Project Modernity has failed.
Tracing the wellsprings of the same to Western ‘Enlightenment values’, where reason, its handmaiden rationality, and individualism were harbingers of ‘progress’ and a new social order, the obverse seems to have happened.
Wars of choice in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran, after the so-called post-Cold War peace dividend, the excesses of globalism, global inequality, poverty, uneven economic development, and so on, social disorder, dysfunction, and anomie in Western societies, unhinged capital flows that promote consumerism as the ultimate ‘value’, among other things, all point to this.
While the irony is that the Global South is moving in this direction, lock, stock, and barrel, many across the West seem to be reclaiming their agency and autonomy. The overall trend, however, appears to have been toward conformism, a decidedly contra-Western ‘Enlightenment’ notion.
In the schemata of conformism, capitalism, its accoutrements, and proclivity, consumption and consumerism as the highest values, deviation from these normative ideals of capitalism engendered a divorce from Western democracy.
In other words, the social order was being shaped by capitalism and its ideals.
This percolated into political orders and systems in and across the West, with only a wee resistance offered by Scandinavian social democracies, despite all their other flaws.
With the link between democracy, democratic individualism, individual agency, and autonomy that inhered in these being broken, capitalism, which morphed into globalism, became the dominant ideology of a post-Cold War world.
All its perversions, including the fraying of the social contract, were justified, almost thoughtlessly and cavalierly, as the apogee of ‘rationality’ and ‘reason’.
The Pied Piper of capitalist modernity led peoples to the ‘abyss, where each peered and jumped into it’. Anything that resisted, reflexively or consciously, and anyone who refused to be ‘blue-pilled’ by this Matrix, was not only seen as deviant but also labelled ‘irrational’ and ‘insane’.
As for the former, the Islamic Republic of Iran was deemed and labelled the paradigmatic instance of the same, and within both the West and the non-West, those who questioned this were subjected to the same labelling and were also occluded, marginalised, and invisibilised.
Both broadly and in terms of aggregates, specifics, and the individual level of analysis, all this meshes with the work of the great scholar, analyst, and critic of power, Michel Foucault.
Foucauldian analysis and critique were perhaps at their most eloquent in his lucid thesis, ‘Madness and Civilization’. In this remarkable work, Foucault postulated that ‘madness was not biological, it was, in fact, a social construct’.
The French philosopher periodized Western societies’ approach to ‘madness’ in terms of a pre-modern, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment one.
In the pre-modern schema, the ‘mad’ were integrated into society. In the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment periods, the ‘mad’ were viewed as ‘deviants’ and ‘castaways’. The instruments and techniques of control for their ‘deviance’ were the ‘lunatic asylum’ and the power to define exercised by the psychiatrist.
Over time, these techniques seem to have been appropriated by states and powers that be across the world.
In a post-Cold War world, where capitalism became the dominant ideology, and where states gradually became auxiliaries to it, conformity to capitalist ideals became the new ‘order’, and any resistance to it was seen as ‘deviance’.
In Plato’s ‘Ship of Fools’, the crew and the passengers became something other than fully human beings with agency and autonomy, the actual promise of the West’s ‘Enlightenment’.
All this gels into dramatic and literary form in one of Shakespeare’s plays, ‘Hamlet’.
‘Hamlet’ is a play within a play, where the main protagonist is a self-aware hero. He tries to skirt around the conventions of a revenge tragedy by casting himself as a clown. Hamlet’s madness gives him the ultimate power to expose the imposters who seek to project a perfect image in society.
To stretch the argument further, the ideas of power and the potential for that power to corrupt are what tie together the various themes that ‘Hamlet’ addresses. This includes love, wisdom, and wealth, in the main.
In a nutshell, then, the themes and ideas that Foucault addresses, and that Shakespeare in ‘Hamlet’ brings forth and illustrates, are all interwoven and interrelated, the potential and reality of power to corrupt, with the same holding for money and wealth, the perversions of individual autonomy and choice, among other things.
All this has a searing resonance in today’s world, where Polanyi’s ‘double movement’ reaction to capitalism is emerging alongside the hegemony of capitalism. The ‘Unconscious Civilization’ is gradually, and hopefully, awakening from its deep slumber.
Within this paradigm, questioning these ideals, often labelled as ‘deviance’ and ‘madness’, jostles with attempts by people, mostly in the West, to reclaim authenticity, morally, economically, socially, and politically.
Again, from a schematic perspective, was, or is, Donald Trump the Hamlet pretending insanity and madness to speak the truth?
If he was, was he too ultimately swallowed by the enabling and totalizing forces of capitalism, to be domesticated and made ‘rational’?
If these totalizing forces of capitalism and capitalist modernity are so ubiquitous and powerful, is there a way out, an exit? Is the exit even necessary?
The answer to the latter is a resounding yes, but with a qualifier.
We humans, and the world at large, need ‘progress’ and ‘development’, but in an idiom that elevates the human and the humanity that inheres in each of us, not just the rate of return and profitability. Our humanness needs to be, and must be, reclaimed.
Can this be done?
I can only answer this from my own vantage point and perspective, and this applies to me.
My quest, a circuitous one, leads me back to faith and God, the anchor that can provide both stability and psychic closure, thereby imparting meaning to life.
I do not know, and cannot know, about others, but I have loved, only to choose to forfeit that in youthful silliness.
I have not achieved much by way of worldly and material accomplishments, but I would like to think I have enough to remain content.
For me, ultimate meaning and closure can be attained by returning to God. The rest is just ‘false consciousness’.
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