Fifth Stage of Civilization? Or a New Dark Age. The Choice is Ours -- Yours & Mine

It's true: I haven't posted here in quite some time. Some will say I've neglected this blog. I'd thought so myself, but then wondered: was I under an obligation to post on a schedule regardless of whether I had something useful to say that day? I think not. I've always been a quality-over-quantity person. Not sure if traffic dropped. I didn't check. It never was high (except, oddly, for the initial post). Getting ideas discussed seriously in the English-speaking world has always been like pulling teeth. But along with Albert Jay Nock & Isaiah, I'm satisfied that there is a Remnant out there. We intellectual bloggers don't know who they are for sure, or where they are, but if we deliver our best, we trust that they will find us.

We in the West need to further the conversation that will help us discover the Fifth Stage. One thing that means is exposing and then avoiding, as much as possible, the distractions mainstream media & mainstream politics are always throwing our way. What NaturalNews.com host Mike Adams (the Health Ranger) just called racial theater, its newest chapter opened by the outcome of the George Zimmerman trial, is a textbook case of a distraction. Helping further the distraction is the prevailing, politically correct mythology of racism in contemporary America. One need not deny that the U.S. has a racist past, or even that there are isolated incidents of racism in the present. But one of the prevailing premises of the currently reigning intelligentsia in the U.S. is that the U.S. is still fundamentally, systemically racist, because nowhere is to be found exact, politically-approved ratios of black-to-white, on corporate boards or in workplaces or in other centers of influence (which would include Congress). This leads to the further myth that blacks are systemically oppressed in America. What makes it clear, this is a myth? By the very fact of a black president in America (Barack Obama), a black attorney general (Eric Holder), black mayors all across the country, successful black entrepreneurs, wealthy black entertainers (think: Oprah Winfrey), black sports heroes (think Tiger Woods, although he partly self-destructed), etc.

Obama could not have been elected and then re-elected president without the willingness of the white majority to vote for him, whatever else one says about their judgment. Blacks only constitute a little over 12 percent of the population of the U.S., after all. That's not enough to elect a president. I tend to think Obama will go down as the worst president in U.S. history. For saying that I would be condemned as racist if anyone in the intelligentsia cared enough to spread the fact that I said it. My judgment, however, is based on his policies, not on his race (for whatever good it does to say this). He's furthered both the domestic and the foreign policies of his predecessor, protected the interests of the powerful and wealthy elite; his Affordable Health Care Act (Obamacare) will arguably ruin whatever is left of health care in the U.S., but possibly not before being exported elsewhere in some "free trade" agreement to come down the pike. Do I know this last? Of course not, but who really knows what is in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (for example)? The agreement is not available online, and all discussions--which Obama is pushing--are being conducted behind very tightly closed doors!

Enough of racial theater; it stands exposed for what it is, a distraction from our world's real problems. These range from spreading unrest all across the developing world, a product of the realization that the desire of peoples to be free is quite real however manipulated, and on collision course with the tightening authoritarianism of the global elites, whose home bases range from the City of London, Basel Switzerland, Brussels Belgium, New York City and Washington, D.C. A real question is whether we will ever outgrow our tendency to solve our problems--economic, social, etc.--by resorting to domestic force and wars fought on foreign soil (which, if our ruling elites were honest they would admit was over control of the world's oil supply). In the U.S., meanwhile, over 47 million people receive food stamps. This is an all-time high--additional proof, for anyone interested, that the federal government / Federal Reserve complex cannot micromanage anything as complex as the U.S. economy. While of course there are some who are probably abusing the food stamp system, the majority either cannot find a job at all or cannot find a job that pays sufficient wages. Where else are they going to turn?

