Conspiring on new terms 1
Ante or anti ? After or against? Succeeding or opposed to? How might one characterize the current Euro-American, ‘North and Western’ retreat from modernizing processes that conferred greater authority on reason and logic. It sought solutions to problems through science and calculation, managerial bureaucracy, rational public politics and debate and economic rationality. For example, electrification and vaccination campaigns, mass education, hygienic meat packing and the disciplined, industrial working class, urban public services and rural infrastructure programs were all features of a mosaic of societies that aspired to ‘modernity’.
The rise of reactionary political sentiment against the calculated risks of contemporary socioeconomic activities may fail to change the direction and risks of industries and hydrocarbon extraction. Nonetheless, there is a general refusal of the social contract of modernity, including cosmopolitanism and the acceptance of living in a risk society. Ceding a bit of place to displaced migrants and refugees, accepting cultural diversity and novel identity conflicts over demands for respect, ameliorating damaged environments and ecosystems are subject to a retrenchment in values and social ordering that harks from the days of early industrialization.
Yet, grassroots antemodernism is strikingly out of sync with the industrial and economic base that might support it. Indeed, as a protest vote, the election of xenophobic, well-aged male politicians is supported by the economically-excluded and disadvantaged men. However, a political-economic position against the agencies and policies of the welfare state makes good sense from the perspective of economic elites. Against other elites (cultural, political etc.), they have been able to engineer hegemonic values and enforce taboos through the control of financial capital, education, health and legal institutions (Althusser’s Institutional State Apparatuses), as well as the press, social media and religion.
The performative evoking of grievances during campaign rallies does not address the loss of power by those no longer in demand in these ‘North and Western’ economies. For example, industrial production workers have been displaced by outsourcing to overseas cheap labour jurisdictions. Will that come back? (But what about those frackers? A temporary increase in high-paid, mostly male, energy extraction workers in North America who are well-paid enough to form single-earner suburban households is a notable exception).
A more detailed discussion of antemodern maleness (and whiteness) is clearly needed.
Yes, like in the nineteenth century, men will wear hats. Perhaps not of beaver felt but the intangible stuff of MAGA? But is it too dystopian to anticipate that dismantling the economic spaces of international trade regimes will not lead to a re-establishment of the industrialized twentieth century in the North and Western societies? Such a reset is likely illusory. Instead, one could expect that contending societies and their citizens loose access to each others’ expertise, innovation and products. For example, does preventing the import of affordable Chinese-built electric vehicles in North America mean that people eventually loose their cars as the costs of hydrocarbons increase and North American oil and gas runs out? Herein lies the path to several generations of environmental and economic social ruin…
-Rob Shields, Univ. of Alberta