This is the abstract of a paper from the 2014 Jean Gebser Society conference. I cannot locate the whole of it online but would like to read it.
A Gebserian and Beckerian Look at the Extinction Vortex
Eric Kramer, PhD
We all know what it means to try to change from within, to kick a habit, and we are all addicted to the current techno-economic structures and institutions that promise unending progress toward a utopia of effortless and limitless wealth in energy, things, services, and most of all life. We dedicate ourselves to achieving what this world offers as rewards. And goal of all goals, the ultimate reward of progress is life everlasting. Technology promises to defeat death itself. That is why, for modernists, to question technology is to question their religion, their death-denying delusion, to be a negativist rather than a happy positivist. But as Ernst Becker observed, we are willing to do horrible things in our campaigns to defeat evil — death. Since we, especially we narcissistic moderns, see our own mortality as pure evil, then any activity to enhance life, fun, and leisure, and to prolong life, is justified as self-evidently good. And anyone who challenges that right to pursue happiness is more than a mere naysayer; such a person is on the “other side,” a minion of evil, an enemy of reason and of personal liberty and progress.
In recent centuries we have been changing from a tribal species to a super-tribal species. A major consequence is that relations are increasingly anonymous, impersonal, and disinterestedly objective. The universe is emptying out and dying. The vacuum that has replaced the thick association of spirit-beings, the space between things is clearly creating dissociation, a lack of empathy. When nothing is watching, we do not take care.
As humanity has moved from animism to pantheism to monotheism and finally the void, as “the people” have fragmented and shrunk to one tribe among many, down to the clan, down to the extended family, down to the nuclear family, down to the hyper-defensive individual who has to find him or herself, identity has become a major concern—at the same time cultures and species are vanishing. Difference is dwindling and monoculture is ascendant. Today Shanghai looks more like New York City in 1930 than Shanghai in 1930. More people in China speak English than people in the United States.
This process of homogenizing convergence, of modernization/westernization liberates us from associations and obligations (car-ing) and enhances material efficiency enabling us to perceive everything as essentially the same, as assemblages of proverbial “building blocks of nature” available to us for manipulation at will. The age of transcendentalism means that history, the plan, subsumes us all. We either conform or are seen as insane. This trend is now on the verge of reducing subjectivity out of existence, of “liberating” us from our uniqueness, our parochial selves. We have become an aggregate of competing individualists. The irony is that that is the grand modern ideology that encourages us all to pursue the same end — hypertrophic individualism.
This situation is absurd. As difference is eliminated so too is meaning. Our condition constitutes a hypertrophic humanism wiping out humans in order to advance humanity. Hypertrophy is the current obsession. On the one hand we have extreme positivism that, in its profound immodesty demands that only one interpretation of reality be allowed and on the other an equally dogmatic insistence that all interpretations are equally valid, that validity itself is not real.
Standardization and technology have exploded. One scale rules the world, mechanical clock time. Other scales such as currencies are slowly converging. Humanity has achieved great power especially in organizational regimentation. But it also makes for a very lonely existence verging on nihilism. For those who are able, consuming can offer some satisfaction. But nothing can replace meaningful human relationships. They are different from having a fetish for electronics, a house, car, or boat.
Standing alone with all else at our feet, humans have no equals, no companions within the ecosphere. Cultures too are hierarchized as first, second, third, and fourth worlds. Philosophies, where they are still recognized at all, are hierarchized with positivism reigning in this era of unchecked power. As Gabriel Marcel (1950-1951 Ger./2001 Eng.) argued, and we agree, everyone has a philosophy, a perspective but only critical self-reflection can make that apparent to us. On the one hand, when reduced to material bits governed by the inviolable laws of physics, human free will and dignity are eliminated. On the other hand, the drive to transcend ourselves also threatens human dignity and unfettered freedom demands that we become more responsible for ourselves. Independence is taking a profound toll.
Increasingly we even regard ourselves as nothing more than objects in space available for arbitrary self-manipulation at the levels of overt social engineering and genetics. Eugenics is one example.
Such dissociation (objective disinterest) involves all relationships, including those between people, and between humans and the rest of nature. Relationships become increasingly engineered and litigious. Because we are strangers to one another we have difficulty forming bonds. And time-pressure is all pervasive leading to phenomena such as speed dating—by the regulating stopwatch. Normative regulation of behavior has given way to institutional and script-based conflict resolution administered by professionals—the legal sphere. And the power-distance between people and between people and other animals has expanded enormously. We share less and less with the Other. In the magic tribal world for instance, shame and glory, joy and sadness, used to be shared among all of the clan, but today the sins of the father are not of the son and my money is mine, not my brother’s. Decisions and consequences become increasingly egocentric. Significant portions of a society can be depressed while other sectors blissfully ignore the situation because they are dissociated and distantiated from one another. Walls and distance or tele-surveillance proliferate. Incarceration is a growth industry. Personal security has become a fashion. Since we can no longer assume that we will come to each other’s aid, carrying hand-guns is not only thinkable but also increasingly commonplace. Welfare, the wellbeing of each one of us is increasingly privatized.
Spatial thinking dominates the modern mind. Alienation is the modern plague. It is rooted in geographic, economic, social and psychological mobility, and isolation—individualism premised on the modern sense of spatial thinking. Ernst Becker warns that ideologies that give us meaning against the night of nihilism are often defended with fanatical violence so that we do more evil in the preservation of the sacred than the evil we fear. Technology promises to deliver us from the ultimate evil, death and modern hypertrophic perspectivism (narcissism) sees no limits in pursuit of techno-utopia. The paradox is that this pursuit is actually killing not only us but our environment.
Conference