This, of course, is a problem affecting all: white, black, Hispanic, and so on. The "American Dream" of a middle class existence working for a corporation is effectively dead whatever your race or ethnicity (for all except for those fortunate enough to have very specific skills the corporations want). What has killed the "American Dream" is a combination of factors. Too much government is the obvious killer of all genuine prosperity: too many taxes, too much strangling regulation, too much interference in our lives generally. Globalization hasn't helped. It has been the scene of corporations--many of which are able to write the rules enabling them to control governments--moving operations to where labor is the cheapest, and that isn't the U.S. Another factor, however, is more mundane: changing technology, which enables even smaller companies to be more productive with progressively less labor, meaning there is less and less work for human beings to do. Of course, if human beings are earning less, they have a choice of spending less or going massively into debt (at present we see both). A few writers are describing this as a structural flaw in capitalism as it currently exists--although I prefer the term corporatism for the prevailing economic system of the dominant powers of the First World (Robert Locke's short essay remains the standout explanation of corporatism, offering good reasons for thinking outside the set of boxes Marx's thought supplied). Whatever we call it, however, the flaw is there and will have to be addressed at some point in the future. The alternative is a world with a very small and very wealthy minority ruling over utterly impoverished masses--a future looking so much like our feudalist past that I call it techno-feudalism.

Recent events in my life, including materials I've gathered on entrepreneurship to presentations I've recently attended about financial markets and sustainable systems, and more besides, have made it even more clear to me the role Philosophy needs to play in evaluating the present state of affairs in civilization and working towards taking it to the next level: the Fifth Stage. (My book manuscript What Should Philosophy Do? is up to 35,000 words.) I recently had a discussion over just the need for ethics and its role in creating and maintaining institutions that are sustainable: self-supporting, growing, helpful, in harmony with their surroundings; and not self-destructive and destructive of whatever they touch (like today's corporate leviathans of high finance, as well as most of the world's governments). We don't need to delve into theory here, or even go deep into the theology (although I think a review of what Jesus Christ actually says in the Sermon on the Mount and in his Parables couldn't hurt us at all!) to develop what I could call a common horse sense ethics.

A common horse sense ethical system would consist of the following beginning with the old-fashioned Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Or to paraphrase Hobbes from his Leviathan: Do not exercise more liberties against others than you would want others to exercise against you. To some, such prescriptions will sound naive. To the extent they do, is an index of where we stand in our materialist world today, part of it still in the Third Stage but much of the culture in the Fourth. There are other ethical rules that can be logically inferred. Respect life, especially if it has the capacity to suffer (for you can suffer). Honor your agreements with others (for you do not like promises to be made to you & then broken). Do not see yourself as the center of the Creation, but rather live with humility: none of us is at the center of Creation. Realize that most people do need leadership, motivation, encouragement ... and to be held accountable. Be prepared to supply it when needed. Note that to err is human: forgive others; and also forgive yourself. Avoid conflict and the use of force--if your ideas are any good, that Remnant I mentioned will embrace them voluntarily. But do be prepared to unleash your inner warrior to stand on principle and defend the innocent.

Recognize cause and effect, however we cash it out. Ideas and actions have consequences; they affect others. Recognize, too, that the consequences of our ideas and actions do not manifest themselves all at once, or even in a few days or even months. The really important ideas and actions manifest themselves over a lifetime. They can affect many others, for better or for worse. Finally: reality always gets the last word. Results do not lie. The results we see around us, wherever we are, are the sum total of our premises, our thoughts, our actions, and their consequences--in aggregate. The laws of nature including human nature are what they are, but they allow sufficient flexibility to make it fair to say: we have shaped our world. If that is true, then up to a point, we can reshape it. That brings us to the choice before us as a civilization: forward, to a Fifth Stage, or continuing on our present course. In earlier posts I've attempted to characterize what ascension to a Fifth Stage will amount to. I've tried to do this in a particular fashion: learning and employing what we can learn from the previous stages while keeping the concept sufficiently loose and indistinct that it can continue to shape itself, in terms of events and developments none of us can foresee. Part and parcel of Fifth Stage Thinking is what I think of as bottom-up sustainability: we rebuild the systems of civilization, through entrepreneurship of various sorts, from the bottom up instead of from the top down, and we keep in mind the need for the long view: long term goals, including those which will take years to bring about, designing short term objectives as we work toward those goals piecemeal. The idea is to have systems that will sustain themselves with less and less effort on our part, as we ride in the direction we want to go. The country--indeed, the English-speaking world as a whole; the West as a whole--needs a re-examination of its philosophical first premises (including the materialist view of the universe & of the human condition) as a condition for assuming some control over the changes embroiling us all. If we assume control, I would hold out some hope that we can carry civilization forward to its Fifth stage, able to further the genuine unity of an ethically grounded international community, liberate people from the chains of authoritarianism, and build real prosperity (not the debt-fueled pseudo-prosperity of the mass consumption culture. That's the choice. For a while now, we've been at this crossroads. If the English-speaking world in particular continues on its present path of materialism, centralization, poor education based on outdated models, short term thinking, and distractions such as the present racial theater, it can look forward to what will prove to be a very long and painful dark age, and its peoples will have only themselves to blame.

