by Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture:
We’re living under the fog of a World transitioning to a radically changed way of imagining itself, amid the open sluice-gates of psyops.
We’re living in the fog of a war in Europe. We’re living too, in an economic fog of war, obscuring those who are sound, and in contrast, who it is who can no longer afford themselves, and thus are living on borrowed time. We’re living too under the fog of a World transitioning to a radically changed way of imagining itself, amid the open sluice-gates of psyops.
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And transitioning the World is. Let’ try to clear the fog a tad.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II suddenly brought home – thanks to those replayed early newsreels of a young Queen in India and ‘her other colonies’ – that it is not only the world that is in change. It comes as a physical shock to recall, embedded in those newsreels of just one woman’s life, just how completely the West itself is changed.
Moving up a level, we see from those earliest clips, those secure, striding figures, confidently inhabiting another ‘reality’. They breathed out the air of the European Enlightenment and Rationalism. But not for long – for then came the push-back: ‘post-modern’ scepticism for ideals per se, for big ideas and conceptions; and utter disdain of Reason. Individual subjective mental process and consciousness-altering experience was the litmus for life ‘experience’ (the Woodstock era).
Today, the West has stepped yet further away from ‘what it was’. It is now an ideological battlespace, peopled by zealots who will firmly assert: ‘There is no ‘other’ to Ukraine’; ‘there is no ‘othering’ to Putin’; ‘and I will not ‘other’ the de-fossilisation of our world’ – that is, only their opinion is right. It is a battlespace which pointedly ‘cancels’ rationality and dialectics, and has created a distressed, fractured West, struggling to give meaning to itself.
The point here, however, is about that which has not changed. The earlier West may have become almost unrecognizable to itself today. Yet a part of that earliest legacy still hovers in the foreign policy background – almost wholly unaltered.
Foreign policy ‘bedrock’ remains framed around the Enlightenment and Scientific Rationalism ideal. A missionary project, based on the notion that as science ‘was neutral’, this inherent quality of neutrality had the power both to ‘free the world’ from its fetters of religion, cultural norms and ‘superstition’. And to serve as the pole around which the West might unite the world. It remains thus today.
But one big problem is that Enlightenment Science is far from neutral. It tilts; tilts in a direction that is antithetical to much of the rest of the world.
The western Scientific Revolution took, at its core, a hypothesis that “the cornerstone of the scientific method, is the postulate that nature is objective”. This postulate was asserted, whilst openly admitting simply that this definition amounted to “a systematic denial” that ‘true’ knowledge might be also reached through interpreting the world differently: as possessing latent meaning, direction, and purpose”.
The world thus was to become mere ‘matter’, reduced to inert, meaningless ‘dust’ – and inevitably, given this definition, ‘Man’ becoming the sole agent of transformation, and sole giver of meaning to our cosmos.
Jacques Monod, (a Nobel scientist), noted in his 1971 essay, Chance and Necessity, that this Enlightenment hypothesis erased the core postulate of the ‘other sensibility’ that has nurtured all ancient cultures and pre-Enlightenment science: that the blueprint of life – DNA, if you prefer – threads through everything. All the great (and very rational) sciences of the ancient world regarded the world as literally pulsating with life – and far from inert.
Paradoxically, Monod acknowledged that the assertion ‘nature is objective’ is impossible to demonstrate. But he wrote that [anyway] the “postulate of objectivity is consubstantial with science, and has guided the whole of its prodigious development for three centuries. It is impossible to escape it, even provisionally or in a limited area, without departing from the domain of science itself”. TINA – there is no alternative.
The western foreign policy zeitgeist therefore, was – by definition – secular. And though this construct is metaphysically at odds with most religions – Islam being but one example. It nonetheless brought many young Muslims to a secular version of Islam (exactly as intended, though with unforeseen and explosive consequences).
The bigger picture here is that Rationalism, postulating ‘modernity’ as rigorously secular, has morphed into a coerced one-size-fits-all, economic and political system, by which all others be judged. A universal rules-based system, in other words.
But societies and peoples around the globe who have experienced the very worst rigours that this Enlightenment myth imposed upon them, such as America’s ‘forever-wars’ that have killed millions, have collectively now concluded that this western ‘myth’ which at first had seemed to promise a ‘new world’, but so often ended badly, would no longer ‘do’.
Some would, and do, argue that American or European Enlightenment ‘liberal’ humanism, with its presumed ‘good intentions’, has no connection to Jacobinism or Trotskyite Bolshevism.
But, in practice, both are crucially similar: They are secular versions of the inexorable march towards a utopian, redemption of a flawed humanity. Yet most civilisations do not accept history to be at all linear.
Nevertheless, towards the end of the 20th century (and sometimes, in some societies, earlier), there occurred (to borrow a phrase from Frank Kermode) this “sense of an ending”.
Liberal orthodoxies had fallen into radical self-doubt. And around the world, movements (sometimes covert), were beginning to be arrayed against the political and economic imposition of (a diversity) of hybrid, literal, scientific rationalities (i.e. in Russia and Germany). Other societies suddenly just leaped into unknown futures (Iran).
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