “knowings” about very narrow segments of reality that are destined to help investors to reduce the costs of their actual productions or to develop totally new productions. Science is thus at the service of capital and its public servants.

In contrast the finality of knowledge is to ensure human well-being essentially by reducing the suffering of the individuals. Starting with tribal societies, along the entire span of societal evolution, men of knowledge strove to understand – the interactions between all the elements within their society’s habitat, – the interactions of their societies’ habitat with the wider ensembles in the Universe. Viewed in this particular sense knowledge relates to the understanding of the impact, – of the interactions of our universe as a whole on the context of our local habitat, – of the interactions between all the elements inside our habitat, – and of the interactions between human societies and their individual members.

The nature of science is quite different. Science functions as a service supplied to capital holders, or their representative corporations and states, in order to allow them to increase their profits. Some scientists might consider, for reason of personal attachment to moral or other principles, that their role is larger and more noble but their research is nevertheless always financed or by capital holders or by their servants who expect returns on their investments. And if scientists want to address larger or more noble finalities, than increasing the profits of their financiers, they are forced to do so outside of the institutions receiving the grants that pay for their monthly wages. But if they do so, fact is that, the nature of their work becomes estranged from the nature of science and their quest becomes more like a quest for knowledge.

In contrast to science the nature of knowledge is to uncover the impact on human well-being of environmental and universal factors – and factors that are at work in the minds and bodies of the individuals. The mastery by the mind, of such knowledge about how human well-being is affected by the interactions between all the elements in the local environment as well as in the larger ensembles, is considered to be the highest form of knowledge. It is called wisdom. And the reason why the men of knowledge strove to attain such a wisdom is because they considered that it was their societal mission to render knowledge services to their fellow citizens in their search – to reduce their suffering, – and to gain pragmatic knowledge to ease their toiling. Their mission furthermore helped to increase the cohesion of the group which allowed it to reproduce over the generations.

Wisdom is thus the mastery in reducing the suffering of the individuals and incidentally it also increased their happiness. Knowledge, trust between the individuals, societal cohesion and societal reproduction were the ultimate goal of the ‘wo(men) of knowledge’. They are all elements that help keep the group on a path of resilience.

Science does not care about societal resilience. It is simply not financed to care about this which ultimately explains why, within the short timespan of a few centuries, Modernity landed humanity in its Late-Modern predicament. “

This description of science is particularly true for the period directly following the elimination, by big capital holders, of the cultural relativism that was prevailing during and after the cultural revolution of 1968. Big capital holders and their servants viewed this relativism with suspicion and feared that it would distract science from the acquisition of “knowings” about the very narrow segments of reality that, the corporations they owned, were chasing in the hope to reduce the costs of their actual productions or to develop totally new productions.


The animist men of knowledge opened the path to knowledge as a search to enhance human well-being essentially by reducing the suffering of the individuals and by extending the reproduction of their societies over the long haul. Animist knowledge was also functional. But the nature of its functionality was radically different from scientific functionalism :

1. the function of animistic knowledge was to reduce individual suffering while generating a holistic narrative about the working of reality that once shared by their fellow-citizens ensured societal reproduction over the long haul.


2. the function of science is to procure ‘knowings’ to the  capital investors’ so that they can  – reduce the costs of their actual productions – or develop totally new productions but in the process the side-effects of these productions is being ignored.

The present shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world, towards East-Asia with Beijing at the core, promises to deliver a corresponding shift in the priorities of science :

1. Private big capital holders are driven by the reason that is at work within capital which limits science to a very narrow focus on knowings directly related to micro-economic considerations like cost reduction or the creation of new products.


2. Chinese state capital is financing the priorities defined by the state and as such the scope of science relates to all the factors relating to life.
   

Thus defined it appears evident that the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world will enlarge the scope of science to many new horizons. Critics will point to the present reality of science in China. But this is a reduction of the potential of science to the country’s present context of catching up to the hegemon. Once China has caught up, economically and scientifically, it will develop its own specific path and its context will radically change. It is in that new context that the future scope of science will evolve in China.


We can only project what could be its future potential in this emerging context. Without any doubt it will be immensely larger than the narrow focus that is being imposed by Western big capital holders presently. Here is a sketch of how I view the scope of science in this emerging new context which I think will be defined by the political answers to the diverse demands from the following entities :

• the individuals :  shelter, consumer goods, health-care, education, culture and so on

• society as a whole :  goods and services to satisfy its pursuit of social stability (balance between increased complexity and societal reproduction), societal cohesion (art), and reproduction over the long haul (societal and ecological sustainability)

• the species itself :  services to ensure its reproduction over the long haul (natural ecology and ecology of the mind) and for enticing the individuals to innovate in order to set their societies on the path toward more complexity (knowledge)

______________

Notes

1.   “A growing disconnect between East and West” laodan. 2008-10.

2.   “China’s socialism beats capitalism” in the SCMP by William Zheng. 2020-06-16.

3.    See “What is going on ?”. Part 4. determinant side-effects of Modernity and Part 6. societal collapse.

4.   “African Union” Wikipedia

5.   “Agenda 2063: The Africa We Want” African Union website

6.  “Dream of a unified Latin America remains disrupted” in FT by Vincent Bevins.   2010-11- 22.

7.   SCO in Wikipedia

8.  “Explainer: The Fed has a repo problem. What's that?” Reuters by Richard Leong. 2019-09-18.

9.   “Donald Trump And The Fed Are Destroying The U.S. Dollar” in Forbes by Billy Bambrough. 2020-03-28.

10.  See “The organic art manifesto. Part 4. Western Late-Modernity sows the seeds of After-Modernity”.

11.  See “What is going on ?  Part 2. the cultural context forces human thinking and actions”.

12.  See “What is going on ? Part 3. determinant factors driving the ‘governance-world’. 3.1. Societal atomization”