Humpty Dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall

Humpty Dumpty had a great fall

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Who is Humpty Dumpty? That is us, the children of Modernity/Coloniality and its extractivist logic. What is the wall on which we sit? It is the great political-cultural-economic paradigm that has ruled the world for the last 300 years.

It is this wall of linear time-thinking, lost in the silos of different knowledge and information echo chambers, and systems of political organisation. It is a wall of many bricks mortared together by a complex mixture of cultural stories, hopes, fears and beliefs.

Humpty Dumpty’s great fall is the crisis we now find ourselves in—the intersecting multi-layered crises of climate change, loss of bio-regional sustainability, intensifying geo-political conflict, and an information eco-system ruled by the narcissistic libertarian tech bros of the ‘new masculinity’.

All the king’s horses and men are the desperate attempts by reformers within the oligarchic worlds of liberal democracies, and the new breed of populist ‘warrior’ authoritarian leaders, promising to turn the clock back and restore ‘white culture’, which promised everlasting progress and prosperity for those lucky enough to be held in its embrace.

Taking the Long View

We need to take the long view when thinking about how we got to where we are now—swirling in confusion in the face of multiple crises engulfing our world, as we track the evolution of Modernity as an all embracing cultural system of meaning-making and socio-economic-political organisation.

Taking the long view, we can track the cultural dominance of ‘the modern mind’ from the waves of technological change that stretch from the Industrial Revolution through to the Digital Age, with its deeper roots in the rational tradition of the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. But despite the Modern preoccupation with individual rights and freedoms expressed in the idea of ‘human rights’, it has always been bracketed with coloniality—the  subjugation and objectification of the ‘other’, in order to extract the means of wealth and/or political power. Whether that ‘other’ was defined by gender, class, or by ethnicity and difference from Western norms and values, or the ‘other’ was the rest of the non-human natural world.

The World of MAGA

We are trying to make sense of the Trump victory in the US elections—of what it means to ‘make America great again’, a transactional world where ‘America First’ makes the rules. Where we find the libertarian economics of Elon Musk and the Tech Bros combined with protectionist tariffs on the rest of the world, and where America faces off with China as its arch-enemy in a contested Pacific and in world trade.

Of a global inability to face the challenge of global warming’s impact on how climate change will cause mounting devastation, as in the recent floods in Spain, the droughts in Africa, the rising sea levels in the Pacific, the hurricanes in the US, the wildfires everywhere. Of the masculinity backlash against feminism in the form of the tech bro podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman who are raking in millions, and in masculinity icons such as Andrew Tate, as they champion the manosphere of a reclaimed patriarchal masculinity of dominance being embraced by schoolboys in our classrooms.

To understand this, I suggest we need to abandon a linear view of history, common to Western cultural modes of thought, and adopt the spiralling Kondratiev cycle-like wave approach of technological innovation theory.

The Rise and Fall of Techno-Modernity

We are witnessing the long arc of the rise and fall of Techno-Modernity aligned with extractivist capitalism, and the emergence of a new cultural paradigm—multi-layered relationality in the ashes of convulsing Modernity.

This shift is combining insights of First Nations knowledge systems, grounded in bio-regional sustainability and eco-spirituality (the Indigenous Resurgence movement), and a growing understanding of the nature of interconnected complex systems, with their emergent and adaptive properties, within Western science. This is set against the imperative of bio-regional sustainability and resilient adaptation.

This paradigm shift is in its early stages, not yet discernible by the dominant commentariat, but bubbling away nevertheless with a creative energy that belies its lack of political and intellectual power. It is like a strange attractor, which in complex systems can flip the entire system, like the famed flap of the butterfly wings.

We can detect an earlier manifestation of this movement towards relationality in the 1960s Western cultural revolution, with its interest in communal living, but which was soon subverted by the consumerism and individualism of Modernity.

However, as the contradictions inherent in Modernity now threaten its implosion, we witness a further move towards relationality in many disciplines of thought, as a second spiral takes us into new ways of being, thinking and doing.

