Hypermodernity — The political is personal
The monumental “personal is political” argument put forward by late 1960s second-wave feminism and popularized by Carol Hanisch and her essay of the same name was a landmark expression of the challenge and shift away from a uniform (though distorted) understanding of progress and rights as had been posited in the western world up until the end of the World War II. What today seems so obvious that it almost quaint, was revolutionary all the same in that, much like all the other rights movements of that time, it called into question what was assumed to be a decades, if not centuries, long ascendency of society and culture that was moving towards an ever brighter future. This questioning of progressive modernity, the many movements pushing forward to lay claim to their identity within society and the rights they had hitherto been denied, as well as the dissecting of all the constructs that upheld this distorted and prejudiced modernity, is often considered to take place in the general environment of post-modernity, a blanket term applied to a wide range of aspects of western society. However, instead of an end to modernity and birth of some new reality or movement, the claim that the “personal is political” and other pushes for recognition seem, instead, to be thoroughly modern. To claim the rights of the individual — the focal point of the Enlightenment — to push for the recognition of one’s self by society through identity, to call out the injustices suffered thus far with the aim of taking one’s place within democratic society, either individually or as a group, is the push to have that society make good on its founding principles. Highlighting the faults in the thought constructs, the hypocrisy of blatantly prejudiced societies, the purposeful denial of rights — all these things are attempts to ensure that nations and their communities really are founded on the idea that all people are created equal, that human dignity and the pursuit of happiness are the cornerstones upon which society is built. The rights movements were not the end of modernity, they were a call for the true promise of progress, they believed in that paradigm, they were modernity proper.
That the personal is political is nowhere near revolutionary now, it is the truth of our societies, it is what defines us. The nature of contemporary western society and its accelerated fragmentation through the dissolution of, and belief in, the concept of progress, combined with the explosion of digital technologies and their effects on our self-perception, have led to a hyper-individualization of culture. Endless self-reflection and a marketing and advertising driven approach to most every aspect of life, down to our every social interaction, has led to a disconnect with wider national societies and their politics. That, combined with the flawed historical roots of our democracies, our ideas of progress, and the religious foundations and devotion they inspire in our understanding of progress, have led to identity driven politics where we seek out those who speak our specific truth and we can find no way to understand the arguments of those who we perceive to be our enemies. All these elements do not constitute some theoretical and cultural paradigm that followed a modernity which ended in the 1970s, they are themselves thoroughly modern concepts. The degree that personal identity dominates our everyday life, and how it is marketed at every second of the day are simply the accelerated form of what was sold to us in the past. In that way, we live in a “hypermodernity.” The civil rights movements were claiming rights that had been sold as self-evident, but obviously were not. In this hypermodern time, where everyone is increasingly aware of their identity, chosen or not, our very selves and every choice we make has been made political — the political is personal, it is everything we do. Our aggravation, our fear, our confusion, all stem from this development.
This whole idea of progress, individuality, and the questioning of rights is borne out of the concept of linear time and the European ideals of Enlightenment. That narrow European understanding, or interpretation, of a continuous flow of a monolithic history towards a future to be created out of the agency of humans, gave birth to the idea of rights that should be guaranteed so as to ensure the fruits of this progress, or access to the possibilities to attain these, are distributed fairly. With its roots firmly embedded in the Christian tradition, the human (moreover, white male) was made the apex of creation. As the Enlightenment picked up steam, thinkers such as Immanuel Kant now placed man at the center of the universe instead of God, and his faculties in this universe and world were infinite. The freedom and liberties of these men were sanctified and they could not help but see themselves at the head of a long column of humanity, marching forward from the dark past of ancient time into the bright future that the sciences were making possible for them. All the political movements that would come out of this line of thinking would have a distinctly religious quality to them. From the invisible hand of the market, guiding the righteous undertaking of commerce, the reverence for “founding fathers” and the poring over scripture in the form of constitutions or manifestos, socialist utopias where all men would be equal, to the racially pure, fascist future, where the Übermenschen would rule over their subjects — the divine calling was everywhere. Sciences opened up the world for humans to become divine, to change their world, to mine resources to supercharge their societies, and lay claim to divine rights such as liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness, and the brotherhood of man.
