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The limits of modernity: with environmental catastrophe threatening to undermine the very conditions of existence, Guy Rundle looks at the need for reassessment of the basic presuppositions of modernity.

Article Excerpt
Late medieval timepieces are designed so as to hold a measure of the hour, within a measure of the month and year, mechanical sun and moon sweeping over--and within all that a measure of the hour and second. Order within order within order is what the mechanism suggests, the way of the medieval world. For our own times, one would require a sort of unimaginable mirror object--one of multiply nested chaos, worlds and power unwinding: Iraq within the market, within the biosphere. With disaster in Iraq coinciding with a new and wider appreciation of the possible consequences of climate change, and a growing breakdown of mistrust of the poor and excluded within Western societies, there is multiple and intersecting evidence that the dominant process of the west is coming into a multiplicity of contradictions. The response has been to engage in a sort of desperate triage at both ends of the spectrum, in the hope that a commitment to the project of 'modernity' can be maintained in the middle. The delusional rhetoric of George Bush and his boosters about victory and staying the course is one expression of it, but so too is the hypnotised belief that a mere quantitative change in our energy use can allow business-as-normal to be carried on.

In effect, a crisis in the project of modernity has become most visible in the implications of the climate crisis, but is no less determinate on more particular crises such as Iraq. Under pressure from both ends of the spectrum, the defense of modernity has moved into a mode that looks aggressive but is supremely defensive--an assumed and un-argued triumphialism that is simply, at the cultural level, a narcissistic shield against any challenge that might threaten its fragile self-confidence. The most visible victims have been Muslims, who have been subjected to a sustained campaign of fear and hate, but there have been others.

In the US, much of this argument was coming from the direct centre of the political spectrum. Even though the Republican party had made a substantial alliance with, and to some extent been colonised by, fundamentalist Christianity over the last two decades, the body of it was colonised again by the neo-cons and the Project for a New American Century who formed an inner core with an explicit vision of the shaping of capital-H History. Much has been made of the fact that a number of the neo-cons were ex-Trotskyists, who brought to neo-conservatism the belief that history was something that could, with sufficient consciousness, be grasped and steered, but it could also be said to be coming from life-long conservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, who had tapped into a European, rather than an Anglo-American, notion of a conservative order as having an internal ordained character, rather than as 'muddling along'.

From the manifesto of the Project For a New American Century, through the brief triumph of the Iraq invasion and into the confused and...

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