(Political Analyst, RIEAS Member in the International Advisory Board)
Copyright: www.rieas.gr
Since 2008, humanity in general and the Western world in particular have become deeply aware that a peculiar crisis threatens the very foundations of the established civilization and contests old world-conceptions.
In December 2012, the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s draft “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds” recognized that, even though, for much of the last fifty years, the international system remained stable, the first decade of the 21st century made it amply clear that the international system –as we know it today and as it is represented by such organizations as the IMF, World Bank, WTO, WHO, OECD, United Nations and NATO– must be reformed or, otherwise, the power of its core institutions will be substantially decreased and these institutions may even become obsolete. According to the same global trends publication by the NIC, new institutions should be expected to emerge that will contribute to the reshaping of the international system with significant implications for the U.S.A. and the Western world in geopolitical, security and economic terms.
Analyzing the historical West from Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin, in 2012, in a biennial speech to Russian ambassadors, stated that “domestic socio-economic problems that have become worse in industrialized countries as a result of the crisis are weakening the dominant role of the so-called historical West”.
In 2012, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) –which was created at the G20 summit in April 2009– issued its “Global Shadow Banking Monitoring Report”, which shows that the global financial system is the realm of institutionalized and generalized corruption and crime. According to this report, in 2011, the global shadow banking system grew to $67 trillion, and the world shadow dealings were 86% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2011. The shadow banking relative to GDP was 520% of GDP in Hong Kong, 490% in the Netherlands, 370% in the UK and 150% in the U.S.A. The major cause of this tragic phenomenon is the speculative orientation and greediness of the Western banking system, which developed catastrophic practices and innovations in financial engineering after the US President Bill Clinton decided to repeal the Glass–Steagall Act and establish a system of “casino capitalism”.
Furthermore, the 21st century has amply demonstrated that global dominion by any single power is no longer a realistic international prospect and that the world is more vulnerable to growing global chaos. Hence, responsible international players have to create cooperative international structures. The world will be led to global cooperation either through intellectual and moral progress or through the experience of chaos and aggressive politico-economic nationalism.
However, cooperation and especially international cooperation presuppose common values, common rules and common norms, i.e. cooperation presupposes participation in common principles of civilization. Therefore, the management of the international system is simultaneously a geopolitical, an economic and a cultural issue.
In the second decade of the 21st century, it became amply clear that the West in particular and the world in general suffer by a systemic crisis that necessitates international cooperation, and simultaneously this crisis undermines the intellectual and moral presuppositions of international cooperation. Hence, humanity is trapped in a vicious cycle, where systemic crisis undermines humanity’s capabilities for cooperation, and the lack of cooperation –as a consequence of the lack of a universal cultural vision– deepens the crisis.
In her enlightening and thought-provoking book “La Crise sans fin” (2012), the distinguished French philosopher Myriam Revault d’Allonnes of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales argues that the crisis that broke out in 2008 is not simply a phase of a historical evolutionary process about which one can tell where it comes from and where it goes to. Nor is it simply one of the known crises of the economic cycle, which will be succeeded by similar crises. Almost five years after the onset of this crisis, the world talks about “the crisis” (“la crise”) –as Professor Myriam Revault d’Allonnes has pointed out– which is not like other crises, but it is a global crisis of finance, education, culture, interpersonal relations, family (including the institution of marriage) and the natural environment.
After analyzing the notion of crisis according to ancient, medieval and modern philosophers, Professor Myriam Revault d’Allonnes concludes that ‘crisis’, more than a concept, is a metaphor that refers not only to an objective reality but also to a life experience. Hence, crisis narrates and demonstrates the difficulty of contemporary humans to envisage the orientation of their itinerary towards the future.
Furthermore, according to Professor Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, at the dawn of the 21st century, it became clear that crisis as a concept and as an experience has been mutated: in its original meaning, crisis signifies the ‘decisive moment’ in the course of an uncertain process, which, nonetheless, can be diagnosed and, therefore, it can be managed towards the ‘conclusion of the drama’; instead, due to the crisis that broke out in the first decade of the 21st century, humanity experiences the moment, or the challenge, of structural uncertainty about the causes, the consequences and the general dynamics of the issue. Thus, humanity cannot see the ‘conclusion of the drama’ in the historical horizon.