Fairly quickly though, it became obvious that these rights were still only granted to the few and that these few clearly implemented slavery and exploited class differences to attain further riches. All our modern struggles have been connected to a narrow interpretation of history and time as singular, linear, and progressive, though few have questioned the epistemological foundations. It has continued to be a struggle for millions to simply be given access to this progress, even when modernity has shown in its flawed nature through industrial genocide and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the old empires were in the final stages of their dissolution and the many African and Asian countries gained their independence, when post-war welfare states were failing, that the first flickers of doubt called into question the unified trajectory and the societies built on it. Add to that the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it became truly clear that so-called progress, whether capitalist or communist, could easily turn to annihilation within days. What is progressive modernity, this unified history and universe of knowledge unlocking the secrets of the world, if its two most shining examples can implement the most advanced scientific knowledge in the history of humanity to trigger the apocalypse over a relatively minor geopolitical spat? In the 1970s, the western world was hit by the oil crisis that struck at its long-held belief of a steady momentum forward, socialists throughout Latin America saw their movements crushed by military coups, while the communist states faced stagnation and starvation. Progress and the idea of human agency to achieve progress by revolution or otherwise increasingly began to show itself to be a matter of perspective and interpretation rather than historical fact. The failing of these grander, illusory truths made the discrimination and obstacles faced by minorities even more striking. Civil rights movements helped to pull back the curtain on the long-held belief of a singular march of civilization towards a bright and shining future as a one-sided interpretation of an all too familiar pattern from history — that of one culture emerging and, through the particularities of geopolitics and environmental conditions, coming to dominate and subjugate others. The stagnation of that time has continued and, with the onset of digitalization, the world as a whole has become very aware of the struggles of others, the effects of one society’s progress on others, and the gradual dissipation of the environment, as well as linear time, as a constant backdrop for humanity’s history, resulting in the loss of future.
Our perception of possibility has shifted distinctly due to the technologies at our disposal. With the Industrial Revolution came the harnessing of the powers of nature to provide us with super-human abilities to shape the world around us. We could literally move mountains, everything was seemingly possible, the horizon was truly wide open, and the future was anything we made it to be. It served as the ultimate evidence of progress and human ingenuity and led to the schism that was socialism, and the debate over what ends all this progress should serve. Today, we are living through the Digital Revolution, where we are creating machines that are faster and more accurate than humans could ever be, our cerebral capacities are being replaced. At the same time, these applications can only make use of what has been, the data and knowledge that exists. It does not open vistas; it digs deep canyons in our psyche. As such, the future has become blocked as we continuously and minutely manifest the present.
This disappearance of a reliable future as a result of technological innovation and the stagnation of progress on both the left and the right has left liberal democratic politics in disarray, with most political discourse devolving into finger-pointing, as well as shaming and blaming. The oft-cited Slavoj Žižek quote that it is easier for people to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism, misses out that this may be the case because communism showed itself to be such a poor option. Having spent the last hundred years in a bi-polar world, and having one of those poles shown itself to be wholly oppressive and inefficient, the western world is left staring at what it has left and unable to think of any other way to see the world and their societies. No grand conspiracy is needed to explain the human inability to understand the world surrounding it. The dominant paradigm of our world is failing, or has failed, and we are as yet unable to think outside of a progressive framework based in a linear idea of time and history. This combined with the acceleration of that phenomenon through the effects of climate change and now a global pandemic has revealed the transient nature of our conceptions of time and historical progress, as well as the dependence on stable environmental factors to ensure our societal structures or any debates related to them. We are slowly realizing that we have not escaped history to enter some forever paradise, nor do we exist outside nature, and the divine mission of progress can be made conditional at a moment’s notice.
The understanding of the limits of our own power, the inability to not be drawn towards the abyss despite all the presumed progress, the hollowness in claims to freedom and liberty by nations fighting fascism or communism who themselves systematically oppressed their own minorities, or where age-old colonial powers, are all elements of what was known as post-modernity and the ground from which so many theoretical frameworks sprung up to challenge a monolithic history and epistemological paradigms. The wide range of groups and cultures that came to the fore with their own perspectives and histories that had been, and were, running underneath, parallel to, or intertwined with, the dominant western narrative helped uncover many living and thriving perspectives which helped highlight what appeared to be an increasingly decrepit worldview. As more and more narratives challenged the hypocrisy of both democratic and socialist states, friction within the societies grew exponentially as groups called for their identities and individualism to be recognized and not subjugated by a dominant template. In our time of hypermodernity and digital acceleration, the promise of individual freedom, the promise of equality, the promise of a place in society with full rights is now truly being claimed by all and it is slowly becoming clear that all grand narratives can at all times be told from countless perspectives and with equal validity. Until now, they had only been recognized as sporadically surfacing to challenge the failure of an older paradigm. Though this kind of challenge to the status quo generally tends to be interpreted as stemming from the left, there is not much to distinguish their efforts or ideals from the right. The question then becomes why these two are so difficult to separate.
