The Modernising Process: The New Ancien Regime

The Modernising Process is the Ancien Regime of our times. The revolutionaries of 1789 saw through the Old Regimes claims of Enlightened Despotism and kicked them out enlightened or not.


The very processes that brought enlightenment and progress are now complicit in delaying the New Era that will emerge with the end of the modernising process. The fight against priest-craft has become a blind faith in atheism. The rationalising process has become the virtual workhouse of the many. The luminous City has become a vast machine of geometric glass and steel that extracts labour from sexless suited drones in vast over lit offices.


Credit, which was once one to one, "my word is my bond," has become so debauched, that even the nation state, the early optimistic son of enlightenment, cannot control it. Nation states won by long and bitter civil war, washed in the blood of heroes and heroines, have become enfeebled by the homeless nature of credit and the supranational forces that can push aside with ease language, culture and the soul of great nations.


The Kings and rulers of the first Ancien regime, the Old Europe of priests and aristocrats, were on the eve of revolution , model enlightenment rulers, guarantors of arts, sciences and letters through their academies and in institutes. But the people saw through their act and displaced them like dried sticks into the fire of change.

 

Self Identity: The Old and the New

In non industrial societies a persons identity is defined by potency, his or her power to act, to create. Identity is a future thing. In industrial society identity is made from events long ago, a school attended, certificates of this or that educational institution  a curriculum vitae, potted history of employments. The past drags behind the person like a cloak of chaos whether for good or ill. In failure mode the list is comprised of examinations failed, certificates not held, chartered institutions not joined, psychiatrists consulted, marriages ended, suicides attempted, the list is endless. The things that people did before industrial society to increase their potency, their ability to act on the future, are now barely tolerated: drinking, joining groups of a rowdy character, fighting to gain land or prestige, fighting to gain the best man or woman. Ego, strength, status and libido combined to create an individual who was located in the present with a view to the future. It is a vitalistic view of self compared with one that is categorically determined.

The Thinker Rethought

This new blog will be devoted to my reflections on the present Industrial Society  and the New Era that will  succeed or destroy it. Just as the thinkers of the Enlightenment, who brought industrial society about,  proceeded from the particular instance to the general, so my blog will dwell mostly in the manifested present proceeding occasionally to general conclusions.