End Times by Kenneth Smith   

3. Fugitive Images

I. Epochs and Regimes

What is then the meaning of the modern epoch and its forms?

No other question has provoked so many contentious, fatuous tomes: moderns love to congratulate themselves on their unique way of existing, whatever it is, and on their unprecedented feats in science and technology. But a question about meaning is transparently philosophical, and philosophy among moderns is an atrophied organ of intelligence. To grasp modernity in its meaning — its world-historical significance — demands a millennial sense of how it evolved and what it distinguished itself from, in sum a cosmopolitan historical perspective.

But moderns are more futurist, less historically retrospective or recapitulative than any other world-civilization: we are unparalleled in the memory-hole of Babel we have excavated for ourselves to live and work in, and in our self-promotional imperative to treat all of history as eminently forgettable. Modern culture thus promulgates a sophisticated provincialism. Even our classicists and historians merely assimilate our predecessors to our preconceptions, and do not try to find in our precursors the coherence or intelligibility of how they grasped the significance of their own way of existing. Even less do our scholars seek any critical leverage from premodern principles to achieve distance from our own cloying, insidiously stupefying culture.

Even worse: to grasp the meaning of anything demands the most concentrated resources for seeing things in their essence, grasping and articulating the principles that key something into its lawful way of being (its character or nature). But modernity is intellectually and morally corrupt with an extrinsic way of understanding: it thinks always circumstantially and mechanistically, in terms of extraneous conditions conducive to manipulation, not intrinsic essences. In itself this strategy is the quintessence of technocracy and Machiavellianism, the "politics" of executives and administrators, and the "philosophy" of scientists and technicians. No form of nature has to be respected as a limit on our activities — not human, natural, or social. Profitability, the market, experimentation, public opinion, social-political repercussions, deployable "image" — these kinds of systems think for us, define what issues "mean" modernly, what is and is not acceptable and significant to us ("useful"). What our economic laws cannot digest escapes us.

Moderns lack philosophical acuity, lack intuitive and incisive essentiality so profoundly as to make us a species of cultural mentality radically heterogeneous from the Greeks: not typical moderns but rather the very exceptions among them will grasp the truth of this remark. Moderns cannot see in an essential way, a clear, original and incisive way: we cannot grasp the simple and fatal defining nature of things, our own selves and culture most of all. Foolishly we criticize the Greeks for their aristocratism, but we have made true intelligence far more scarce than the Greeks ever did. Neither our educational system nor our literature, nor our media or professional institutions, cultivate it. The art of penetrating and synthetic thinking is a function of intelligence alien to modern culture as a culture: even among academic philosophers — and especially among analytic mentalities who mistake themselves for philosophers — it is a foreign language. The difficulty and repugnance of this very writing should illustrate the point. English can be used in this way, organized for the purpose of philosophizing; but it will then be accessible to perhaps 2% of the reading public, itself no more than 5% of the population at large.

The meaning of the modern age is the peculiar bias it puts upon our lives, our thinking, understanding, evaluation, and conscience, including our systematic ineptitude to comprehend questions about philosophical meaning. Moderns are toned by covert presuppositions that make us follow a subliminal logic, whose consequences we read not just in eco-crises, extinguished species, traffic and indulgence in drugs, systemic corruption in politics and professions, predatory and totalitarian economics, fractured family life and culture, etc.; but also in banal pathologies of everyday work and mentality. Moderns are so colored by their own refractory cultural medium that they can hardly grasp the sense of societies that have been otherwise cultured.

Ancient culture attuned the Greeks to see an inherently organic nature, to search out intrinsic order implicit in nature itself; modern culture conditions moderns to see a stochastic universe, which is the dominion of accidentalism and meaninglessness. Our era is far less interested in pure science — the discovery of the system of nature — than in technology, the imposition of artificial order upon nature. We are narcissistically obsessed with making nature reflect our own desires and uses. Moderns disbelieve in principle in any form of natural or divine teleology, even though the same evidence Aristotle dealt with so deftly is still available to us — the coordination of organs, of senses, etc.; the adaptiveness of teeth and prehensile extremities to their functions; and more — the homeostatic control of body-temperature, the ingenious and economical fit of chemical precursors and reagents within their cycles. Moderns a priori demand and expect to see accident, fortuitous arrangements: a world ordered by any but human means inherently menaces the metaphysical and moral sovereignty of arbitrary will.