At the dawn of 21st century, the Western world in particular arrived at a situation of deep identity crisis, which has been skillfully and eloquently analyzed by Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski –National Security Adviser under former US President Jimmy Carter (1977-1981)– in his book “Out of Control” (1993) and by the distinguished French author Pascal Bruckner in his book “Le sanglot de l’homme blanc” (2002).
Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his book “Out of Control”, argues as follows: “We are all racing into the future but it is increasingly the pace of change, and not our wills, which is shaping that future. The world is rather like a plane on automatic pilot, with its speed continuously accelerating but with no defined destination…History teaches that a superpower cannot long remain dominant unless it projects –with a measure of self-righteous confidence– a message of worldwide relevance…But unless that message is derived from an inner moral code of its own, defining a shared standard of conduct as an example for others, national self-righteousness can degenerate into national vanity, devoid of wider appeal. It will be eventually rejected by others –as was very much the case with the fall of the Soviet empire”.
The trends of globalization and multiculturalism that were established in the 20th century and in the first decade of the 21st century –apart from reflecting the ethos and serving the interests of capitalist elites and particularly of financial speculators– are alien to the Western humanist tradition, which was developed during the Renaissance and the European Enlightenment, and they show indifference towards the essence of Western culture. Hence, this type of globalization and this type of multiculturalism undermine both the cohesion of the Western world and its capacity to articulate a globally appealing and historically relevant Western cultural proposal.
Even though several members of the Western capitalist elite think, with stunning self-complacency, that the West alienates and swallows up other nations through its own corporate ethos, through the whip of technocratic financial institutions, through technological gadgets and through consumption patterns, the West itself becomes alienated by non-Western communities, too.
As the notion of ‘Westerness’ becomes increasingly dependent on capitalist principles and norms and increasingly disengaged from the classical Greco-Roman, Renaissance and Enlightenment values and institutions, the Western world undergoes a deep cultural alienation by non-Western cultural systems. In the context of many Western academic institutions that conform to the capitalist-driven models of globalization and multiculturalism, the founding fathers of the Western culture are displaced from their ‘academic thrones’ in order to be squeezed –next to representatives of non-Western cultures– in the inconvenient pews of a commercialized and spiritually disoriented temple of the capitalist globalization.
At the dawn of the 21st century, the West is unable to articulate the cultural underpinnings of a model of viable globalization, and it becomes increasingly fragmented into what the brilliant French sociologist Michel Maffesoli calls “tribes” in his book “Le temps des tribus” (1991), explaining the disintegration of great cultural powers and arguing that, in the context of postmodernity, social existence is conducted through fragmented tribal groupings, organized around the catchwords, brand-names and sound-bites of consumer culture.
Rick Roderick (1949-2002), Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, liked to refer to an old TV show in the US –namely, “Laverne and Shirley” ran from 1976 to 1983– to highlight how society encourages ridicule, trivialization and acceptance of how things are (but should not be). Hand in hand with this cultural crisis of the West goes the onslaught of oriental metaphysical systems, which undermine the foundations of Western individualism and the ontology of particularity and promote oriental world-conceptions inspired by oriental notions of determinism and obedience to rigid and metaphysically grounded hierarchies.
In addition, the cultural disorientation and alienation of the Western world instigates certain Western social groups –especially those which feel spiritually or financially threatened by the overwhelming and nihilistic onslaught of global capitalist forces and postmodernism– to exhibit reactionary behaviour in the forms of nationalism, racism, fascism, neo-Nazism and socio-political violence. These reactionary types of behaviour are often a consequence of cultural insecurity and identity crisis, as the West encounters the overwhelming desert of nihilism.
What does ‘nihilism’ mean? The word nihilism comes from the Latin terms ‘ne’ (= ‘not’) + ‘hilum’ (= ‘a hilum’), i.e. it signifies ‘unknown origin’, or spiritually hovering and disconnected people.
There is a huge difference between a world order that is founded on universal humanistic values –which underpin and legitimize institutions of global governance– and a world order that is built upon a chaotic cultural hopper, as it is described by the well-known metaphor of the “Tower of Babel” in the Book of Genesis of the Bible.
