The Case for a New Enlightenment
The theory, sentiment, and aims underpinning the album Enlightenment.
“Enlightenment is not a happy feeling. Enlightenment is the destruction of everything you thought to be true. I hope you will find this a completely shattering experience.” - Guy McPherson
These very words were pronounced at the beginning of a lecture held by doomsday ecologist Guy McPherson, as he was about to take his audience on a dark journey that could very well forever alter their perception of reality. McPherson never shies away from bluntly expressing the very grim reality of our ongoing climate catastrophe, and never tries to sugarcoat it nor endow it with any hopeful conclusions. According to him, we’re already too late, and all we can do is observe the unfolding of our own extinction. For any hopeful still clinging on to the possibility of a reversal, of an 11th hour recovery possibly pioneered by science and technology, McPherson’s assessment is indeed a very sobering experience - and very plausibly, a worldview-shattering one.
Although I greatly appreciate McPherson’s lifelong insistence on bringing to light the very real cataclysmic effects of climate change, I will not personally make any normative claims agreeing or disagreeing with the conclusions that nothing can truly be done anymore, although I cannot help but feel the same way more and more for every day that goes by. So why this reluctance on my end? Well, shattering a worldview is indeed a traumatic experience. I remember experiencing a first semblance of it when I was 14 years old, and my physics teacher at the time spent an entire lecture telling a classroom filled with blue-eyed young teenagers of all the ways by which humankind will likely face extinction during our lifetimes ahead (and he even gave us a homework assignment on the topic afterwards). I became very depressed for several days following his session, and many parents were furious at him for sending an entirely classroom of teenagers home morbidly disillusioned (potentially rightfully so). But in the big picture, maybe it was the right thing for him to do?
Maybe kids shouldn’t exactly be the prime audience for a world shattering experience, but many adults today I believe would certainly need it, because - whether it is yet terminal or not - we are currently heading down a very, very dark path due to our “reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth” (to quote a passage from the Dark Mountain Manifesto, also sampled in the song Uncivilization of the album).
Ideology as Fantasy
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posited that while we typically tend to create a dichotomy between reality and fantasy - where the latter subdues and undermines the former - to him fantasy in fact is rather a prerequisite for humans to be able to engage with reality at all. Every single human being on Earth, throughout their lives, constructs a fantasy “master frame” through which they can understand and interpret the world. Without this fantasy frame, life would indeed be unbearable, as we would need to approach our existence solely in the most elemental fashion, possibly perceiving ourselves only as molecules of flesh and bones copulating forever for no apparent reason within a universe that holds no meaning at all. Every single experience, whether good or bad, would not be able to be defined as such. Without a fantasy frame, the meaninglessness of life would be the only acceptable reality that colors all lived experience, which makes the very act of living utterly pointless in every sense of the word.
This is what Lacan also calls the Real (that which renounces all signification) and is indeed what the fantasy attempts to cover up. Throughout history, it can be argued that the primary collective fantasy has been that provided by religion as the grand explainer of everything, providing the foundation for the stories we internally tell ourselves about ourselves, others, and the world. Yet in the nihilistic societies of the modern and postmodern eras, as religion lost its place at the core of our understanding of the world (also known as our collective ‘disenchantment’ that happened under and after the Enlightenment period), mankind has been looking for new avenues of meaning - new fantasies to structure reality in the place of legacy religions. That is not to say that only religion functions as a fantasy framework, as in fact, any grand explanation that serves to cover up the uneasiness of the unknown in all its forms is in some shape or form an applied fantasy frame.
Many familiar with early 20th century existential philosophy - particularly that of Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre - know that the suggested remedy for a meaningless existence is to create our own systems of meaning, no matter whether they speak to a universal existential truth or not. This is all well and good, but by the time Camus and Sartre came forth with their theories of meaning, Western societies already had a new king in town: science and reason, as had been pioneered by Enlightenment thinkers.