We are oblivious by acculturation to all the subtle ways of criticizing and controlling our own subjectivist presumptions, the regimen that ancient aristocratism enforced on itself to transcend the envelope of conventionalisms: if there is a dearth of "transcendence" in modern life and mentality — an incestuous parochialism even in our system of education and publishing — certainly that expresses the modern preference to wallow in our own miasmal preconceptions and prejudices. Everywhere arbitrary will has enclosed itself in a hall of mirrors, a nest of narrow idioms and counterfeit experiences that pass for authentic truth. It is our dysvalues that constrict us in such idiotism: we do not care to master our own prejudicial assumptions, or escape our own narrowness. Moderns have very limited appetites for philosophy, a very fragile sensibility for self-disillusionment.

That is the pathos to which a subjectivist and egocentric culture is liable: we like to nurse our diseases to their strongest. A sense of contrast with other epochs or civilizations has been scrupulously starved off by our utilitarian educational system, by our facile techno-artificialist revolutions that glut the market with superficialities. How do moderns then live and think? — blithely, perfunctorily, mechanically, facilely, unphilosophically, glibly — without a thought to such a how, with no impediment of critical reflection or self-diagnosis.

To grasp how we orient ourselves, what we primordially take for granted — our ideological false firmament — that is the task of seeing ourselves millennially, as the outgrowth of ancestral lineages of culture from which we have derived and deviated. In anatomical detail a universe of culture or civilization cannot be finitely rendered. I give only a thumbnail-portrait of the two modes of civilization that preceded modernity, limning them in terms of the regime of principles that define their distinctive ways of seeing the meaning of life and intelligence. Modern order is the mutant distant relative of those orders, remarkable for its profound deficiencies and amputations — its cultivated insensibilities, the entire dimensions of value and intelligence that have lapsed from it. Moderns suppose their order or mode of existence is unique and unprecedented, but indeed they are utterly in no position to know such a thing because they comprehend nearly nothing of the logic and fate of previous systems of civilization. Much of our "experimental" and extemporaneous course of culture still fulfills the archetypal teleological or "natural" pathways that Hellenic thinkers understood as intrinsic to character and political culture.

In our time the only philosophically significant question can be: Has modernity depleted its essential resources of order, has it spent its sanity and authority? No form of culture endures by virtue of sheer mechanical dead weight; it is necessary for any civilization, as a complex and extended work of man, to continue to be believed in by man — and thus, necessary for it to continue to produce human beings competent to value and believe. But moderns, as Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kafka saw, are not so competent, and by cultural design not by accident. The premise that a civilizational form can forever revolutionize and "reinvent" itself, can be infinitely self-permutable and -replenishable — that is, inexhaustible, characterless, nonnatural — is merely an illusion or intrinsic effect symptomatic of the modern worldview and its ideological system: a trick of perspective. What has so far passed as "postmodern" is merely a variation within modernity in its primary sense, and has not even touched on the essence of the whole system: modernity has run through many such subspecies, and the more they changed the more perfectly it became what it essentially was. Surface-changes in stylistics do not reveal structural or defining forms, although they are obliquely reconfigured by those forms.

The question of the senility of modern civilization is a wholly secular, this-worldly issue. But for the great mass of moderns it is the only universe they have been conditioned to know, and it has alas trained them to miscomprehend itself, no less than medieval Christianity did (another notoriously eternal arrangement). In our professions, our institutions, our media, our culture at large, we see mentalities overwhelmingly in the grip of cultural lag, forms of past indoctrination imprinted so indelibly that their images long outlive whatever actuality they once had. Most moderns are passengers fated by their malformed consciousness to go down with this Titanic. My argument and explication are meant, can be meant, only for those who have struggled in some measure to attain a mind of their own. All others read on at peril of their own self-distress and bewilderment.