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Why a Fifth Stage of Civilization Might Not Happen in the West: Thoughts on the November 6 Election.

In just four days the election of November 6, 2012, has been analyzed and agonized over so much that it would be impossible to summarize it all. One thing is clear: always assuming no vote fraud in crucial states like Ohio, U.S. voters were willing to send Barack Obama, easily the worst president in U.S. history, back to the White House for four more years. This despite (1) his utter failure to contribute anything toward turning the U.S. economy around by encouraging a business-friendly or entrepreneur-friendly economic climate; on the contrary, under Obama’s watch unemployment rose to depression-era levels (see below), food and gas prices also soared, the percentage of people living below the official poverty line reached the worst levels since the Great Depression, and the national debt skyrocketed from $11 trillion to over $16 trillion with no end in sight. (2) Obama’s foreign policy has been based on a level of war, violence, and destruction that makes George W. Bush look like a man of peace by comparison, also with no end in sight as a confrontation with Iran now looks inevitable. (3) Obama’s continuing with the domestic police and surveillance state which began under Bush II and, very likely, will make whatever is left of Constitutionally-limited government, the rule of law, and privacy, things of the past within four years.

What we might add is that never before has an election season highlighted the immense gulf between fact and fantasy among American voters. The fantasy is that the differences between Obama and Mitt Romney were more than cosmetic. The fantasy is reflected in the hostility between Obama’s supporters and Romney’s which reached levels I have not seen in my lifetime (and I am old enough to have been following political campaigns as far back as the Nixon era).

The fact is that the Obama and Romney agendas were in agreement on all these essentials:

Both, as just said, have pro-war, interventionist foreign policies.

Both favor expansionist government and the regulatory state.

Both favor unrestricted immigration.

Both favor the continued outsourcing of jobs as a consequence of corporatist “free trade”; combine this with their support for expansionist government and both support, by implication, the main economic forces destroying the capacity of the U.S. to sustain a middle class: the fact that other things being equal, corporations always move operations to where labor is cheapest and regulations, laxest.

Both Obama and Romney service the superelite international banking cartel based in the City of London.

Both support the Federal Reserve System, the superelite’s primary instrument of economic control in the U.S.

Both therefore support an economy based on a fractional, inflationary monetary system which devalues the currency, wiping out incentives to save, and on steadily accumulating debt.

Both have supported and will continue to support bailouts for leviathan corporations (especially banks).

Both support a corporatism in food and pharmaceuticals, and factory farming, over the natural health movement against which the corporations would like to use federal authorities to suppress in all forms, be they dietary supplements, family farms, or just the producers of raw milk.

Both favor the brand of health care socialism that goes by the name Obamacare, which is not about health care but how health care is paid for. Obamacare does not contain one word about, e.g., primary prevention. What it does ensure is that health care will get more expensive, less efficient, and increasingly scarce as doctors leave the profession rather than comply with cumbersome regulations.

Both support continuing the irrational, destructive war on drugs which has resulted in the U.S. having the largest per capita prison population of any advanced nation in the world.

Both support continuing the centralization of “public education” through the U.S. Department of Education.

Both support the current tax structure.

Both favor police-state measures such as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which allows for the potential indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens without specific charges, due process, or legal counsel.

