ANTERO DE ALDA Photography Recent Works
|
Man, the soul, body and nourishment [ 2 ]
photo by DOROTHEA LANGE, Migrant Mother, 1936.
Reflections on post-modernism: the great depressions occur nearly every day at the time of the newscast. Where has globalization and Lyotard ‘s “ungoverned society” led us?
2. A postmodern moral?
«A person with a belief is as powerful as 100 000 people who have no more than interests.» JOHN STUART MILL by Anders Breivik Behring, Twitter, July 17th, 2011.
Today, July the 22nd [2011], the world was startled with a terrorist attack in Norway, which caused 76 deaths and dug out the memory of 9/11 in America. The main suspect, Anders B. Breivik, is a 32 years old young man, regarded as an anti-Nazi nationalist, conservative and Christian, with assumed admiration of Winston Churchill. This episode takes us to the dilemma of the extreme Hobbesian geodesy, and the quotation of Stuart Mill seems to prove that there is a possibility of brutal threat to the moral (if you can still call it that), oppressive of the postmodern.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested on May the 14th, 2011, charged with raping a hotel maid in New York. The then leader of the International Monetary Fund, which aspired to succeed to President Sarkozy in France, was eventually released one month later, after his lawyers have discredited the theories of the prosecution. Later, newspapers reported that Strauss-Kahn denied the possibility of having raped the girl of the Sofitel, in Manhattan, «because he had sex around the clock with three other women, in the hours before his arrest.» (Expresso portuguese newspaper, July 18th 2011).
Following these allegations to the former chief of the IMF, the French newspaper L'Express reported that he would have had a «relation consentie mais clairement brutale» (consented, but clearly brutal intercourse) with Anne Mansouret in 2000, at the offices of the headquarters of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), in Paris. The then advisor to Strauss-Kahn described him as «un prédateur qui cherche non pas à plaire mais à prendre, se comportant avec l'obscénité d'un soudard» (a predator that seeks not to please, but to take, acting with the obscenity of a soldier) (L'Express online, July 18th, 2011).
If these behaviours are typical of today's leaders of the institutions that dominate social morality, is it so strange that the IMF — and the European Union and the World Bank — impose exorbitant interest rates to the poor indebted countries of the Euro zone? And how should we interpret the recent wiretapping scandal of the billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid “News of the World”?
The contemporary movement tells us that we have passed from the oppression of morality to a moral of oppression. Contrary to what the postmodernists think, the free society is not one that is detached from religion, but one that can integrate all religions. The secular Touraine admits that «Europe would truly exist in the world if it could prove that it is able to build a relationship between a part of the West and a part of the Muslim world, while Americans closed themselves in a shameful war» (Euronews, 2010). But what do we speak of but war, if the West doesn’t understand the East and vice versa? For some modernity theorists (such as Steiner, for instance), man does not find his way, does not exceed its history, not because his soul is inhabited by an inaccessible God — as Descartes supposed — but because it is dominated by Dionysian splendour: always the lust, wealth, consumerism, sexuality («pornography», according to Touraine) without consequence.
Man’s morality (God) of the postmodernism, it seems, is money. If the industrial revolution emerged as a technical opportunity generator of abundance and happiness, the interest in money ended up undermining that wealth and happiness. What came after (the "hyper-modernity" — according to Lipovetsky and Sebastien Charles — or the exacerbation of modernity, consumerism, individualism, hedonistic ethics...) was a closed movement, which generates both wealth and poverty at the same time, happiness and pain. To this disorder we call “generalization” — or the individual deprived of his narrative — to which a global society governed primarily by the matter corresponds.
Can man survive without a soul? For the post-modern, the man with a soul is a useless man, but how to separate the soul from the body which must be nourished?
|