II. Introduction to the Issues

We later civilizations . . . we too now know that we are mortal.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. . . . We were aware that the visible earth is made up of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia... these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania, too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers.

—Paul Valéry, The Crisis of the Mind (1919)

A civilization that is powerless to constrain the appetites of its moguls and cartels; that gives its youths electrifyingly powerful motivations to tune out their sordid human reality; that despoils its natural world wantonly with toxins that will remain lethal for over a thousand generations; that devotes its awesome technology to methods of extorting profits and strategically infecting or obliterating its numberless enemies; that thrives on industries that wrack the very stability of our planetary weather-systems, currents, and species of animals and plants — that is a civilization heavily invested in its own entire obsolescence. Its artificial obsessions and compulsions have triumphed over its instinct for survival, whether as individuals or as a system: its most demented and demonic forces cannot be compelled to take seriously the chaotizing and cancerous threat they pose to primal health no less than to the human quality of civilized order.

To politically literate and acute minds, no more need be said — no more but this, Aristotle's somber pronouncement on the Achilles' heel of all empires:

All who have reflected on the fate of civilizations agree that everything depends on the education of the young.

Gibbon deemed it a decisive moment in the decline of antiquity that the Romans came at last to value education so meagerly that they routinely turned the task over to slaves: insuring that the remaining generations of Roman patricians would be imbued with the mentality and values of slaves. Modernity, whose utilitarian contempt for education is famous and chronic, has achieved that same effect by putting our schools and universities in the hands of our own narrowly slavish personalities, the petty-minded and pathetically conformist middle class and the Lilliputian homunculi that compose it. The concentrated intelligence of a mechanistic civilization runs down thus: inexorably, like a clock; imperceptibly, to its own mechanical minds.

If a prophet had come to our village in those days and told us that the things were to take place which have since come to pass, none of our people would have believed him.

—Black Hawk, Chief of the Sauk and Fox

Fifty years ago do you suppose that either the Macedonians or the King of Macedonia, or the Persians or the King of Persia, if some God had foretold them what was to come, would ever have believed that by the present time the Persians, who were then masters of almost all the inhabited world, would have ceased to be even a geographical name, while the Macedonians, who were then not even a name, would be rulers of all? Yet this Fortune, who bears no relation to our method of life, but transforms everything in the way we do not expect and displays her power by surprises, is at the present moment showing all the world that, when she puts the Macedonians into the rich inheritance of the Persian, she has only lent them these good things until she changes her mind about them.

—Demetrius of Phalerus, c. 317 B.C.

The material goods of a civilization are perishable in obvious ways. Its moral, spiritual, political, cultural bonds also perish, but at a different time-scale and in far more insidious ways: they lapse out of validity by our changing moral sensibilities, our preoccupations and inadvertence. They are not immune to change but only relatively resistant, and they mutate — wax or wane, grow or die — as an unseen and unfelt soul at the core of our mercurial concerns. We do not mourn the passing of what we no longer comprehend or care about. The heart of a civilization is enfeebled by being made peripheral; and it is made peripheral because it is already growing feeble.

The ethos — the highest code of values of a civilization, its defining scruples and imperatives — perishes by deformation, by neglect under the impact of myriad one-sidednesses, fracturing and idiotizing perspectivisms, normal and ordinary ideologies. It perishes of no longer being publicly articulable and privately cogent, but survives then not as living spirit but as the letter that killeth — as lying rhetoric, the Judas' kiss of hypocritical cant, vapid self-flattery, empty formulaicisms, "System" or impersonal routine. But it no longer forms the profound code of self-inspiration which is civilized character; it has no reformative dynamism of values that endow individuals with a sufficient reason to live, assume responsibilities and profess an ethos.

A civilization has its impact not by the real artifacts it engineers but by the idealities — implicit forms of understanding and values — that govern the minds of its subjects. For the ultimate authority of a civilization is rooted in its power to format their ideas and values, the preconceptions and prejudices that drive their thinking ex profundis and are least thinkable. In any transitional or revolutionary era it becomes evident as "cultural lag" that it is not current actualities that individuals see and think, but the dead-weight of formatting assumptions they were long ago conditioned to carry: ideas that in effect think for them by setting up the frameworks in which they think.