Both will expand Homeland Security and the activities of the Transportation Security Administration. The latter has already expanded its reach beyond airports into bus terminals, subway stations, and tractor-trailer weigh stations. One may expect the TSA to begin random checkpoints on interstate highways and major thoroughfares in the wee hours of the morning when it can be done without creating traffic backups.

Both support the growing cold war on Internet freedom.

Both support, at least by implication, the growing tendencies to demonize the various freedom communities (libertarian, Patriot, Constitutionalist, prepper, homeschooler, etc.) by labeling them potential “domestic terror” threats.

Both would probably support using military might to suppress a vibrant freedom movement, or possibly a secession movement in one or more States, that had reached a critical mass: with the NDAA and similar items of legislation some dating to the Bush years, and through any number of executive orders Obama has signed over the past four years, all the machinery is in place for such, with the permanent incarceration of its leadership, and it would be entirely legal.

In light of all these levels of fundamental agreement all of which were off the table during the contrived and orchestrated “debates,” a rational person would have to wonder what all the fighting between the two camps was over.

I fear rationality has very little to do with life in the U.S. today—or in Western civilization generally.

Where does all this fit in with our previous posts, in which we have discussed how Stage Three thinking (in Comte’s words, “scientific and positive”) eventually gave way to what I call Stage Four (“postmodern and negative”), and whether doors will eventually open to a Stage Five? This last, of course, is the primary subject of this blog.

Stage Three thinking had/has the advantage that its participants / adherents believed they had acquired genuine, objective, value-neutral truth about the universe and about ourselves. They believed the methods of the physical and natural sciences—also the social sciences—were the key, whatever their disagreements over specifics. Stage Three thinking, whatever our criticisms of it, has an impressive resume. The combination of respect for science as free inquiry, the unleashing of technological creativity of all kinds, and the furthering of commercial activities to improve the standard of living of all who participate (and many who don’t), built the greatest civilization the world had ever seen in what—in epochal terms—was a relatively short period of time (a few hundred years).

Niall Ferguson, in his latest book Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), outlines the “killer apps” that built Western civilization: competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and a work ethic. While certain of these contain backward glances into Stage Two thinking (especially the rule of law), Stage Three civilization allowed them to bear full fruit as a seamless unity for the first time.

It is easy for those of us born in the twentieth century to draw benefits from Stage Three accomplishments without appreciating the amount of work that went into them. Somewhere here is the source of the entitlement mentality that characterizes the typical Obama supporter. The fact that Obama was reelected would indicate that entitlement addicts now outnumber those with a work ethic. When work no longer pays, people will gradually cease to work as it brings them no advantages. Civilization will, at that point, cease to enjoy further advances and begin to decline. If I may give Ayn Rand a quick nod, Atlas will begin to shrug. Some will say that decline has already begun. I do not believe the West is at that point just yet, if only because new technologies continue to appear in, e.g., electronics and high technology generally, the products of genuine enthusiasts for whom the work is an end in itself, not something they do just for the money.

So when we draw upon disquieting essays such as Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship” or Walter T. Stace’s “Man Against Darkness” or the literature of existentialism or the products of “modern art” to highlight those areas where Stage Three falls short via its gradual creation of a moral vacuum within civilization, we do not do so lightly, without a clear acknowledgement of its accomplishments and of the need to preserve what was best in them.

Stage Four, in this case, came about because of these weaknesses. While Ferguson sees the West as having fallen into a period of self-doubt, the problem of the moral vacuum of, e.g., utilitarianism was quite genuine. Some may be sacrificed involuntarily and even unknowingly supposedly to benefit others (e.g., the Tuskegee Experiment). Unnecessary wars, of course, sacrifice entire peoples and cultures to benefit the expansionist empire. We kept careful count of the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. I don't know if anyone accurately counted the number of dead Iraqis. Were they less than human? Stage Three clearly went overboard in its optimism about human nature and its meliorism. Technology makes us more efficient and more comfortable, but it does not make us better people. Two World Wars plus the Cold War—plus the past 20 years during which we’ve seen the seeds of empire sprout full bloom in the West—should have cured us of that. These are observations, by the way, which philosophers are uniquely qualified to make. Why is the philosophical community (with very rare exceptions) not making them?

