The Great Turning (06)

5. The expansion of the paradigm of Modernity into philosophic rationalism and science

As I wrote in Part 3 “the pragmatic common sense of the long distance merchants ensured the thriving of 'the reason' but this came at the price of subduing its development as a worldview”. This implies that by leaving “the reason” unspoken, in its fundamentalist Christian context, it was given the chance to thrive.

In other words “the reason” went unspoken for some 6 centuries before the classical economists started to rationalize philosophic rationalism and the actions of capital holders in the eighteenth century. So while the paradigm of Modernity was in effect forcing its rationality as a daily occurrence on Western-European merchants, there had been no thoughtful contemplation about its real implications for society at large. And the reality of the expanding impact of “the reason” on European thinking and the working of European societies remained thus largely unknown !

The thinking about philosophic rationalism and the scientific method, in the European context of the 17th and 18th centuries, operated thus in complete ignorance of the impact of “the reason” on the cultural evolutionary continuity of the past 6 centuries. And in consequence European intellectual considerations were forced to rationalize the following :

1. The richness of the long distance merchants had been well earned due to hard work and a high dose of intelligence. In other words the profits generated by long distance commerce was a highly moral endeavor that would suffer no critiques !
   
   The new sciences of economics and anthropology were rooted in this understanding. See for example the economic theories of the individual “rational choice” and of “national comparative advantage” and the deep racial prejudice of anthropology that barely recognized the human nature of native people in the Americas, Africa, and Asia while affirming that Africa had no history which justified the merchandization of African human bodies and the plunder of African resources.


2. The will of Western-Europe to protect the richness of its merchants, and the accumulation of metal money by its nations, from their commercial vacuuming by India and China who had represented over 50% of the world GDP for the last 2 millennia before the Western “voyages of discovery” brought these countries to their knees.
   
   But the fact is that while Britain and Europe desperately wanted Indian and Chinese goods they had nothing to offer in return that attracted these countries. So they had to pay with the gold and silver that Western merchants looted or extracted from America, Africa, or Asia.
   
   The 3 Western national estates, — the nobility — the clergy — the bourgeois capital holders, shared a common understanding that protectionism would have to justify the hiding of these historical realities while forcing raw imperial violence onto those countries to extract their resources.


3. The rationalization of the extraction of resources, from the rest of the world, got justified by dualism which is the core Western civilizational axiom that ingrained the belief in Western minds about “the exceptionalism of the good Europeans” and “the ordinary evil of the others”.
   
   In this separation originated the vile Western racism that equipped the minds of the Western agents who were in charge of implementing whatever policies were deemed necessary to extract the resources of the rest of the world. The same racism was also at work in economics and anthropology and only got questioned over the last half a century.


4. In parallel to the extraction of resources from the rest of the world the 3 European national estates (nobility, clergy, capital holders) also became aware of the necessity to generate returns on investments locally.
   
   The merchants had always dreaded investing the proceeds of their looting, or forced extraction of resources, in the territories where their richness originated. But very few opportunities tempted them back home so their capital was mostly sleeping in the hands of bankers who always found ways to loan several times the value of this sleeping capital.
   
   Having become aware that the capital of the merchants could be invested, in activities within the national territory, the 3 estates made a pact that remained unspoken in the history books but that effectively promoted the investments in the 18th and 19th centuries industrial revolution of European nations.

When you try to follow the reasoning of the philosophers, and the classical economists, you are stunned by the mental contortions they have to go through to elaborate intellectual abstractions that tentatively explain the emergence of rationalism, the scientific method, capital accumulation and the industrial revolution.

They failed to see how 3 categories, that had originated in the continuity of the past 6 centuries, were determining the culture of the day of Western-European nations :

1. “The reason” forced its rationality in the minds
   
   The emergence of the paradigm of Modernity, sometime in the 12th century in the form of “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”, impulsed the gradual affirmation of the belief in the rationality of “the reason” which negated the traditional belief in religion.
   