With an ever-growing number of issues being highlighted and debates constantly arising and changing shape in the face of democratic injustice or blunt authoritarian power, various groups from across the political spectrum argue their point based on positivist identities taken from the books of Enlightenment thinkers. Human worth and rights as a scientific fact, values as measurable and ascribable, all interlinked with the religiously infused, quasi-divine freedom of the individual. Of course, this is a necessity in societies that will only grant those people rights who can be integrated into their paradigms. To make themselves seen, heard, or even recognized as a legitimate group or individual worthy of rights, they must use the same tools as their erstwhile oppressors. The paradox this leaves them in, is that they can only be defined by an epistemology that was used to justify their subjugation. The expansion and shifting of these epistemologies require a malleability from the framework that is, in its current interpretation, fairly rigid and was never designed or meant to be dynamic. As these groups stake their claims in this paradigm, they delineate their identities and, in doing so, necessarily exclude other groups. The slippery slope of identity and individuality can be witnessed in the ever-expanding acronyms or adjustments to spelling and language. Individual letters are cause for fury, articles are denials of existence and centuries of harm. On the other side are those who dismiss all of it flat out, without considering the exceptionally long and often severely troubled history that many of these groups bring with them, as well as never questioning why these specific laws were laid down, yet the rights not granted to women, people of a different “race,” sexual orientation, and so on. This leaves each identity left to write its own history, and they do so using the dominant paradigm, with their own heroes and saints, and the religious fervor of a scorned people often leads to the fragmentation and hatred we see today (even within what were once singular, unified communities). This is true of all sides. The western, Enlightenment-based paradigm, embedded in monotheistic religion and its dogmas, combined with the western-scientific notion of measurable worth, identity, and truth, has led to multiple religions of progress, all warring for the divine paradise of equality. With capitalist, liberal democracy as a Catholicism of sorts, and the socialist spectrum as the Protestant beliefs, we see the various fragmentation and re-interpretation of the holy scriptures, be they Rousseau, Marx, Smith, Butler, Rawls, Keynes, or Rand. People have invested so much in the borders of who they are, that to blur these or even go so far as to admit a mistake, would be tantamount to blasphemy.
In the end, it seems that we are at the end of one age and the beginning of another. Older ideas of progress are dying, maybe they have been dying a long death since the end of the first world war. At the same time, in the face of this new, accelerated world, we have fallen back into the human default mode — tribalism. It could well be that we are simply in the middle of the revolutionary phase described by Richard Kuhn in which the old paradigm begins to fail, and as the friction mounts due to the obvious faults in relation to reality, we are poised to be shot forward into a new paradigm. The friction we feel is all the various groups using the same concepts to differentiate their identities that were designed from the toolkit of European thinkers to delineate their presumed uniqueness in history. Yet, this positivist politics does not, and cannot, add up. Facing the truths of the multiple perspectives that we exist in, has led to a last gasp defiance and struggle to reassert the monolithic paradigm, but it is simply not fit to deal with the world we live in, or is at least showing itself to be so. Ironically, or maybe not so much so, democracy still might be the ideal system. It can incorporate multiplicities, it is made to be imperfect, to be debated, to be readjusted. Once we move away from divine ideals, we may see that we need an imperfect solution that matches our vast deficiencies as a species. Only then can we adjust and improve. For now, though, we continue an intense struggle to make sense of the world we have created, and the socio-political and cultural multiplicities that are being uncovered and merged every day.
The cultural aspect is interlocked with every other progressive perspective as it is being wholly reshaped by digitalization and, through this ongoing shift, it is enacting a complete upending of our perception of the world. Digitalization has pervaded every aspect of our lives. It is the medium through which we now choose to see ourselves, others, and everything around us. It is our most trusted source of information, it is how we take in our surroundings, it is the source of our agitation and confusion, and both actively brings people together as well as pits them against each other to the point where people have lost their lives due to emotions invoked through it. It is a shift that is comparable with the invention of the printing press, but its effects are so much more varied, as it reaches into our thought processes at lightning speed and remolds how we understand ourselves. A large part of the confusion felt by many older generations can be attributed to the acceleration that digitalization has triggered in our relationship with culture and how younger generations interact with it. This too comes up against the idea of identity, individualism, and the elements that ground a community and society, leaving older ideas and concepts formed out of progress ineffective.
