Rajani Khant is a very provocative writer, with whom I often disagree; yet, I find that his work has a great deal of truth in it. The kernel of truth is this: that to live in an extended family, in the context of a small-scale tribal environment, is probably the most natural human environment, the most able to make us happy. So any and all social structures that take us away from this do not bring happiness but remove us even further from this state.
But humanity did not follow that road, so what is the solution? I do not think Rajani is quite satisfactory on this, as we have to start from where we are now. In my opinion, the social-technological revolution of peer to peer, does give us a historic chance to reconstitute smaller communities, not just cyber-collectives, but physical ones, that combine the global and the local.
Against Eurocentrism renders an uncompromising verdict on the ‘scourge’ of our millennium: modernism, itself the artifact of certain late Eurocentric propensities. Kanth argues that while modernism is possessed of some virtues, they are purchased at far too high a cost – indeed a cost that neither the species nor the planet can, on any scale, find affordable. Given the imminence and the gravity of this threat, he further suggests that no other posture is at all ecologically responsible. Kanth suggests breaking with the manifold paradigms of European expansionism or find ourselves, soon enough, living on a planet damaged beyond recovery.
This book goes far beyond the usual genre of critique by actually offering salves and antidotes to the enduring malaise of our times. It also offers a new paradigm for the human sciences locating it firmly in the species being of our hominid natures thereby annulling the spurious distinctions between “nature-culture”, et. al. drawn by the European enlightenment. In particular, the book points to the “paradigm of femininity” as the potential agent of a very real, and realizable (and realized) emancipation from the delusive “utopias” of European, masculinist paternity. Finally, the book entreats us to re-evaluate our real placement in an evolving, self-fulfilling universe.
In the words of Immanuel Wallerstein, “…we have to recognize that something special was indeed done by Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries that did indeed transform the world, but in a direction whose negative consequences are upon us today. We must cease trying to deprive Europe of its specificity on the deluded premise that we are thereby depriving it of an illegitimate credit. Quite the contrary. We must fully acknowledge the particularity of Europe’s reconstruction of the world because only then will it be possible to transcend it, and to arrive hopefully at a more inclusively universalist vision of human possibility, one that avoids none of the difficult and imbricated problems of pursuing the true and the good in tandem.”
RAJANI KANTH is Visiting Professor of Economics at Duke University in North Carolina, USA.