Most humans carry to the grave beliefs they were trained to respect as ultimate truths: it is unheard of for significant numbers of people to be converted to a new way of thinking by rational argument.

Harnack... in discussing the comparative success or failure of various early Christian sects, makes the illuminating remark that the main determining cause in each case was not their comparative reasonableness of doctrine or skill in controversy — for they practically never converted one another — but simply the comparative increase or decrease of the birth-rate in the respective populations.

—Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion

...A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

—Max Planck, A Scientific Autobiography

Certainly most humans are never educated to understand how to educate themselves, how to see why they see things as they do, to elaborate alternatives or invest their intelligence in other conceivable perspectives. Indeed most humans have little critical resistance against indulging in whatever seductive illusions happen to appeal to them: "Men freely believe whatever they desire," wrote Caesar. Our supposedly rational institutions and professions do not temper but mostly aggravate this affinity for delusion, since they themselves are riddled with interest-factions and ideologies.

All in all, in spite of the idiosyncratism of private subjectivity, a civilization replicates itself and keeps itself stable by being a way of thinking that imposes barely articulable demands (a tacit a priori or guiding uniformity in ultimate beliefs) on a way of living: this is of course far from being a guarantee of immortality. Civilizations by degrees grow senile and incoherent with themselves, self-conflicted and impotent to govern their own distinctive vicious liabilities. But a civilization or culture even in decline continues to control the ways its subjects interpret its vitality and authority: it projects a virtual universe or an infinite prospect for itself because few civilizations can conceive they may be mortal, historically conditioned, depletable in moral, political or spiritual resources. Modern culture can no more give its creatures permission to wake from its tattered dream than medieval Catholicism will absolve its followers from fealty to a defunct regime.

Like a Klein bottle, a civilization seems to have no outside, to permit no external perspective on itself: it wants to absorb all feasible forms of intelligence into its ideologically controlled repertory. Its totalitarianism repels every independent mentality as an agent of alien values that sabotage its self-certainty. A senile civilization is afflicted with this incoherence: even as its resources of integration and sanity are wearing threadbare, it grows more and more intolerant of the anomalous or contrarian perspectives that bloom in its corpus like tumors. As antiquity persecuted its visionary Christians, as the late-medieval Church torched its conscientious heretics — many of them more principled than the power-mad, materialist popes and pious frauds who executed them — so modernity also repels and discredits critics of its morbid obsessions and lunacies, its pious irrationalities.

We are lived by Powers we pretend to understand.

—W.H. Auden

Not by any conscious or deliberate way of thinking does a civilization imprint its order on its subjects, but by the taken-for-granted forms active in their presuppositions, their ineffable myths and deepset beliefs. Virtually all of us think about our format of society with resources it inculcated in us: we evaluate it, if at all, by its own preconceptions. Prior to the methods of any conscious logic are these civilizational axiomatics, apodictic urgencies of the mind we can hardly free ourselves from believing even with utmost self-discipline.

Once those ways of thinking or seeing things have lost their sense of direction and authority — their power over their subjects' private judgment — the artifacts and architecture the civilization has generated will not help anchor it in the world of living human beings. A code of values is never a luxury. Complex societies centrifuge themselves apart rapidly without a sense of what is essential; all that prolongs their dynastic life may be the inertia and credulity of those multitudes who cannot comprehend what is decaying underfoot.

Without the felt imperative of a living ethos as an intuitive sense of what is right, sane, clarifying, and authoritative, past lives and actions become nothing but dead letter, a clutter shackling individuals into a status quo. A culture notoriously asthenic in its sense of values and openly contemptuous of philosophic intelligence, modernity has for profound reasons been enslaved to its own pragmatic artifices, its system of technology that dictates life- and mindforms and economic-political policy to its ranks of human servants. A doctrine of cultural materialism is as incoherent as the Greek categories it draws upon: for "matter" is devoid of energizing potential, it is so much stuff needing to be organized. "Technocracy" — the "rule of means," of ways of controlling — utterly conflates ends and means, values and facts, form and matter, higher and lower. It is a perverse fealty to chaos, a massive public debt in the form of cultural and political negligence. Incoherent or not, it aptly describes a society vacuous of values and enslaved by its own instruments of license.