A cultural effect that accompanied the political stagnation and rise of so-called post-modernism in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, was the revival of times recently gone-by, cultural nostalgia for eras usually some 20-years previous. Be it rock’n’roll, psychedelia, mod, soul, garage rock, disco, or movies, TV shows, cartoons, hairstyles — the yearning for a simpler or more authentic time, an aesthetic that called from the not-so-distant past to infuse the present with meaning and stability. This came to its peak in 2000’s hipster culture, where it became mixed with a base note of irony and a myriad of social cues, symbols, language, and styles. Today, we live in what has become the “big now.” With the future blocked, we lack a possible ideal that dictates what could be the aesthetic of a bright tomorrow, onto which we can project our hopes and promises of today, we live in an ever-present in which the objective is to combine what has been to create a unique moment, identity, and art in the now. Social media platforms curated personalities, whereby fashion, and other past cultural pillars merely become means to an end with the overall objective being the peak experience of the present. The past is a treasure trove to pick and choose what sounds will shape the soundtrack to this platformed life; which specific accents will be set where in either movie, art, or fashion; what filter will suggest the right by-gone atmosphere for the momentary impression and emotion to be communicated. A continuous and ongoing revival that tries to scope out the smallest corner of every space so as to extract peak meaning in the present and offer balance in a shifting environment. With access to any and all culture at their fingertips, adolescents can access the entire history of any culture they want, no rarity or minutiae is out of reach. Movies, TV shows, infamous moments throughout cultural history, can be called up on YouTube, combined with fashion that speaks to the specific mood they are in, and then presented to an amorphous public audience. What were once particularly important cultural identifiers are accessories, culture has become a reservoir from which to piece together your hyper-individualized identity. Cultures — such as those of music, fashion, movies, and even humor — and life experiences themselves are resources, and daily life consists of the continuous micro-dosing of all these elements to remind oneself and others of who one is. No specific uniform or ideological stance need be associated with these elements. This completely negates older social groups, such as those formed from similar musical taste, and runs contrary to how people have been identifying themselves in western societies for the past 70 years.
The cultures and subcultures that had replaced older constants in human communities, such as religion or trade, are now being replaced by multi-dimensional, shifting realities. They appear meaningless, confusing, and even pointless to the older generations and the uninitiated but are simple reality to younger generations. Not to say that this is some new youth craze — this is the new reality, and it stands in stark contrast to the way we have seen the world until now. The cultural groups that gave people a home in the more secularized societies of the mid to late 20th century, are no longer relevant or exist solely to sell products. The depth of meaning that these cultures gave people does not fit into today’s world. That is neither positive nor negative, it simply is today’s reality. The problem this creates, however, is a loss of identity and meaning for entire generations. On top of contemporary conservatives that put their weight behind older ideas surrounding religion or the identity of the working class, there is a new group of former countercultural stalwarts who now also don’t belong and are not able to make sense of a world where the system they once railed against no longer exists, or exists in such a vastly different form that their now simple take on it does not carry weight.
It is the effect of the progress to date, the growth in general living standards, and the globalization of ideas that has led to the privilege of choosing which (sub-)culture will represent your personality. Ironically, it is the older progressive capitalism, and the digitalization it gave birth to, that have accelerated individualization and extra-group identities through the incentives driving advertising and marketing, thereby creating a feedback loop of styles and ideas that intertwine and mingle and cannot be understood with the previous paradigm. The old meaning that was infused to specific clothing styles, music genres, and lifestyles, simply do not apply anymore. With the future blocked, culture, and with it, societies, become battlegrounds for how best to view and act out the present. With both familiar and new challenges facing our species, and the growing realization that progress is just one of many perspectives, culture has become a less weighty arena, existing more on the surface to either distract or offer a backdrop, to give soft social cues or signal possible friendship, in a time where larger problems loom and demand our attention.
ECOLOGY
Arguably the most important of these issues is the question of our environment, as it constitutes the source of all the wealth and status that has made this modern and hypermodern world, as well as all the resulting conflicts, possible. Both the left and the right of our contemporary political spectrum continuously demonstrate how rooted our current paradigm is in a human-centered universe through their dealings with the environment. They are frameworks that only allow room for individual human agency and what can be achieved within the borders of an Enlightenment-inspired society powered by industrial-economic structures. The western perspective that espouses deep and unifying truths concerning humanity, and which has been exported to the world, is based on environmental, geopolitical, and societal conditions entirely specific to the last few hundred years. The consistency of this environment, which was only punctuated by local natural disasters, combined with the steady progress of scientific, industrial, and medical achievements, as well as the birth and growth of nations and vast empires (including business empires), resulted in nature being seen solely as a backdrop to our human history. Nature was conquered, tamed, bridged, climbed, or re-routed to demonstrate or serve human progress. Though our main focus these days is the destruction wrought by capitalist greed, anyone old enough will remember that the socialist paradises of communist Eastern Europe and Asia were grey and black landscapes where smoke belched out of factories built to power the tower blocks of smog-filled cities. Socialist ideals took as little account of the well-being of the environment as their capitalist counterparts. And this is in no way confined to the past — modern-day Communist China re-routes and dams enormous rivers, changing a continent’s topography to suit its specific needs; Ethiopia strangles the Nile; the United States constricts each and every one of its rivers — all leaving the less fortunate downstream to deal with the consequences as millennia-old sources of food and work literally dry up. Political ideals and the means of production to date have always served human needs, and human needs alone.