Be that as it may, Stage Four loses all confidence in the quest for truth—scientific as well as moral. Truth becomes a cultural artifact, invariably historicized and relativized in a manner not dissimilar to what happened to religion in the hands of Stage Three thinkers. Arguing in defense of putatively important truths is blurred with the category of imposition based on authority—an idea developed in great detail within postmodernist philosophy and cultural studies. (Back in the 1990s I had a running debate with a professor emeritus at a major university for whom this distinction seemed literally unintelligible. His way of putting the matter: “Truth is determined by authority.” I would ask in response: “Is your statement true, given that you aren’t in a position of authority?” I saw no indication that he understood the question or its significance.)

Not just is confidence lost in the quest for intellectual truth, but respect for truths essential to any sort of sound public policy is lost. Truth in a variety of public arenas ceases to be important. When truth ceases to be important, the masses believe fantasies. Indeed, almost automatically they come to live in a fantasy world which politicians and mainstream media shills merely have to reinforce to accomplish their goals which, in this environment, will involve furthering a more controlled society. The fantasy, in the case of Romney, was that he represented a viable alternative to, and fundamental change of direction from, the past four years of the Obama presidency. Orchestrated “debates” didn’t need to do much to reinforce the fantasy, as so many were already willing to believe it. Other fantasies include an “employment rate” that does not count as unemployed anyone who stopped looking for work a month ago (the “U3” rate), thus radically understating the true extent of unemployment in the U.S. which has been at near-depression levels; and an “inflation rate” that fails to include food and fuel costs (“core inflation,” a bogus statistic created during the Nixon era with then-Fed chair Arthur Burns). For antidotes to these fantasies of officialdom, go here.

What I am leading up to in this discussion is just the following: by talking about a Stage Five I am not talking about something that is, in some sense, inevitable (even if various aspects of a possible Stage Five mindset possibly exist in incipient forms in, e.g., systems theory and presuppositionalist theology). There are no “laws of history” in that sense. Comte’s phrase Law of the Three Stages is actually something of a misnomer. There is no inevitability that a given stage will lead to its successor, as Marx believed capitalism would create the conditions for socialism. Most cultures, after all, never achieve a Stage Two level, developing distinct philosophies apart from their theologies. Only in the West did Stage Three develop and come to fruition—although other civilizations have now “downloaded the killer apps” at least in part. China is probably the best example. Other nations showing promise: India, Russia, Brazil, and of course, Chile.

There is no guarantee that the West (by which I tend to mean the Anglo-European world) will survive the skepticism, self-doubt, and public flight into fantasy that characterize a Stage Four culture. Stage Four might well be the furthest the West gets. This blog is an attempt to define the problems and obstacles ahead. We human beings are problem solvers, and as problems go, this is the Big One—the hugest problem facing the West. Breaking through skepticism, self-doubt, and the tendency toward fantasy and escapism is one of the biggest challenges of those of us seeking to go beyond Stage Four and bring about the nurturing and eventual flourishing of Stage Five—at which we finally achieve wisdom born of age and bitter experience, including acknowledging our limitations as finite beings. This might soon become a still larger challenge, since the reality of unsustainable fiscal policy will make itself felt sooner or later—and the longer it takes, the rougher will be the landing on the shores of economic reality! Many writers (e.g., Michael Snyder, author of this blog) support the apocalyptic view that a crash of unprecedented proportions is just around the corner and could occur as soon as next year! I've avoided such pronouncements, since it seems clear that the global elite doesn't want this to happen; they could easily lose control. Could it be that such an event is necessary, however, and that afterwards it will be possible to build up a better civilization assuming that what was best in the West can be preserved? Doing so obviously will be several magnitudes more difficult than just reexamining our first premises now would have been. Most people will doubtless be too busy just trying to survive! The Ron Paul movement was attempting just this sort of reevaluation, especially where economics was concerned. The GOP elites responded with resolute hostility and brazen dishonesty. The entire country might soon be paying the price.

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