Modernity: Our Version of Empire.

1. Empire has functioned as the dominant political/economic operating system in the Western world for about 4000 years, since Pharaoh's Egypt.  Empire generally exhibits injustice and violence in the forms of:  a. social and economic stratification (patriarchy, racism, caste/class), b. military expansionism, c. a fetishization of economic growth, d. subservient religious institutions. 

2. For the last 500 years, we have called the prevailing version of Empire "Modernity."
3. Modernity expresses the characteristics of Empire in the following ways:  

• Humanism - While "humanism" sounds very enlightened and benign, under Modernity it means that human beings (by this it originally means almost exclusively white men) constitute the highest and best form of life, "the measure of all things," and absolute lords of the planet, with freedom to dispose of anything as they see fit.  No higher power exists in the universe.  Modern Humanism means Secularism.

• Rationalism - the human mind may completely know the universe by reason alone.

• Individualism - every individual human functions independently and autonomously.

• Materialism - only things that we can quantify, measure, and empirically verify exist. 

• Techism - humans have the right and responsibility to manipulate, transform, and commodify things in the world for their own benefit.

• Capitalism - "Benefit" means material wealth: capital, money, property, ownership, goods, possessions, and their ceaseless accumulation.  

• Progress - under human management, life necessarily continues to improve, advance, evolve.  Modernity focuses on the future; it demands "growth."

• Survival of the fittest - the best humans will naturally increase their wealth and power; those who have wealth and power deserve to rule.  Modernity uses different kinds of controlled violence to determine fitness: eg. adversariality, competition, war, asset measurement.

• Oligarchy - the class of the fittest individuals rules.

• White supremacy/eurocentrism.

• Colonialism - Those espousing this ideology have the right to conquer, rule, and profit from the work of every other life form on Earth.

• Secularism - Nothing has reality beyond the tangible, knowable, measurable, quantifiable, commodifiable world.     

4. Modernity, like every manifestation of Empire, cannot sustain itself.  Built on falsehoods of Empire, Modernity contains essential contradictions that doom it from the start.  Modernity has always exerted extractive and controlling violence towards planet and people.  While it talked about "democracy, equality, and human rights," in practice it always featured the hegemony of one class: white, male, property owners.  While it made progress including a limited number of more kinds of people in mainly the lower margins of the hegemonic class, Modernity has always demanded a cohort of usually non-white poor and working people to exploit.  It remains impossible to argue for the goodness of Modernity when we observe its results in ecological, social, and psychological devastation.  Modernity therefore disintegrates and collapses in turbulence and upheaval, confusion and insecurity.  We face changes we cannot anticipate and do not understand. 

4. Most people who feel as negatively as I do about Modernity want somehow to go "back" to an idealized better time (which could mean just an earlier era within Modernity or some pre-Modern age).  Therefore, they tend towards a conservative and reactionary perspective, even sometimes resorting to Fascism and other kinds of autocracy.  

4. But going back doesn't work.  History and time do not move that way.  We cannot escape our context.  We only attempt this through the application of extreme violence -- and it will inevitably fail.  Conservatism thus falls short as foolish, futile, and cruel.    

4. Liberals, on the other hand, tend to view Modernity positively, requiring merely a few technical tweaks to function more effectively.  They see a bright future in the intensified application of its avowed principles.  They point to the technological and social progress achieved under Modernity (mostly ignoring or discounting the cost or the uneven distribution of that progress).  

4. But problems cannot be solved from the way of thinking that produced them.  For example, we cannot grow our way out of an ecological catastrophe that results from the fetishization of growth.  Technology will not save us from problems created by the belief that technology will save us.  We cannot build communities through individualism that inherently rejects community.  Basically, humanity alone cannot solve problems perpetrated by humanity acting alone.  The myths, institutions, structures, ideas, and practices of Modernity cannot and will not help us overcome or even survive Modernity's ecological or economic catastrophes that came out of those myths, institutions, structures, and ideas.  To follow the liberal path will simply lead to a re-manifestation of Empire in some new, yet-to-be-named, post-Modern, expression.  

4. Instead of looking to an impossible utopia -- a conservative one that looks back to restore an illusory past or liberal one that looks ahead to an illusory future -- I suggest that we look elsewhere: Up.  To a "Higher Power," God, the Creator.

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