Modern-day socialist perspectives strain to incorporate ecological issues into their agenda as they have spent a century-plus arguing the case for the workers in industrialized societies — ones which are fast disappearing. They appear somewhat rudderless and grasp at various social issues to bolster their own relevance, or doggedly adhere to their age-old message of the corporate fat cats and the downtrodden. Though they are not wrong in highlighting wealth inequality, their inability to think beyond the harms of progress as we understand it, and open up to an approach that would truly be protective of large groups of populations through the protection of our environment is a further illustration of an idea too trapped in the time of its conception. Similarly, the classic conservative spectrum of democratic societies simply tries to pretend these worries are absurd — some hippie wish-wash that is a waste of their time. Once, however, they realize that this approach could hurt revenue, they begin to see the light and incorporate words such as “sustainability”, “conservation” and “green” into their press releases, annual reports, and ads. The fact that oil companies were some of the first to jump on this bandwagon should be cause for some doubt. At the same time, it is these changes that push conservative parties in some countries to finally adopt ecological issues into their agendas, even if it is only in the form of lip service. It could also be, however, that this is simply how change happens. That it is a disingenuous push to make sure the annual result of any given institution does not suffer to a greater extent that brings change, though we can see by the various versions of cheating on environmental regulations, and the frustration of many parts of populations, that this ecological push is still meeting a lot of resistance on multiple levels. At every turn, and in various forms, we see the inability of our thinking to grasp the fact that the actions of over seven billion people could possibly influence their environment. The epistemological tools we have been given do not allow us to truly understand the ramifications of our actions on non-human actors.
Still today, and despite the prominence of issues such as climate change and resource conservation, goals concerning a healthier society or personal freedoms take place in a realm characterized by the exclusivity of our place in history and the human condition as the apex of experience. Tempers are aroused not by the misguided use of the resources at our disposal, or a false understanding of our place in the world (even in human history), but more by the fact that not everyone is allowed to partake in the fruits of our great march into the future. This, however, is not likely to last long, as we will be facing greater challenges soon, most likely making contemporary debates look antiquated. People in the future might ask themselves why these different castes were having it out when the real disaster was already looming on the horizon, much as we do when we look at the world before the outbreak of plagues, wars, or the last days of great empires gone-by. We have yet to be able to look back at the various civilizational shifts and dark ages throughout history, all of which included an element of environmental change, and visualize how our future could be dissolving precisely because progress never factored-in nature. Though we will not be offering sacrifices, building monuments, or sculpting figures into the landscape to appease the gods, our beliefs will have been just as shuttered as that of any ancient religion. The fact that we have such difficulties in seeing ourselves as part our actual environment, to not see how easily earthquakes, droughts, tsunamis, or pandemics destabilize affluent societies, and how precarious all of our achievements are, displays that we have yet to come up with a socio-political paradigm that incorporates humanity into our own world without resorting to dogmatism, spirituality, or totalitarianism. The desperate state of today’s societies in the face of very old challenges reveals our inability to admit that progress is fallible, the grasping at unhinged theories to somehow make humans conspiratorially responsible for the weather or a pandemic illustrates the lengths we will go to not to give up on our place at the center of our world.
PSYCHOLOGY
Lastly, and in the face of global events and the growing extreme polarization in both ideas and actions, there is the issue of our general psychology as we face all these changes, issues, and events. Though understanding the psychology of events and groups is a quite progressive field in and of itself, and one which demands a certain level of privilege, it is of necessity to look at how we seem to be digesting all of this mentally. The wide spectrum of ideas and emotions on display in the world today — be they conspiracy theories, identity politics, protests, violence, and general confusion — are all utterly human and speak to pressures exerted on groups and individuals that are overwhelming and causing them to form their own shuttered epistemologies. In a world that has been governed, or at least, dominated by the sanctity of the individual and individualism, people, problems, and their politics can mostly only be understood in how they relate to personal rights, freedoms, and well-being. There are obvious exceptions, such as Asian community-based cultures, but even there, the understanding is that what benefits the individual is connected to what benefits other people that are similar to me (be that class-based or any other group), as we all move forward to a common promise. As the once uniform progressive trajectory crumbles, and we understand that nature can end to any of our so-called progress, history and even reality are up for grabs. In trying to understand the manifold trajectories and narratives that have been bubbling up over the last fifty years, and how they relate to our own identity and place in a global society, people turn to the only thing they feel sure of — their personal, lived experience. Add to that the digital proliferation, siloing, and deepening of information reservoirs — trustworthy and not — and the narratives become even more dynamic, feeding off each other or in opposition to each other. We are currently living through the maelstrom this has created, and the socio-political reactions speak to the general confusion of the human mind when confronted with the reality of a failing epistemological paradigm.
The answer we are currently applying has thousands, if not millions of historical precedents, we project the personal onto everything happening around us. Every event or piece of information seems to affirm what we already are or have become. What currently feels like the fracturing of societies, is the human practice of taking subjective experiences, views, and surroundings, and giving them objective characteristics and value. Isn’t this the de facto approach of all religion and creation myths? We can assume the various tribes of hunter-gatherers had their own specific truths and realities that explained and gave meaning to their very specific lived experience, and the geographies that shaped it, in the same way the monotheistic religions explained and built morals for the people living in what is today the Middle East. And this is not the sole currency of religion and myth, Enlightenment sciences and philosophy carried on this tradition — to such an extent that one can make the case that all knowledge-seeking endeavors have been triggered by a deep human insecurity and need to explain why we are either here or the way we are, or both.