Through my book “The Kairological Qabalah” (published in Northampton, UK, in 2012, by White Crane Publishing Ltd), I propose a strategy of spiritual self-awareness, elucidation and progress for the Western man and a philosophical system for the creation of an anthropocentric world order.
Building a healthy civil society
The 21st century great crisis has brought to the fore of political debate the idea of civil society. But this debate is unaware of and unable to explain the historical transformation of the concept of civil society. Originally, ‘civil society’ was conceptually equivalent to ‘political society’, but the dominant modern conception of civil society emphasizes the autonomy of society (and especially of market society) vis-à-vis the state. Hence, to talk meaningfully about civil society, one must analyze the historical development of the notion of civil society and to understand that the essential constituent elements of the modern concept of civil society are the following: its autonomy from the state, its interdependence with the state, and the pluralism of values, ideals and ways of life that are embedded in its institutions.
There are two major schools of thought that are concerned with the methodic study and promotion of civil society. The first school of thought belongs to the broader socialist political family, and it is a post-Marxist attempt to find new foundations for socialist ideals in order for the latter to be elucidated within a broader theoretical framework. In this group, scholars like John Keane –author of the book “Democracy and Civil Society” (1988)– move towards a liberal viewpoint, which emphasizes the distinction between the concepts of state and society, while other scholars of this post-Marxist socialist school of civil society, like Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato – co-authors of the book “Civil Society and Political Theory” (1992)–, are primarily concerned with the regulation of civil society while avoiding the dangers of statism and bureaucracy. Furthermore, within this school of thought, Paul Hirst –author of the book “Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance” (1994)– has put forward innovative arguments, proposing a plurality of voluntary socialist organizations within civil society, as an alternative to the model of compulsory socialism, which is founded on the state and is realized through the state.
A second group of civil-society theorists is more firmly embedded in the framework of traditional liberalism. Scholars like Seymour Martin Lipset –author of the highly influential research paper “The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited”, published in the “American Sociological Review”, February 1994– emphasize the importance of the pluralistic institutions of civil society to the viability of liberal democracy itself. This thesis has been strongly defended by Robert D. Putnam –author of the book “Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy” (1993)– who demonstrates an empirical connection between autonomous pluralistic associations and successful democratic governance. As Alexis de Tocqueville originally argued in the 19th century, these institutions, i.e. autonomous pluralistic associations (of physical or legal entities) being voluntarily formed and reformed within civil society, are the arena in which people learn to trust others with whom they have no blood or feudal ties.
The notion of trust, as a fundamental element of civil structures, has been emphasized by Adam B. Seligman in his book “The Idea of Civil Society” (1992), where he treats the religious supposition of universalism as a precondition to John Locke’s idea of civil society.
In addition, Edward Shils –author of the highly influential research paper “The Virtue of Civil Society”, published in the journal “Government and Opposition”, Winter 1991– demonstrates that an ethic of civility is a necessary underpinning of civil society, and also it is the common spiritual horizon of the adherents of the variety of ways of life within civil society. This civil ethic –since it is endorsed by each and every member of civil society (independently of his/her particular way of life)– constitutes the basis and the essence of social consensus in a civil-society system. Moreover, this very ethic underpinning of civil society is often used by liberal scholars as an answer to communitarian critics of liberal cosmopolitanism who charge that liberalism has led to the atomism and moral poverty of modern societies.
The original idea of civil society, as equivalent in meaning to political society, can be traced from antiquity to the Enlightenment. But after the Enlightenment, as part of the reaction against it, the meaning of civil society underwent a significant change. The shift away from the conception of ‘civil’ and ‘political’ society as conceptual equivalents, towards the modern conception of civil society as distinct from the state originated with various scholars in the 18th century, each of whom argued against the rationalistic universalism associated with the Enlightenment.
Aristotle is credited with the first usage of the term civil society. The Greek phrase used by Aristotle, at the outset of his “Politics”, is “koinonia politikē” (which literally means political society). The Aristotelian term “koinonia politikē” was translated by the first Latin translators of Aristotle’s works as “societas civilis” and thus in English became civil society. The Greek noun koinonia has been translated by Liddell and Scott as “communion, association, partnership”. The Greek adjective politikē is a derivative of the Greek noun polis, which is in general a Greek civic republic, and, more precisely, it means the city as a political community.