Enlightenment as Ideology
According to Slavoj Zizek, the way we could understand ideology is that of a certain ‘prepackaged fantasy’. Ideologies are the master frames that we individuals use to understand the world around us, in all of its non-metaphysical aspects: politics, culture, the economy, and even science. While religion (particularly Christianity in the West) also went beyond explaining the metaphysical, up to the Enlightenment it also constructed the social structure where the church held special status, and legitimized the reign of the deified royalties. Yet through the naissance of the new bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes who held no special status within these monarchical societies, the booming of scientific research fueled by the newly created wealth of capitalists and merchants helped provide the framework for a new fantasy order. Nothing in science and reason served to justify the first and second estate, so they were to be eliminated entirely - even by blood if necessary, as we know very well.
So while Enlightenment thinkers proclaimed to reject the truncated worldview of Christianity, many of its fundamental aspects have remained an integral part of the overarching culture which ended up tainting their approach to science altogether. This includes:
An emphasis on the special status of man over nature, not unlike how the Bible categorized living species in such arbitrary hierarchy.
A compulsive need to explain even the unexplainable through scientific abstraction and categorization, i.e. often gross oversimplifications, because not understanding is a source of anxiety, and as formerly religious beings we are still very used to having all-encompassing, all-explaining worldviews.
The core belief that universal truth will set us free, which is the role formerly played by the Christian God itself, understood as being the source of all truth. The central value of truth thus still prevailed, it simply redshifted its focus to scientific abstractions and something we could reason our way towards.
The understanding that certain special classes of the more enlightened should hold more power than the ignorant masses, hence wanting to establish a new form of technocratically minded ‘priesthood’ that could disseminate knowledge from above - a type of knowledge which of course was to be internalized as absolute truth, and thus serve to legitimize various forms of domination in the same fashion the Church formerly had. As Nietzsche develops in his Genealogy of Morality, historically morality has always been the code of conduct imposed on the masses by the dominant class in order to justify their rule. Hence, there is no big difference between the Church imposing a morality that supports its hegemony in the name of God, to the bourgeoisie doing so in the name of reason.
Similar type of institutional structure and semiotics was to be founded in the Nation (the Enlightenment project par excellence): its institutions became the new cathedrals, national flags and symbols became the new crosses and religious icons, leaders the new popes (or even Gods in some instances), national hymns the new psalms, constitutions the new holy texts, scientists and economists the new priests, the law of the nation the new tenets and commandments, and civic duty over religious duty became the new universal morality. Questioning or challenging all of these was to be understood as treasonous to the nation, i.e. as heresy is to the church.
This is what led Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to claim in their famous work of critical theory Dialectic of Enlightenment that by virtue of its own self-aggrandizement and special claim to truth, Enlightenment thinking became a myth itself - a fantasy order through which all reality could be explained and the world subjugated. The main problem was, as many 20th century postmodern thinkers were to unveil after the two deadliest world wars in human history, various genocides, and world-scale economic recessions, the affirmation that there was indeed a limit to modernist optimism and blind scientific positivism. The question raised by Adorno and Horkheimer which they approach in their work is thus: how could an ideology that claimed to embody the tenets of logic and reason lead us to experience the grimmest sides of humanity’s potential for destruction?
Enlightenment as Myth
It is not surprising that, as the fantasy structure of religion was losing its legitimacy, that some new ‘prepackaged fantasy’ needed to take precedent in order to avoid finding ourselves in the realm of the Real - the dreadful unexplainable, the void of pure meaninglessness. And just as the clergy, royalty, and nobility, had together set up systems of domination to justify their special rights, the advent of the dominant class under bourgeois society also required systems of meaning that could justify their ‘special status’ and domination over the rest of society, now touted as ‘equal’ within the remaining estate - the newly established idea of the Nation of free men.