Our much-lauded philosophies and modern deconstructions of the human condition are based on this foundation as much as any ancient religion, though their objectives are more shaped by modern individualism than older epistemologies. Why else would Ludwig Wittgenstein, who suffered from a stutter, elaborate theories concerning communication? Is it a coincidence that Michel Foucault, who was sent to a mental institution by his family on account of his homosexuality, would invest so much of his intelligence to chronicling a history of mental illness in society? Or that someone who practiced S&M would also be intensely interested in the dynamics of power and punishment. We see it in all the great thinkers when they invest their mind-boggling intellects to deconstruct vast histories and age-old societies in such a way as to answer looming and overarching questions which, on closer inspection of their personal lives, turn out to be very close to home or even attempts at the justification of their own being. All thoughts and epistemologies, both the most elevating and destructive, are deeply human and reflect the lives of those who bring them forward. This has never been truer than in the world today, a world based on the rights, freedoms, and liberties of the individual. The progressive paradigm that shaped the structures of this global civilization — be they colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, socialism — has ensured that the overriding struggle and objective is defined by the recognition of the self, self-determination, and the civil rights related to it. With those struggles and assertions of narrative come the histories built from lived experience, both ancestral and present. Experience becomes truth, anecdotes become history, and, in the age of digitalization, opinions become reality.
What is lost, however, is context and self-critical reflection as to the causes of the environment that we inhabit. Not only that, but how that environment has shaped our own psychology, from the family level on up. What filters are we seeing the world through, what are we projecting onto the world, how do our narratives sit with the manifold truths that also inhabit the world? In short, it is everything that has been discussed up until this point. It is history, politics, culture, ecology, and psychology. Particularly in western societies today, universal truths are often espoused from histories going back a mere 500 years, mixed with personal experiences, usually couched in class, race, or gendered terms, however the next deeper levels are rarely touched upon. When speaking of structures, why not dissect histories further, fully dissolve the paradigm to the level of humanity. If we are taking account of individual experience and lived truth, we should also know the filters that have been set up on an individual level, meaning personal experiences on account of a childhood spent in a dysfunctional family, living with an addict parent or family member, further traumatic life events, or childhoods spent living under the threat of violence on whatever level. While these are obviously bound up in the aforementioned, larger categories, their effects are very personally specific and should be considered by the actors themselves when espousing a theory, and for anyone who is discussing them.
NOW WHAT?
Who, then, can lay claim to truth when it is so varied, when right and left are so clearly couched in hypocrisy, when progressive agendas take on the form of sectarian infighting, when arguments that lay claim to overarching justice so clearly push subjective perspectives? In the end, there is no one truth, but many truths that are lived every day and are constantly changing. The personal is political and always has been. Structures of governance, class, economy, and much more, have always affected our lived reality, just as they have the tools we implement for voicing our needs as resulting from our individual lived experience. In the hypermodern society where individuality has become a means to an end, a relentless goal that is always being catered to, where the denial of self-expression of our historical tribe — be it gender-related, class-based, racial, vocational, tribal, defined by sexuality, religious, even the right to bear arms — is the powder keg that sets off a million debates and protests, our reality has gone a step further. While Carol Hanisch’s original essay was only laying claim to what had been promised, as so many civil rights movements did and still do, we have moved beyond this near antiquated truth. With the school of post-modernism uncovering one history after another of all those denied a modernity on grounds of race, gender, geography, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, physical disability, the political, economic, and moral failures of democratic and socialist progressive systems has, in the end, led to the stalling and dissolution of a belief in the future. In writing their own histories, forming academic fields, and claiming rights, these groups made those failures evident. The double cataclysm of accelerated climate change and the digital revolution in the early 21st century, combined with the slow collapse of American hegemony, have rendered the future non-existent, civilizational progress (whatever that might mean) an empty promise, with only our past and present lived experience as orientation markers in the now. Technology, and specifically social media, have pushed this into overdrive and given it a new spin. The individual has become so siloed and radicalized in their self-perception that everything about themselves is a matter of debate — their lifestyle, their diet, their speech, their pastimes. Culture as we knew it, has shifted, experience as we knew it, has shifted. We are in uncharted territory and dumbstruck as to how we got here. This hyper-individual, hyper-ideological, hyper-technological, and hyper-sensitive time has flipped our understanding on its head. Now the political is personal and we demand it to be so. More so, as this recent pandemic is showing us, we can construct our own reality out of our politics, our opinions, our fears, and our insecurities. We can rewrite history, deny reality, and even deny the mere existence of other human beings, living and dead. In that way, actual reality has become a matter of personal interpretation to a dangerous extent.