   Thomas Aquinas eschewed the conflict between religion and rationality by adding the idea of “human participation” to the field of the Eternal Law of god which thus augmented the field of reality to both the traditional belief in religion and the belief in rationality.
   
   The fact is that this idea of “human participation” avoided a conflict that rationality, or the paradigm of Modernity, could not have won during Early-Modernity. Thomas’ stroke of genius de-facto hid the paradigm of Modernity behind a smoke screen that left it unspoken. And when came the time of philosophic rationalism, the emergence of the industrial revolution and the rise of science and liberalism, the paradigm had been forgotten.


2. “The reason” has its own rationality
   
   That rationality, over the centuries, expanded from the transformation of money into capital to adjacent domains like the 4 rationalizations of the national interest that I described here above.
   
   The pact of the 3 national estates to invest the capital of the merchants, within their nations, was in line with the gradual European intellectual developments that followed the Renaissance and the supply of books of Greek philosophy and Muslim science. This emerging rationalism, and science, while not being a direct extension of “the reason” got nevertheless instrumentalized by “the reason” to serve the growth of returns on investments within Western nations.


3. Since the start science was captive of “the reason”
   
   The necessity to cover its operating costs rendered science captive of “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”. Taking the US as example we observe that, until this very day, the financiers of science are predominantly businesses and the federal government which are the institutional servants of Western big capital holders.

 

This graph (1) visualizes how the financing of science is originating, nearly exclusively, from state and business institutions that are owned (2) by the biggest capital holders. And the fact is that the financing of an activity, over the long haul, gives the originator of the finance the overriding power to de-facto decide what the money will be used for. Science in finale is captive of the biggest capital holders. And it is in this sense that science was made the instrument of “the reason”.

But there is more to this than the sole instrumentality of science. The fact is that the rationality upon which the scientific method was conceived is the rationality of “the reason” that is so dear to capital holders ! Science derived indeed from the rationality of “the reason” that, over the centuries, had been expanding to all there is under the sun. In other words the rationality at the root of rationalism and science is the rationality of “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” !

A little bit of history will be necessary to clarifying how rationality is identical to the paradigm of Modernity.

 

 

5.1. Propitious antecedents

The new paradigm of Modernity emerged in a very particular context that shaped the cultural continuity of the 6 centuries of Early-Modernity. But to survive, in the context of a fundamentalist belief in the worldview of Western Christianity, the paradigm had to remain unspoken. I will now concentrate on the 2 most important factors that have laid the ground-work for the emergence of the paradigm of Modernity : — Augustine of Hippo — the ingredients that unleashed a chain reaction of causes and effects (3).

5.1.1. From Augustine of Hippo to the Franks

It is generally considered that he Roman Church of the fourth-century had four "Doctors" or intellectuals who dominated the intellectual life of the time and who assumed the bulk of the religious unification. St. Jerome's translation of the Old Testament, from the Torah, became the authoritative version of the creed while Pope Gregory the Great, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine of Hippo weighed heavily on the vulgarization and the spread of the creed to the believers.

Augustine’s sermons and commentaries permeated the medieval preaching manuals. His ideas were thus spreading far and wide. He was largely influenced by Plato’s philosophy and Aristotelian metaphysics which presented the Christian God as the absolute cause of everything which rendered him — omnipotent and the essence of all power — omniscient and the essence of all knowledge — and the essence of all Truth.

Augustine preached openly about the need for Romans to plunge in Greek philosophy and his sermons imprinted a lasting impression about the dualism of Aristotle that was at the root of his notion of the final cause that interrupts the need to search for a further cause in the chain of causality. That ultimate cause, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, is the love of god.

As mentioned here above the message of Augustine permeated the medieval preaching manuals and this is how the dualism of Aristotle reached the Franks among whom the concept resonated profoundly for reasons that are still not well understood. Alastair Crooke says the following about Frank dualism :

"These contours to European ideology, as they emerged during the French revolutionary era, largely were cast by the Franks in the period before, and after Charlemagne. It was then that the doctrine of racial superiority arose (‘others’ were ‘barbarian’ and Pagan and served only as slaves). It was then too, that outward, predatory expansionism (the Crusades, then colonialism) was embedded in the European psyche.

