This text retained all my attention for 3 reasons — those you cite are on the top of the list of my daily news sources (Kunstler, Weinstein et Bardi) — your observation of the daily cultural chaos refers to the fall of Western civilization but ...the fact is that humanity is a lot larger than the realm of the Western civilization (the West is merely 10% of the world population) and so you miss the interactions between the Western fall, how other centers are reacting, and what this bodes for the future.... — your appreciation of the situation is that "Tout cela est tragique mais tout cela est inévitable"... I agree with what you write there but these words appear in a contextual void which leaves me deeply unsatisfied. Please bear in mind that this is not a critique. This is simply a statement about the fact that I'm hungry for the logical follow-up of your words. The story of humanity does indeed not stop with the fall of the West ! And if so then the exciting and logical question that follows is what's coming next ?
Kunstler et Bardi are among the first generation of lucid Western baby-boomer observers who started to inform, from a systemic perspective (the rarity of available resources, etc...) that Western Modernity was engaging in a one way street that inevitably would crash, sometime further down the road, in the wall of reality. Weinstein is more of a new-comer and his approach is based exclusively on the observation of the dissolution of Western culture (last stage in the systemic approach of Kunstler and Bardi). All three, and if I add you, all four of you are focusing exclusively on the fall of the West without reference to the larger context of humanity as a whole. If my memory serves me well Bardi once referred to Iran because his wife is from Iranian origin but that was it. Now I have to add that Bardi is taking a new and interesting thinking path with his Holobiont new blog which delves into the fundamental interdependence that animates all entities which is also the defining factor in animist thought.
From my perspective I have to say that a finer resolution picture emerges when one integrates the Western fall into the dynamic of the whole of humanity. Not only is the West no more than 10 % of the world population. Its cultural hegemony over the whole world is no more than 200 years old. From a Western European, and even more so, from a US perspective this may appear as an eternity but from the perspective of observers in the rest of the world this was no more than a blimp on the line of time. As an aside it could very well be that our Western self-centeredness was the reason why we acted so brutishly toward the other people of the world during our last 5 minutes of glory. But today the situation is changing. The fall of the West is forcing us to awake to the fact that we are no more than a tiny portion of the whole of humanity and that the rest of the world is now starting to trace a new way for itself that, willingly or not, we will have to compose with in the coming years.
Kunstler et Bardi are among the first generation of lucid Western baby-boomer observers who started to inform, from a systemic perspective (the rarity of available resources, etc...) that Western Modernity was engaging in a one way street that inevitably would crash, sometime further down the road, in the wall of reality. Weinstein is more of a new-comer and his approach is based exclusively on the observation of the dissolution of Western culture (last stage in the systemic approach of Kunstler and Bardi). All three, and if I add you, all four of you are focusing exclusively on the fall of the West without reference to the larger context of humanity as a whole. If my memory serves me well Bardi once referred to Iran because his wife is from Iranian origin but that was it. Now I have to add that Bardi is taking a new and interesting thinking path with his Holobiont new blog which delves into the fundamental interdependence that animates all entities which is also the defining factor in animist thought.
From my perspective I have to say that a finer resolution picture emerges when one integrates the Western fall into the dynamic of the whole of humanity. Not only is the West no more than 10 % of the world population. Its cultural hegemony over the whole world is no more than 200 years old. From a Western European, and even more so, from a US perspective this may appear as an eternity but from the perspective of observers in the rest of the world this was no more than a blimp on the line of time. As an aside it could very well be that our Western self-centeredness was the reason why we acted so brutishly toward the other people of the world during our last 5 minutes of glory. But today the situation is changing. The fall of the West is forcing us to awake to the fact that we are no more than a tiny portion of the whole of humanity and that the rest of the world is now starting to trace a new way for itself that, willingly or not, we will have to compose with in the coming years.
I have been observing the whole of humanity, over the last 50 years, not only by living among "the others" but also by immersing myself in their history and I discovered some interesting things that are widely unheard of in the West :
1. Civilization, and the power societies that it serves, are the story of the last 5000 years. But the history of our species goes back at least 300,000 years and the picture that starts to emerge about the preceding 295,000 years is very different from what our Western civilization has indoctrinated us to believe. Societal evolution and culture go back to our emergence as a grouping species... and this experience is integrated in "the continuum of the cultural field". Indeed. When we speak about culture, worldviews (religious or other), and about civilization we speak about things that are constitutive parts of "our societal cultural field" and there is a continuum in this field that forces the emergence of our daily culture.
What this field does in practical terms is forcing on us the synchronization of our contextual settings with our axioms of civilization and our worldviews. This means that the chaos of the crisis of our times (“La crisologie de notre temps”) that you run after, day after day, is somehow forced on us by our cultural continuum. What is implied here is not fatalism. It is something relating to the working of the mind. We have no clues that the axioms of our civilization and the foundations of our worldview have firmly rooted in our minds. But as a matter of fact they force on us our behaviors, ideas, and so on. Chaos ensues when we face difficulties to reconcile these with the larger societal context we live in.
The fact is that not much space is left for free-will in the subconscious ! Such a thinking is perhaps not common among Westerners but it is not uncommon among thinkers in the rest of the world who observe with utmost interest the chaos rising from the West out of the contradiction between the individuals' subconscious and their contextual settings.