People are driven by the weight of personal experience and the resulting opinions, fears, and ideals. As such, they move towards the concepts that support them, using western positivist categorization to stake out their identity. With this increasingly being done through the pains they have suffered in opposition to what they see as the majority and dominant narrative of society, their (sometimes forced) self-identification simultaneously cuts off any possibility for truly deep and grounded commonalities. In the past, people were bound by broader consensus, through class, religion, nationality, simple geography, later common, western (sub-)cultural cues. Now these identities have become and are becoming highly individualized as people find themselves not able to relate to older paradigms of identity. The boom of radical ideas, such as religious fanaticism, but also conspiracy theories, shows the need for some kind of consistency or overarching answers to give people the feeling of control in a world that is constantly in a state of flux.
Though we are attempting to grapple with problems of an unprecedented scale, we are still “only” equipped with our age-old neuro-emotional system and the socio-political tools as developed up until the past century. In the current and overdue broad challenge to the western hegemony of singular, progressive thinking, many civil rights movements fail to bring novel ideas to the table. We are entrenched in an ideological civil war, or to put it more accurately, the early 21st century has become defined by the wars of progressive religions. The various forms of liberalism be it economic or socio-cultural, clash with one another while also battling classical conservative moral values and the place of government within a society. All with the best of intentions and all of them secure in the notion of their righteous truth. We are unable to face the challenges of the now as we are only able to use the epistemological weaponry forged in the 19th century. Technology meanwhile is far ahead of us, and as we attempt to debate the issues pertinent to our time, we find that anyone can argue their case with an arsenal of facts fashioned completely to their perspective and liking. Even superficial, cultural life functions along these lines, in digital popular culture everything is an aesthetic to be tried on and combined with other elements. Though superficial sounding, this works in tandem with political views, as these have percolated into every aspect of our societies and everything is free-floating and up for grabs. The religious foundation of all western constructs also ensures that everything is run according to the gospel of the current time, with the unwanted being erased from the culture. Simultaneously, what was known as the right wing has now also begun to conjure up its own subcultures, mixing and matching, creating its own language and symbolism, as the left used to do in the last century. The various sects keep metastasizing and elaborating their screeds as they interpret newly anointed holy texts. In our day, everything is personal, and everything is political. With that in mind, the question becomes: Is this a healthy society?
A WORLD OF MULTIPLICITIES
We are, of course, not just swimming aimlessly through the chaos of the now, there are, and have been, people putting forward interesting ideas and tentative answers to this current predicament. While more conservative thinkers call for a return to classical liberal-democratic thinking, various neo-Marxist and post-colonial thinkers have been putting forward enticing ideas as to how we could possibly change our epistemological frameworks to embrace a world of multiple realities and perspectives. The productive way forward might indeed be a dissolution of strict and centered paradigms to fuse these different concepts and approaches.
The post-colonial thinkers recognize the need to deconstruct the contemporary perspective though they, unsurprisingly, do not make the extra step to also repudiate socialist, progressive thinking. It speaks to someone like Dipesh Chakrabarty that he would call himself out for not having taken proper account of the dangers of climate change due to his focus on socialist undertakings. His point being that we quite obviously see that Western capitalist societies did not take much account of nature, but neither did the socialists in their plans for the worker’s utopia. His answers to these problems are still couched in socialist terms however, again an indication of the religious, dogmatic nature of these paradigms (meaning, the inability to deny one’s own doctrine). Other post-colonial thinkers outline some interesting epistemological approaches, though also couched in neo-Marxist terms (these being the school of Latin American thinkers who have had to live with the effects of North American geopolitics their entire lives. The political is personal, after all). They draw on indigenous perspectives as a ready alternative to the Western individualistic perspective. If there are worlds between the individual perspective and the Asian communitarian perspective, there is a universe between them and indigenous multi-perspectivism — a certain ability to inhabit the perspective of other beings, and not just humans, whether it be in ritual or in community life. Though currently popular for the more esoterically minded and their affinity for ayahuasca and other psychedelics, the epistemological argument is geared more towards the cultivation of an understanding that these perspectives are possible and recognizing their existence. This is an extremely crude summary of a range of theories being posited, but the overall objective is to push for the incorporation of more globally “southern” epistemologies into our dominant “northern” perspective to enable society to operate from the understanding of multiple perspectives, multiple truths, multiple realities — in short, multiplicities — that are existent and manifesting themselves at all times. To function successfully and improve our societies, we can make use of these multiplicities as resources, while also respecting them and not subjugating them to a dominant, singular narrative.