The original ideology of civil society, as a creation of classical Athens and later on as the major political project of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, was founded on the awareness that man himself is the creator of the institutions that regulate his life. This is the essence of ‘social autonomy’. The word autonomy is of Greek origin, with auto- meaning ‘for or by itself’ and nomos meaning law, defining the condition of creating one’s own laws. In other words, autonomous societies explicitly self-institute, and, therefore, they believe that no law is beyond criticism or change, since every law is a human creation. Hence, as I argue in my book “The Kairological Qabalah” (2012), history is the fullest expression of human creativity in general and of political life in particular.
But, in the 18th century, a serious change took place in the West’s political thought. In particular, a series of scholars, who were members of the schools of romanticism and of German idealism, attacked against the rationalistic universalism of the Enlightenment, and they argued that particular cultural communities and especially particular national entities are closed systems, which can externally interact among themselves but can be known only ‘from the inside’, and that there is no universal value system.
The romantics’ reaction against the Enlightenment gave rise to the idea of each nation as the home of a particular people, in the ethnographic or sociological sense –namely, a cultural community with its own organizing traditions, values and norms. This idea of a society as a ‘people’ has given rise to the modern conception of civil society as a unique entity apart from the state. Whereas in the context of Western Humanism and the European Enlightenment, the state is accountable to civil society, with its universal values and requests, the romantics argue that the state must primarily serve the nation and must be primarily accountable to the nation, and, therefore, in the context of romanticism and Hegelian idealism, the state is the supreme institutional form of the super-individual that is called the ‘nation’ and takes primacy over the human individual, simply because the first is a bigger individual than the latter. Thus, nationalism transforms a quantitative argument (the quantitative superiority of the nation over the human individual) into a qualitative one (the moral superiority of the nation over the human individual).
Since states, as a result of nationalism, were gradually placed under the control of national elites, civil society, maintaining its universal ideals, separated itself from the state, and, therefore, Georg Hegel, in his “Philosophy of Right”, argued that civil society is a peculiar sphere of life, distinct from the nation state and the family. In particular, Hegel understood civil society as a form of market society. Thus, in the 19th and the 20th centuries, the Western civilization was divided between two powerful social forces: the nation state and a civil society that had been degraded to the realm of economic relationships as they exist in the modern industrial capitalist society; the first subjugates humanity to communitarian/nationalist agendas, and the latter, as a degenerate form of civil society, subjugates humanity to the logic of capitalism.
Whereas the original form of civil society, as it was understood in the context of classical Athenian democracy and the Enlightenment, emphasizes autonomy and humanism, the romantics’ nation state and Hegel’s conception of civil society are totemic societies. The national interest is the nation state’s totem, and the logic of capitalism is the totem of Hegel’s conception of civil society.
The major enemies of civil society are the following:
- First, statism: statism consists in the expansion of state authority at the expense of society, in the context of (and for the sake of) oligopolistic/monopolistic capitalism, or monetarism, or state-imposed austerity programmes, or state-imposed economic ‘bailout’ programmes, or compulsory state-funded social-security systems (and compulsory welfare-state schemes), or bureaucratic socialism, or fascism. On the other hand, civil-society theorists –independently of whether they follow a form of meta-Marxist socialism or they work strictly within the framework of classical liberalism– argue for a political economy based on voluntary agreements among physical/legal persons, with the state playing the role of the ultimate guarantor of those agreements and of the human rights.
- Second, nationalism and generally communitarianism as the antithesis to cosmopolitanism: these theories and attitudes refuse to accept that the human being has a value that is prior to and independent of one’s incorporation into a particular national/religious community. On the contrary, according to the classical civil-society theory of human rights, the human person enters history, or rather it produces history, as a bearer of intrinsic value, which is derived from the very fact that one is a human being, and the value of humanity is prior to any historical community.
- Third, the capitalist conception of globalization: in the context of classical liberal ideology, globalization is primarily a political prerequisite and a safeguard for the maintenance of the belief in the a priori character of the rights of man and the citizen, but, on the other hand, the capitalist version of globalization has distorted the classical liberal request for globalization and has transformed it into a project for the world-wide domination of a globalized capitalist elite and especially of the global financial capital.
