The scourge of post-modernism
Anyway, this goes around something I've been thinking about a little bit (Actually, more than a little bit) and well, I just wanted to share my thoughts about it, even if I have to do it in English, something I find preety hard to do, because you know, writing this kind of stuff in a non mother language is not exactly easy. Good thing, though, I have a nice poem related to what I wish to expose (By Luis Eduardo Aute).
"Back to order" is the spirit of these times
and its matter, all the silence of its crimes,
market prophets blessing final Histories,
show-biz vampires sucking blood from realities,
wall street churches built on homeless walls and streets,
entertainment celebrating thought´s defeat...
To make a long story short, we all know more or less what has happened before the time we came to the world, that means from ancient times up to now, I guess we all have a basic idea of the periods. And this is, on the 18th century, we can find the philosophical idea of Enlightenment. What is enlightenment?
According to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.
This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! (Full manifesto here). Basically, we can say Enlightenment is a philosophy of emancipation from that which has been alienating humanity, this stands for the power which attempts to idiotize the people in order to mantain itself, be it absolutist state or religion that will not contemplate the idea of free-thinking (In other words, chick.com). Even though the project of Enlightenment started in the highest classes ("All for the people but without the people") it sooner started moving among those who were submited to power, all with the help of some defenders of change, such as the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, famous for his theory on social contract, his ideas on pedagogy and his popular revolutionary speech "A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of The Inequality of Mankind". I don't want to talk much about it because I would make this topic boring, and that is not my intention. Anyway, so at the end, it all resulted in the French revolution, 1789, where the monarch Louis XVI got his nice head chopped in the guillotine.
And this is how humanity is supposed to be: Prometheus. In a nut shell, Prometheus is the man who dared to rebel against Zeus in pro of humanity, the man who cheated the gods and stole fire to give it to humans. Prometheus is a fighter, a wolf, the destroyer of the order which alienates humanity as the Gods keep the fire for them.
The rest you more or less know. Through the 19th century we saw lots of revolutions, it was in 1830 where the famous revolution so brilliantly potraited in Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables" or Declacroix's "Liberty guiding the people". Then, of course, we got the revolutionary storm of 1848, where the most relevant thing would be the whole Paris commune thing (Yes, Paris is an amazing city). In this revolution there was a man known as Karl Marx: it was in this time where he learned about communism and the ideas of utopia previously exposed by other thinkers. Utopia was term first used by Thomas Moore to describe a perfect society, and it comes from the Greek "u topos" (No place).
This was the start of a new social theory based on Enlightenment: even if before the whole concept of communism existed, it was Marx who developed it further. According to Marx, who lived in the extreme capitalism of the industrial revolution, history progressed through fight of classes, which lead to a change in the infrastructure of society (means of production and organization) that formed to the suprastructure (culture and thought) that influenced on the society of individuals. This is why he thought a change on the infrastructure would lead to a change in the culture, and this is why revolution was a way to make man progress. About this, my personal opinion is that Marx forgot to keep in mind capitalism can wisely adapt to circumstances and is more dangerous than he could have ever predicted (I will go into this later).
I would like to refer now to Erich Fromm's "Marx's Concept of Man", where he refers to the current falsification on the concept of Marx: "It is also discussed that his socialist paradise as the center of millions of men submited to an all-powerful state burocracy, that have renounced to their freedom to obtain equality; this "individuals" materially satisfied have lost their individuality and have been transformed into millions of uniformed robots and automats, ruled by a small elite of better fed leaders". The truth is that socialism and communism are in fact philosophies born from Enlightement, in fact, the objective of Marx was the spiritual emancipation of man, the liberation from the chains of economic determinism, the restitution to human wholeness, the finding of unity and harmony with other humans and nature.
Of course, along with Marx's theory also came Mjail Bakunin's anarchy, another interesting social theory that clashed with marxism in the first International. Truth is, both anarchy and communism have emancipation as their objective, and both believe in the supression of the state as a way to achieve (Contrary to popular thought, "communism" is a society without state while "socialism" is the period of proletariat dictatorship). I do not want to discuss which is better here, I have problems with both, not with the objective, which I fully agree with, but with the idea of if it can be taken into practice.
Back to the brief history thing, the rest we know: 1914, World War I, and in 1917, Russian revolution, where Lenin brought down the regime of the tsar and started with state capitalism, a system where people where supposed to be equal but means of production still kept with the alienating work denounced by Marx. This system was kept "temporally" to stop what according to Lenin would be the sinking of Russian economy. Yeah, whatever, actually I am closer to believe he did that to mantain in power. Anyway, so Lenin died too soon, and then Stalin managed to reach to power through doubtful means. We know what happened after: An alienating regime of terror and absolutist power.
On the other hand, we got another system that though mankind could progress, only it did not look exactly for emancipation. Fascism believed the ruler knew how history would progress, and thus this leader had to guide the people to glory.