Enlightenment ideals proclaiming to follow only truth, reason, and science, served to establish the new social order as a realism in its own right, i.e. an ideology that only gets stronger the more it gets critiqued, since every aspect of it gets framed as the only "rational ideals" or “laws of nature”; any criticism could hence easily be dismissed as illogical, unreasonable, or unscientific, no matter their actual validity. In the societies led by this Enlightenment realism, constant competition amongst individual gets framed as core aspects of both freedom and human nature, individual self-preservation and success as virtue, and alienated survival as simply going along the natural order of free societies. We know through history that there was nothing particularly liberating about the Industrial Revolution, which was in fact one of the worst, most exploitative periods of history for the average individual working the fields and in factories in the West (slavery not considered, of course). Or the many massacres that happened during the Napoleonic wars. And yet, it all happened at the peak of the Enlightenment era; the era of truth and reason.
This is why Adorno & Horkheimer claim that Enlightenment ideals simply ended up becoming yet another myth, and by extent, another system of domination - of man over man, and of man over nature - something which both Kant and Nietzsche suspected might happen if we disregarded the skewed, biased morality of self-proclaimed ‘objective’ reason. When we abstract human beings and nature through scientific categorization for the largely utilitarian ends of economic growth and development (‘progress’), we also open up the way for systems of separation between individuals, and between humans and our very environment; Trees become potential lumber, animals potentially harvestable food sources, and other abstracted human beings become individuals with particular characteristics that define their very being (such as through nationality, culture, race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and so on).
Through these abstractions (which while present to certain extents in pre-modern times but not a structural part of the prevailing ideology of unquestionable scientific truths), it is thus possible to politically affirm our relationship to them - and under economic systems driven by growth and progress, this often means: what economic utility can they have? Nature is mainly resources for production and consumption, and humans are, as is so well exemplified even in today’s corporate jargon, ‘human resources’ to be used in the labor process (and if not as resources of production, then as resources for consumption, ie. consumers). Unless of course one is categorized as unfit (for example due to being considered disabled, or up until quite recently by virtue of being a woman), to which special conditions apply that in many ways secludes them from society at large. What is considered fit to partake in society is also something which the modern state has refined over the years, as the song The Myth of Normal on the album also touches upon.
The refined bourgeoisie also became an abstracted class of its own with special privileges, particularly regarding their rights to the ownership of capital, their freedom to strip other individuals of their freedoms through slave-like labor conditions, their support of the legal apparatus’ strongly biased in their favor, their right to utilize their wealth to achieve political ends, and the right to subjugate nature to whichever purpose would bring them the most wealth. The upper class was educated, and hence more ‘enlightened’, which gave them the moral right (if not duty) to shape society, because the underclasses they continued to exploit were not morally or intellectually fit to do so themselves (this is why so many early Western democracies ended up excluding such huge portions of the population in the democratic process altogether). This is still prevalent today, particularly within the field of economics (a creation of Enlightenment thinkers as an academic discipline in its own right), where self proclaimed “experts” use complicated language out of the understanding for the common individual (the new priesthood) to dictate the course of our world based on often shoddy and basied economic models (ie. ideological abstractions of reality) always for the same end: growth and progress.
Taken to the very extreme, and under conditions of widespread national anxiety, Enlightenment also becomes the cornerstone of Fascism, Adorno and Horkheimer argue. Abstraction of human qualities such as race become politicized: scapegoats are drawn up on whom to blame a lack of social cohesion and prosperity, and hence the universality of meaning found in racial purity and other nationalistic signifiers (such as cultural or linguistic ones). Everything unknown which lays at the root of these anxieties become explained through ‘reasoning’, often relying on some type of scientific logic of abstraction and categorization - in short, a universal fantasy frame that isn’t religious in nature, but rather utilitarian. This is certainly not helped by the fact that for the majority of the distressed individuals who are looking for answers for often worsening economic conditions, usually cannot find them in economics itself, because of its exceptional and exclusively technocratic nature. “Culture wars” thus often become the lowest common denominator on which an antagonism can be found (or created).