A humanist globalization agenda
In the beginning of the 20th century, the old world order died during the First World War, which began on 28 June 1914, when the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo. This political crime sent nations that previously were not intending to go to war into the most catastrophic war Europe had yet experienced.
In the beginning of 1914, the European international order consisted of six major powers and an assortment of minor states that the major powers did not care much about. Those six major powers –namely, the British Empire, the French Empire, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire– were ensnared in military alliances whose purpose was to maintain the established international order. The political ‘orthodoxy’ among the diplomats of that era was the theory of the balance of power, or Realpolitik. Thus, they believed that, when confronted by a significant external threat, states may employ alliance tactics, such as balancing, bandwagoning, buck passing, and chain ganging. In the beginning of 1914, there were two major alliances: the one was the Central Powers (Mittelmächte), composed of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Bulgaria, and the other was the Triple Entente, composed of the British Empire, the French Empire and the Russian Empire. Even though the diplomats of that era thought that international order was assured due to the established system of balance of power, their expectations and plans were shattered. Why?
After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, confident in its military prowess, decided to retaliate against Serbia, which was attacked on 28 July 1914. But the Serbs ambushed the Austro-Hungarian forces at the battle of Cer (August 1914) and at a battle on the banks of Kolubara River (December 1914). Thus, finally, the Austro-Hungarian armies were thrown back with heavy losses. However, Russia became involved in the war in order to assist its ethnically related Serbs, and Germany invaded France through Belgium and Luxembourg. Moreover, Great Britain became involved in World War I to the defence of France, whereas the Ottoman Empire joined the war in the Balkans on the side of the German and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. When World War I was over, the Austro-Hungarian, the German, the Ottoman, and the Russian Empires had lost their imperial status and were at a ruin, whereas the United States of America, which joined the war late on the side of the Triple Entente, had emerged as key world player. The old world order had arrived at its end.
The U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sought to create a new world order on the basis of his Fourteen Points, which stressed multilateral diplomacy. Wilson’s project for a new world order consisted in an attempt to create separate nation states out of former colonies and ensure international order by creating a League of Nations. Germany and Austria lost significant parts of their territories, a group of new and revived nations was created in Eastern Europe, and the Ottoman Empire was carved up by France and Great Britain according Paris’ and London’s interests. However, the new world order was still based on nationalism, which had been dominating the spiritual and political life of Europe since the 18th century, and, therefore, this world order was not as new as Woodrow Wilson had hoped.
Germany’s power was significantly increased under Adolf Hitler’s government. Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. He, too, sought to create a new world order, one dominated by the Third Reich (in essence a new German Empire) and founded on crime. To that end, his policy was focused on seizing “vital space” (Lebensraum) for the German people by extending Germany’s borders. Thus, Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia were annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, and, in 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. But, since Poland had a mutual defense treaty (i.e. another balance-of-power instrument) with Great Britain and France, the invasion of Poland started World War II.
When World War II was over, Germany again was at a ruin, and Great Britain and France had lost significant parts of their imperial territories. On the other hand, the U.S.A. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) ascended to the top of the post-war world order.
The aftermath of World War II is often considered a new world order. In fact, the victorious powers –namely, the U.S.A., the U.S.S.R., China, Great Britain, and France– sought to create a stable world order by creating the United Nations, which, however, they attempted to keep firmly in their control by making themselves permanent and, in essence, ruling members of the Security Council, which had a veto on all UN activities that were not unanimously approved by these five nations. Hence, since its creation, the UN, far from enjoying the status of a global government, fell prey to nationalisms and national-interest calculations.
The lack of unity among the “United Nations” became amply clear since the beginning of this institution’s life. From 1945 to 1971, China was not represented by mainland China, which had become communist, but by “Nationalist” China, whose government withdrew from mainland China to the island of Taiwan in 1949. But, ultimately, in 1971, Communist China managed to occupy China’s seat in the United Nations and membership of the United Nations Security Council, and, thus, the UN Security Council was divided into two blocs: the one bloc was composed of the U.S.S.R. and the People’s Republic of China (Communist China), and the other bloc was composed of the U.S.A., Great Britain, and France. The new world order was stillborn.