2. the transition from the tribal to the power model of society ended up separating humanity in different civilizational realms. What I mean to say is that, for many reasons that are too long to expose here, the Tri-Continental-Erea (Middle-East from our Euro-centric perspective) separated itself from our universal animist past and transmitted to the societies that emerged in its realm a vision, of the historical transformation that was taking place, in the form of a rupture with the past that necessarily called for a new ideological construct that the citizens would be sharing along the entire history of their societies in the form of subconsciously shared axioms of civilization. Within the realm of the Chinese civilization things took a radically different turn. This historical transformation was lived in continuity with the universal animist past and so the Chinese citizens are subconsciously sharing a different set of axioms of civilization and worldview foundations that force them to think and act in continuity.
2. the transition from the tribal to the power model of society ended up separating humanity in different civilizational realms. What I mean to say is that, for many reasons that are too long to expose here, the Tri-Continental-Erea (Middle-East from our Euro-centric perspective) separated itself from our universal animist past and transmitted to the societies that emerged in its realm a vision, of the historical transformation that was taking place, in the form of a rupture with the past that necessarily called for a new ideological construct that the citizens would be sharing along the entire history of their societies in the form of subconsciously shared axioms of civilization. Within the realm of the Chinese civilization things took a radically different turn. This historical transformation was lived in continuity with the universal animist past and so the Chinese citizens are subconsciously sharing a different set of axioms of civilization and worldview foundations that force them to think and act in continuity.
Thinking in rupture mode as in the West makes us see chaos as the ending of something that will be replaced by something new. In contrast thinking in continuity mode makes us see chaos as one extreme moment, among the many moments, on the continuous line of time. This is generating vastly different attitudes among the citizens of different civilizations. Chaos is fostering fear of the unknown in Western minds. Many individuals feel paralyzed while others go mad and this creates an extreme societal tension that can exploded in brawls having the potential to bring societal institutions to their knees. This idea that chaos is the sign of an ending, of a rupture, that opens to "change" can foster moments of madness when chaos, rage, and rupture converge into incomprehensible acts. In China, and East-Asia, chaos is viewed as a momentary phenomenon that eventually brings unexpected opportunities and so people follow the flow...
3. the implications of one and two is that the formation of knowledge, in "the West" (Western Europe and its geographic extensions), diverged considerably from the formation of knowledge in East-Asia. This fact is starting to have colossal implications in our new globalized world where humanity is forced to come together by necessity to answer its newly discovered predicament which is "the great convergence of Late-Modernity" between — a globalizing world that is facing the fall of the West while it is searching to balance a common "governance-world" understood in a similar sense as Fernand Braudel's "economy-world" — the externalities of Modernity (side-effects) are just starting to catch our minds and what we discover is that Modernity had been all along, its existence as a quasi-worldview, messing up "the principles of life". In consequence the natural habitat of our species has been radically diminished to say the least (I mean our physical and our mental habitat) as well as the habitat of all other species. No wonder viruses are after us with a renewed vengeance...
4. the fall of our Western civilization will be leaving the rest of the world with the responsibility to handle the mess left over by Western Modernity. This is something that the rest of the world is very slowly starting to discover. Entering Modernity, from the perspective of those outside the West, was a dream suggested by the tv windows on the world of consumerism. A few years down the road when those people discover that the dream, suggested by their tv windows on the world of consumerism, will not materialize for them anger will submerge their minds and it most probably will be addressed to the devil Westerners who forced the world on a one way street to nowhere.
3. the implications of one and two is that the formation of knowledge, in "the West" (Western Europe and its geographic extensions), diverged considerably from the formation of knowledge in East-Asia. This fact is starting to have colossal implications in our new globalized world where humanity is forced to come together by necessity to answer its newly discovered predicament which is "the great convergence of Late-Modernity" between — a globalizing world that is facing the fall of the West while it is searching to balance a common "governance-world" understood in a similar sense as Fernand Braudel's "economy-world" — the externalities of Modernity (side-effects) are just starting to catch our minds and what we discover is that Modernity had been all along, its existence as a quasi-worldview, messing up "the principles of life". In consequence the natural habitat of our species has been radically diminished to say the least (I mean our physical and our mental habitat) as well as the habitat of all other species. No wonder viruses are after us with a renewed vengeance...
4. the fall of our Western civilization will be leaving the rest of the world with the responsibility to handle the mess left over by Western Modernity. This is something that the rest of the world is very slowly starting to discover. Entering Modernity, from the perspective of those outside the West, was a dream suggested by the tv windows on the world of consumerism. A few years down the road when those people discover that the dream, suggested by their tv windows on the world of consumerism, will not materialize for them anger will submerge their minds and it most probably will be addressed to the devil Westerners who forced the world on a one way street to nowhere.
Having said all that what comes next ?
The shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world, and the simultaneous fall of the West, augur very difficult times for Western citizens. In my understanding the turning to After-Modernity will be as dramatic as the shift from small bands to tribal societies or as the shift from tribal societies to power societies. What I mean by this is that, for Westerners, the transition from Late-Modernity to what comes after Modernity is going to be a long process that will advance by trial and error till some new societal arrangement finally satisfies some groups of individuals at which point mimetism sets in and the model is reproduced within an expanding territory.
It seems to me that outside of the West Modernity has not had the time to mold the minds into — the reason that is at work within capital — the rationalism and materialism of science and consumerism — individualism, hyper-individualism, and the loneliness of the societal atom. In other words the minds outside of the West are not ready to atomize their society. Their traditions, while having been affected by Modernity, are not forgotten as in the West and so people have still the wherewithal to return to their past rural ways...
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