For the Nazis, eugenics was used to justify the natural superiority of the white race, and the power of large scale state bureaucratization served to detach human beings of their individuality and instead put them into neatly defined boxes based on arbitrarily abstracted characteristics. Following this, the effectiveness of the industrial process and the division of labor normally used by capitalist industrialists could now used to perform a large scale genocide of those who had successfully been scapegoated by means of propaganda - a new form of communication which new technologies such as the radio could facilitate. Nazism, in short, was made possible by the utilitarianism, nationalism, technological advancements, and scientific ways of reasoning (abstraction/categorization) that was advanced by Enlightenment ideals. Fascism was “reasoned to existence”.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek often brings up antisemitism as an example of the ultimate ideological fantasy, because the Jew as an abstracted figure becomes endowed with any and all kinds of characteristics that can serve to explain, and thus appease through their extermination, the anxieties of an anxious gentile population looking for answers in a largely disenchanted, financially unstable, constantly and rapidly changing and hence confusing society. Through this fantasy framework, the Jew can be seen both as a powerful globalist controlling the world behind the scenes, as well as a dirty rat-like figure living underground who may very well corrupt and steal your daughter. The same can be said of the so-called “Schrodinger's Immigrant” in today’s society, i.e. the migrant who is at the same time stealing the jobs of the locals, while also lazily leaching off the welfare state.
Within the xenophobic fantasy frame, both can be true without any semblance of contradiction. And particularly, they need to coexist because they underpin the fantasy that, should it be removed, will force the individual to reckon with the Real of our current social predicament - that our current societies are inherently unequal and favor special interests, that the state or your employer doesn’t really care about you as an individual but only as a source of extractable value, that you are at all times at the mercy of autocratic powers stronger than yourself (your boss, the state, the police, the bank to who you owe money, your greedy insurance company, etc.), constantly in competition against everyone else for survival which undermines social cohesion and makes trusting others difficult, and that you are essentially just a ‘cog in the machine’ (to use a cliché term) which strips you of your humanity, and reduces you to your most basic characteristics in such a way that you can be replaced without much consideration, should it be deemed necessary by the powers above you. We have become the cannon fodder of the economy, instead of the cannon fodder of the Church.
Continuously, in today’s disenchanted societies we no longer have a God that spiritually cares for us on an individual level, a soul which makes us unique and valuable, nor any divine purpose in life. This is not an endorsement of religion from my end, but simply pointing out that this hunger for meaning and purpose, which Enlightenment utilitarianism came forth with, left a lot to be desired - and especially so in times of economic hardship. Fascism fit in perfectly to mend this gap, stressing out the intrinsic value of being of a certain (scientifically constructed) race or worshipping the almost divine entity that is the Nation state. Fascism creates social cohesion based on an elevation of abstracted characteristics that can put a peasant, worker, shop-owner or capitalist in the same in-group, which is why fascism often tends to be so ideologically confused, as it isn’t so much about the logic of politics but about the aesthetics of politics as such (as Walter Benjamin would say).
Fascism is an ideology that promises unity, stability, and meaning in a manner that is easy to understand for people who have already internalized Enlightenment ideals, whether they’re aware of it or not. It is a fantasy frame that allows the individual to tell themselves that they are valuable, that they are special and unique, and even potentially superior to others all while being homogenized in a sea of sameness (‘purity’). It offers social unity and cohesion through racial abstractions, a worship of the Nation, and a deifying of its leader. And potentially above all, fascism offers an outlet for popular anger, disappointment, and resentment, no matter their roots. Fascism offers societal status by extension of race and/or nationality, which can be tempting for an individual who doesn’t feel valued within his cold capitalist society.
So just as much as the fascist fantasy can be a comforting frame for the in-group, removing its veil to face the depressing reality of modern industrialized society can be a devastating experience, which is why contradictions or ‘facts’ is rarely enough to break it apart. Trauma, according to Lacan, is in fact meeting your fantasy as is, which then dissipates before your eyes only to be faced with the traumatic Real. When one’s entire understanding of reality falls apart (which is what tends to happen to people experiencing highly traumatic events such as r*pe or war), what is left is only a void of ununderstanding. “Enlightenment is not a happy feeling. Enlightenment is the destruction of everything you thought to be true” McPherson told us in the beginning. “I hope you will find this a completely shattering experience.”
