Friday, June 29, 2012

I know nothing - I hope - about academic post-hegemony

I find reading academic works on post-hegemony feels like being fracked in the butt by a sociology thesis - the jargon will tear your insides out like nothing else can.

All I believe is that something very important happened in 1945, after 500 years of stability.

Modernity didn't die but it was wounded, its hegemony assailed - one could fancy you could even heard its last breaths.

Post-modernity didn't replace modernity, but it was birthed that year and one could almost hear its faint first yelps.

So, nope, no shiny brand new hegemony dominating the high ground, replacing the earlier hegemony.

That is a very modernist notion and feels almost quaint to say in 2012.

Instead we see competing hegemonies occupying different parts of that high ground - an concept that itself is typically post-modernist and 2012-up-to-dated.

So I am saying that pre-1945 Modernity survived almost unchanged,  but limited to areas such as politics, business, some applied sciences, among wealthy retirees - call them all 'the denier classes', from their position on climate change.

But they really deny any and all thought that there can ever be biological or material limits on man's will to do whatever he wants ---- and to correct quickly any mistakes he might very occasionally make.

They see themselves as Pierre-Simon LaPlace would - as skygods - high above Nature.

Post-1945 thinkers are usually but not always younger - they accept that there are limits to what Humanity can hope to do.

They accept we humans are deeply embedded in the web of life and that we must be global commensalists and share the Earth, because it is the only lifeboat in the Universe that Life has got.

Think of them as earthlings - particularly in relationship to their polar opposites - the skygods.

The earthlings dominate in areas like the life sciences, among greens and environmentalists - and among some of the young.

That is enough for you to know about post-hegemony as I see it.

I might attempt to describe hegemony of course - good luck !

It can be thought of  as when sincere opponents to a system of government or society nevertheless coach their opposition in terms that the government or society's elite have provided - the day in day out total emersion bath of schooling, media, political talk etc.

Successful hegemony isn't seen as an ideology - but as pure common sense and even as 'the way of nature' - unchangeable even if we wanted to change it.




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