The Charlemagne era further cemented an unbridgeable social schism. The Frankish oligarch in his castle; his Frankish bishops inculcating his villein serfs, living by the foot of the castle, with vivid fear of eternal Hell. To which, the non-elect was pre-destined, unless improbably, they gained the grace of God. This nascent Frankish ‘idea’ was precursor to how we Europeans are today: the sense of absolute superiority; of belonging to an elect; and Europe’s class divide – are today’s shadows from that totalitarian era. (4)

The etymology of the word “Frank” effectively contains the dualist notion of racial superiority “Franks, as the conquering class, alone had the status of freemen in a world that knew only free, captive, or slave” :

"Frank (n.) one of the Germanic tribal people (Salian Franks) situated on the lower Rhine from 3c. that conquered Romano-Celtic northern Gaul c.500 C.E.; from their territory and partly from their language grew modern France and French. frank (adj.) c. 1300, "free, liberal, generous;" 1540s, "outspoken," from Old French franc "free (not servile); without hindrance, exempt from; sincere, genuine, open, gracious, generous; worthy, noble, illustrious" (12c.), from Medieval Latin francus "free, at liberty, exempt from service," as a noun, "a freeman, a Frank".

A generalization of the tribal name; the connection is that Franks, as the conquering class, alone had the status of freemen in a world that knew only free, captive, or slave. " (5)

In “The Continuum of the societal cultural field I argued that dualism originated in Western Christianity. The fact is that dualism does not resonate exclusively with the Franks it also resonates profoundly with the Anglo-Saxons !

5.1.2. Necessary ingredients and chain of causality

All the necessary ingredients were assembled in the context of South-Western Europe in the 12th century that would set in motion a chain reaction of causes and effects which drastically changed the course of world history.

The emergence of Modernity in the land of the Franks was the unintended outcome of an evolving contextual setting that could simply not have been designed nor planned beforehand. That particular context was the result of the convergence of multiple factors that interacted among themselves during the 9th-11th century in the South-Western part of Western-Europe.

These factors were like the necessary ingredients, of an emergent process, that converged in the right time, and in the right place, where they found the appropriate energy to power an evolving process. This process unfolded, as a result of an uncontrollable chain reaction of causes and effects that gradually pushed a paradigmatic shift in the human perception of the world.

I gave a presentation in “Modernity. Part 1” of these ingredients and of the chain of causality they set in motion. Here is a sketch of that presentation :

1. Necessary ingredients
   • 1.1. Western axioms of civilization
   • 1.2. The 5 stages of individualism
   • 1.3. The fall of the Roman empire
   • 1.4. The Medieval “Climate Optimum”
   • 1.5. The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages
   • 1.6. Revitalization of old cities and emergence of new ones
   • 1.7. Local and regional markets
   • 1.8. Impact of bettering economic circumstances


2. A chain of causes and effects
   • 1.1. The pope’s call for the crusades
   • 1.2. The accidental discovery of luxury goods
   • 1.3. The possession of luxury goods changes material life
   • 1.4. The desire to possess such luxury goods unleashed a new economic demand
   • 1.5. Discovery of the hazards of long distance commerce and need to remedy their intolerably high risks
   • 1.6. Copying the practices of Arab and Chinese merchants
   • 1.7. The display of richness, by long distance merchants, unleashed envy and the emulation of “the reason” by all
   • 1.8. Western-Europe morphed institutionally into Nations-states that continuously raped the world

5.2 The rediscovery of Aristotle and his 1277 condemnation resulted in a major boost of rationality  (6)

Universities were new institutions, that copied the focus, of the Muslim “Houses of Wisdom”, on the formation of knowledge (7) but its professorial corps was still mostly composed of monks and priests who were detached from cathedral schools and seminaries. This was assuredly a rare combination of the old and the new that called for a clarification of the role and finality of knowledge.