OK, this leads to World War II: The holocaust, the atomic bomb, the killing...it made the 20th century the most bloody century ever. This also affected in philosophy, causing a great depression on the thinkers, you just need to read Jean Paul Sartre to see that. According to many, the images of Auschwitz are the evidence: Enlightenment has failed.
It was not until 1968 where in Paris, again, there was revolution. This time it was by hand of the students, then the workers, who wished to bring down the capitalistic democracy leaderated by Charles De Gaulle. This revolution, started by Daniel "The Red" Cohn-Bendit and supported by thinkers like Sartre or Marcuse, is the only we have against society of well-being. However, it failed.
Now we take a little jump across the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution (1959), the Pinochet coup d'etat (1973), Videla's rise to power (1976) and go to 1989, in the fall of the Berlin wall. For many the fall of the Berlin wall was something to celebrate, it really lead to a progress for the people who had been opressed by the tyranical Russian goverment. Yet ironically, this fight for freedom was also a symbol of a new historial period: post-modernity. And here we are. With the "communist" block having fell, capitalism is now an imperating system: We are facing the instrumental reason, lost of horizon and individualization that leads to narcissism.
And that is the new man. For Francis Fukuyama, the fall of the wall was "the end of history". Man is no longer Prometheus the fighter, but Narcissus, who looks at his own image in the mirror, or maybe Sisyphus, condemned to repeat the same scheme over and over in hellish routine.
For post-modernism, there is no fight to keep on, because it would lead to more wars and killings. Lets just mantain what we have, that is, representative democracy and capitalism. We do not need more fight, more disorder, we should go "back to order".
Right wing eagles flying over legal theft,
only anger of distress is all that´s left,
racist raiders are the winners of the race
and the darskins ride the horses of disgrace.
If you think twice, you may be called Bertold Brecht
and that poet is somehow not too correct...
This idea, naturally, is friendly with neoliberalism, friends of capitalism.
Basically, we are now facing what I call an ideological crisis. People do not seem to believe in nothing. Yes, this is where I wanted to get, this four pages of history and philosophy are just a background to this part. By looking at the lyrics of the song coming along this topic, you can see how it attempts to describe post-modernism. Yes, entertainment is celebrating thought's defeat, and we seem to forget the big picture to concentrate on the little acts of a president. A president fails? We can change it! Yeah, sure, but this is not the problem, it's the whole system that alienates. It is dehumanizing, it is alienating, it is like the realization of the anti-utopias predicted by Orwell (1984), Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451) or Huxley (Brave New World). Of course, not literally, taking things literally would be too easy. This books present a society where the secular explotation of man for man has becomed a new way of domination of humanity. When Friedrich Nietzsche talked about the death of God, the end of alienation to the idols, he said there was the possibility for the superhuman, the emancipated man, or the Last Man, that who would fall into nihilism, believing in nothing, and would only look for "pathetic well being", or in other words, the search for having instead of being, the modern man of consumerism: Once, humanity was a miracle of God, now humanity are producers and consumers. We are facing the decadence of thought, the fall into the instrumental reason and the market economy. Let's have fun, let's not think. Homo sapiens, they say? Homo stultus, I think is more suitable.
We are facing unsustainable alienation, total and powerful, globalized. We are at last haunted by the monsters of reason Goya talked about, we are in the decadence of the philosophy that makes passion out of life. "The light is buried by chains and noises/ in impudent challenge to science without brotherhood./For the slums have people who shake sleeplessly /like new dawns of a bloody shipwreck." wrote the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca when seeing the dehumanization of New York, back in 1928, fearing it may extend everywhere, as it has now. "Go to the forest and remember what your people forget", he begged to a child sick with cancer. What your people forget, or what everyone seems to forget. Who cares about the death of poetry and the end of utopia? We are so free now! (Sarcasm). And nature is there for us to destroy it, and society, what is the objective of society? Production! All that matters: Man is a producer, consumer, and narcissist.
Swords of wisdom are the keepers of the key,
sin redeemers selling heavens on TV.
Crooks and thieves will have you begging on your knees,
that´s the bargain if you want to get your fees.
Lady Rainbow, all your colours have been sold,
tell me Beauty, are you worth a pot of gold?
And what now? Where theare we? Sheep? Where did the wolves go? Terrorism, market, black gold, entertainment, culture made industry...and thought? Where the
Well, so this is more or less the world we live in, in a nut shell. I still have many things to explain, yet I do not wish to continue, since this topic is long enough as it is, I save it for the replies, if there are any replies.
Without love, without soul,
without heart, without mind...
In this grave new world,
deaf and dumb and blind.
There where the State ends starts the man that is not superflous: There starts the song of what is necessary, the unique and irreplaceable melody.
There where the State ends- look there, my brothers! Can't you see the rainbows and the bridges leading to the superhuman?
So spoke Zarathrustra.
