The ebook "The Great Turning” is online.

 

I just uploaded the ebook “The Great Turning”. It is a compilation, and edited version, of my series of 10 articles under the same title. “The Great Turning” examines the contemporary through the lens of my recently published book “Modernity”.

The great turning (11)

10. A new worldview in After-Modernity

The historical combination of the societal disintegration of the West, with China’s economic rise to the top spot, have initiated the hope in the Global South of a potential liberation from Western hegemony. But, notwithstanding this potential, it is already a mathematical certainty that lifestyles comparable to the present ones in the West will never become available in the Global South !

The Great Turning (10)

9. The Fall of Modernity

At first sight one might think that what is at stake, in these two-thousand twenties, is the rejection of Western hegemony which, the large majority of citizens by now know is entirely geared toward privileging the biggest Western capital owners, their Multi-National corporations, and their armies of servants : — state bureaucracies and their units of force — the intellectuals and scientists — the managerial class — the professionals in charge of those technologies that sustain the systems of state and corporate institutions.

The Great Turning (09)

8. The Russian operation in Ukraine is a rallying cry against uni-polarity (1)

At the image of a train, whose engine has stopped running for lack of energy but that continues to move powered solely by the force of its physical inertia, a society, that is atomized, loses the existential power conferred to her by the initiative of her citizens, but it continues to move forward for some more time powered by the sole force of its societal inertia.

The Great Turning (08)

7. Western resistance to the shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia

Over the last decade the center of gravity of the economy-world has been shifting extremely rapidly to east-Asia. But, as the graph hereunder illustrates (1), that shift is in reality no more than a return to the historical normality of these last 2,000 years.

The Great Turning (07)

6. ‘separation – rationality – scientific knowings’ / ‘interconnectedness – pragmatism – knowledge’

Content of this article (8000 words)

6.1. Animism = ‘interconnectedness – logic of pragmatism – traditional knowledge’
6.1.1. The reduction of individual suffering
6.1.2. Institutional reproduction of the societal group
6.2. Modernity = ‘separation – rationality – scientific knowings’
6.3. knowledge versus science
6.3.1. About the finality of knowledge and science
6.3.2. About the nature of knowledge and science
6.3.3. science and rationalism versus knowledge
6.3.4. How knowledge got kicked out of the picture