There were no discussions in these new universities about “the merchants money”, nor about its capital importance, nor about “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”. These notions were still unknown to all at the exception of some long distance merchants and their bankers who would occasionally write a word or have a talk about it. That’s how we find traces of the word capital that permit us to situate its origin in the 12th century High-Medieval Period.

These merchants and bankers were living and working among themselves at a distance from the large majority of citizens who were toiling the land. But their success, and perhaps more importantly, the money they were bestowing on luxuries was impacting the minds of the nobility, the high-clergy and the “burghers”, or the city-people who were active in crafts and commerce. Their material richness was generating a diffuse envy that somehow unconsciously validated the process that allowed these merchants and bankers to accumulate their richness in the first place.

Over the centuries the spread throughout Western European societies of such a diffuse validation, that started in the ending years of the High-Medieval Period around 1,150, pervaded the thinking of the high clergy and of academics in universities. But what was merely an unconscious validation allowed merchants and bankers to accumulate their richness while keeping hidden from the public conversation the shift that was slowly taking place, from the paradigm of “the belief in Christianity”, to “the belief in the reason”.

While this validation was operating unconsciously in the minds it was nevertheless fostering real outcomes that were impacting the thinking of all throughout Western Europe. Thomas Aquinas' notion of “human participation”, that augments the field of the Eternal Law of god, emerged right out of this validation and spread from Paris to London and to urban Western-Europe.

Universities became centers of learning and of societal change but the Church remained the most important patron and repository of European scientific and scholarly thinking till long after the Renaissance and the Reformation. The Christian creed was now being driven mostly by the debates in the new universities instead of the traditional cathedral schools and seminaries.

The first batch of translations in Roman, from the Arabic version of old Greek Classic works as well as translations of newly discovered works by Muslim scientists and philosophers, reached South-Western Europe during the 12th century. The debates about these works opened the intellects to new horizons and the economic, cultural and intellectual paradigm was slowly moving away from a traditionally closed Augustinian view of Christianity toward a more open Thomist view of the creed.

5.2.1. God’s Eternal Law is augmented by human participation

Under the Augustinian creed belief transcended rational principles and the Aristotelian absolutism, that is posited as the “ultimate cause” in the dualism of the “Metaphysics”, found a home in the realm of Christianity.

The debates in the universities, during the High-Medieval Period, slowly eroded this Augustinian absolutism. Thomas Aquinas appeared one of the principal artisan of that change and the church gradually recognized his role in actualizing the creed to the air of the time.

Augustine of Hippo believed that the word of god, as revealed in the books, is governing all creation and he called god's creation the Eternal Law. Thomas Aquinas wisely added that in shaping reality the Eternal Law gets augmented by “human participation” which naturally adapts the context of the day to the eternal principles. Thomas viewed these eternal principles as “the first principles of life” and he thought that the natural adaptation of the context of the day to these eternal principles was best reached through logical thinking.

In Thomas’s thinking natural law is derived from logic and is applied by governments to societies. He stipulated that human behavior, human thinking, has to be directed by divine law as revealed in the Christian books and as such he posited that nor natural, nor human law, can ever be adequate by itself. His words have naturally to be understood in the context of his time but their actual meaning is that the new paradigm residing in “the reason” can not derogate ”the divine Eternal Law” that in today’s language is best translated as “the first principles of life”.

Thomas believed that humans have a natural capacity to know many things without the need for divine revelation. And he assimilated not only Aristotle’s metaphysics (dualism and the ultimate cause) into Catholic orthodoxy, as Augustine had done, but also his physics which over the following centuries would focus the rational on materialism.

The most important intellectual contribution of Thomas Aquinas, to Early-Modernity, was to complement the eternal law of god with the natural law of man. This was a master stroke indeed ! Depending where one stands Thomas’ contribution — or allowed the survival of Christianity under Modernity — or definitely handicapped the formation of Modernity as the 'complete' worldview of the new emerging age of the rational.