This is, in essence, also what many left-leaning movements in western societies are saying, however due to their adherence to the north-western epistemological paradigm, they use the same narrow set of tools to attempt to stake their claim. Isn’t a society made up of multiplicities simply one that is fluid, where distinctions are simply unnecessary in everyday life (obviously then playing a role in specific environments, when needed)? Though an inheritance from European, colonial history, liberal democracy presents an extremely valuable and potent tool for representing a society of multiplicities, with multiple views on society, for realizing a fluid society. A move away from a classic understanding of progress that is couched in religious thinking, morals and action, to a more open understanding of all perspectives (even those of people one considers “crazy,” left or right), makes possible the argumentation for why a certain idea would beget a healthy society for all, and not just one’s own tribe. Those groups who would deny this approach on grounds that they would not want to share this society with some group of unwanted people — be they conservative, rich, immigrant, poor — would prove themselves undemocratic in that sense. There are many places to meet at and once these can be stripped of positivist value, religious morality, and righteous history, a healthier society could be possible. There are already areas where this is happening by chance, strange bedfellows such as many libertarians and socialists championing universal basic income, for example. On the whole, this type of undertaking, should it ever come to pass, would also have to include honesty on the part of all — from hypocritical, classic conservative classes who look for tax breaks wherever they can, willingly override health standards to get their products selling, or rid themselves of some toxic problem, to hypocritical classic social-progressives who chastise their own societies or communities for the wrongs done against various groups, but who themselves harbor a wealth of prejudices and have nothing to say about similar wrongs being done against similar groups in other countries or even other communities in their own countries.
CONCLUSION
In the end, we are faced with a situation that calls for almost immediate action. Not everybody can be right, but everybody can be (very) wrong, and being wrong at the present moment can and will be very costly for many people. Our past, and what seems like the end of this last historical stretch of 500 years of colonialism, European empires, and Western epistemological hegemony, is neither a shining march into the future, nor is it solely a hideous tale of war, slavery, disease, and genocide. At least, no more than any other time in human history. It does seem beneficial to move away from the monotheistic roots of Enlightenment, away from humans as some divine beings, where every struggle is some holy battle of the downcast against the Goliaths of every age. Robert Oppenheimer stated that, with the dawn of the nuclear age, humankind would have to mature very quickly. It has obviously failed to do so, and we still live in a world filled with nuclear bombs that all pose very real threats, even though we have temporarily forgotten about them. Now there is the onset of climate change and the very real geopolitical pressures that it will have and is already having. Add to that the weight of a new technology that is, at least for the time being, quite literally driving us insane. It remains to be seen if we can gain the maturity to admit our mistakes, let alone our hypocrisy.
Time as we understood it for the last couple hundred years is dissolving, the effects of the hyper-individualization of hypermodernity are destabilizing communities, societies, and people’s individual mental health. Children are having to take on childhoods and personal experiences that are completely unique to their time, that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. Our foundational belief-structures have us locked into sects that can only relate to the like-minded and, staring at the dead-end that was supposed to be the freedom and equality that progress promised us, we immerse ourselves in a technology that was sold as egalitarian and free, but has become the wrecking ball of liberal democracy. There is so much information out there, and we are currently so ill-equipped to deal with it, that people now readily believe and espouse ideas that you would not be surprised to hear from a medieval peasant.
Access to information is clearly not enough, we have to understand the weight it has, how important it and its effects are, and treat it accordingly (as we do anything else that can have the effects on society that we are currently seeing.) A critical pedagogy must be established and enshrined that enables people to engage in meaningful dialogs, as well developing basic practices that mirror the importance of this new resource. People without the basic epistemological frameworks, both overarching as well on an individual, psychological level, cannot make deeper connections between issues at large, and the possible angles of analyses. There are endless perspectives, understandings, and traditions that all bring with them essential insights. In the end the very platonic understanding of knowing that one does not know is a good starting point, freed from righteous, religious indignation, and Western, scientific positivist value.
We do seem to have the tools at our disposal to move beyond this state of affairs, to incorporate multiplicities, both in the sense of time and nature. We can very much understand the imperfection of our bodies — that our basic biology simply does not allow us to experience every aspect of the world we inhabit. We understand that our closest personal relationships are imperfect — be it one’s partner, parents, children, or friends — and that they are made up of many elements and require hard work. Yet, we demand our political systems, our cultures, and our realities be perfect and easily understandable. We currently expect a day-to-day reality where we never have to see or hear something that we don’t like, and that politicians or celebrities should never utter a word that we disagree with. We have the emotional and cognitive tools at our disposal to beyond this. The future may lie in coming to terms with the person one is listening to and reckoning with them as a human being. To be willfully ignorant is one thing, and a personal choice, but to be willfully ignorant on the basis of the incompatibility of the surrounding reality with one’s preferred state of being, and to then make this ignorance doctrine within a community so as to push it onto others, is the most human thing to do, as well as the most common cause of human failure, tragedy, pain, and suffering.