However, in the 1950s, several Western scholars, policy-makers and think-tanks, such as the Bilderberg Club, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, etc., realized that all these unstable and fragile “new world orders” were founded on nation states that were short-sighted and committed to national-interest calculations, and, therefore, they could not give priority to global issues and global governance. Hence, the ideas of globalization and global governance emerged as an alternative to nationalism and old balance-of-power politics. Furthermore, since the 1950s, an increasing number of scholars, opinion-makers and policy-makers started realizing that global issues call for global governance.
Thus, in the 1950s, a number of people and institutions began an attempt to create a truly new world order, one that is founded on the notion of globalization. David Rockefeller –an influential and leading member of the Bilderberg Club, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Council on Foreign Relations– has articulated a globalization and global-governance doctrine, about which he wrote, in his “Memoirs” (2002), the following: “For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure –one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it”. Additionally, David Rockefeller has been quoted as arguing that a supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is preferable to nationalism and the legacy of national self-determination.
David Rockefeller has offered precious services to the project of globalization and international cooperation. The starting point of David Rockefeller’s globalization doctrine has been historically confirmed, and it is correct. Indeed, nation states and nationalism have been major sources of international turmoil and crisis. The history of the nation state is intimately related to war. But an important point that is missing from David Rockefeller’s perspective on globalization is that –as we mentioned earlier in this essay– the philosophical schools of romanticism and German idealism as well as nationalism caused a serious transformation of the notion of civil society in 18th century Europe.
According to Georg Hegel, the major paradigmatic representative of German idealism, the state is primarily accountable to the nation, and not to the universal (and hence supranational) values that were represented and historically objectified by the institution of civil society in the context of the European Enlightenment and especially in the context of Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. In the context of Hegelianism, civil society ceases to be identified with political society, since Hegel defines civil society as market society, i.e. as the realm of economic relationships that characterize the modern industrial capitalist society. In other words, the Hegelian way of understanding civil society leads to a degenerate form of civil society.
If one’s political horizon is restricted by Hegelianism and romanticism, the Western world is trapped between two options: the one option is the nation state’s nationalist logic, and the other option is the internationalist logic of a degenerate civil-society’s elite that is identified with the supranational capital and especially with the global financial capital. In the 20th century, the Western world did not follow the anthropocentric cosmopolitan agenda of Kant’s civil-society ideal, and, therefore, in the first half of the 20th century, the world suffered by the consequences of nationalist mentalities and of old balance-of-power policies, and, in the second half of the 20th century, the world gradually lapsed into the world bankers’ internationalism, which cannot create a viable international order, because the world bankers’ approach to globalization is founded on economic terms, along the lines of Hegel’s conception of civil society, and not on Aristotle’s and Kant’s theses about the moral underpinnings of civil society.
From the perspective of humanism, the “new world orders” that were founded on global capitalism and on the world bankers’ architectural plans about the world have not been much better than the “new world orders” that were founded on nation states. After the assumed triumph of a form of market society during the 1990s and the emergence of “casino capitalism”, Francis Fukuyama, probably under the influence of Hegel’s propheticism, dared to declare the end of history (as Hegel had declared the end of philosophy), i.e. the end of the creativity of human spirit in the spheres of politics and economics. Both Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s eschatological prophesies have been proven stunningly wrong. Even though the contemporary world has departed from the nationalist world-conception and is moving towards internationalist principles, it remains warlike and lacks a globalist spiritual vision. Free trade and international business are only a starting point for the creation of a really new world order. However, the keystone of a viable globalization programme is the reformation of people’s consciousness through a globalist spiritual vision. My book “The Kairological Qabalah” is, among other things, an attempt to propose an anthropocentric spiritual approach to globalization.
The world needs a really new world order founded on universal humanistic values in the spirit of Aristotle’s and Kant’s conceptions of civil society.
Note: 1)This essay has been originally announced and published by Dr Nicolas Laos at the Kairological Society (a philosophical and political club created by him in 2012) as part of this organization’s manifesto, and also parts of this essay were published by the author in a series of articles he wrote for the Greek newspaper “Hellada” in February 2013.
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