And, de-facto, Modernity has always acted since then as if it were an 'incomplete' worldview. Philosophers might have declared religion dead but they were thinking along those lines because they had misunderstood and overstated the real nature of Modernity in the first place.

But we have always to remember that “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” becomes an acting principle solely after the mental acceptance by the capital holder that the transformation of money into capital is the ultimate rationality in capital accumulation. And because the process is so highly effective at amassing richness it has been expanding over the whole span of Modernity.

“The reason” guides people and helps them to accumulate financial returns that they eventually transform into new investments. And the success of the practitioner signals to her of him that ”the reason” contains the ultimate rationality. This rationality is rooted in an abstraction which necessitates a mental conversion to become operational. As a matter of fact it is peoples’ thinking, behavior, and actions that operationalize the abstraction. Without human mental conversion the nature of the abstraction would forever remain stuck in a non-realized potential.

5.2.2. The reason subordinates nature

In Christian tradition nature, or the material realm, is viewed as the opposite of God, or the spiritual realm, and in that sense it is thought that nature can not be helpful in advancing the human spiritual search but its material temptations of humanity can eventually be hostile. In contrast Western Renaissance separated humans from nature which it viewing as a field from where to extract resources and so, as Western science today, it thought that humanity had to study, explored, and exploit this field.

Both Christianity and the Renaissance had thus a dualist approach of nature. For Christianity the duality was between human spiritual perfection and material temptations while for the Renaissance it was between me me me and its extraction of resources from "a nature other". Christianity, as the Greek, viewed nature as an organism imbued with life and intelligence. For the Greek that intelligence was proper to nature while Christianity thought that it was the intelligence of god. In contrast the Renaissance viewed nature as a machine that is animated by the force and mind of god.

Life for the Greeks was not driven by machines their worldview was rooted in the observation of the recurring characteristics in the thinking and actions of individual human beings. And nature was thought to be possessed by similar characteristics. In contrast the High and Late-Medieval periods as well as the Renaissance were driven by machines and the worldview was thus rooted in a machine vision of the world. In such a worldview the human body and nature could not be viewed as anything else than machines that are powered and ordered by god.

In the world of the European Renaissance “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” was thus bound to associate with Christianity in order to maximize the extraction of resources from the natural machine. 

5.3. The reason imposes its rationality on all (8)

Once “the reason” has been internalized, in the mind through mental conversion, its acts as a societal mirror that reflects the capital holders’ actions and financial success in the eyes of the others around them. That reflection in the societal mirror acts like a tactical principle that awakens the envy, and the affirmation of greed, in the viewers’ minds. Left free to proceed, over hundreds of years of practice, envy and greed have unmistakably shaped unequal social relations that fostered : — extremes in power concentration — extremes in social inequality — extremes in the externalization of side-effects that destabilize the habitat of life.

This is what I call “the paradox of Modernity” :

1. Modernity is the highest human achievement
   Without any possible doubt Modernity constitutes the highest human achievement in term of producing material goods and as such we have to recognize that it has reduced the burden of the individuals in producing their daily lives.


2. But that achievement came at a steep cost
   Lately we came to realize that, in parallel to that achievement, human activities unleashed a slew of side-effects that could possibly wipe our very own species from the face of the earth." (9)

Modernity was so radically successful that Westerners lost track of the big picture of what life is all about. They failed indeed to observe that “the reason” came at the cost of the capture of their minds and so they got blinded to the side-effects of their actions. Nature and “the first Principles of Life” momentarily tolerate deviance but at a certain threshold it gets wiped out !

5.3.1. Dualism forces the mind to exclude “the other”

Dualism forces Westerners to reject the humanity of “the other”. The Catholic church was well aware of the facts on the ground since the beginning of “the great discoveries” as is attested by the “Valladolid controversy" (10).