Matter does collaborate in subtle ways with the energies of form — intuition, foresight, values — that orchestrate it by harnessing it to some purpose or system of needs; but ultimately matter is morally, intellectually, culturally, and politically mute, an inherently chaoticizing factor in the human world. Matter contributes to social order only insofar as it is made to shine by reflected light: when we have a developed sense of how we need to live together, then we learn how to endow physical things with symbolic value — as part of a property system e.g. that commands a sense of rational respect, or as an ensemble of traffic symbols, or as marks of an organic language, or nuanced degrees of desirability within a spectrum of cultural goods.

The things in the human world only count insofar as they are imbued with meaning and translatable into normative terms (able to be valued or potentiate some kind of ought). For the Greeks all the materiel of human existence must be evaluated for its implicit ability either to contribute to unity or else to constitute a stress upon that system of organization: in any given context — psychological, social, linguistic, instinctual — factors are either centripetal (part of the forces of form, order, clarity, harmonics, logic) or else centrifugal (part of the forces of matter, chaos, confusion, dissonance, irrationality). The ancient Greeks were as profoundly political as philosophical; to evaluate the world in this way made them far more deft than us at the art of grasping what was essential, masterly, and responsible.

For a people not to grasp what ultimately contributes to human orderliness — and what fractures or enervates that order — is not to discriminate between virtues and vices, values and vanities, soulish roots and subjectivist cancers, moral assets and biopsychological liabilities. Not all forms of civilization have the resources that enabled the Greeks to grasp the profound metabolism or synergetic order underlying human no less than natural existence: the Greeks' philosophical intelligence was a function of their intuitive sense of what made anything organic or internally coherent, governed by authoritative archai or principles. Without such a sense there could be neither community nor tradition, culture nor individual character; for existence is rife with chaoticizing factors that cause ill-framed actions to miscarry, ill-architected institutions to defeat their original purposes, ill-cultivated languages and literatures to generate confusion and conflict rather than clarity and consonance. All life is organic, a "music" (activity of the Muses) inspired by a coordinating Logos neither conscious nor voluntary.

The matrix of ideas and values — the culture — that contains the concentrated order of a civilization may make it easier or harder for its individual subjects consciously to grasp what is essential and what is incidental, what is central and what peripheral, what is commanding and what merely obedient, in that civilization. The Greeks were by nature philosophical; the harmonic factors in their culture conspired to make judgments of essence natural for them — thus their organic system of pre-philosophical myths and richly metaphoric language, their philosophically provocative polytheism with its characterologically and naturally symbolic divine personalities, their concept of homeostatic natural order that expressed itself by penalizing the hybris of individual character (as in tragedy, history, myth, politics, or economics).

Cultures are the fund of taken-for-granted meanings that predestine individuals either to agree or else to conflict in specific ways typical of their civilization. A culture harmonizes by inducing individuals subliminally to see things more or less in the same way, according to the same perspectives and interpretations: culture is the matrix or community of subjective forces which are tendencies to understand and to baptize things according to the same fundamental categories. As moderns inhabiting — or inhabited by — an extremely "individualistic" culture we are profoundly uncomfortable with the notion that our personal subjective actions might be symptomatic of a larger communal organism: we may concede that primitives can be understood in this way by cultural anthropologists but we moderns interpret ourselves far more abstractly, as independent and self-active isolable units. That way of seeing ourselves is the primal expression of our peculiar alienative culture, the imperative that we see ourselves according to a code of self-understanding congruent with the modern worldview generally: to wit, we take ourselves in abstracto.

Our concept of what it is to be an "individual" has been impacted by centuries of sophistic intellectualism, a millennium of Christian spiritualism, and half a millennium of modern notions of rational-arbitrary will: we think of ourselves atomistically, asocially, abstractively, as if neither nature nor culture had played any part in forming our self-conceived essence. And we construe ourselves thus not because we are "emancipated" by our modern culture from the constraints of traditionalism, but because we are bound by the invisible forces of collective presuppositions and preconceptions, tacit imperatives exempt from the play of critical individual consciousness.