So when is the trauma of an ‘enlightenment’ a positive? Well, maybe when it saves us from an even more destructive fantasy. The Enlightenment claimed to free us from the shackles of religious domination, but put us in a whole new, potentially far more devastating predicament.
The Limitations of Blind Instrumentalism
While the role of Enlightenment ideals as underpinning highly problematic social ideologies is certainly an important one, for Strandhem’s album Enlightenment, it is mainly the modern, enlightened human’s relationship to nature which is in focus (although the two are usually linked).
One key aspect of Enlightenment thinking underpinning Modernity was the switch of understanding nature as being over man (in the means of its power over us), to now seeing man over nature (as something that can be understood, tamed, categorized, and utilized to its most ‘efficient’ extent). If we disregard the atrocious effects of the industrial revolution over the working class, the way it permanently altered our natural environment and has by now destroyed entire ecosystems is a fact that can be difficult to come to terms with.
One of the main underlying themes in the album is that of the myth of progress, challenging the Enlightenment belief that progress is always a net positive for humankind, and something we should continuously strive for. Of the songs on the album, Inhumanism, Broken Continuum, as well as Uncivilization all deal in some way or another with the myth of progress; the underlying conclusion being that we as humans have essentially hurt ourselves potentially irredeemably or even fatally, by adhering to the extremely shortsighted ideology of progress at all costs. The blind optimism of science in the name of economic advancement (both under capitalism as well as state capitalist/real socialist systems such as the USSR and China) has led us all into the gloomy age of ecocide and Anthropocene, simply because these ideologies could not stop to consider the long term effects of the applied scientific advancements and their usage at industrial scales.
Modern societies have taken a purely instrumentalist approach to our natural environments, focusing on the aspects needed for progress, and ignoring those with no economic value. Hence, they tend to feel very little remorse when they for example eliminate entire ecosystems. Entire forests can be destroyed for lumber, farming, or fracking, entire mountains destroyed for mining, our oceans ruined for industrial fishing and careless waste/spills/pollution, and our air poisoned possibly forever by an unexhausted, unapologetic usage of coal, oil, and industrial animal farming. The list of our destruction goes on and on.
Yet somehow, we are well aware of all of this, but seem completely unable to address it, because valuing nature within a system that only understands value through commodification is somehow impossible - and here lies the true limit of our prevailing ideology. When given the choice between saving an ecosystem or destroying it for the purpose of setting up a mine, the latter will usually take precedent because it favors economic growth, which we value more than we value our environment. Even now, as politicians attempt to tackle climate change, it can only be done in a way that would still allow for things to stay to same for business owners and consumers, and that doesn’t shake up the economy too much (and particularly those on top of it). I have already written extensively about this topic here because it is a very important one, so I won’t dive too deep into it here. But needless to say, the ideology of continuous progress and growth will be our own demise if not seriously addressed.
Traversing the Fantasy
So how do we deal with this? Well, according to Slavoj Zizek (going through Lacan), we need to “traverse the fantasy”, meaning we need to expose the fantasmatic nature of our beliefs. We can never be free of fantasies, because as stated earlier, fantasy is what we rely on to engage with reality. But since so much of it is unconscious (most ideologues will claim themselves to not be ideological at all), it is about making the unconscious conscious, bringing to light what exactly it is that the fantasy attempts to cover up. As Zizek writes it:
In our daily existence, we are immersed in ‘reality’ (structured and supported by the fantasy), and this immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another, repressed, level of our psyche resists this immersion. To ‘traverse the fantasy’ therefore, paradoxically, means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy – namely, with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily reality.
Once you get to see the mechanistic workings of the underlying ideology (so not necessarily the factual elements structuring the fantasy but the very questions that the fantasy serves to answer), one can attempt to extend the fantasy to force it to reckon with additional elements of the Real, and thus expose everything that the fantasy fails to explain as a way of making the fantasy present itself as what it really is. Once it has, it can be possible to change the fantasy without necessarily having to go through the traumatic experience of being without one.