The church was aware that Western behavior was problematic but even Bartolomé de Las Casas who, during the “Valladolid controversy" was defending the thesis that Amerindians are humans after all, considered their cultural difference unacceptable and his solution was their conversion to Christianity through dialogue.

The difference with his debate opponent, who argued for their enslavement, was that he defended their humanity and rejected the use of force to convert them. But in finale both wanted the same thing : the conversion of “the other” while passing, under the rug, the reality that the European colonists were stealing the land and the resources of “the other” while destroying their societal ways of living.

Ugo Bardi thinks that this historical episode was determinant in provoking the future downfall of Christianity and he mentions as much in his article “The Collapse of Science” (11). In my view the downfall of Christianity was the reward for its attitude to “the other” ? Karma is a bitch indeed !

5.3.2. Not respecting the rationality of “the reason” gets punished and so a rationalist outlook on life was gradually forced in the minds

As I mentioned earlier “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” imposes a strict methodology. And playing loose with the required rigor is sanctioned by the loss of one’s capital. The fright of losing one’s capital disciplined the mind forcing it to automatically view things through the prism of “the reason”. And over the centuries “the reason” forced a change in the human outlook on life that appeared definitely as a tyranny of the practical and the rational over the spiritual.

This process ran approximately from 1,150 to 1,750. Yes for some 600 years Western European cognition, or at least that of the active elite that I call “the strong societal force” in my presentation of “the First Principles of Life”, got gradually driven toward a more rational outlook on everything. The 18th century witnessed the intellectual systematization of this more rational outlook. Philosophic rationalism and the emergence of science became instruments to satisfy the needs of capital for innovation and for submitting the populace to the tenets of this more rational societal undertaking.

While originating outside of the mind “the reason”, from the outset, forced the merchant’s cognition to process a satisfactory “transformation of money into capital” while forgetting about the big picture of how this process fits in the “First Principles of Life”. Going forward in time we observe that “the reason” molded an ever more practical and rational societal outlook that served the inner-need of capital to reproduce and grow ever further while ignoring the effects that this inner-need was having on “the First Principles of Life”. Note how powerfully those effects are backfiring in our present Late-Modernity!

What is perplexing is that the inner-need of capital and the inner-need of life are following a very similar reason indeed : — their first objective is their own reproduction — their secondary objective is their growth in size and complexity. But their essence is nevertheless fundamentally different :

1. Life is in essence the reason for our being here as individuals. And our being here as individuals is in essence the reason why our minds are pondering about reality.


2. Capital is in essence a conveyor belt that rewards the mind for engaging in a one-sided track which — separates the individual from the essence of her or his own being which is to ponder about reality — and which also separates the individual from the other individuals.

From its essence we observe that capital separates the individual from the essence of life. Seen from this perspective we come to the realization that the material rewards of capital lead to a dead-end ! Once we know this for a fact the choice is ours. But we had better be aware that any sane society would have the obligation to put aside those who search the material rewards of their conversion to “the reason”…

The fact is that we can’t avoid “the paradox of Modernity”. There is no satisfying clear-cut answer to untangle the knot, between the acting efficiency of capital and its capture of the minds which distracts human attention to its side-effects.

But more on that later. Let’s just observe here that what I call “the paradox of Modernity” was also what disturbed the conscience of Marx and of many others. But their critiques never focused on the rationality of Modernity which is “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”. Their approach was in essence moralistic. They thought that the negative aspects of Modernity, — extremes in power concentration — extremes in social inequality — extremes in the externalization of side-effects that destabilize the habitat of life, could be avoided. But their failure to focus on the rationality of Modernity got them captive of the paradigm. In other words the system they wanted to replace was not Modernity.

The concept of “Asiatic mode of development” was Marx’s intellectual recognition that socialism could only emerge out of capitalism. Marx’s political ambition was to advance the progress of Modernity from the private ownership of capital to a state ownership of capital that, in his eyes, was the sole way to correct the negative aspects of Modernity. So were all these revolutionaries merely stuck in a political tautology ?

