The celebrated French philosopher, Henri Corbin, who taught at Tehran University, once drew the attention of a Western friend to an ancient cupboard in a Tehran café, in which they were sitting. The old piece had several shelves -- each enclosed by thin panelling -- cut around the outline of different vases and urns, into which they would be slotted on the shelves.
Only, as Corbin noted, the vases and urns were absent: they had long since vanished; broken or lost.
The point Corbin was making was that nonetheless the space which once they physically occupied still persisted in clear outline. And so it is with ideas, with things said or written. They are not entirely gone. The space persists and somehow relentlessly reminds us of them.
Corbin here was pointing at something important about Shi’a understanding of time and memory. He was hinting that memory resides not just in ourselves, but beyond the confine of individual brains; and that memories can and do surge up into consciousness, triggering a recall of something past.
Corbin was a close friend of Carl Jung (they together attended the annual Eranos conferences), and Corbin’s insights drawn from long study of Shi’a philosophy were, as Jung acknowledged, to influence his own work on the collective (transpersonal) unconsciousness.
It is a significant point: Ideas, conceptualisations and history may be shut down and cancelled by the command of the ‘masters of dogma’, but the space these intellectual vessels once occupied is still ethereally there -- to rise again in challenge to dogma.
The massive polarization occurring today in the world is not simply geopolitical. It is not simply a competition over resources, or even simply a rivalry based on trade relationships. The conflict between Western élites and the rest of humanity, as Emmanuel Todd has suggested in La Défaite, is the result of the West “falling into nihilism and the deification of nothing”. Todd defined this nihilism as “the desire for destruction, but also of the negation of reality. There are no longer any traces of religion, but the human being is still there.”
We are in for an extended period of revolution and of civil war. Ukraine and Gaza already have brought about the West’s ideological self-isolation in the world. The world is not in the least invested in the notion that Ukraine and Washington somehow represent ‘freedom and progress’, and Moscow ‘stands for tyranny’.
The Washington-led West simply has no clue as to how much of the world rejects the value system of contemporary globalist neo-liberalism.
The Ruling Strata, however, views giving up power as the height of irresponsibility. As betrayal, even! A mindset reflecting a breath-taking dogmatism; a kind of ideological solipsism, preventing these technocratic élites from seeing the world as it actually is.
Holding onto power trumps upholding the old Order that brought them to power (or maintaining a Constitution, or respecting the Law).
The masses -- absent essential élite guidance -- our rulers believe, risk being captured by the dark forces of ‘Populism’ and authoritarianism.
The disorder of their slide towards ‘otherness’ threatens to disorder the new world of values - and makes them enemy to the new diversity of identity, now sacralised to the point of being non-negotiable.
Diversity paradoxically inverts not at all to legitimize wider horizons, but rather, towards a new dogmatism: Rival minorities are ‘gated’ behind an array of dogma and impervious to rational discussion.
The physical segregation of the population to self-enclosed, heterogenous identity enclaves has its counterpart in the balkanization of opinion. Each compartment is barricaded behind its own dogmas, emoting and shouting at each other; yet unable to settle any dispute.
Therefore, all tools -- Money, Institutions and Media -- must be put to the enforcement of the New Order.
The Ancient understanding of society and history -- of the world -- was that of an integrated totality. It offered a more holistic perspective -- one which can account for, rather than annul or strike out, the contradictions within the fabric of reality.
Responses
« Back to index | View thread »