What this means is not necessarily trying to rationalize the angers and anxieties of the masses (as many liberals who believe that better education will solve every problem there is), but rather tapping into these strong emotions that hold emancipatory potential. As Zizek puts it, “The fantasmatic figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism obfuscates the class antagonism by way of projecting it onto the “Jew,” the external cause that disturbs an otherwise harmonious social edifice”. He continues:
The least one can say is that Lacan’s theory opens up another way, what one may call a politics of traversing the fantasy: a politics which does not obfuscate social antagonisms but confronts them, a politics which aims not just to “realize an impossible dream” but to practice a “discourse (social link) which would not be that of a semblance” (Lacan), a discourse which touches/disturbs the Real.
So what we are essentially dealing with can be a type of misdirected anger and uneasiness at a large social scale, and as we know through the rise in far-right and far-left politics in the West, this anger is only being felt stronger and stronger every year as centrist politics lose in prominence. This discontentment opens up a space for radical politics, and I believe that art can play an important role in steering this development in the right direction
Art as a Catalyst for Change
Art as compared to politics generally, can affect one by going behind the ego altogether. Art is not one subject actively trying to argue with another, which is far more likely to be confrontational, but a piece simply trying to meet you on your own frequency, potentially appealing to certain human emotional sensibilities which can affect the way one sees the world without necessarily feeling aggressed in the process. And this can be very powerful.
There is a scene in Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or winning movie Triangle of Sadness in which “society’s finest” so to say (millionaires, industry tycoons, star influencers, famous actors, models, etc.) find themselves in the dire situation that their luxury cruise mega-yacht is going through major turbulences, affecting the yacht’s inner waste disposal system. A very lengthy scene ensues where all of the cruise’s guests find themselves uncontrollably swimming in their own urine and excrement in the most dehumanizing manner while endure horrible spurring of their own sea-sicknesses at the same time. While the movie generally is a bit of class commentary, this particular scene alone strips the upper class of its sublime, fantasmatic qualities that typically define them as signs of success and high social worth, and we see them as what they simply are: humans who defecate like the rest of the world, completely helpless like the rest of us in dire situations where wealth is of no value. The art thus helps the viewer see the emperor being naked, and the object causes of their desires reveal themselves not as tangible realities, but mere fantasmatic figures whose sublimity fades once it is faced with reality.
There are many more elements of modern society which underpin its legitimacy by the way they get internalized in our own identities, in the same way that the Jew figure played an essential role in the very identity formation of the Nazi. Without the myth of the evil Jew being at the core of all the world’s problems, there could be no Nazi ideology. Without the myth of the millionaire representing success and virtue, the myth of progress and eternal growth being a constant positive we should strive for, there can be no capitalism as we know it, which is why most media we continuously consume only serves to reinforce this fantasy (for more on that, the chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is a good read).
I strongly believe in this sentiment, which is why I sampled in the beginning of the song Uncivilization a passage from the Dark Mountain Manifesto that I believe very well encapsulates what the role of art should be in the 21st century:
Mainstream art in the West has long been about shock; about busting taboos, about Getting Noticed. This has gone on for so long that it has become common to assert that in these ironic, exhausted, post-everything times, there are no taboos left to bust. But there is one.
The last taboo is the myth of civilisation. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species. It is where our vision and our self-belief intertwine with our reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth. It has led the human race to achieve what it has achieved; and has led the planet into the age of ecocide. The two are intimately linked. We believe they must be decoupled if anything is to remain.
We believe that artists – which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams – have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it.
I have emphasized here the parts on decoupling, because this would be what relates to a traversing of the fantasy: decoupling the Enlightenment myths from our collective identities and our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. As of today, Enlightenment ideals are to the modern man what the Jew figure is to the Nazi, and the migrant to the xenophobe. It is that which underpins the fantasy, which structures our reality in a way that is causing far more harm than good. It needs to be questioned, revisited, stress-tested, put on its head, challenged, because only then will we see it for what it truly is. And any ideology which cannot legitimize itself in such a fashion should be thrown in the garbage can of history.