We do not know what the new economics will be, following the abject failure of neo-liberal economics. There are various new shoots: mission economics, doughnut economics, new monetary theory. But this new economics must find a way to align with this shift to a relationality paradigm. It will be an economics that takes account of complexity and bio-regional sustainability in a changing Earth system marked by radical climate change, mass movement of people (immigration), attempts to ‘close borders, and a new more militarised global world order of protectionist nation states.

An economics that speaks to the insights of First Nations knowledges of a thoroughly animated world of which we humans are but a small part. An economics that privileges relationality over individualised, competitive wealth creation.

The Spiralling Waves of Modernity’s Transformation

1. European industrial/technological revolutions

Modernity’s framing in dualistic, mechanistic, materialist, utilitarian thinking + European imperialism, with all its extractivist logic masquerading behind the veil of ‘civiilisation’, led to global capitalism (in various forms) via the disruptions of two world wars. The dominance of the British Empire gave way to the US as the global cop.

Its final hurrah is manifesting in US global techno-economic-entertainment dominance, and the current wave of technological transformation being wrought by information technologies, most recently through generative AI. However, while US dominance is now being challenged by China, with some side movements from Russia and India—all are within the dominant techno-materialist-capitalist mode of thinking that characterises Modernity/Coloniality as an organising system.

The early Marxist class analysis, based on the ownership of the means of production, no longer holds. The dream of a worker-led revolution to create inclusive socialism didn’t work out. Even the soft approach of Keynesian welfare economics in liberal democracies didn’t survive globalism.  The neo-liberalism of the Thatcher and Reagan era freed up global trade, but led to ruinous financialisation of the economy and increasing wealth inequality, which is destroying the dreams of the aspirational working and middle classes that have been the bedrock of  liberal democracies. This bedrock is how crumbling in sharp shards.

Instead, we see a new class of rent seekers, along with the rapacious greed of the billionaires, protecting their assets in ‘shareholder capitalism’ in a new era of retreat from global supply chains, and stubborn inflation. Liberal democracies have become increasingly oligarchic in reality – ruled by wealth maximising vested interests and ‘dark’ money.

But what replaces neo-liberal economics? Most of the economics priesthood vainly continues to mouth its truism, while the lived experience of the many is showing increasing distrust in these so-called experts shaping government policy. The ‘peasants’ are in revolt. But rudderless against the forces aligned against them, they are reverting to rage, conspiracy and nostalgic revisionism.

 

2. The 1960s-1970s Western Cultural Revolution

There were early ructions in the 1960s-70s. China had its lethal Cultural Revolution led by the student Red Guards against the ‘capitalist order’ threatening Mao’s peasant revolution. In the West we had a very different youth Cultural Revolution that rejected the moral order of the 1950s, and embraced ideas of freedom expressed in sexuality, dress codes, lifestyles, music, art and religious ideas, and sought to champion human rights.

But the underlying extractivist logic that created the wealth of the West was never really challenged by this first wave cultural revolution.

In the new era of mass university education and full employment, there was an active search for alternative lifestyles in communes/communities that led to new planning laws to allow for ‘intentional communities’ as neither suburban subdivisions nor farms. Living together as sexual couples outside of marriage was normalised, the feminist movement threw off the shackles of patriarchy, and young people looked East for new spiritual ideas in Indian yoga, Japanese and Tibetan Buddhism, and American Indian sweat lodges and quests. 

Along with this went big changes in the music and arts sector.  This slowly flowed into the rest of the world via global economic integration, through feminism, demands for more individual freedom (the Arab Spring), and human rights and anti-racism movements in the US and Australia, which finally acknowledged its Indigenous peoples as fellow citizens with the same freedoms and rights as the rest of the population.

But the western cultural revolution was full of contradictions that are now ‘blowing the place up’. The push for human rights sits alongside continued exploitation – two sides of the one coin: Modernity/Coloniality. Alternative lifestyles (the Hippie movement) was subverted by drugs and consumerism – the long reach of consumer capitalism.

The Chinese Cultural Revolution imploded under the weight of its vengeful destruction of any attempt to embrace reform, producing a new Chinese Socialism with Chinese Characteristics—state capitalism and high levels of technological surveillance.