We readily see in the case of other cultures that their members belong to it as expressions of it no less than do members of a family or gang, or party, church or corporation; and that all its expressions make up a syndrome (a way of life or worldview which civilizationally is ancient Judaism or Hellenism, or medieval European Christianity, etc.). But it has become significantly more difficult over the centuries for moderns to grasp their own ways of understanding and valuing as a syndrome symptomatic of a specific worldview: we have naively wanted to imagine that "modernity" in its sophistication was not another -ism or subjectively deformative culture like those preceding it. But then, so had "Christianity" conceived of itself not as one more -ism among others but as a system of absolute truth, an objectively valid or authoritative way of seeing that was not just another human "way" at all. The same is true of what thinks of itself as modern "science" but which in practice is a corporate faith of "scientism," a chauvinistic overestimation of the salvation science can effect through technological revolution. A peculiarly modern self-obtuseness arises from our code of scientific objectivity, taking our essence as pure ego or abstract consciousness — a neutral spectator, a psychologically empty and presuppositionless "presence" absent from its own concrete existence. Our culture induces us to be self-unreflective, uncritical of the impalpable forces that shaped our subjectivity and remain active within it: to be oblivious to culture, presuppositions, bias, etc. as a subliminal formative domain.

We imagine ourselves consequently to be "free" in a uniquely modern way, self-determining our own wills while at the same time lacking any resistance against the covert concrete influences that subvert our appetites and desires. We are abstractly free, we believe, without ever actually having to work athletically at emancipating ourselves, without understanding the historical or psychological tendencies that move within us; we believe in a freedom that requires no cultivation, no sense of self-understanding or self-discipline. But acultural, amoral, aphilosophical "freedom" is an oxymoron like "wooden iron" and "free society," as Nietzsche compares them in The Gay Science. In the natural and human world there is only freedom that has been worked for and earned: there is only mastery, the self-overcoming of obscure forces within oneself. All other "freedom" is delusory, an abstractivist fiction or ideality. Modern society believes in a metaphysical birthright of "freedom," we suppose that culture and self-education need not prepare us for freedom by making contranatural demands of us; we believe we can be utterly impoverished in every spiritual or moral resource and yet still be "free" in some sense. This is one of our definitively modern delusions, a lunacy that only an idiotized mind can find cogent: the illusion of freedom, like that of happiness or wealth or rationality, is for us as good as the real thing.

It seems extraordinarily perverse, by modern standards of rationality, that a culture would exercise authority just by virtue of the blind spot in its subjects' mentalities, their systemic incompetence to formulate, comprehend, and criticize essential issues. But all cultures and civilizations are in truth forms of fideism — their ultimate contents and structure are taken on faith — and their ultimate foundations have more in common with mythic religions than with conscious beliefs. As moderns we want to think of our conscious and decision-making will as the very essence of what we are, the ultimate source of all the significant forms of order under which we live and think; we want to think of modern social order as radically artificial (e.g. a "social contract" of authority based utterly on consent of the governed, a language based on entirely conscious conventions, an economy generated out of symbolisms, a consciously controlled body of sciences) and founded in rationally intelligible, mathematically determinable principles. Whatever modern rationality has conceived of as irrational, we have profoundly wanted to disbelieve can be superordinate over us: we trivialize not just divinity but nature and history, even human nature and fated character, for this reason.

The modern worldview has doted on a vision of utmost human autonomy, a regime of human conscious rationality governing itself according to its own self-conceived laws. This civilizational premise has been termed secularism, humanism, immanentalism, etc. but it could as well be called technocracy — the supposedly sovereign rule of humanly controllable techniques, whether as science, technology, capitalism, or bureaucracy. The human domain declared itself radially independent of all obscure, unwilled, implicit, hereditary, dark forces — all that is divine, natural, traditional, historical. We have split the human order and our selves off from every matrix traditionally authoritative or fatal for our acts and thoughts. We live in vacuo.