Conclusion: The Case for a New Enlightenment
I have in the album Enlightenment attempted to do just that, because I believe our enlightened societies need a “new Enlightenment”. Our collective fantasy which Mark Fisher would call the business ontology of late capitalism needs to be traversed before it is too late, so that it can be replaced with another that better highlights the contradictions and antagonisms present in our industrial and post-industrial, consumer societies. And like the original Enlightenment, it needs to be spearheaded by the trove of knowledge we have acquired since the 18th and 19th century, by those who hold descriptive power of any kind, and to do so with the enthusiasm of a liberatory movement from the tyranny of outdated ideals. The pessimism of postmodernity needs to be reinvigorated with an optimism for change, a metamodern frame of action which acknowledges the shortcomings of modernity, but knows we need to be bold in asserting a new universalism that is less human-centric yet more humane at the same time.
It remains insane to me that a few young activists (Just Stop Oil) ruining a few paintings in museums in order to call attention to our urgent need to move away from fossil fuels can for the majority of people be more offensive than the cataclysmic reality of climate change (what do these people think this art will be worth when there are no humans left to admire it?). A quote I bring up often simply because it is so relevant to our current condition is “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (attributed to both Zizek and Frederic Jameson), which is a direct continuation of the way Enlightenment ideals cemented the values of capitalism as absolute natural truths, because of their directly expressed (not factual) relationship to science.
There is absolutely nothing natural about a system that treats the planet as one large inventory and humans as disposable. There is nothing natural about valuing the economy (in all of its mystical interpretations) over the environment. There is nothing natural about infinite growth. There is nothing natural about believing that humans can tame and conquer nature. Whether we like it or not, nature is a dictatorship which cannot be reasoned with. And right now, our insubordination might very well cost us our lives, and the lives of those other often-forgotten living beings who have been unlucky enough to have to share this planet with us in this day and age. There is also nothing natural about people needing to be in constant alienated competition against their fellow humans for survival, when us humans relied on cooperation with our peers for 99% of our existence as anthropological research continuously reminds us. There is nothing natural in the division of labor, the submission of individuals to wage labor, the self-proclaimed sanctity of made-up institutions and their legal apparatus’.
What is natural, and what is human, is what I try to bring up in the album, and they are the cornerstones of what our new Enlightenment should be about. To quote Kant, arguably one of the big thinkers of the Enlightenment era:
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"—that is the motto of enlightenment.
If we are in the West so proud of what we achieved during the Enlightenment, why are we leaving this grand project in a state of arrested development, when all of the ‘understanding’ is right here in front of us? It can be argued that our current lack of resolve and courage stems from the real-world results of the Enlightenment as elaborated at length by Adorno & Horkheimer (amongst many others), and the limitations of the grand narrative ideologies of modernity. The second half of the 20th century up to today has been one of caution towards big, progressive, system-altering ideas, because of the suffering endured in the two world wars and the various kinds of authoritarian regimes that ruled (and some places still do) in the name of often myopic universal systems and values.
The 20th century was of course also the century of decolonization and social justice movements, and many positive changes were indeed achieved, but the very foundational core principles of modernity (progress at all costs) was unfortunately not questioned seriously enough. Even the environmentalism of the 20th century was quite naïve in its desire to affect certain destructive symptoms of careless modernization, and not the very structure itself which continues to cause this planetary-scale environmental degradation. Yet this is today no longer a reality which can be ignored. This is where, going back to Kant, we need to revisit one of the core elements of Enlightenment: Sapere Aude! Let us dare to not take the teachings of the new misguided priests of modernity at face value, and the morality it expounds all in its own favor as universal truths. Let us dare to question the unquestionable, to challenge the beliefs we take as absolute truths, and to move ahead in the world knowing that nothing can be worse for our survival, for our planet and its many inhabitants, than the status quo. It was done two centuries ago, and it can be done again.
Listen to Enlightenment where you usually find your music.
Links to Spotify and Bandcamp here.