The fact is that all anti-capitalists were rabid rationalists who did not understand that Modernity never was an all-encompassing narrative. And this explains why religions have survived as an answer, to the individual need for inner meaning, primarily among the populations of socialist and communist countries. I'll explore this subject more systematically in Volume 3.

Let’s just note here, as is suggested by Isabelle Stengers (12), that the capture of the minds by “the reason” is assuredly an act of pure “capitalist sorcery” !And, oh irony, the sorcery, at the end of Western Modernity, is that its only serious alternative is the Modernity of the rest of the world !

Yes. This is where we are now. The capitalist sorcery forces dualism and rationality to the whole world :

 

In other words the presently peddled alternative of the rest against Western unipolarity, or of the south against the north, invariably results in living under the same totalitarian rationality of capital, for, as I wrote in Part 3 about the morphing of the paradigm of Modernity :

1. The reason
   
   The paradigm of Modernity emerged, sometime around 1150, as “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” which initiated an era that ultimately evolved into rationalism, and science


2. The gamble
   
   In the nineteen-seventieths “the reason” morphed into “the gamble that is at work in the transformation of debt into capital” which opened an era marked by wild financial speculations that peaked with the total corruption of Western societies and the belief of their elites in their god given autocratic power to impose their scientific and technical remedies to all societies on earth and their citizens.
   
   The “gamble” comes to an end in these 2020ths with a total world debt reaching some 310 to 350 Trillion US dollars, as of 2022, while the available income streams, to pay for the charges related to these debts, are stretched to the limits and are force-capturing the financial means reserved to the operation of societal daily life...


3. Totalitarianism
   
   After the “gamble” comes crashing to its end, sometime in the 2020ths, human confusion will reign supreme over the entirety of the earth.
   
   Western big capital holders plan to surf on that confusion to counter the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia with a Western “totalitarian imposition of the transformation of nature into capital”.
   
   They started to plot the financialization of nature, with their servants, in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008 (13) and they think that, by claiming ownership of the services rendered by nature to the human species, they will generate ginormous income streams that will beat the returns gained by the industrial activities generated by the investments of Chinese state capital.
   
   Its architects are convinced that this plan is so other-worldly that everybody will believe it is fake news propagated by the Rest…

Both the West and the Rest presently subscribe to the same paradigm of Modernity that emerged in 12th century Frankish Western Europe which then morphed in the nineteen-seventieths into “the gamble that is at work in the transformation of debt into capital” !

The terminal episode of Late-Modernity is still hanging in the air and will most probably reach its conclusion sometimes during the coming thirties. But this terminal episode will most certainly play out very differently than what the West and the Rest have in mind. But more about that in Parts 9 and 10. 

Notes

1. "U.S. Research and Development Funding and Performance: Fact Sheet", Congressional Research Service. Updated June 29, 2018.

2. Business institutions are legally owned while state institutions are de-facto owned by capital holders.

 

3. A more exhaustive presentation is given in “Modernity. Part 1. Pre-Modernity was the context of Modernity's emergence” by laodan.

 

4. "The Masque of Pandora", The Strategic Culture Foundation, by Alastair Crooke. 2022-08-08.

 

5.  Frank in the Online Etymology Dictionary

 

6. This section is inspired from “Modernity. 2.3.1. Rediscovery of the Greek classics”. 

 

7.  Muslim houses of wisdom : see note 185 on page 204 of “Modernity”.

 

8. The text of this chapter was adapted from “Modernity confronts us with a paradox”. For notes and further info click on this link.

 

9. “Modernity. Let’s first observe that…”. See 1. Dualism forces the mind to exclude “the other” 

 

10. “The collapse of science”, The Seneca Effect, by Hugo Bardi.

 

11. "Capitalist Sorcery: Breaking the Spell", Palgrave Macmillan 2011, by Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers.

 

12. See notes 20 and 21 page 48.