For the past two centuries our most penetrating geniuses have been trying to get across to the obtuse modern mind that our forms of order have grown self-pervertive, treasonous against their original charters or rationales for existing. The most profound kinds of ironies have been incubating in the bowels of modern order as "the human" has systematically been subverted by the inhuman and even nihilistic logic of man's own creatures — technology, bureaucratic organization, money and its ideological gridwork, the mindlessly self-aggrandizing impulses of our systems of knowledge (science and academia), and indeed the sterile, toxic and even virulent pseudocultures that have been extrapolated out of the modern media of abstracted value (money), abstracted language (ideology, jargon or techspeak), and abstracted will (arbitrarial nihilism). We purified these forces the better to control them and only made monsters of them, as they developed a demonism or an ideological authority over our minds and wills. We become more and more pathetically the creature of our own creatures, "educated" to see and understand only what those institutional behemoths have a need for us to see and understand.

Over the last two centuries, a massive and pervasive peripeteia or ironic reversal has spread across our cultural landscape: our relation to our own artifice has grown more obtuse, pathetic and pathological. Daedalus the master-craftsman in ancient myth, the architect par excellence, eventually became the victim of his own superb labyrinth; the crews constructing the Tower of Babel were cast down for their hybris at wanting to be like Gods into an incoherence that made them less than humans. What we build comes to dominate us, becomes our obsessive earthly god, a pathos Kafka captured in the paranoia of "The Burrow." The matrix of systems we inhabit has grown more and more hostile toward the values that humans require in order to be human: we blindly accept that whatever our educational institutions process us to believe is by definition "education" because it would be absurd for such investments of time and money to yield up a counterfeit, an ersatz-knowledge which is merely institutionally generated illusion.

But that is indeed the prospect: by its monopoly on the base of research, its guild of professional authorities, its prohibitively costly fixed capital of libraries, laboratories and architecture, and its privileged relations to governmental and corporate clients, the system of universities has been free to pump toxic effluent into our culture — institutional delusions, chic intellectualisms, Mandarin contempt for concrete relevance — calling this mutagenic soup an "education."

This is an isolated specimen of dysfunctionality within the modern matrix, albeit one that has left no quadrant of our society unaffected: it is well known that major corporations spend more money reeducating recent graduates than universities originally spent processing them. Megacorporations of the future may well become self-enclosed cities, abandoning corrupt and onanistic public systems of education to their own luxuriant dementias. Within the apparently infinite universe of universities, their "efficient" systems proceed unimpeded: courses prepare students for further coursework, tests test their efficiency at taking tests, and academics keep their eyes firmly fixed on the institutionally defined dictates of a healthy career. It is pointless to criticize for no one there has any reason to listen; and indeed nothing human is in command of the system or could change it. Universities are the modern order in nuce, ineducably secure in their self-righteous abstractedness. Are universities and schools systematically disserving the needs of individual students as well as of professions and communities, and indeed the entire culture? The priorities of the culture disserve its own most profound needs and interests as a culture: the fabric of the culture is composed of just such conflicts, law versus religion, media versus politics, family versus economics, commerce versus culture. As a form of civilization it is another hybristic Titanic, warrantied to be unsinkable but already in collision with itself because of the narrowness and incoherence — the one-sidedness or abstractiveness — of its cultivated delusions.

As a form of life a civilization's timescale is somewhere between the biographical and the geological. They die as they grow, in terms of centuries: it is fallacious to expect to see, in any decisive timeframe, the "collapse" of a civilization. Even for those who understand the significance of what is happening, the collapse of an epoch or saeculum is like watching a trainwreck in excruciatingly slow motion. Language has aptly been called "the perfect instrument of empire," since by controlling systems of expression an imperial authority can preclude anything from being understood in a disadvantageous light. But the modern mind itself is the tool of all tools (as Aristotle said of the hand), and by the forms of ideology promulgated by universities as state-of-the-art thinking, minds like languages are indeed turned into institutionally controllable tools. Given our simplistic notions of freedom and individuality and our dysfunctional education, it is no challenge for institutions to digest generation after generation of impoverished minds into the web of a self-serving matrix that nearly perfectly masks from view its own pathological logic.