The West’s cultural movement failed because it did NOT challenge capitalism’s consumer-driven growth impetus. By the 80s we had the whole ‘greed is good’ mantra of neo-liberal economics, which even the GFC was not able to sufficiently puncture.  Alternative spirituality and lifestyle morphed onto ‘wellbeing’ and ‘influencer’ narcissism – the dark side of individualism, along with conspiracy thinking. Eastern spiritual insights got turned into lifestyle yoga and mindfulness therapy – all designed to keep folk going on the capitalist consumer hamster wheel of buy, buy, buy.

3. Unravelling of Modernity and the Indigenous Resurgence

The third wave of this spiraling movement is coming from what is being called the Indigenous Resurgence and what I am calling the shift to a Relationality paradigm – to make sense of reality and lived experience in the face of climate change and the unravelling of the assumptions of modernity.

We see the revisiting of alternative lifestyle ideas championed in Spiral 2, but this time informed by ideas of bio-regional sustainability and investment in the transition to a circular economy and community resilience and connectivity—not rampant individualism and throw-away consumerism.

This calls for a new economics, but for it to take root it needs a new paradigm, a new ontology and epistemology. It needs to bust out of the western habit of reverting to abstract universalist rationality, and a dualistic focus on ‘things’ as an explanatory device.

And this is not easy.

The shift is to processes, adaptation, emergence, ambiguity, fluidity, complex layering, liminal spaces—an understanding of reality that can’t be pinned down in linguistic categories, but can be experienced in all its different manifestations. Where all of reality is spiritually charged with ‘presence’ and has its own voice, beyond human language. The recovery of sensate embodiment in physical places, away from technological alienation.

This ‘shift’ is a combination of insights from scholars of Indigenous Knowledge systems – now active in many universities – particularly Deakin, Melbourne and Macquarie, but also others. See the First Knowledges Series, edited by Margo Neale and published by the National Museum of Australia. Important work on this Indigenous Resurgence is Vanessa de Oliveira’s ‘Hospicing Modernity’ (2021).

This is meeting/challenging the intersecting crises of modernity and its extractivist logic, which is being expressed in a full tsunami of unnerving developments: climate change, right wing populism and the masculine identity crisis (manosphere), AI and the impact of social media on trust, identity, loneliness etc, continuing environmental degradation, and continuing wealth inequality crisis.

A human species that is ‘eating itself’ and has become lost in its separability from nature and its own inner sense of being.

Busting out of Modernity’s ‘White Culture’

‘The conclusion is that the root of the crises is epistemic and ontological. It requires a shift in ways of being, thinking and doing that is profoundly unsettling.

BUT the western consumerist-capitalism is now so hegemonic that most people don’t even know they are trapped in a particular knowledge perspective bubble.

Yet there is a pervasive and deep feeling of unease – that things don’t ‘work’ anymore the way they are meant to; that we need to ‘blow the place up’ and somehow make things go back the way they were (Trumpism). This is particularly so for those for whom the promise of individual freedom and prosperity via liberal democracy seemed to be so viable (ie, particularly white men and ‘white culture’).

However, I would argue ‘white’ is not about ‘race’ per se, but ‘cultural framing’.  There are black & brown faces in the UK Tory Party and among US Republicans. Racism is alive and well across the world as differences are weaponised to create ‘othering’. It is not just a ‘white’ thing.

The neo-liberal economic model, which serves the ‘rich’ will not be let go easily. Nevertheless it is fracturing. Trumpism is a form of a ‘peasants revolt’ – blind with rage and false hope that can only implode. It will not be pretty.  Climate change will have a real impact, especially on immigration and people movement. This also will not be pretty. Israel’s desperate attempt to impose its will via military destruction on the Arabs can only end in its long term destruction, as a religio-ethnic state. For many who have watched its treatment of the Palestinians whose land it took, it has become a ‘terrorist’ state.

So I think the new economics will grow from local movements, like Circular Precincts operating in the cracks and crevices of a crumbling world order.  It will not be easy. We will all have to lower our expectations about lifestyle and material prosperity. We will have to climb off the consumerist bandwagon and recover the joys of simplicity and inner contentment.